Volume XX, Number 5 May 2023
“The study of the past is a constantly evolving,
never-ending journey of discovery.” – Eric Foner
AN EXCELLENT MAN: As I found out while doing the research for Saving Monticello, Jefferson M. Levy, like his uncle Uriah P. Levy, was a New York City resident who did not live full time at Monticello during the years (1879-1923) that he owned it. But Jefferson Levy did spend considerable amounts of time, including many summer weekends, at Thomas Jefferson’s Charlottesville, Virginia, “Essay in Architecture” during the 44 years when he was its proud owner.
Said evidence: a brief, kind-of gossipy article in the May 22, 1911, New York Herald, on the occasion of JML’s “return to the halls of Congress.” Levy, an extremely successful lawyer and real estate and stock speculator, had been re-elected to the House of Representatives in the fall of 1910 and took his seat in March 1911. A decade earlier he had served in the House for one term, from 1899-1901, representing New York's 13th Congressional District in Manhattan.
Levy, a conservative Democrat, would be “an excellent man for his district,” the article predicted, pointing to the fact that 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 as he was to be a member of Congress, Jefferson Levy was “prouder yet,” of owning Monticello, which in 1911 he had owned for more than three decades. Keeping up the “reputation for hospitality” that Monticello “enjoyed in Jefferson’s time,” the article noted, Levy “takes down a gay party of his cronies nearly every week-end.”
I couldn’t help pondering the ironic fact that at the time the article was published and Jefferson Levy was hosting regular jolly parties at Monticello, the ardent Thomas Jefferson devotee Maud Littleton was launching her national campaign to take Monticello from him and turn it into a government-run house museum—a campaign, as I show in Saving Monticello, tainted by the stench of anti-Semitism.
After resolving that the property should
not belong to Jefferson Levy, Maud Littleton spent the first half of 1911
furthering her knowledge of the history of Monticello. That resulted in her
writing and publishing “One Wish,” a sixteen-page tract mailed out to
influential friends around the country that summer. That emotional plea for an
end to the Levy family’s ownership of Monticello was the start of a bitter,
contentious, three-year battle between Mrs. Littleton and her allies and
Jefferson Monroe Levy and his supporters over who would own Monticello.
The bitterness ended in the fall of 1914 when Jefferson Levy—who once said that he would sell Monticello only when the White House was for sale—agreed to let the government have the house and its 600-plus acres, plus all its furniture and furnishings, for $500,000. That mollified Maud Littleton, but the sale never happened as Congress couldn’t come to grips with the asking price.
All interest in Monticello on Capitol Hill ended when the U.S. entered World War I in 1917. Five years after the war Jefferson Levy 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 the Center for Jewish History archives back in pre-digital days (1999), are made up primarily of newspaper articles in which Jefferson Levy is mentioned. He employed a clipping service, a long-gone, pre-Internet business that searched for and then physically cut out newspaper articles and sent them to clients.
When I started my journalism career in 1974 at Congressional Quarterly 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 searching for topics that the magazine’s and other CQ news services’ reporters were working on and then “clip” them out with a metal ruler and deliver them to us. That low-tech “search engine” had nothing on Google, but it worked very well back in the 1900s.
MEA CULPA: URIAH LEVY’S WORTH: In the April issue I mentioned that, as I wrote in Saving Monticello, Uriah Levy was listed as one of the wealthiest men in Manhattan in the 1855 edition of Moses Beach’s The Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens 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, who said that while doing research for a play he is writing about Uriah Levy, he came 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 can see from the image of the entry below—although the comma looks like a period and the last zero somehow was dropped. How I managed to double that figure when I wrote the book more than twenty years ago escapes me. But it happened. And if the book ever goes into a second edition, I will correct that error.
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That misstep got me thinking about how much $250,000 in 1855 would be worth today. So I went online and found several inflation calculator websites. I also found out that the sites use educated guesses for pre-1913 inflation figures because the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics only began tabulating inflation data in 1913.
I went to three inflation calculator sites, plugged in $250,000 and 1855, and they all came up with approximately the same figure: that Uriah P, Levy that year was worth the equivalent of more than $8.5 million in 2023.
THE DOC: Steven Pressman’s great documentary, “The Levys of Monticello,” which was inspired by Saving Monticello, is making its last round of film festivals this spring. Next up is a screening in Brookline, Mass., on May 8 during the National Center for Jewish 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 Scott Key, based on my book, What So Proudly We Hailed: Francis Scott Key, A Life, at the McLean (Virginia) Historical Society.
On Tuesday, May 23, the topic will be Saving Monticello for my talk and book signing for the Resident Forum speaker series at the Heritage Hunt Retirement Community in Gainesville, Virginia.
For details 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 hardcover
copies, along with a good selection of new copies of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate
Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; Flag:
An American Biography; and Ballad of
the Green Beret: The Life and Wars of Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler.
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