Saving Monticello: The Newsletter
The latest about
the book, author events, and more
Newsletter Editor
- Marc Leepson
Volume
XXII, Number 1 January
2025
MEMORIALS & MONUMENTS: The founders of the foundation that formed to buy Monticello in 1923 from Jefferson Levy incorporated under the name, The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. That’s presumably because the foundation’s goal, in the parlance of the times, was to own and operate Monticello as a “memorial” to Thomas Jefferson. The organization dropped “Memorial” from its name in 2000.
This mini rumination on the word
“memorial” was spurred by my continuing search for information about the Levy Family
and Monticello. That quest recently led me to an 1881 newspaper article I hadn’t
seen (Thank you, Library of Congress’ Chronicling America historical newspaper
database) with an intriguing tidbit about Jefferson Levy that I hadn’t come across.
Said article was penned by Lyon Gardiner Tyler
(1853-1935), a son of President John Tyler, and published in The Memphis
Daily Appeal on January 2, 1881. J.G. Tyler, an 1875 graduate of the
University of Virginia, was the principal of a private school in Memphis at the
time. He went on to serve as President of the College of William and
Mary—Thomas Jefferson’s alma mater—from 1888-1919.
While expounding on the greatness of the Sage of
Monticello, J.G. Tyler mentioned that he had learned that Jefferson Levy—who
had owned Monticello for less than two years at that point—had written an
article in which he said he would donate $500 toward “the erection of a statue
of Jefferson in Central park [sic]” in New York City. As that was news to me, I
tried to confirm it, or at least find more information about the proposed statue.
Searching through the best primary sources, though, I couldn’t find anything
more on it.
I therefore can only speculate that Jefferson Levy’s reverence for Thomas Jefferson and his desire to help build a monumental statue was influenced by his uncle Uriah Levy’s decision to buy Monticello in 1834 out of admiration for Jefferson, especially his strong support for freedom of religion.
A year earlier, when then U.S. Navy Lt. Uriah Levy was in France, he
expressed that reverence by commissioning a full-length statue of Thomas Jefferson
by the top sculptor of the day, David d’Angers, which today is prominently
displayed in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. I wrote about UPL and the statue in Saving
Monticello and in several issues of this newsletter.
There are a slew of statues in Central Park—from Hans Christiaan Anderson to Daniel Webster—but, alas, none of Thomas Jefferson. There are plenty of Jefferson statues throughout the nation, however. Most of them were commissioned starting early in the twentieth century.
The Memorial
The most monumental Jefferson statue is Rudulf Evans’ towering, 19-foot-tall sculpture that is the centerpiece of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. Not surprisingly, Jefferson Monroe Levy was an early proponent of a memorial to Jefferson in the nation’s capital.
In February 1903—a year after it was decided that the Tidal Basin would be the site of a future unspecified memorial and two years after Jefferson Levy had completed his first term in the House of Representatives—he was appointed as one of several dozen vice presidents (see the shortened list above) of the recently formed Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States.
That Washington, D.C. group soon began to raise funds and lobby
for a memorial to the “author of the Declaration of Independence,” as the above
membership card puts it, to be located in the Nation’s Capital.
It appears that the TJMAUS ceased functioning in 1907 without making any traction in its mission. But in 1926, two years after Jefferson Monroe Levy’s death, Congress took up the cause and considered a resolution to authorize the erection of a memorial to Thomas Jefferson for the first time.
It took eight years for the idea to gain traction on the
Hill, but on June 26, 1934, the Senate and House approved a Joint
Resolution establishing the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Commission (TJMC)
with a mandate to build a memorial to its namesake at the intersection of
Constitution and Pennsylvania Avenues in downtown D.C. Congress appropriated $3
million for construction. The following year, the commission commissioned the
architect John Russell Pope, who designed the National Archives building four
years earlier, to draw up the plans for the Jefferson Memorial.
In 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt asked the commission to chose a larger site for the memorial. They decided on the south bank of the Tidal Basin and construction began in late 1937
FDR laid the cornerstone two years later. Evans received the commission to sculpt the statue in 1941 and the memorial was dedicated before 5,000 spectators—including three dozen Jefferson descendants—on Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, April 13, during the World War II year of 1943.
As
I wrote in Saving Monticello, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial
Foundation took a leading role in the movement to build the national
memorial to Thomas Jefferson beginning in 1926, when Congress first proposed
it. That included Stuart Gibboney, the first head of the Foundation, being
named chair of the Memorial Commission in 1938.
Gibboney (1876-1944), a Virginia-born New York City lawyer who specialized in
banking litigation and was a mover and shaker in the national Democratic Party,
opened the dedication ceremonies in 1943. Following the invocation by the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in America,
came the singing of the National Anthem during which the giant statue, which
had been covered with American flags, was unveiled.
President Roosevelt spoke next in an address that was
broadcast live on national radio. He called the memorial a “shrine to freedom,”
and went on to talk about Jefferson’s challenges and those facing the nation
during the dark days of World War II.
Jefferson, FDR said, “faced the fact that men who will not fight for liberty can lose it. We, too, have faced that fact. He lived in a world in which freedom of conscience and freedom of mind were battles still to be fought through—not principles already accepted of all men. We, too, have lived in such a world. He believed, as we believe, that men are capable of their own government, and that no king, no tyrant, no dictator can govern for them as well as they can govern for themselves….
“The words which we have chosen for this Memorial speak
Jefferson’s noblest and most urgent meaning; and we are proud indeed to
understand it and share it: ‘I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal
hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.’”
EVENTS: I will be doing more events in 2025, including talks on Saving Monticello, as well as for my new book, The Unlikely War Hero. It’s a slice-of-life biography of the extraordinary Vietnam War story of Doug Hegdahl, the youngest and lowest ranking American prisoner held in Hanoi during the war. More info at https://bit.ly/Hegdahl
The book had a strong start. Not long after The Unlikely War Hero arrived in bookstores and at online booksellers in early December, it became the bestselling Vietnam War History book on Amazon
The first printing then sold out within a week. The second printing, on January 17, sold out immediately due to the huge number of backorders after the first printing was gone. The third printing is scheduled for the first week of February. I have some copies of the first printing. To order a signed copy, go to my website, https://www.marcleepson.com/
If you’d like to arrange a talk on The Unlikely War Hero, Saving Monticello, or any of my other books, please email me at marcleepson@gmail.com
For details on upcoming events, check the Events
page on my website: marcleepson.com/events
COMMERCE: I have brand-new paperback copies of Saving Monticello and a few as-new
hardcovers. To order personalized, autographed copies, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering
or email me directly at marcleepson@gmail.com
I also have copies of Flag: An
American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; Ballad of the Green Beret; and Huntland.
You can read back issues of this newsletter at http://bit.ly/SMOnline
