In 1947, two years after the death of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the postal administration issued an eight-denomination stamp set and two souvenir sheets in his memory, each sold with a 100% surcharge. It remains something of a mystery how such an imposing issue commemorating an American president could have been produced at the State Printing Works on behalf of the postal administration at that time. No anniversary or specific event called for such an issue. In the summer of 1947, Hungary was formally still a multi-party republic, but political language and propaganda were already clearly following Moscow’s model. Anti-“West” rhetoric was intensifying, while the Ministry of the Interior and the state-security apparatus were in the hands of the Hungarian Communist Party led by Mátyás Rákosi.
By then, Rákosi, increasingly captive to the logic of power and backed strongly by Moscow, was openly preparing the way for total dictatorship. He followed the Soviet-inspired “salami tactics”, whose essence was not the immediate abolition of democracy but its gradual dismantling: only as much was removed at each stage as society could still “swallow”. This avoided provoking immediate mass resistance. The electoral law was altered to suit Communist interests, propaganda loudly promoted Soviet ideology, and political opponents who challenged the narrative that the “West” was evil—or who defended democracy—were first destroyed by character assassination and then by harsher methods. The rigging of the so-called “blue-ballot” election of 31 August 1947 ultimately fulfilled Rákosi’s ambition—and became a nightmare for Hungarian society.
Against that background, it is indeed striking that an eight-stamp set and two souvenir sheets were issued precisely in honour of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The stamps also appeared in two types of miniature sheet, with upright and inverted stamp orientation. The 100% surcharge supported the Foundation Postal Workers’ Hospital. Philatelic literature written in the 1960s stated that “the origin of the issue is obscure; it was presumably produced for a foreign order”. (Clearly they did not mean Moscow...)
Another curiosity is that organised collectors could buy the Roosevelt stamps and souvenir sheets (for 8.80 Ft) only if they also purchased four complete sets of the “30 Years of the Soviet Union” issue depicting Stalin and Lenin (for 16 Ft), plus an additional 3 forints 20 fillér in other charges.
Most of the stamps were printed in sheets of 25 and reached collectors after being separated into individual stamps. A few complete sets of 25-stamp sheets survived, however, and are now valuable rarities. In addition to the sheets of 25, sets of miniature sheets containing four stamps each were also produced. Miniature sheets containing the ordinary-postage and airmail stamps were issued with both upright and inverted stamp orientation. A particular curiosity of the four-stamp miniature sheets is that Hungarian collectors were unaware of their existence for a long time, because the postal administration did not sell them domestically and organised collectors could not order them. They reached Hungarian collectors only later through commercial imports and stamp exchange.
The stamps were designed by Pál Szűcs, for whom this issue became his main lasting contribution to Hungarian philately. Apart from it, his name is associated with several propaganda stamps and the 1962 Tropical Fish series.
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