Roosevelt elected to a third term

On Tuesday 5 November 1940 Americans elected a president for the thirty-ninth time, and for the first time in their history they entrusted the office to the same man for a third term. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in office since March 1933, defeated the Republican Wendell Willkie by 449 electoral votes to 82. In doing so he broke an unwritten rule observed by all his predecessors since the days of George Washington. The election was held in the shadow of a war that had been raging in Europe for more than a year, and since the summer in the skies over Britain as well, and almost everyone – in Washington, London, Berlin and Tokyo – understood it as a vote on how far the United States would go in helping Britain, which was fighting alone.

Election night

Roosevelt spent election day as he had four years earlier: at his family estate at Hyde Park on the Hudson. In the morning he voted at the local town hall; in the evening he sat down in the dining room of the house over tally sheets on which, according to members of the household, he himself recorded the results coming in from across the country. The first returns, from rural and small-town districts, looked worrying for him. According to the memoirs of the head of his Secret Service detail, the President, normally composed, then ordered that no one be let in to see him for a while. The tension eased when results began to arrive from the great cities of the North – New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Cleveland – which, as four years earlier, voted for him in huge numbers. Before midnight radio commentators were already announcing the President’s victory. Neighbours from Hyde Park came to the house with torches, as in previous years, and Roosevelt went out to them on the porch. He said that difficult days lay ahead for the country, but that they would find in him “the same Franklin Roosevelt” they had known for many years.

Willkie awaited the results at the Commodore Hotel in New York. Long after midnight, when it was already clear that he was losing, he went out to his supporters but did not concede defeat; he told them not to be afraid and never to quit. He did so only the next day, 6 November, at 10.30 a.m., sending a telegram to Hyde Park in which he congratulated the President on his re-election, noted that they could both be glad that so many American citizens had taken part in the election, and wished him health and every success. Roosevelt replied the same day with a courteous note of thanks.

The result

According to the final figures, Roosevelt received about 27.3 million votes, just under 55 per cent, and Willkie about 22.3 million, just under 45 per cent. The President carried 38 of the 48 states and Willkie ten: Maine and Vermont in the north-east, and Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Colorado – mainly, that is, in the agricultural Midwest and on the Great Plains. In Michigan the Republican’s margin was only about 7,000 votes; many commentators attributed his victory in that state to the support given to Willkie by the labour leader John L. Lewis. In many other states, from Illinois and Ohio to New York and Wisconsin, Roosevelt won by only a few percentage points.

It was thus a clear victory, but a distinctly more modest one than his previous ones. In 1932 Roosevelt had won 472 electoral votes, and in 1936 as many as 523 of 531, losing only two states. Willkie gathered more than six million votes more than Alf Landon had four years earlier and set a record for votes cast for a Republican candidate that stood until 1952. The voting map revealed lasting divisions: Roosevelt won in almost all the big cities, among workers, trade unionists, Catholics, Jews and African Americans in the North, and in the Democratic South; Willkie among farmers, in the suburbs and among the middle class. Post-election analyses also indicated that the President had lost some votes among Americans of German, Italian and Irish descent, who mistrusted his foreign policy, and gained among voters who feared Germany more than war.

A new vice-president was elected together with Roosevelt. The outgoing vice-president, the conservative Texan John Nance Garner, had broken with Roosevelt and tried to win the nomination himself. At the convention in Chicago the President therefore imposed on the delegates as his running mate the Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Wallace, a New Dealer and an advocate of a hard line towards Germany. The Democrats also retained clear majorities in both houses of Congress: in the House of Representatives they increased theirs slightly, while in the Senate they lost a few seats but still held about two-thirds of them.

A broken tradition

At that time the Constitution of the United States did not limit the number of presidential terms. The rule that no one should govern for more than eight years had been established by custom: George Washington had declined in 1796 to seek a third election, and Thomas Jefferson had raised that decision to the rank of a constitutional principle, protecting the republic against the lifelong rule of one man. Attempts to circumvent it had so far ended in failure. In 1880 the Republicans refused the nomination to Ulysses Grant, who wanted to return to the White House after a four-year break, and in 1912 Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin’s distant cousin and the uncle of his wife Eleanor, likewise after four years out of office, lost as the candidate of his own Progressive Party. No one had yet tried to govern for three consecutive terms.

Franklin Roosevelt long kept his intentions to himself, and he presented his nomination in July 1940 as a duty he could not shirk while war raged in Europe. Willkie made the issue one of the main themes of his campaign, and his supporters wore badges with the slogan “No Third Term”. The result showed that for most voters the war and the crisis mattered more than tradition, although many of them, including some Democrats, voted for Roosevelt with misgivings.

“The loyal opposition”

The campaign had been bitter and full of accusations: the Republicans portrayed Roosevelt as a man who would drag the country into war, the Democrats portrayed Willkie as the candidate on whose victory Hitler was counting. All the greater, then, was the impression made by the speech Willkie broadcast on the evening of 11 November, the anniversary of the armistice that had ended the First World War. He addressed the more than 22 million people who had voted for him and urged them not to turn into an opposition against everything. In a democracy, he said, a strong and vigilant opposition was needed, but a loyal opposition – one that criticised the government where it was wrong and supported it where it served the good of the country, above all in building up the armed forces and in aiding Britain. For Willkie, a long-standing critic of the New Deal but also an advocate of help for the British, this came naturally. For a large part of his party, in which isolationist sentiment was strong, it heralded a split that would become apparent in the following months.

