June 2024

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

 

Volume XXI, Number 6                                                         June 2024

 

JML & THE UDC: In mid-November 1912 the battle between Jefferson Levy and his supporters and Maude Littleton and her backers over her well-financed plan to have the government assert eminent domain, confiscate Monticello, and turn it into a government-run house museum was reaching a crescendo. 

A bill that Mrs. Littleton (as she was referred to in the newspapers of the day) and her allies on Capitol Hill had written would do exactly, and it would soon be coming up for a vote in the House of Representatives. The bill came out of a series of bombastic hearings during the summer and fall in which the two camps—led by Maude Littleton and the congressmen supporting her effort, and by Jefferson Levy and his lawyer, Judge Tom Duke of Charlottesville—verbally sparred over Monticello’s fate.

As the adversaries worked to gain support before the vote, the United Daughters of the Confederacy—a then-influential descendants group founded in 1894 whose members were blood relatives of Confederate soldiers or those who supported the South’s cause in the Civil War—came into the picture.

Although I wrote a fair amount about other events surrounding what some people called “The War of 1912” in Saving Monticello, I only recently learned new details about Mrs. Littleton’s interactions with the most-influential American hereditary groups, including the UDC and the Daughters of the American Revolution, about the pending legislation. The DAR spurned her offer to support the government-takeover plan, but proposed an alternative, having a private group (such as the DAR) run Monticello as a house museum open to the public. As I wrote in the book, DAR leaders later would make a case before Congress to do just at that. It did not come to fruition. 

Meanwhile, in November 1912, the UDC briefly stepped into the Levy-Littleton imbroglio. It came about during the organization’s 9^th annual convention at the lavish Beaux-Arts-style Willard Hotel in Washington (in photo below) during which Mrs. Littleton showed up to lobby UDC members to endorse her plan. But she left the city without addressing the body, after the convention did not take up the matter when the proceedings ended on November 16.

Spurning Maude Littleton may have been due to the fact that the convention received a letter from Jefferson Levy “reiterating,” a Richmond Times Dispatch reporter wrote, “his oft-repeated declaration that he does not wish to sell the historic home.” 

In the letter Levy also lambasted Mrs. Littleton and her supporters for “the abuse” of his family and for her “misstatements and disregard of the care I have bestowed on the property.” 

At the convention’s last session, the UDC elected new members, then “applauded a statement with reference to the right of the South to have succeeded,” as a Washington Times reporter put it. Then came an address by a Union Civil War veteran that “had many of the delegates weeping” after the man spoke about the ceremonies of the dedication of the cornerstone of a Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery a week earlier.** 

After the convention ended, word got out that influential UDC members, including Mrs. Frank Anthony Walke (as the newspapers referred to her) of Norfolk, Virginia, the UDC’s Custodian of the Flags, opposed a government seizure of Monticello. But the Daughters were not averse to their organization running the property, an idea that Mrs. Walke said Jefferson Levy agreed to do at some unspecified time in the future. 

Monticello, she told a reporter, “belongs to Virginia in the future, and the government shall not own it. Mr. Levy has promised that the Virginia division of the [UDC] shall have the old home of Jefferson. I have his personal assurance that the property shall go to us when he has finished its use.” She went on to say that she would oppose “any proposition for [Monticello’s] acquisition by the United States which may be advanced by Mrs. Littleton.” 

Mrs. Walke then sarcastically advised Maude Littleton to have “the government purchase all the historical places in the North, South, East and West, and to preserve them. But Virginia can take care of her property, particularly when it is not [on] the market.” 

That didn’t exactly go over with Mrs. Littleton. “Don’t pay any attention to Mrs. Walke,” she said the day after the convention ended. “She is just a silly, little thing—a little foolish thing—a busybody who is trying to get even with me because I wouldn’t okay her railroad fare to Washington and her hotel expenses there.” 

Then she added: “I don’t care a row of pins about Jefferson Levy. He is nothing but a stumbling block in the way of our great purpose. All I am thinking about is Thomas Jefferson.” 

Mrs. Littleton went on to say that the famed populist politician and orator William Jennings Bryan (above, orating) had “informed Mr. Levy” that “we are going to have Monticello.” Bryan, she said, assured her “that he would fight while he had breath in his body to have Monticello set aside as a public memorial.” 

William Jennings Bryan, a venerator extraordinaire of Thomas Jefferson, had written to Jefferson Levy in 1897 suggesting that he sell Monticello to the federal government, which would turn it into a national shrine. Six months earlier Bryan, the Democratic Party nominee, had narrowly lost the 1896 presidential election to William McKinley. 

In November 1912, William Jennings Bryan did, indeed, come out in support of Mrs. Littleton’s cause. But Bryan, who died in 1925, never saw the government take Monticello from Jefferson Levy—though he (and Mrs. Littleton) did live to see the newly formed nonprofit Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, purchase Monticello from Levy in 1923 and begin the process of turning it into a privately run house museum. 

**That memorial, the largest in the cemetery, was commissioned by the UDC and dedicated in 1914. It was created by the Virginia-born sculptor and diehard former Confederate soldier, Moses Ezekiel. The memorial was removed from the cemetery on December 22, 2023.

 EVENTS: Aside from a talk at an informal gathering of folks near where I live, I don’t have any speaking engagements for Saving Monticello or any of my other books in June. In other event news, Steve Pressman’s great 2022 documentary, “The Levys of Monticello,” which was inspired by my book, is now available (with ads) for free on Amazon Prime. 

In other news, the pub date for my next book, The Unlikely War Hero, a different kind of Vietnam War POW true story, is December 17. You can get a sneak preview at https://bit.ly/PrePubInfo 

And the 11^th printing of the SM paperback, published by the University of Virginia Press, is now available in bookstores and online. If you would like an autographed copy of the hardcover, I have a few on hand, along with brand-new paperbacks. To order, go to this page on my website: https://bit.ly/BookOrdering or email me at marcleepson@gmail.com  

I also have six of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; Flag: An American Biography; Ballad of the Green Beret; and Huntland. There’s more info on all those books on my website.