An Unhappy Legacy Ends: Monticello Honors the Levys
Reprinted from Preservation Magazine
Jefferson Levy's sale of Monticello to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation seventy-five years ago ended the Levy family's eighty-seven-year ownership. The foundation's mission was to restore and preserve the house, lawns, and gardens. The effort to restore the mansion and its grounds took decades, during which original Jefferson furnishings or similar period pieces were collected through loans, gifts, and purchases. Today, the foundation says, Monticello appears "much as Jefferson knew it." Given the foundation's restoration philosophy, which was typical of its day, the elements added by Jefferson Levy, including bathrooms, a bathtub, and a stairway, were removed. "The focus was to reclaim the presence of Jefferson," said William L. Beiswanger, an architectural historian who is Monticello's current director of restoration.
While the foundation was erasing the physical changes made by the Levys, it also all but ignored the family's invaluable caretaking of Monticello. Tour guides did not mention the Levys' role in preserving Jefferson's mansion. The foundation's guidebooks made only brief reference to the family's long period of ownership.
Levy family members felt unwelcome when they visited, according to Harley Lewis, Rachey Levy's seventy-two-year-old great-great-granddaughter. When her parents visited Monticello in the 1930s, Lewis said in an interview, "they would ask for the key to the gravestone of Rachel Levy, which was behind a little iron fence. The people there said no one was buried there by that name. Then eventually someone would come up with the key, and they would go in and take care of the grounds."
"There was tremendous anti-Semitic feeling because of the fact that a Jew owned the house," Lewis said. Susan Stein, Monticello's curator, agreed. "There was a leitmotif, if you will, of anti-Semitism in Monticello's history, just as there is everywhere at the upper reaches of American society," says Stein. "I see the attitude here being reflective of our culture."
On the other hand, Stein points out, several prominent members of the original Thomas Jefferson Foundation, including Theodore Kuper, the foundation's original director, and Felix Warburg, the New York financier, were Jewish. Kuper, Stein said, "went around the country raising money for Monticello and was active here for some time after Monticello was acquired."
Dan Jordan, the foundation's current president, also pointed
to the participation of Jews in the foundation's earliest days
as evidence that Monticello's silence on the Levys may not have
been motivated solely by anti-Semitism. "The founding board in
the 1920s included some very prominent people in the New York
Jewish community," Jordan said in an interview. "My sense is that
they were trying to figure out how to advance Thomas Jefferson,
and 
maybe
the Levy story got pushed to the side, almost inadvertently, in
an unthinking way."
Public acknowledgement of the Levy legacy at Monticello came in 1985, soon after Jordan was named president of the foundation. Almost immediately upon the announcement that he would head the group, Jordan said, he "started to hear from various Jewish friends -- some were eminent scholars and some just had an interest in history -- with the same message: that an important story was not being told at Monticello."
The foundation contacted descendants of the Levys, including Harley Lewis, after deciding to refurbish the Rachel Levy gravesite and place a plaque there honoring the family. On June 7, 1985, family members and several dozen others gathered at Monticello. Edgar M. Bronfman, head of the World Jewish Congress, made the principal address, and then the plaque was unveiled. "At two crucial periods in the history of Monticello, the preservation efforts and stewardship of Uriah P. and Jefferson M. Levy successfully maintained the property for future generations," the plaque notes.
Members of the family are warmly received when they visit Monticello today. "Ever since we had such a royal welcome by Dan Jordan [in 1985], we've gone down every couple of years," Harley Lewis said. "They have really treated us well. They have been very interested in talking to the Levy family."
Two articles about the Levy family's stewardship of Monticello are also available: a longer, related article from Preservation Magazine, and a brief piece located in the "Jefferson" section of the Monticello Web site.
Marc Leepson is a free-lance writer in Middleburg, Virginia. This article originally appeared in Preservation Magazine and is published on the Monticello Web site with the gracious permission of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.