# Why did the 22nd Amendment pass? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 4, 2011, 5:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-the-22nd-amendment-pass/584288 "2011-06-04T05:02:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![installLSC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/54ee81/32.png) [@installLSC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/installLSC)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 5:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-the-22nd-amendment-pass/584288/1 "2011-06-04T05:02:32Z")
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? ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 5:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-the-22nd-amendment-pass/584288/2 "2011-06-04T05:32:16Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 5:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-the-22nd-amendment-pass/584288/3 "2011-06-04T05:38:24Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Whack-a-Mole](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/whack-a-mole/32/141_2.png) [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 6:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-the-22nd-amendment-pass/584288/4 "2011-06-04T06:07:48Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Jim\_s\_Son](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19adc/32.png) [@Jim\_s\_Son](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jim_s_Son)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 12:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-the-22nd-amendment-pass/584288/5 "2011-06-04T12:25:13Z")
> **[Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/22nd_amendment)** > > The Twenty-second Amendment (Amendment XXII) to the United States Constitution limits the number of times a person can be elected to the office of President of the United States to two terms, and sets additional eligibility conditions for presidents who succeed to the unexpired terms of their predecessors. Congress approved the Twenty-second Amendment on March 21, 1947, and submitted it to the state legislatures for ratification. That process was completed on February 27, 1951, when the requi... 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 ---
**Author:** ![dolphinboy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dolphinboy/32/330_2.png) [@dolphinboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dolphinboy)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 2:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-the-22nd-amendment-pass/584288/6 "2011-06-04T14:00:13Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 2:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-the-22nd-amendment-pass/584288/7 "2011-06-04T14:11:00Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 3:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-the-22nd-amendment-pass/584288/8 "2011-06-04T15:12:28Z")
We did a [thread that covered this in detail](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=56566&highlight=22nd+amendment) 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. > [@Reagan and term limits](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reagan-and-term-limits/51123/29): > > OK, let’s try to examine this in less than a book’s length. > > First, we need to ask what the alternative explanation is. If you’re going to argue it was a purely idealistic re-adoption of the gentleman’s agreement, I’ll bow out now. Nothing in politics, let alone at the level of a Constitutional Amendment, is done for pure unsullied and unmixed idealism. > > Can we at least agree that Roosevelt dominated the politics of the country from 1933 to 1945? He was the most popular politician - people treated him as a secular saint and hung his picture next to that of Jesus - and yet virulently opposed. > > Roosevelt, it is generally agreed, decided to run for a third term for two reasons. One was that the country was still grappling with the Depression. Conservatives reviled the New Deal but he had also lost the support of a large number of former progressives and liberals - different things at the time - who had switched over for a variety of reasons, ranging from economic theories to dislike of federal controls. They had battled him every moment of the decade and it seemed certain that a successor would have less leverage over them. The second was that Europe was already in WWII. Again, conservatives were loudly isolationist and most liberals were tepidly internationalist at best. Roosevelt wanted to aid Britain and wanted to keep maneuvering to supply the Allies with money and equipment. Both of those would have been jeopardized with Republican control. (What actually occurred in the election was high irony. Republicans, looking for a Republican Roosevelt, nominated Wendell Willkie, probably the most liberal Republican candidate since Teddy Roosevelt (maybe Taft, but still), who ran as a Roosevelt clone. Both were publicly isolationist.) > > Roosevelt’s health probably should have kept him from running in 1944, but there was no chance he was going to step down in the middle of the war. > > Roosevelt’s run for additional terms lay in the most extraordinary circumstances since the start of the Civil War. You could try to argue that circumstances that dire would happen again in the future, but the abrogation of the gentleman’s agreement lay in a single data point. I would argue at length that no other Amendment ever rested on a single data point and the possibility that it might, just might, happen again in the future. > > When was the Amendment proposed? The 22nd Amendment was passed by Congress on March 21, 1947\*, which was very early in a session that had seen the Republicans pick up 55 seats in the House and a dozen in the Senate to take control of both bodies for the first time since Hoover. The [ratification record by the states is also interesting](http://www.usconstitution.net/constamrat.html). 