President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Father Damien: An Open Letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu”

FDR had a great interest in Father Damien, who devoted his life to helping lepers, and got the U.S. Navy to transport Damien’s casket to Belgium for reburial.

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of English literature. He is best known for works such as Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped.

Stevenson is also remembered because of his famous reply, in the form of a published letter, to the Rev. Doctor Hyde of Honolulu about the Catholic martyr Father Damien, undertaken because of Hyde’s attack on Damien, who he called, to Stevenson’s displeasure, “a coarse, dirty man, headstrong and bigoted…He had no hand in the reforms and improvements inaugurated, which were the work of our Board of Health, as occasion required and means were provided. He was not a pure man in his relations with women, and the leprosy of which he died should be attributed to his vices and carelessness.”

Stevenson’s response has attained the stature of a small classic. Damien’s extraordinary devotion to the lepers of Molokai moved Stevenson to compose a response to the offensive charges hurled against Damien. The letter holds the reader with the incisive beauty of its diction, with its irony, its mockery, and its sarcasm. Measured in words, it is brief; but gauged in terms of the scene it evokes, the truths it states, the man it portrays, it is long.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote it with the same clear and accurate insight into human motives and the same depth of sympathy found in all of his great novels and essays. Many books and pamphlets have been written about Father Damien, but this letter is surely the most profoundly moving work about his courageous, dedicated, inspiring life.

Originally written in 1890, in 1930 “Father Damien: An Open Letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu“ was published privately for William Andrews Clark, Jr., and John Henry Nash. In the mid-1910s, Clark, a noted philanthropist, began collecting antiquarian and fine press books as a serious hobby. In 1919, he hired bibliographer Robert E. Cowan to consult on book-buying purchases and to help with the compilation of a printed library catalog. The first volume of this was printed in 1920 by San Francisco printer John Henry Nash, who did other books for Clark as well, including the Open Letter.

This is Franklin D. Roosevelt’s copy of “Father Damien: An Open Letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu.” Eleanor Roosevelt has written an ownership signature in her husband’s name, and she has added “his book.” Below that she has written own her initials.

On his death in 1889 Damien was laid to rest by and among his leper friends on Molokai. 46 years later his remains were transferred to his native Belgium. President Franklin D. Roosevelt provided a United States Navy ship to transport the casket, which was welcomed at Antwerp by the Cardinal Archbishop, King Leopold III and more than 100,000 people.