Roosevelt's second term

On 20 January 1937, in front of the Capitol in Washington, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the oath of office as President of the United States for a second term. The oath was administered by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Charles Evans Hughes. A cold rain fell all day, but the ceremony was held outdoors, and the president rode back to the White House in an open car so that the drenched crowd could see him. It was the first inauguration in the history of the United States to take place on 20 January. Since 1793 presidents had taken office on 4 March, and when that day fell on a Sunday the ceremony was moved to 5 March. The change was introduced by the 20th Amendment to the Constitution.

The end of the “lame ducks”

The 4 March date went back to the days when counting the votes and travelling to the capital by horse-drawn carriage took weeks. By the 20th century the four-month gap between the election and the assumption of office had become an anachronism. During that time the country was governed by politicians who had lost the election, known in America as “lame ducks”, and a Congress elected in November usually did not meet until thirteen months later. Senator George Norris of Nebraska argued for years that this had to change. Congress passed his amendment in March 1932, and the states ratified it on 23 January 1933. Since then the terms of the president and vice-president have begun on 20 January, and the new Congress has met on 3 January.

The winter of 1932–1933 showed why the change was needed. Between Roosevelt’s victory in November and his inauguration on 4 March, the country had a president who had lost the election and a president-elect without power. Hoover and Roosevelt could not reach agreement, and in February 1933 the banking system collapsed. The amendment came into force too late to shorten that interregnum. Because of it, Roosevelt’s first term was 43 days short of four years. For the first time Vice-President John Nance Garner, who until then had been sworn in in the Senate chamber, took the oath on the same platform as the president.

“One-third of a nation”

Roosevelt began his second term in triumph. Two and a half months earlier he had won the election in 46 of the 48 states, and the Democrats had overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress. His inaugural address, short and devoted almost entirely to domestic affairs, heralded further reforms. The president recalled that four years earlier America had been paralysed by the Depression and acknowledged that much had been achieved. But, he said, he saw “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished”. He added: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” He argued that democratic government was capable of protecting people from disasters once considered inevitable. In a world in which more and more countries were placing themselves in the hands of dictators, the message had an unmistakable subtext.

The world in January 1937

Roosevelt said almost nothing about foreign policy, although the international situation was growing ever more dangerous. In Spain the civil war was raging, with Germans and Italians fighting on General Franco’s side. In November 1936 Germany and Japan had concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact, and in December the kidnapping of Chiang Kai-shek in Xi’an in China heralded an agreement between the Nationalists and the Communists against Japan. In the Soviet Union the Great Purge was under way: three days after the inauguration the second show trial of former Bolshevik leaders opened in Moscow. The United States responded to all this with isolationism. At the beginning of January Congress, in a separate resolution, extended the embargo of the Neutrality Act to Spain, cutting off the lawful government of the Republic from American arms. A third Neutrality Act, with no expiry date, was soon to be passed.

A year of setbacks

The second term began with a mistake. On 5 February 1937 Roosevelt, angered that the Supreme Court kept striking down New Deal legislation, presented a bill allowing him to appoint an additional justice for every justice who had reached the age of seventy and had not retired, up to a total of fifteen. Opponents called it “court-packing” and an assault on the separation of powers. Hughes too came out against the plan, and many Democrats in Congress refused to follow the president. In July the Senate finally buried the bill. The Supreme Court, however, changed course of its own accord and from the spring of 1937 began to uphold social legislation as constitutional, and in the following years Roosevelt appointed several new justices to replace those who retired.

In the autumn of 1937, after cuts in federal spending, the economy fell into a sharp recession. Industrial production dropped by about a third, and unemployment rose again. In the 1938 congressional elections the Republicans regained many seats, and conservative Southern Democrats increasingly voted with them. The New Deal lost its momentum.

Significance

The second term, which began on 20 January 1937, coincided with the years in which Europe and Asia were heading towards war. In July 1937 Japan began its war with China; in March 1938 Hitler took Austria, in September he decided the fate of Czechoslovakia at Munich, and in March 1939 he occupied Prague. Roosevelt saw the danger ever more clearly. In October 1937, in Chicago, he called for a “quarantine” of aggressors, and after Munich he began expanding the air force and the navy. For a long time, however, Congress and public opinion did not share his alarm, and the Neutrality Acts tied his hands. When in December 1937 Japanese aircraft sank an American gunboat on the Yangtze, Washington contented itself with an apology and compensation.

In domestic policy, however, the second term was not wasted. In 1937 Congress passed a housing act for the poorest, and in June 1938 the Fair Labor Standards Act, which introduced a federal minimum wage, a forty-hour working week and a ban on child labour. It was the last great reform of the New Deal. From then on the president’s attention shifted more and more towards the wider world, and the men who had built the relief programmes of the 1930s, such as Harry Hopkins, directed American aid to the Allies during the war.

When Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, less than a year and a half remained of Roosevelt’s second term. In 1940, after the fall of France, the president decided to break the tradition begun by Washington and run for a third time. On 20 January 1941 he took the oath for a third term, and in 1945 for a fourth. It was precisely because of this precedent that in 1951 Americans adopted the 22nd Amendment, which limits a presidency to two terms.