Paul Edmondson, the CEO and president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation who has been heavily involved in turbulence at James Madison’s Montpelier, a Trust property, has announced he will step down from his post in the spring of 2023.
Montpelier remains mired in turmoil, with key departures from both its board and its staff — and with another key board member threatened with eviction from the board because she objects to what has been described as a “hostile, woke takeover” of the estate museum. Montpelier’s finances this year were precarious, according to memos from its now-departed chief financial officer, and the Trust’s own finances reportedly have been challenged by the pandemic and other factors.
Edmondson reportedly has been under pressure from Montpelier’s controversies and its finances, including a reported $7 million note the Trust took out on its behalf, held by Capital One. One observer said the budgetary struggles in the wake of the takeover show that “woke means broke. … They better check themselves before they wreck themselves.”
Meanwhile, Stephanie Meeks, who preceded Edmondson as CEO and president of the National Trust and who also served as vice chairwoman of the board of the Montpelier Foundation, surprised some in the Montpelier community by recently resigning from the foundation’s now-volatile board. New board member Betty Kearse, who supported the woke takeover and authored a book claiming (somewhat dubiously) to be a descendant of Madison himself, reportedly told Mary Alexander, a documented descendant of Madison’s manservant Paul Jennings, that Alexander will be forced off the board unless she stops speaking against the aims and methods of its new management.
Alexander has been vocal that Montpelier’s main focus should be on Madison, the nation’s fourth president, and on the Constitution he is credited with doing so much to craft, whereas the new management has said they want it to be a national center for “disputed history” about enslaved communities.
Meanwhile, Montpelier in late October released its human resources manager in a cost-cutting move, with several jobs being consolidated into “fewer positions.” Montpelier thus finds itself without either a CFO or a human resources manager, all while it has canceled, postponed, or announced it will repurpose major, traditional fundraising events such as the long-successful Dolley Madison Luncheon.
There are many new strands to Montpelier’s tumult, which have been covered in prior columns here. Start with Edmondson, the hardball progressive Trust president who reportedly told William Lewis, who was essentially the founder of the Montpelier Foundation, to “lawyer up” after Lewis complained about the foundation’s new focus. On Nov. 16, Edmondson announced in a letter to numerous National Trust officials and supporters that he would step down. Even in resigning, he insisted that the Trust should “redefine” the “preservation community” in “the broadest possible way. To institutionalize the notion [of] telling the full American story.”
As reported by Brenda Hafera of the Heritage Foundation, that “full American story” at Montpelier apparently involves leaving out most of the story of Madison himself apart from his slave holdings.
Meanwhile, the new Montpelier Foundation management, which took over the Foundation board in the name of the “Montpelier Descendants Committee,” has been openly hostile to Mary Alexander, one of the committee’s only two remaining actual descendants of Montpelier slaves. (The other descendant is recovering from a stroke that occurred immediately after a contentious board meeting earlier this year.) Through concerned sources, I secured a letter Alexander sent to the full board overnight on Nov. 3-4 complaining that after Kearse’s threat to remove her from the board, she was never informed of a Nov. 4 board meeting until she received a Nov. 3 note falsely telling her the Nov. 4 meeting would be canceled. She wrote that although no action had been taken to evict her from the board, “the leadership and staff are treating me as if I am no longer on the board,” and she accused the “board leadership and administration” of “underhanded and corrupt practices.”
On substance, she wrote, “I hope to remind you that Montpelier is a National Treasure, not an Afro American treasure but a National Treasure. If we continue and disregard calls for a return to the original mission of the Foundation, which is to educate the public about the life of James Madison and his intellectual achievement as creator of the US Constitution, Montpelier is destined to fail.” And she wrote of “the wreckage that was produced … after the takeover by current leadership. I can only tell you the core supporters of the foundation have been profoundly disaffected by being publicly labeled racist. I can attest that nothing is further from the truth and usage of such tactics were in and of themselves racist.”
Reached by phone, Alexander confirmed the letter was hers and that Kearse was the one who threatened to evict her from the board. She said she was unable to attend the Nov. 4 board meeting after all because her fiance, who had been suffering from cancer, was rushed to the emergency room that very morning and died a week later. She said her requests for transcripts, minutes, or board-material handouts from the meeting have still not been honored nearly two weeks later.
Finally, there is the recently downsized human resources manager, Colleen Morrissey. Dismissed in a cost-cutting move with a solid letter of recommendation, she nonetheless told me by phone, when reached late on Nov. 17, that she was appalled by an incident that happened in September. Management decided to dismiss a longtime tour guide who had complained about what the guide considered to be management’s racial double standards. Morrissey thought the situation was being mishandled and disagreed with the guide’s termination, but management sent the termination letter under Morrissey’s name against Morrissey’s objections.
“I did a full human resources investigation of the situation, and I told the chief of staff I absolutely do not want to be part of this termination,” Morrissey told me. “She assured me, 100%, that it will not happen. She could not have been more precise. Then the attorney drafted the letter without ever consulting me, never consulted me on the facts or the verbiage, but put my name as if I were the author of the letter — and I was ordered to bring it to the post office.”
I’m no expert on Virginia human resources law, but it sure sounds to me as if the lawyer and management acted with dubious legality.
Emails to Edmondson, to National Trust board Chairman Jay Clemens, and to the Trust’s “chief marketing officer,” Matt Montgomery, went unanswered after more than 12 hours. Through Montgomery, all had declined requests for comments for earlier columns on Montpelier’s travails.
Whatever the reasons for Edmondson’s departure, it gives the Trust’s board the chance to fill the spot with someone more apolitical, with less of an ideological agenda.
