Eight thousand letters a day, and almost none in his hand

The ladder

The research behind this index's Roosevelt page turned up three Heritage sales that, read together, show how the price rises with every word in his own hand. All three were sold by Heritage's manuscript specialists without a modern third-party certificate, which keeps them off the page's record table but makes them fair to compare with one another.

A typed letter, signed as president, 1936: $388.

A short handwritten note, signed with his initials, "FDR": $2,250.

A full letter written in his own hand, signed as president, 1942: $24,000. Heritage called it extremely rare.

These sold years apart, so the exact multiples should not be pressed hard. The order of the ladder is the point.

The certified letters on the page, mostly from before his presidency, sold for between about four hundred and fifty and fourteen hundred dollars. The handwritten presidential letter sits far above all of them.

The mail

The reason starts with the post.

Herbert Hoover, Roosevelt's predecessor, received about 800 letters a day. Roosevelt received around 8,000, ten times as many, and a single Fireside Chat on the radio could bring in some 450,000 letters, cards and telegrams.

Mail on that scale could only be answered by a system. The White House mail room was run by Ira Smith, who had started under McKinley and whose operation became the permanent office that still answers the president's correspondence today. Letters were sorted, routed, drafted and typed. At eight thousand a day, only a fraction could ever have reached the president himself.

Missy LeHand, his secretary for more than twenty years, described learning the job in her early days with him by reading every letter he dictated, until she knew which letters he would want to see and which he would not. By the White House years, sparing his time and his hand was the whole purpose of the office around him.

A typed letter with his signature at the bottom was the normal output of that machine. A letter he sat down and wrote out himself was the exception, which is why the market treats it as a different object.

Where the handwriting went

Roosevelt did write by hand, often in short notes to the people closest to him. A good deal of what he wrote that way has ended up somewhere it can never be bought.

Grace Tully, his last personal secretary, kept a collection of more than 5,000 documents and items, including the handwritten notes he sent his staff with instructions. Roosevelt also wrote about forty letters by hand to his distant cousin and confidante, Daisy Suckley.

The Suckley letters were bought privately by a newspaper company, and both collections ended up in its bankruptcy. In 2010 a court approved their donation, in full, to the National Archives and the Roosevelt Library. Two important collections of Roosevelt's personal handwriting went into an archive, and with them a share of the supply the market might otherwise have seen.

The same lesson, turned around

On this index we have now seen four presidents, and the question of whose hand wrote a letter keeps coming back.

Washington's famous letter on raising a new army was written out by his aide, and still sold for eight times his signature, because of what it said. Lincoln's secretary may have written one of the most famous letters Lincoln ever signed. On Theodore Roosevelt's page, a typed letter about the Panama Canal outsold one written in his own hand before his presidency.

Franklin Roosevelt is the case where the hand matters most. When a president's ordinary output is typed, signed and sent by the thousand, the scarce thing is not the signature or even the subject. It is the fact that he wrote the page himself, in office.

What to check before buying

Learn the abbreviations. Dealers describe a letter written and signed entirely by hand as an ALS, a typed letter signed as a TLS, and a letter written by someone else and signed as an LS. With Roosevelt, the difference between them is the difference between a few hundred dollars and tens of thousands.

Check the date against the office. A handwritten letter from before 1933 is a different thing from one written in the White House, and not the kind Heritage called extremely rare.

Expect the best material to come with a story. At this level, provenance and the auction house's own specialists carry as much weight as a modern certificate, exactly as they do for Lincoln.

And be wary of anything that looks too easy. Where a president's handwriting is worth sixty times his typed letters, it is worth imitating. Buy from a house that will stand behind what it sells.

The thing worth sitting with

By Franklin Roosevelt's time, a president's mail was answered, in effect, by an office. The office did its job so well that the letters he wrote himself became the rarest things he left behind.

The most common Roosevelt signature is the one at the bottom of a typed page. The rarest is the one at the end of a page he wrote out himself.

You can read how we work the numbers out.

Sources