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. 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.
I bet a cite is needed. The commission first met September 29, 1947, six months after the Amendment had been passed.