I know it was changed due to Hoover’s inept response to the Depression. Was there a call to change in the wake of Buchanan’s handling of the secession crisis?
Please elaborate.
Your initial assumption is incorrect. Congress approved the 20th Amendment on March 2, 1932and sent it to the states for ratification. That was before Roosevelt was even nominated, and seven months before his election. There were also several other changes, such as the moving of the date of the required annual Congressional session and changes in the Presidential electoral process and succession (which it still didn’t entirely fix.)
But it was still 3 years after the market crashed, and Hoover had 3 YEARS to do something, and he didn’t do nearly enough.
Hoover (who did do too little, but also has had bad press; he did make some efforts at relief) remained in office until March 1933; the 20th Amendment was ratified during FDR’s first term, and had the effect of shortening it, not Hoover’'s.
But, it would seem to reason that the Depression, and Hoover’s (lack of) response it what got the ball rolling on the amendment in the 1st place.
Are you saying that Congress passed the 20th Amendment to punish Hoover by shortening his term in office by six weeks?
No, they did it to get rid of ineffective leaders quicker.
March 4th to January 20th? That was to reduce the “lame duck” period for the new president.
If it was a reflection of the Depression at all, it was due to the realization that an extra three months of a lame duck Congress and President could make response to a crisis more difficult.
Further, the Republicans has a majority in both houses of Congress under Hoover. Why would they punish their own president?
Further, the amendment was passed on March 2, 1932 and would have had to have been ratified by October 15th for it to affect Hoover. That’s a very short time frame for a housekeeping amendment at a time when the country was fighting a crisis. Indeed, the amendment had only 17 states ratifying it before then; it was ratified quickly in January – when it wouldn’t have affected Hoover as states voted for it after the Roosevelt victory. By that time, it would have penalized Roosevelt, not Hoover.
Believe it or not, the Twentieth Amendment was more a reaction to Warren Harding than to Herbert Hoover. And, it was designed more to eliminate the lame-duck session of Congress than to shorten the presidential transition.
The pre-1935 Constitution and federal law combined for a triple-whammy of bad scheduling: (a) elections in November; (b) inauguration in March; and (c) annual sessions of Congress beginning in December. This meant that in even-numbered years, Congress would convene in December, after the election (at which many members were inevitably defeated), for a rushed “short session” which would end in March. Then the newly elected members would cool their heels until the following December.
This was stupid. Everybody knew it was stupid. But nobody wanted to change it, or could agree on how to change it. To answer this part of your question . . .
No. Nobody felt that Lincoln would have done better if only he had been allowed to take office sooner. No proposal to change Inauguration Day was debated during or immediately after the Civil War. Proposals were debated, but shot down, during the 1880’s.
Finally, in 1922, Republicans in Congress introduced, and President Harding supported, a controversial bill to privatize surplus naval vessels. Republicans lost the House in the election of 1922, but the 1922-23 lame duck House passed the measure anyway. (The measure was filibustered to death in the Senate–this was another problem with short sessions.)
Liberal Republican George Norris, who had opposed the bill, then began championing the proposed Twentieth Amendment in every session of Congress. Because of its origins, however, the Republican House leadership opposed it. As a result it did not pass until Democrats gained control of the House after the election of 1930. (Republicans still controlled the Senate, but Republican Senators supported the Amendment.)
Dissatisfaction with Hoover’s handling of the Depression played a part in the Republican loss of the House in 1930, so yes, there is a connection between Hoover and the passage of the Twentieth Amendment. But, it is an indirect one; the Amendment was not devised specifically because of dissatisfaction with Hoover.
Further dissatisfaction with Hoover, and ongoing problems with the very difficult 1932-33 transition, may have speeded ratification of the Amendment. But, it almost certainly would have been ratified even if Hoover had been reelected.
Very interesting history Freddy! Thank you.
An additional factor that no one seems to have mentioned is that the 4 March date was originally decided upon to give everyone plenty of time to travel to Washington after the November election. By the early 20th century, advances in transportation had eliminated that concern.
And it would still have been a factor in Buchanan’s time.
I think it was transportation problems that forced the long delay between elections, the electoral college, and the inauguration. Nowadays, you could have the elections on a Tuesday, the electoral college two days later (they don’t need to meet–or even exist) and inauguration on Sunday. And the new congress meet the next day.
I don’t think they can shorten the time that much. It usually takes states 2 or 3 weeks to certify elections.
But it only affected that one president.
FDR was an ineffective President?
As Polycarp noted upthread, Hoover’s term was not affected. He took office on March 4 1929 and left office on March 4 1933. It was FDR’s first term which was shortened.
If that was in response to my post, what I was saying was that the post I quoted suggested that the change would somehow have an ongoing effect on “ineffective leaders,” when, in actuality, it only ever would have affected the president who was in office immediately prior to the change. After that, the term from one inauguration to the next wouldn’t be getting any shorter, effectiveness notwithstanding.