No convoluted hypothesis or theory here; just a question that popped into my head.
Yes. That is assuming he brought a victory in Japan the way Truman did. I think Truman was largely elected himself based on the goodwill people still felt for Rooseveldt.
Probably a 5th, but the Brits eventually tossed out Churchill - so who knows hold long FDR could have kept his popularity.
“I did not become Prime Minister to oversee the dissolution of the British Empire.”
I doubt it. The Brits tossed Winnie, and I think the voters would have had the same idea. Let Roosevelt exit the stage to plaudits from everybody and let someone else steer the ship for a few years.
GB was in terrible shape after WWII. The US didn’t have anything like those problems. But there is the question of whether he’d run again.
I have a Roosevelt For President replica poster on my living room wall.
We need him today.
Yeah I think so. He was wildly popular and would have been the president who presided over the our victory in WWII and finally a recovered economy. He may not have been so popular after that term though.
I don’t see how that is remotely an accurate reading of history.
Okay, let’s assume Roosevelt brought about victory in World War II as Truman had. Unless we also presume Roosevelt be a healthy and whole man I fail to see how he would have any chance of beating Thomas Dewey in '48.
The transition from the war economy to the peace economy was poorly planned and executed even worse. This was in part the fault of Truman sure, but Roosevelt himself had basically ignored domestic matters and barely interacted with Congress once American involvement in World War II fully evolved. I see little indication Roosevelt had any planning or thinking at all directed to the post-war economy, and since the war ended a year earlier than Roosevelt thought it would there is little reason to assume if he had lived he would have made any such plans.
When you go from the war economy to the peace economy a few things happen. You have price controls removed and then massive inflation. You have the largest industrial strikes in American history break out as labor-management relationships, kept under control due to the demands of producing munitions for World War II, deteriorated. Basically America had been willing to tighten its belts during the war. Employees were willing to forego strikes for higher wages because they didn’t want to reduce the power of the United States to fight in the largest war in history; farmers were willing to sell under the price control regime because of a recognition of national necessity. Without the war both things and their support ended. So right as farmers were advocating for an end to price controls labor is demanding a higher wage. The result was massive economic hardship and instability in 1946 and a huge defeat for the Democrats in Congress in the '46 mid terms.
I’ve yet to see how Roosevelt would have avoided any of this.
As the Great Depression and World War II become distant memories in the minds of voters, Republicans are pushing a popular platform that promises sustainable growth for a new era. Truman suffered multiple veto overrides on important issues attacking Democratic policy points.
Further, for years the Democratic party had been a disparate coalition held together by first necessity in the Great Depression (and by FDR’s great leadership at that time) and later by WWII. In this post war era FDR was not the same man he was in 1934, he was a tired and increasingly ineffective President near his death. Unless we assume no health decline at all, it’s hard to imagine he would not be exhausted and ineffective in the length of his fourth term. So you’d have still seen a splintered Democratic party (into left wing populist / socialist candidates in '48 and right-wing states rights candidates in '48.)
So then we come to the actual election of 1948. How did Truman win in history? Through a tireless, inexhaustible and determined campaign. Dispensing with many of the traditional niceties of Presidential politics campaign he railed against Dewey by name, called a special session of the Republican Congress so he could excoriate it for its inactivity and inability to agree on a coherent agenda, and basically covered the entirety of the country that was on any major train route in an unprecedented and unrelenting whistle-stop tour. Unless we presume more than just extended life, but massively extended vigor and health I just don’t see how Roosevelt could keep his poll numbers up in the face of all the economic gloom (which would have still happened), and Roosevelt lacked the ability to wage the sort of effort Truman undertook to make his comeback. (And it was a close thing, Truman was facing not one but two major third party candidates who broke out of his own party and while his final surge in October resulted in him solidly beating Dewey in the popular vote he won the electoral college in part based on less than a 1% margin in three of the largest states–California, Ohio, and Illinois.)
I don’t know if Roosevelt’s popularity ever would have cratered as much as Truman’s did, but it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t. As has been said…Winston Churchill was every bit the inspiration Roosevelt was and he was knocked out of office. But what we can be sure of is Truman did not win in '48 because of residual feelings of support for Roosevelt or for Truman’s handling of World War II’s ending. Truman won because he campaigned probably harder than any President ever had up to that point, and because Thomas Dewey played prevent defense til election day because his advisers assured him his lead was simply insurmountable and the only way he could lose was by muddying himself in a fight with Truman.
Another vote for hard to say.
Roosevelt was a great campaigner. And Truman won in 1948 so there wasn’t an overwhelming backlash against the Democratic Party.
But still … I just feel he would have been going back to the well one time too many. He was able to justify running in 1940 and 1944 because of the crisis of the war. If he had run again in 1948, people would have been saying that he apparently was never planning on quitting.
And his opposition wouldn’t have come just from the Republicans. There would have been a lot of Democrats with ambitions of their own that would have been thwarted by Roosevelt’s refusal to step down. They might not have publicly broken ranks with him but their support for him getting a fifth term would have been tepid. Some Democrats might have secretly preferred to see Dewey kick Roosevelt out of office to open up the field for them in 1952.
“Next Tuesday all you will go to the polls. You’ll stand there in the polling place and make a decision. I think when you make that decision it might be well if you would ask yourself- are you better off than you were 16 years ago?”
I think, from the historical record of what he actually did do, it’s safe to say that he’d continue to keep running until he literally dropped dead.
That’s an interesting and informative post Martin. But it does nothing to refute the basic logic of my contention. FDR was the president who saved the country from the depths of the Great Depression and rallied the nation to make the world safe for democracy. He was in fact the commander in chief of the allied forces and it was his leadership that brought an end to WWII. The very fact that Truman was elected himself while dealing with the aftermath of the war shows that FDR would have had an easy time getting re-elected once again. He gained his fourth term with minimal campaigned and was revered by the nation and the world. Had he run again no opponent would be noticed in the shadow of this great man.
That could be. But he may have been tired. He certainly had aged in the office as all presidents do, but no one else had done it as long. Many of his last actions in office showed a man who knew life was soon to end. I have no way of knowing, but he certainly may have considered retiring to have some time of his own. However his estimate of his successor may have caused him to run again. I don’t know for sure how he felt about Truman, or if there were any other candidates he would supported. Fear of turning the country back to the Republican party which had destroyed the economy and failed to recognize the threat of the Axis may have been the inducement for him to run again, and again if needed.
How could Herbert Hoover be accused of failure to “recognize the threat of the Axis?” With the Bonus Army and everything else happening in the wake of the '29 crash, perhaps he should have seized upon a beer hall riot by a couple of subsequently imprisoned ne’er do wells halfway across the world as the thing that was really important?
TriPolar said the Republican Party not Hoover. And he’s mostly correct in this. Many Republicans in the late thirties did fail to see the danger that Axis represented. They figured it was a foreign problem that the United States could and should avoid.
That said, I don’t think this would have been a major campaign issue in 1948. The problem of the Axis had been resolutely resolved in 1945. People in 1948 were looking at the future not the past. The election was about things like public housing, civil rights, post-war reconstruction, and the threat of Communism. Roosevelt wouldn’t have been given a free pass on these issues.
Not any more so, or much more so, than Democrats, IIRC. The America Firsters had pols and celebrities from both sides of the aisle.
But Roosevelt was openly anti-isolationist. So the Democratic isolationists at least muted their arguments in deference to the President being a member of their party. Republican isolationists, on the other hand, publicly pushed isolationism as an argument against Roosevelt. So the Republicans came to be seen as the isolationist party.
Given that Truman won in 1948, I have to think FDR would have won, and more easily.
Now a 6th term against Ike, no way.
You can say the same thing about Churchill in the UK, so your premise isn’t supported by the closest comparison we can find in history. If FDR’s re-election was held the day after V-J day you’re right. But in 1948 the country had gone through economic turmoil, and a disastrous post-war economic transition plan. FDR’s plan if anything would have been worse than Truman’s, because FDR had basically gotten to the point during WWII where he paid no attention to domestic policy at all.
Also, keep in mind despite FDR’s strong historical image, his popularity fluctuated all the time while he was actually alive and in office. I’ve not seen anything to suggest he’d oversee the economic problems Truman did without a hit to his polling numbers. It was very high after Pearl Harbor and never went below 50 during the war, and he was overseeing a slow but steady recovery before then. However the fact that his numbers went down even as late as 1938 after he’d already enacted tons of popular policies strongly suggests it’s unlikely a President easily portrayed as being out of touch and basically too infirm to run the country would win in '48 in a walk.
I also don’t see how FDR keeps the Socialist/Progressives and the Racist Southern Dems under control and that splintering was a major part of the reason the election was tough for Truman, he had two third party candidates garnering over a million votes both from portions of the electorate that traditionally voted Democrat.