After the election the defeated candidate received more than 100,000 letters. The President, as his son James recorded, is said to have remarked that he was glad he had won but sorry that Wendell had lost. At the end of November Willkie, breaking off a holiday in Florida, ended one of his speeches with a toast to the health of the President of the United States.

London’s hopes

In Britain the result was awaited with a tension that no American election had ever aroused before. The British press greeted Roosevelt’s victory with evident relief, and in government circles it was regarded as the best news for many weeks. Willkie too supported aid to the British, but in the last weeks of the campaign he had played more and more heavily on fears of war, and behind him stood a party in which the isolationists held a strong position. Roosevelt was a known quantity, proven in the summer of 1940, when he had handed the British weapons from American stocks and concluded the destroyers-for-bases deal, and his victory also spared Britain a transition lasting months, until the inauguration in January, during which an outgoing president could have done little.

Winston Churchill, who throughout the campaign had carefully avoided any remark that might look like interference in American affairs, sent Roosevelt a personal telegram on 6 November. He wrote that he had not thought it right for him, as a foreigner, to express any opinion on American politics while the election was on, but that he could now say that he had prayed for the President’s success and was truly thankful for it. He added that both sides were entering upon a “sombre phase” of a war that must be long and ever wider. He received no reply. In a message of 16 November, in which he reported the success at Taranto, he asked whether his “personal telegram of congratulation” had arrived. In his memoirs he later supposed that it had been lost in the flood of congratulations; the lack of a reply, however, clearly hurt him.

It is often written that the British saw Roosevelt’s election as a promise of greater help from the United States. So they did, but these hopes did not translate into deeds at once. The ambassador in Washington, Philip Kerr, Marquess of Lothian, had earlier warned Churchill that the belief that a re-elected Roosevelt would ask Congress to declare war on Germany was entirely without foundation: at most the President could continue a neutrality benevolent to the British, and Congress was not ready for more. Immediately after the election Roosevelt announced no new initiative. London’s most pressing problem, in any case, concerned not ships or aircraft but money. Under the neutrality laws Britain had to pay for American arms in cash, in gold and dollars, and its reserves were rapidly running out. When Lothian returned from London to New York on 23 November, he told the journalists waiting at the airport, in the most frequently quoted version: “Well, boys, Britain’s broke; it’s your money we want.” This deliberate indiscretion, which went beyond Churchill’s instructions, caused a storm in America, but it made the matter plain.

Reactions in Berlin, Rome and Tokyo

The Axis powers received the result coolly. According to agency reports of 6 November, Berlin officially stressed that the election was an internal American matter. The Germans had not previously concealed their dislike of Roosevelt, and during the campaign their embassy in Washington had tried to support isolationist circles, although the very nomination of Willkie, an advocate of aid to the British, had dashed some of its hopes. In Italy it was feared that the President, now free of electoral calculations, would begin to “stir up war fever”. In Tokyo a Foreign Ministry spokesman expressed the hope that the United States would revise its policy in the Far East. This reflected the thinking behind the conclusion of the Tripartite Pact at the end of September: Germany, Italy and Japan had hoped that the threat of a war on two oceans would make America cautious. The election result showed that this calculation had failed.

Place in the war

A few weeks after the election Roosevelt set off aboard the cruiser USS Tuscaloosa on a cruise in the Caribbean, officially to inspect the new bases acquired from the British. There, on 9 December, a seaplane brought him a long letter from Churchill, dated 8 December, which the Prime Minister considered one of the most important of his life: an exposition of Britain’s position for 1941, of the losses in the Atlantic, and of the fact that Britain would soon be unable to pay cash for supplies. On his return the President, at a press conference on 17 December, presented the idea of lending arms, comparing it to lending a neighbour a garden hose when his house is on fire, and on 29 December, in a radio fireside chat, he called on Americans to make their country “the great arsenal of democracy”. On 10 January 1941 a bill was laid before Congress which Roosevelt signed on 11 March as the Lend-Lease Act. Before that, on 20 January, he had taken the presidential oath for the third time. Among the supporters of the bill was Willkie, who in January flew to blitzed Britain as the President’s unofficial envoy and on his return backed Lend-Lease before a Senate committee – against the majority of his own party.

The election of 5 November 1940 thus did not formally change the status of the United States, which remained neutral until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. It did, however, give Roosevelt four years in power and a freedom of action he had not had in an election year, and his campaign promises, especially the assurance given in Boston that Americans’ sons would not be sent into foreign wars, now constrained him only politically. The draft, enacted in September by the Selective Training and Service Act, and the rearmament programme could go ahead at full steam, and aid to Britain – and from 1941 also to the USSR and China – took on a scale without which their war effort would have looked quite different. Roosevelt also won the election of 1944, for the fourth time, and died in April 1945, a few weeks before Germany’s surrender. The response to his four victories was the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution, passed by Congress in 1947 and ratified in 1951, which turned the old custom into law: no one may be elected president more than twice.