July 2025

 

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

Volume XXII, Number 7                                                        July 2025

 

AI HISTORY: A few weeks ago, when I first began seeing AI prompts on my Facebook pages offering more information on some aspect of what I was posting about, I found them annoying and ignored them. But the other day, after I’d posted about Saving Monticello and the documentary, “The Levys of Monticello,” Meta’s AI offered a link with the teasing question, “How did the Levy family restore Monticello?” and I couldn’t resist clicking.

How could I not? I’m always looking for new (to me) information on the Levys and Monticello, most often material such as old newspaper articles that have been digitized and made accessible online since I did the research for the book in 1999-2001.

I have used Chat GBT occasionally over the years, mainly as a curiosity to see how accurate answers would be on subjects I knew a fair amount about. Most contained errors and not much more info than I could have easily found through a Google or other online search.

But I had read that AI had recently made great strides with accuracy, so I clicked. Not this time, though.

I actually laughed out loud at that howler of a first sentence and the ridiculous name, “Barclay Hazard Levy.” And the nonexistent “Barclay son” named, of all things, “James A. Levy.” And that the Levy Family “purchased Monticello in 1923,” which was only off by 89 years.

To set the record straight, there was no such human being as “Barclay Hazard Levy,” much less him being a great grandnephew of Thomas Jefferson. Plus, the Levy Family didn’t buy Monticello from Uriah Levy in 1923. That would have been miraclulous as Levy had died in 1862.

As for what did happen in 1923, Uriah Levy’s nephew, Jefferson Monroe Levy, who had acquired the property by buying out his uncle’s other heirs in 1879, sold it that year—not to his long-dead uncle, but to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation.

The only Barclay in the equation is James Turner Barclay (below), who bought Monticello from Jefferson’s heirs in 1831 and sold it to Uriah Phillips Levy in 1834.

My advice: Don’t go to AI in search of the history of the Levy Family’s remarkable stewardship of Monticello. You can find the real names, dates, and lots more in Saving Monticello.

DR. SARNA: Soon after he received an honorary degree and gave the Keynote speech at Brandies University’s undergraduate commencement on May 18, Dr. Jonathan Sarna, the eminent American Jewish History professor and prolific author, retired as a University Professor of American Jewish History, Emeritus, at Brandeis, his alma mater.

If fact, the Keynote speech came on the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Sarna’s graduation from Brandeis in 1975 with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Judaic Studies. The following year, he received an MA in history from Yale University; and went on to earn a history Ph.D. from Yale in 1979.

Dr. Sarna—a long-time subscriber to this newsletter—did post-doctoral work for eleven years at the American Jewish Archives at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, then returned to his alma mater, where he spent the next 35 years teaching Jewish American history at Brandeis.

A former president of the Association for Jewish Studies and the Chief Historian at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, Dr. Sarna (above) has written or edited more than two dozen books on American Jewish History. That includes his encyclopedic American Judaism: A History, and Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah, a 1981 biography of the famed nineteenth century journalist and diplomat Mordecai Manuel Noah (1785-1851), a second cousin of Uriah Levy, whom mention in Saving Monticello.

Just like any other writer who deals with American Jewish History, I have sought Dr. Sarna’s advice more than once. He always has responded graciously and has helped me immensely. 

W. WILSON: As I wrote in Saving Monticello, before, during, and after his two-term presidency (1913-21), Woodrow Wilson was a strong supporter of Maude Littleton’s campaign to have the U.S. government condemn Monticello, take it from Jefferson Levy, and turn it into a government-run house museum.

During the hotly debated attempt in Congress in 1912 over legislation that would have put Littleton’s campaign in motion, the then Democratic Governor of New Jersey wrote to her, saying he supported her mission “with all of my heart.”

As the campaign continued in 1914, Maude Littleton (in the dark dress in the photo) let it be known, including during testimony before a Senate committee that year, that she that spoken to Wilson “many times on this question,” and reported that the President was strongly in favor of government ownership, “even through condemnation.”

The next year Wilson actively lobbied Senate and House leaders for passage of a resolution that would have condemned Monticello and turned it over to the government. It didn’t pass.

In the summer of 1916, a large delegation of DAR members, headed by the organization's president general, Daisy Allen Story, met with Wilson at the White House to lobby him to help to continue to use his influence to encourage Congress to approved a piece of legislation that would authorized the government to purchase Monticello.

“The President told the delegation he was in favor of the $500,000 called for in the bill to purchase the property,” the Charlottesville Daily Progress reported, “and would give his influence and aid having the bill passed.” It didn’t.

In 1917, Congress lost interest in the matter after the U.S. entered World War I. After the war ended in 1918, Levy put Monticello on the market and a real estate broker began marketing the property in the spring of 1919. As readers of Saving Monticello well know, Monticello did not sell until 1923. 

I sketched Wilson’s involvement in Maude Littleton’s campaign to wrest Monticello from Jefferson Levy in the book. One small but intriguing piece of that story that I only discovered recently is that Levy took it upon himself to go to the White House on October 2, 1919, to invite the president to come to Monticello, as a newspaper article put it, to “regain his health.” Levy, the article went on to say, “was not permitted” to see Wilson. 

Three days later, Woodrow Wilson (above) had a massive stroke, and was incapacitated for the rest of his term in office. He died on February 3, 1924, at 67. Jefferson Monroe Levy died a month and three days later, on March 6, 1924, five weeks short of his 72nd birthday—and a little over two months after he had sold Monticello to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. 

EVENTS & COMMERCE:  I have a growing number of events scheduled later this summer and into the fall, most Lafayette: Idealist General, my newly re-released concise biography of the famed Marquis, and my latest book, The Unlikely War Hero, 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.

I’m also doing talks, podcasts and other events for the paperback edition of Lafayette: Idealist General and, of course, Saving Monticello.

Many are speaking engagements for historic preservation and other groups. Most are open to the public. For details, go to: marcleepson.com/events

If you’d like to arrange a talk on The Unlikely War Hero, Saving Monticello, Lafayette, or any of my other books, please email me at marcleepson@gmail.com 

To order signed copies from my website, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering