May 2023
Volume XX, Number 5 May 2023
“The study of the past is a constantly evolving,never-ending journey of discovery.” – Eric Foner
ANEXCELLENT MAN: As I found out while doing theresearch for Saving Monticello,Jefferson M. Levy, like his uncle Uriah P. Levy, was a New York City residentwho did not live full time at Monticello during the years (1879-1923) that heowned it. But Jefferson Levy did spend considerable amounts of time, including manysummer weekends, at Thomas Jefferson’s Charlottesville, Virginia, “Essay inArchitecture” during the 44 years when he was its proud owner.
I recently found more evidence to buttress thefact that Jefferson Levy frequented Monticello regularly, especially in theearly twentieth century, in a recently digitized newspaper clipping. It’scontained in one of the massive scrapbooks of clippings of newspaper articles*in which Jefferson Levy (in a 1914newspaper photograph, right) is mentioned in the archives of the Centerfor Jewish History. You can browse through them online at https://bit.ly/JMLCollectionCJH
Said evidence: a brief, kind-of gossipy articlein the May 22, 1911, New York Herald,on the occasion of JML’s “return to the halls of Congress.” Levy, an extremelysuccessful lawyer and real estate and stock speculator, had been re-elected to theHouse of Representatives in the fall of 1910 and took his seat in March 1911. Adecade earlier he had served in the House for one term, from 1899-1901, representingNew York's 13th Congressional District in Manhattan.
Levy, a conservative Democrat, would be “anexcellent man for his district,” the article predicted, pointing to the factthat he’d had experience on Capitol Hill with his earlier term in the House,and that he therefore knew “the ropes and wires better than a new man.”
The article went on to say that as proud ashe was to be a member of Congress, Jefferson Levy was “prouder yet,” of owningMonticello, which in 1911 he had owned for more than three decades. Keeping up the“reputation for hospitality” that Monticello “enjoyed in Jefferson’s time,” thearticle noted, Levy “takes down a gay party of his cronies nearly everyweek-end.”
I couldn’t help pondering the ironic fact that at the time thearticle was published and Jefferson Levy was hosting regular jolly parties atMonticello, the ardent Thomas Jefferson devotee Maud Littleton was launchingher national campaign to take Monticello from him and turn it into a government-runhouse museum—a campaign, as I show inSaving Monticello, tainted by the stench of anti-Semitism.
After resolving that the property shouldnot belong to Jefferson Levy, Maud Littleton spent the first half of 1911furthering her knowledge of the history of Monticello. That resulted in herwriting and publishing “One Wish,” a sixteen-page tract mailed out toinfluential friends around the country that summer. That emotional plea for anend to the Levy family’s ownership of Monticello was the start of a bitter,contentious, three-year battle between Mrs. Littleton and her allies andJefferson Monroe Levy and his supporters over who would own Monticello.
The bitterness ended in the fall of 1914when Jefferson Levy—who once said that he would sell Monticello only when theWhite House was for sale—agreed to let the government have the house and its600-plus acres, plus all its furniture and furnishings, for $500,000. Thatmollified Maud Littleton, but the sale never happened as Congress couldn’t cometo grips with the asking price.
All interest in Monticello on Capitol Hill endedwhen the U.S. entered World War I in 1917. Five years after the war JeffersonLevy sold Monticello to the newly formed Thomas Jefferson Foundation for his$500,000 asking price.
*Those big scrapbooks, which I went through page-by-page at theCenter for Jewish History archives back in pre-digital days (1999), are made upprimarily of newspaper articles in which Jefferson Levy is mentioned. Heemployed a clipping service, a long-gone, pre-Internet business that searchedfor and then physically cut out newspaper articles and sent them to clients.
When I started my journalism career in 1974 at CongressionalQuarterly we had two full-time people serving as our in-house clipping service.Every day they’d go through scores of daily newspapers with a red pencil searchingfor topics that the magazine’s and other CQ news services’ reporters wereworking on and then “clip” them out with a metal ruler and deliver them to us. Thatlow-tech “search engine” had nothing on Google, but it worked very well back inthe 1900s.
MEA CULPA: URIAHLEVY’S WORTH: In the April issue I mentioned that, as I wrote in Saving Monticello, Uriah Levy was listed as one of thewealthiest men in Manhattan in the 1855 edition of Moses Beach’s The Wealth and Biography of the WealthyCitizens of the City of New York. And that Beach estimated Levy to be worth$500,000.
I had an email from an attentive newsletter subscriber, Harry Zimmerman, whosaid that while doing research for a play he is writing about Uriah Levy, hecame across the Beach book and saw that the figure was not $500,000, but $250,000.
I checked my files and he is correct, as you cansee from the image of the entry below—although the comma looks like a periodand the last zero somehow was dropped. How I managed to double that figure whenI wrote the book more than twentyyears ago escapes me. But it happened. And if the book ever goes into a secondedition, I will correct that error.
Thatmisstep got me thinking about how much $250,000 in 1855 would be worth today. SoI went online and found several inflation calculator websites. I also found outthat the sites use educated guesses forpre-1913 inflation figures because the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics only began tabulating inflation data in 1913.
I went to three inflationcalculator sites, plugged in $250,000 and 1855, and they all came up with approximatelythe same figure: that Uriah P, Levy that year was worth the equivalent of morethan $8.5 million in 2023.
THE DOC: Steven Pressman’s great documentary, “The Levys ofMonticello,” which was inspired by SavingMonticello, is making its last round of film festivals this spring. Next upis a screening in Brookline, Mass., on May 8 during the National Center forJewish Film’s annual Film Festival. For info, go to https://bit.ly/ScreeningBoston
EVENTS: Here are details about my May author events:
On Tuesday,May 9, I’ll be doing a talk and book signing on the life of Francis ScottKey, based on my book, What So Proudly WeHailed: Francis Scott Key, A Life, at the McLean (Virginia) HistoricalSociety.
On Tuesday,May 23, the topic will be Saving Monticellofor my talk and book signing for the Resident Forum speaker series at the HeritageHunt Retirement Community in Gainesville, Virginia.
Fordetails on other upcoming events, check the Events page on my website: https://bit.ly/NewAppearances
GIFT IDEAS: For a personally autographed, brand-new paperback copy of Saving Monticello, please e-mail marcleepson@gmail.com I also have a few as-new, unopened hardcovercopies, along with a good selection of new copies of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; DesperateEngagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; Flag:An American Biography; and Ballad ofthe Green Beret: The Life and Wars of Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler.
