Fifth term? Didn’t he die in his fourth? Well yes, yes he did - but what if he survived to the 1948 presidential election? Should he run again?
I’m sure the he would have stopped at four. The war was over, the Depression pretty much recovered from; it’d be a time to go back to Hyde Park and relax.
I think there would have been zero mandate with the war over. While he beat Dewey in a landslide in '44, I think he would have had no interest in '48. It probably would not have resonated well with the public, either, since it would smack of being a little too much like royalty running the country. So no, he shouldn’t.
No, he wouldn’t have run. He still would have been in bad health, the war was won, and he wouldn’t have won.
Churchill didn’t even win, and the war in the Orient was still on.
He might have won, even in bad health, on the theory that his VP would succeed him. A vote for FDR would be a vote for Harry Truman. It would be a tad cynical, but FDR was given a lot of credit, in the eye of the public, for the victory in WWII.
I just looked up the electoral vote for 1944: a blow-out of 432 to 99. Dewey wouldn’t have dared so much as show his face against FDR.
The historical election of 1948 was 303 to 189, with 39 votes slurped off by Thurmond. There’s no way that FDR would have been 57 electoral votes weaker than Truman was.
FDR for the Fifth Term. As sure as anything can be in a hypothetical what-if alternate history!
This. I agree he would’ve retired, given the war ended and the economy was doing okay. Plus, he would’ve been 66 in 1948.
I voted No, because the war was over.
No guarantees that in 1948 Truman would have been the VP choice. FDR had four terms and three Vice Presidents. He swapped them out as convenient.
True. And…we have no way to know what scandals and crises might have happened from 45 to 48. Maybe Truman got caught in bed with a cheerleader. Maybe the USSR rolled into Berlin. That’s the big problem with what-if history. No way to know.
My reasoning is that they’d stick with Truman for VP in '48, as a “known quantity,” to try to maximize the number of voters who figure FDR is likely to die before '52.
Trin: Harry was devoted to Bess. That’s one scandal we can safely dismiss.
I’m going to say that he probably would have run for and won a fifth term. Here’s how I figure it.
Roosevelt had a huge ego, even by presidential standards. He had already broken precedent by running for a third and fourth term so I think he would have talked himself into running for a fifth. I think he was going to stay President until he was either voted out of office or died.
The war would have been over by 1948 but there were plenty of other crises going on. This would have given Roosevelt that excuse he wanted to run again and would have given his supporters reasons to back his decision. It would have been a campaign of “we need an experienced leader in these troubled times.”
His health would have been an issue but he would have concealed it as he did in real history.
And finally, I figure if Dewey wasn’t able to beat Truman, he wouldn’t have been able to beat Roosevelt. The same would have been true for Taft, Vandenberg, MacArthur or anyone else who might have run against him in 1948. Roosevelt just had too much stature.
One reason I think it’s plausible that he might have wanted to (if he’d lived, of course), is because of this bloke, throughout their World War II conferences Roosevelt was convinced that his easy charm could handle Stalin. With the start of the Cold War Roosevelt might conceivably have had the ego to run again to try and keep on top of relations with the Soviets.
It’s always fascinated me that the British threw out Churchill before the war was even over, part of the reason I’ve read is his domestic policy, in that he didn’t really have one beyond ‘keep everything the same’. Roosevelt of course was all about changing things domestically.
Even Reagan would have been re-elected if he had been constitutionally allowed to, and he was certainly mentally incompetent to serve. Every once in a while, the American people latch onto their president as a kind of a figurehead. And, our experience with a few like Wilson and Reagan has led us to believe that it doesn’t really matter who the president is, it is his handlers who administer the executive branch.
Even if FDR had been in perfect health for his age and wanted to run again I think everyone around him, his family, aids, cabinet, ranking DNC members etc., would have begged if not outright ordered him to not seek a fifth term. He was President during the two biggest crises not just in American but world history, the Great Depression and WWII. It was these exemplary situations that made a third (and fourth) term seem ok. But with both of them completely over a fifth term would have been seen as crass, greedy, selfish, and un-American. It would have sullied his up till then stellar reputation. Both his and the Democratic Party in general.
In fact if he had tried I think the Congress would have pushed for legislation to prevent it (i.e. what became the 22[sup]nd[/sup] Amendment).
I’m stunned he was only 63 when he died, all those stressful years really aged him.
You also have to remember that there hadn’t been a general election since 1935, and that had been won by an allegedly cross-party ‘National Government’ headed by Stanley Baldwin. Who was then succeeded by Chamberlain in 1937 who in turn handed over to Churchill in 1940.
1945 was the first opportunity the UK electorate had to vote on the idea of a government headed by Churchill, so its not so surprising they weren’t interested.
I believe he also went for a full on ‘Tory’ pitch to a country that hadn’t elected a Conservative government since 1924, which was “politically courageus” to say the least…
I think you underestimate how sick and tired FDR was by 1944. If it hadn’t been for the necessity of concluding the war—and seeing no serious successor who could take over—he wouldn’t have run for the fourth term.
I think we’re all assuming his health was better than it was historically. Obviously if his health had remained poor enough that he died in 1945 he wouldn’t have run for a fifth term in 1948.
Arguably given his state of health he wasn’t in a fit state to run in 1944, we know that he was often spaced out (that’s the medical term) in meetings and conferences. Little Nemo is quite correct that since we’re already assuming he lives past 1945 his health is not an issue for this hypothetical.
You didn’t ask about him running for his fourth term. (Had you, I would have said he shouldn’t have done it due to his ill health.) I think it’s perfectly reasonable to speculate that he hangs on to life while remaining in ill health.