Roosevelt's fourth inauguration

On Saturday 20 January 1945, just after noon, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the oath of office as President of the United States for the fourth time. A few minutes earlier the senator from Missouri, Harry Truman, had taken the vice-presidential oath. No president before or since has begun a fourth term. The ceremony, however, was held not in front of the Capitol, as was customary, but on the South Portico of the White House. There was no parade along Pennsylvania Avenue and there were no inaugural balls; the whole ceremony lasted little more than a quarter of an hour.

Roosevelt had won the election of 7 November 1944, defeating the Republican Thomas Dewey. The inauguration fell in a week in which the war in Europe was clearly drawing to a close: the Red Army had broken through the Vistula front, and on 17 January units of the Polish 1st Army and Soviet troops had entered Warsaw. In the west the Americans were recovering the ground lost in the Ardennes, and in the Pacific they had been fighting on Luzon since 9 January. The President, who had led the country for twelve years, was by now a seriously ill man, however, and in two days he was to set off on a journey to meet Stalin and Churchill.

A wartime ceremony

It was Roosevelt himself who decided on the modest form of the ceremony. He justified it by the war: it would not do to hold parades and receptions while millions of Americans were fighting in Europe and the Pacific and the country was living under restrictions on fuel and materials. According to press reports and later studies, the inauguration cost about 2,000 dollars. There were also considerations that went unspoken: a ceremony at the Capitol would have required the President to drive through the city, stand for a long time on a stand in the cold and spend hours at a parade, and his health might not have withstood it. It was the only formal inauguration in the history of the United States to be held at the White House.

The day began with a short service in the East Room. Sleet had fallen on Washington the night before, the lawn in front of the portico was wet, and at noon the thermometers showed barely above freezing, with a biting wind. The invited guests gathered on the lawn. Sources give differing numbers: about 5,000 people is the usual figure, while according to the National WWII Museum in New Orleans some 7,000 tickets were issued, with several dozen places reserved for wounded servicemen. A crowd of onlookers watched from beyond the fence.

Roosevelt insisted that the whole family attend. Eleanor Roosevelt recalled that she had been afraid of gathering together thirteen grandchildren aged from three to sixteen, since it risked an outbreak of measles or chickenpox, but her husband was so insistent that she gave way: in her view he realised that this was his last inauguration and perhaps sensed that he would not be with them much longer. At the President’s request his son James, a Marine Corps colonel who had helped his father at the three previous inaugurations, was brought back from the Philippines. Roosevelt, paralysed since 1921, stood at the lectern in steel leg braces, leaning on his son’s arm.

Two oaths

Truman was sworn in first. The oath was administered by the outgoing vice-president, Henry Wallace – the last time in history that a vice-president swore in his successor. There was something awkward about the situation. Wallace, vice-president since 1941, had wanted to keep the office, but at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago in July 1944 the party leaders, convinced that Roosevelt might not live to the end of his term, had blocked his renomination. They considered him too left-wing and too unpredictable to become president. Roosevelt, who in 1940 had himself imposed Wallace on the party and who on 11 July 1944 had announced that he would accept the nomination, did not defend his vice-president this time: he merely wrote that if he were a delegate he would vote for him, while letting it be known that he would accept Truman or Justice William O. Douglas. Truman, chairman of the Senate committee investigating waste in the war industry, won the nomination on 21 July on the second ballot.

The presidential oath was administered to Roosevelt by the Chief Justice, Harlan Fiske Stone. Roosevelt took it on an old Dutch-language family Bible, the same one he had used in 1933, 1937 and 1941. Twelve years earlier, in March 1933, he had been sworn in amid the Great Depression; now it was in the last year of a world war.

The shortest address since Washington

The inaugural address ran, by various counts, to between 556 and 559 words and lasted little more than six minutes. It was the shortest inaugural speech since George Washington’s second inauguration in 1793. Roosevelt did not mention a single battle, nor did he speak of the Germans or the Japanese. He declared that America and its allies would win the war, and devoted most of the text to the lasting peace that was to follow it. In the background lay the memory of 1919–1920, when the Senate had rejected the Treaty of Versailles and American membership of the League of Nations.

He began by recalling his old teacher, the headmaster of Groton School, Endicott Peabody, who had died in November 1944. He recalled what Peabody had said in days that had then seemed secure and untroubled: life, the old rector had said, would not always run smoothly; at times we would climb towards the heights, and then everything would seem to turn and head downwards; what mattered was to remember that civilisation as a whole kept moving upwards, and that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and valleys of the centuries always rose.

The most frequently quoted passage concerned the lesson learned from the war: Americans had learned that they could not live alone, at peace, that their own well-being depended on that of other nations far away, and that they must live as men, “not as ostriches, nor as dogs in the manger”. “We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community.” Citing Ralph Waldo Emerson, he added that “the only way to have a friend is to be one”. He closed with a prayer that God would grant Americans clear sight of the way to a better life for themselves and for all people, and to “the fulfillment of His will to peace on earth”. These sentences contained the programme the President was taking to Yalta: lasting cooperation among the great powers, the USSR included, and a new international organisation in which the United States would this time take part.

The President’s health

The guests saw a gaunt, aged President, but few knew the truth. Since March 1944 his doctors had known that Roosevelt was suffering from severe hypertension and heart failure; they had advised him to reduce his workload, but the public was told only of fatigue and colds. According to James Roosevelt’s memoirs, immediately after the ceremony, in the Green Room, his father suffered a severe attack of chest pain, most probably angina. He asked for half a glass of whisky and, when the pain had passed, talked with his son about his will and which family heirlooms were to go to his children. Then he returned to his guests and received them at a reception in the White House.

That same day Roosevelt repaid his political debt to Wallace. In a letter dated 20 January he asked the Secretary of Commerce, Jesse Jones, to step down from the post, which he had earmarked for the former vice-president. The nomination provoked a fierce dispute in the Senate, because conservatives did not want to give Wallace control of the powerful federal lending agencies that had until then come under the department. Wallace was confirmed only on 1 March, after those agencies had been separated from it.

Place in the war

The inauguration was Roosevelt’s last great public appearance in Washington before the journey that dominated the final weeks of his life. On the evening of 22 January the President left by train for Newport News, Virginia, from where the following day he sailed across the Atlantic to Malta aboard the heavy cruiser USS Quincy. There, at the beginning of February, he met Churchill, and on 3 February the two flew to the Crimea. At the Yalta Conference (4–11 February 1945) Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin agreed on the principles of the occupation of Germany, on Poland’s borders and government, on the terms of the USSR’s entry into the war against Japan and on summoning the founding conference of the United Nations. The President returned from the journey exhausted; on 1 March, reporting to Congress, he spoke seated for the first time and referred publicly to the weight of his leg braces.

The fourth term lasted 82 days. On 12 April 1945 Roosevelt died of a cerebral haemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia. That same evening, at the White House, Harlan Fiske Stone swore Truman in as president. The new president knew surprisingly little about the conduct of the war and diplomacy: in less than three months as vice-president he had met Roosevelt only a handful of times, and he learned of the existence of the atomic bomb programme only after taking office. It was he who brought the war to its end – he accepted Germany’s surrender in May, went to Potsdam and took the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan.

The four-term precedent did not last long. The Republicans, who won a majority in Congress in 1946, passed an amendment in March 1947 limiting the presidency to two elected terms. The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution came into force on 27 February 1951, after ratification by the required number of states. The inauguration of 20 January 1945 thus remained the only fourth inauguration in the history of the United States, and also the only one held at the White House – in the shadow of war, and for a president who had less than three months to live.