The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution prohibits a President from serving more than two terms. It was passed shortly after FDR’s four consecutive terms as President. Considering FDR’s four wins were all by comfortable margins and was given much credit during his two later terms for his conduct of the war, why did the amendment pass so easily? Specifically why did so many Democrats support the measure?
A WAG but with Roosevelt dead, the Democrats knew that the next President who might be elected to a third term was as likely to be a Republican as another Democrat. And they would have been right - Eisenhower and Reagan were the next two presidents who had a realistic chance at a third term.
I was taught, only a few years after it became law, that it was done by the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress as a form of spite or revenge against FDR. This was during a period when bipartisanship tended to be the rule rather than the exception, but in this one case, it was (per my teacher) a naked partisan move. I don’t have a cite other than memory, and am not trying to do a partisan GD-style jab there, just stating what I was told in the 1950s.
I was taught that regardless of party the various branches of government are jealous of their power.
The idea of a President who was kind of king-like rubbed congresscritters the wrong way no matter their party. Even if FDR was on “your side” it is not hard to imagine a time when another president might not be.
Best to nip that in the bud and they did.
The 22nd amendment was passed by a Republican Congress in 1947 (although since they didn’t hold 67% of either house, they needed Democrats) and by three quarters of the states by 1951. It was recommended by the Hoover Commission which had six Republicans and six Democrats. One of the Democrats was James Farley, an Irish Catholic from New York who although he was mostly a loyal FDR man, disagreed with him over running a third term (and also FDR’s attempt to “pack the Supreme Court” (1i.e. FDR was unhappy the Supreme Court struck down many of his New Deal Programs. So he proposed adding a new justice for each over the age of 70. He said it was to help them but everyone knew it was primarily the older ones who opposed him. FDR lost the fight as lot of people of both parties charging he was upsetting the checks and balances. As it turned out some of them such as Owen Roberts began ruling in his favor and others died/retired so he did end up remaking the court over his 12 years).
Back then both parties were wider ideologically. The Democrats had the “Solid South” democrats who favored smaller government and states rights (the better to keep those mostly Republican Black voters from voting). The Republicans had an Eastern liberal wing of people like Tom Dewey and later on Nelson Rockefeller.
If you look at a list of Presidents before FDR who served two terms and refused to run for a third you will notice a lot of them are Southerners (Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Washington and Jackson. Wilson was born in the South but grew up in New Jersey. A lot of them were Democrats except for Washington (mostly non-partisan but leaned Federalist), Cleveland and Grant (a Republican). A lot of Democrats figured that if two terms was good enough for them, it was good enough for future Presidents. FDR was kind of an exception due to the outbreak of World War II
I think there was a real concern that a popular president might get reelected 4 or 5 times and become a fixture in Washington. I don’t think there was concern that someone might start acting like a “king”, there are checks and balances against that ever happening, but I think the public felt there was value in changing the executive branch every 8 years as a rule. I think FDR was a special case where it made sense keeping him throughout WWII, but in general, two terms is long enough for any president.
I was taught that it was basically encoding an unwritten rule once one president violated it. Washington himself refused to run for a third term. Many people were aghast at the idea that FDR did this.
We did a thread that covered this in detail just a few months ago.
I’ll just repost my long explanation there, since it covers the same ground, but you should read the argument that led up to it.
We now interrupt this thread…
From the George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (radio)
And my favourite
…And now back to your regularly scheduled thread
Because Southern Democrats were so disengaged from the Northern wing of their party at this time as to almost constitute a third party. Many of them (enough to carry four states) did in fact support a third party in the presidential election of 1948.
The disengagement, of course, had to do with race. Roosevelt had drifted dangerously (in white Southern eyes) toward support of black civil rights in his latter terms; and Truman openly supported civil rights and desegregated the armed forces in 1948. All eleven Southern delegations would have voted against Truman for nomination to a full term at the Democratic convention in 1948, except that Mississippi had walked out.
Southern Democrats, then, could no longer count on an ally in the White House. In their eyes, anything that weakened the Presidency (and thereby strengthened Congress, in which Southerners controlled key committees) was good.
Fifty House Democrats supported the Twenty-Second Amendment. Thirty-nine were from the South. (John F. Kennedy was one of the 11 Northerners; he had a personal animus against Roosevelt for firing his father.) Sixteen Democrats supported the measure in the Senate. Fourteen were from the South.
No similar breakdown is available for the ratification votes, but the Southern legislatures were virtually one-party (Democratic) fiefs at this time so Dixiecrat support may be assumed in Virginia. Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Texas.
You can observe that many states have term limits for their governors and other offices. Quite apart from FDR, or the specific political situation at the time such measures were passed in any given state, a large factor is that it seems to be nearly impossible to get an incumbent out of office via the normal elective process. They have to do something extraordinarily incompetent, unpopular or criminal, and even then it will probably only happen if they’ve gotten caught in a big enough scandal that they have to resign (Eliot Spitzer in NY), or through a recall (Gray Davis in CA). Proponents of such measures usually say its because of the huge advantage an incumbent has in elections. If so, fixing THAT somehow is a better answer than term limits.
I wish this thread had popped up before I took that online civics quiz - I might have gotten one more question correct!
All kidding aside, it’s threads like this that keep me coming back here - I learn something new about one thread in three.
I will point out that in 1861 in the Constitution for the Confederacy the President was limited to a single six year term, instead of a possibly unlimited number of four year terms. So limiting how long a President can serve had always been a goal of at at least Southern Democrats.
I will also point out that besides having the southern Dixiecrats, led by Senator Strom Thurmond (a Democrat at the time), the Progressive wing also walked out and ran former Vice President Henry Wallace. Wallace didn’t carry any states but received almost as many votes as Thurmond, about 2.4%. Wallace and others were unhappy about the Truman Doctrine and wanted even more civil rights legislation and universal health care.