November 2024

 

Volume XXI, Number 11                                                       November 2024

 

 

BOUNTEOUS HOSPITALITY:  By the early 1890s, as I wrote in Saving Monticello, Jefferson Monroe Levy, a self-made millionaire real estate and stock speculator, was enjoying a lavish lifestyle. The owner of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello since 1879, he also had an opulent townhouse in New York City, owned a good number of commercial properties in Manhattan and in and around Charlottesville, and regularly traveled to England, France, and Italy. I’ve likened the life-long bachelor to being a late 19th century equivalent of a mid-twentieth century jetsetter, as he regularly hobnobbed on the Continent with royalty and others in his exalted income bracket.

Between his globetrotting, J. M. Levy spent many summer weekends and most Thanksgivings at Monticello, oftentimes in the company of members of his family. A staff of domestic servants catered to their needs on the mountaintop. Some worked year-round at Monticello; others were Levy’s New York employees, including his valet, butler, and laundress. His sister Amelia Mayhoff took over as Jefferson Levy’s Monticello co-host following their mother’s death in January 1893.

During the 40-plus years Jefferson Levy (below) owned Monticello, he also hosted countless out-of-town visitors Many of them were nationally prominent political figures, mostly Democratic Party higher-ups. The long list included members of Congress, governors and two sitting presidents—Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt.

A fiscally conservative Democrat, Jefferson Levy began taking an active interest in politics in the last decade of the 19^th century. He had become an influential voice in the Virginia Democratic Party and made strong connections with party leaders in New York. That networking culminated in him being the Democrats’ nominee to represent New York City’s thirteenth congressional district in a special election in 1899, which he won. Levy served for two years in the House, and did not choose to run for re-election in 1900. But ten years later, he re-launched his political career and served two more terms in Congress, from 1911-15, before deciding not to run again in 1914, after the U.S. entered World War I.

One reason Levy bowed out of politics in 1914 was his pending decision—which he announced that October—to sell Monticello after two years of fending off a campaign in Congress that  would have the government take over Monticello and turn it into a house museum.   

***************

Flash back to the summer of 1894 and a visit to the mountaintop that likely influenced Jefferson Levy to run for Congress five years later—a visit that I only recently learned about and is not mentioned in Saving Monticello. In August of that year, the Cleveland Administration’s Vice President, Adlai Ewing Stevenson, spent a few days on the mountaintop, along with David Bennett Hill (1843-1910, in photo below), a powerful Democratic Senator from New York

A prominent lawyer in Elmira, N.Y., Hill had steadily made his way up the ranks of the Empire State’s Democratic Party. He was elected to the State Assembly in 1870, where he became a close associate of Democratic Governor Samuel J. Tilden, who later became the Democratic nominee against Rutherford B. Hayes in the infamous disputed presidential election of 1876.

Hill was elected mayor of Elmira in 1882. Later that year, he ran for Lieutenant Governor and won, getting more votes than the Governor, Grover Cleveland. When Cleveland was elected to the presidency two years later, Hill filled out the rest of Cleveland’s gubernatorial term.

David Hill won the 1890 election to the U.S. Senate while he still was New York’s Governor, but chose to stay in that office for more than a year, not taking his seat in the U.S. Senate until January of 1892.

Vice President Stevenson (1835-1914)—the grandfather of Adlai Ewing Stevenson II, the governor of Illinois and the Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956—also was a national Democratic Party bigwig.

An Illinois congressman in the 1870s and 80s, he went on to serve as Assistant Postmaster General (a politically powerful job in those days) during the first Cleveland Administration after which the party chose Stevenson to be Grover Cleveland’s running mate in 1892.

It's very likely that the visit to Monticello by those two Democratic Party heavy hitters in 1894 played a role in Jefferson Levy’s decision five years later to jump into national politics and run for Congress. At the very least, Hill and Stevenson definitely were impressed by the fact that Levy owned Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and that he was among the wealthiest men in the country—and someone who had the wherewithal to entertain guests lavishly.

After returning to Washington, Hill told an Alexandria (Va.) Gazette reporter that the trip to Monticello “was a delightful one” and that Levy’s hospitality “is not only bounteous but magnificent and that he entertains elegantly.”

During the last night of their short stay, Hill told the reporter that “a large number of the people of Charlottesville and vicinage [very likely Democratic Party supporters] rode out to the Monticello to call” on him and Stevenson and that both of them “addressed” the group.

The only fly in the ointment, the newspaper said, was that Hill said he “didn’t sleep well” upstairs in the small, octagonal guest bedroom known as “Mr. Madison’s Room,” in honor of the fact that James and Dolly Madison often spent the night there in days gone by.

EVENTS:  On Thursday, November 14, I’ll be doing a talk on the life of the Marquis de Lafayette, based on my 2011 concise biography, Lafayette: Idealist General, in a fund-raising event for the Virginia Piedmont Heritage Area, a nonprofit historic preservation organization, in Upperville, Va. To register, go to https://bit.ly/VPHALafayetteTalk

On Tuesday, November 19, I’ll be joining Susan Stein, Monticello’s Senior Curator for Special Projects, at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, D.C., for a showing of Steven Pressman’s great documentary, “The Levys of Monticello,” followed by a discussion of the film, which was inspired by Saving Monticello.  

I will be doing more events in December and in 2025, including talks on Saving Monticello. I also will be doing talks and media interviews starting in early December 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 

If you’d like to arrange a talk on that book, on Saving Monticello, or any of my other books, feel free to 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 a stack of six of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; and Ballad of the Green Beret, and Huntland.