18 states ratified in 1947 and then interest tailed off. Suddenly ratifications start again in 1951. What happened in late 1950? The midterm backlash to the Truman presidency, similar to the backlash in 1946 (and 2010) seeing Republicans back on top all over the country. > > Were they still battling the ghost of Roosevelt and the New Deal? I don’t see how you can argue otherwise. Republicans tried hard to reverse the New Deal throughout the 1950s. Still are, in many ways. The cold war, the “loss” of China, the Korean War, McCarthyism, all pulled the country in a more conservative direction. Many of Roosevelt’s advisors were from the multiplicity of far left factions in the 1930s and could easily be tied to Communist groups, statements, or beliefs, and they made convenient scapegoats throughout this period. Truman’s popularity hit lows not to be equaled for decades. > > In short (far too late), every aspect of the context of the times was a conservative repudiation of everything associated with Roosevelt, the New Deal, the Democratic Party, and leftist politics in general. The minority party achieved power and used it. The 22nd Amendment was one of hundreds of examples of Republican legislation to change the direction of the country. It happened to be a Constitutional Amendment so it lasts after most legislation is forgotten, but it is nothing more than part of the context of its time. > > Could you give me the alternate explanation of the timing and progression of the 22nd Amendment that refutes this? > > \*Wikipedia is not a good source for history, part 12462. > > > [@](#): > > > > The Amendment was the final result of the recommendations of the Hoover Commission which was established by President Harry S. Truman in 1947.[citation needed] > > I bet a cite is needed. The commission first met September 29, 1947, six months after the Amendment had been passed. ---
**Author:** ![Markxxx](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5daacb/32.png) [@Markxxx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Markxxx)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-the-22nd-amendment-pass/584288/9 "2011-06-04T19:25:40Z")
We now interrupt this thread… From _the George Burns and Gracie Allen Show_ (radio) > [@](#): > > Gracie) If we have a son we have to teach him to be good and honest and grow up to be a Democrat > > Geroge) A Democrat? > > Gracie) Yes, I want our son to president some day > [@](#): > > George) Well today’s election day > > Gracie) What’s that? > > Geroge) Gracie, what has happened every four years on the first Tuesday in November, for as long as you can remember? > > Gracie) Roosevelt’s elected > [@](#): > > Little Girl) Tell me a story Aunt Gracie > > Gracie) Once upon a time a long time ago there was a witch > > Little Girl) A witch? > > Gracie) Oh yes, but don’t be scared she lived a long, long time ago > > Little Girl) A long time? > > Gracie) Oh yes, even before Roosevelt And my favourite > [@](#): > > George) Well Gracie today is tax day > > Gracie) What’s that > > George) It’s the day we pay our income tax, without it the government can’t run > > Gracie) It can’t? > > George) No, it pays for the salaries of our congressman and the president and… > > Gracie)…George do the Republicans have to pay President Truman salary > > George) Of course > > Gracie) That’s really rubbing it in, ain’t it …And now back to your regularly scheduled thread ---
**Author:** ![Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a587f6/32.png) [@Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freddy_the_Pig)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 7:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-the-22nd-amendment-pass/584288/10 "2011-06-04T19:37:31Z")
> [@installLSC](#): > > Specifically why did so many Democrats support the measure? 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. ---
**Author:** ![yabob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yabob/32/2821_2.png) [@yabob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yabob)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 8:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-the-22nd-amendment-pass/584288/11 "2011-06-04T20:05:04Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![fubbleskag](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/c2a13f/32.png) [@fubbleskag](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fubbleskag)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-the-22nd-amendment-pass/584288/12 "2011-06-04T20:16:23Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Jim\_s\_Son](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19adc/32.png) [@Jim\_s\_Son](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jim_s_Son)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2011, 9:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-the-22nd-amendment-pass/584288/13 "2011-06-04T21:57:32Z")
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.