When the board of the National Trust for Historic Preservation meets later this week, high on its list of concerns certainly will be the parlous financial state of James Madison’s Montpelier, which the Trust owns.
Trust President Paul Edmondson, who answers to the board, spent several years pressuring the Montpelier Foundation, a quasi-independent organization that manages the founding father’s estate for the Trust, to accept what amounted to a hostile takeover by a self-proclaimed committee of “descendants” of slavery. Despite its name, the Montpelier Descendants Committee includes plenty of people with no direct connection to Montpelier, all the while excluding at least 26 actual descendants of Madison’s manservant Paul Jennings.
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As also reported by the Heritage Foundation, the new management is refocusing the organization by downplaying Madison himself and his Constitution while making slavery the central theme — as part of a larger effort to use Montpelier as a national “platform” for a slave-centric focus on U.S. history.
I have written about this situation a number of times in the past five months. The turmoil, however, has continued on multiple fronts, as have the financial challenges, including reports that the local Lowe’s cut off Montpelier’s credit cline for maintenance of the estate due to money running short — and that visitors have suffered injuries. In June, the then-chief financial officer circulated a memo showing Montpelier was $576,000 below anticipated income for the year. The organization faces large bond payments, along with $1.66 million in “unfunded liabilities” apparently stemming from using restricted donations for operating expenses instead.
Due to budget constraints, the number of tour guides has been reduced by about half over five years. There also are questions about a grant from the state of Virginia originally intended for a slave cemetery memorialization project at Montpelier. The foundation reportedly plans to use part of it for the salary of someone to oversee a massive project to create an 850-square mile “heritage area” far beyond Montpelier’s own property.
Also, longtime tour guide Jeanne Minahan Robinson was recently fired for sending a letter to the staff complaining about an incident in which she said new Montpelier Foundation President James French and acting CEO Elizabeth Chew used racial considerations in ordering a special tour for a visiting family after the scheduled final tour of the day. The facts of the actual incident are in dispute, but the firing can be seen as more evidence leftist ideological dogma now dictates the running of what was once an apolitical organization.
Robinson, who has a Ph.D. and was a software engineer for Raytheon, told me that Chew has openly referred to herself as an “intolerant liberal,” and Chew dismissed Robinson’s earlier complaints that a new exhibit for 4-to-8-year-olds emphasized how “white slavers were abusing black enslaved persons.”
The Robinson imbroglio, which happened the same day former Vice President Mike Pence made a surprise visit to Montpelier, is perhaps a microcosm of the tensions surrounding current Montpelier management.
As Chew, French, and Edmondson have declined to take questions from me, I reached out twice in September to Jay Clemens, chair of the board of the National Trust, to answer a list of specific questions. Through “Chief Marketing Officer” Matt Montgomery, Clemens declined.
Here are the questions I asked:
1. Broadly speaking, is the board of the National Trust supportive of what CEO Paul Edmondson and lawyer Tom Mayes have helped engineer at Montpelier, in terms of its new management and focus?
2. At the most basic level, do you support “structural parity” for putative descendants of historic sites, and is it the Trust’s position that mere ancestry makes someone adept at serving on a foundation board or overseeing a site for historical preservation and education?
3. If the answer to the questions in (2) is “yes,” then is The Trust aware that 26 actual, provable descendants of the most well-known Madison slave sent two letters to the board fiercely objecting to the so-called Montpelier Descendants Committee’s self-appointed role as representative of the descendant community? Does The Trust support the MDC — which originally claimed authority on the basis of a sole, snap election, and which represents people who are not actually descendants of enslaved people at Montpelier and in some cases are merely “those who feel connected to the work the institution is doing, whether or not they know of a genealogical connection” — against the actual descendants? If ancestry is essential to board equity, then why is “feel[ing] connected” more important than actual ancestry?
4. Is the Trust aware that the MDC specifically excludes actual descendants from its count regarding “parity,” and that the MDC founder/now Montpelier board chairman James French urged a black board member to resign (joining about seven other board members who have resigned) because she wasn’t obviously copacetic with the MDC’s agenda? Does the Trust approve of these things?
5. Is the Trust supportive of French and his lawyer repeatedly calling longtime, dedicated members of the Montpelier board “racist” just because they did not agree with French’s agenda or with structural parity? Is everybody who does not agree with “structural parity” for the MDC (but not for actual descendants) a racist? As it was the Trust’s president who helped engineer all of this, does the Trust bear any responsibility for driving away board members and for any other resultant occurrences, including Montpelier income, public attendance, etc.?
6. Is the Trust supportive of its president (Edmondson) telling Montpelier Foundation founder William Lewis to “lawyer up” merely for writing a letter opposing French’s agenda?
7. Is the Trust okay with having employees openly hostile to Madison? Is it supportive of its chief archaeologist reportedly describing himself as a “termite eating out the foundation” from within? Is it aware that he repeatedly promoted on social media articles that called Montpelier board members racists? Is it aware that at a Harvard forum his antipathy to Madison was so open that he called Madison an “oppressor” and made the patently exaggerated claim that by the 1920s, Madison was “using Montpelier as a breeding plantation to sell, uh, invest in human bodies and sell them to the South through the transcontinental slave trade?”
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8. Does the Trust support the downgrading of the Center for the Constitution, including a lesser title and absurdly low salary for its chief educational director? Does it support the interim president’s desire to downgrade Madison’s name on the Montpelier logo? Does it support the interim president disbanding the committee that ran the perennially successful Dolley Madison luncheon and announcing that “we plan to completely rebrand [the event] with a new name, logo, and purpose?” Does it support the interim president publicly saying that she does not even want Montpelier to be known primarily for its Center for the Constitution?
9. Is the Trust aware of reports of severely declining revenue at Montpelier, and severely declining attendance? Are those reports true?
