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FDR: How Roosevelt Won Unprecedented Four Presidential Elections
Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) is the only president in American history to serve more than two terms. His unprecedented tenure at the White House was marked by both extraordinary triumphs and controversial decisions. From leading the nation through the Great Depression to steering the country through World War II, FDR’s legacy is as complex as it is enduring.
Wealthy Background and Overcoming Tragedy
Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, at his Navy Department desk, circa 1920. Source: Navy History and Heritage Command
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was born on his father’s large estate in Hyde Park, New York. The son of a railroad executive, the young Roosevelt skipped public school in favor of governesses and tutors, supplemented with yearly summer trips to Europe and its vast array of museums. Following four years at the exclusive Groton Preparatory School and then Harvard University, Franklin took his history degree to Columbia Law School and later, in 1910, to the Democratic state senate seat from Dutchess County.
Having married his distant cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt, in 1905, the Roosevelts followed Franklin’s political trajectory to Washington when President Woodrow Wilson named him the Assistant Secretary to the Navy in 1913. Just one year after a failed 1920 vice-presidential campaign on James Cox’s presidential ticket, the thirty-nine-year-old Franklin suffered an attack of poliomyelitis—he would never again have the use of his legs. In 1927, the Roosevelts founded the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation to help polio patients who could not afford the treatment. Unwilling to have his handicap stop him, FDR continued his rise in politics, speaking at Democratic Conventions in both 1924 and 1928 for the Democratic nominee, Al Smith, until Roosevelt himself was nominated in 1932.
When Franklin arrived in Chicago to accept his nomination, millions of Americans were out of work, countless businesses had failed, and the Republican administration of President Herbert Hoover clung to the belief that direct federal aid was un-American. In his acceptance speech, the New Yorker bluntly stated: “Never before in modern history have the essential differences between the two major American parties stood out in such striking contrast… I pledge to you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.” In November, Roosevelt won by a landslide with 472 electoral votes to Hoover’s 59.
“All We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself!”
Unemployed men queued outside a depression soup kitchen in Chicago, 1931. Source: National Archives
When he took office on March 4, 1933, Roosevelt was fifty-one years old. The whole nation tuned in to his inaugural address, where he famously said, “First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
In the hundred days that followed, the new president led the federal government through the most significant change it had ever encountered. “Our greatest primary task is to put people to work,” FDR stated, adding, “I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage war against the emergency as a power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”
As a starting point for his New Deal for the American people, which promised relief, recovery, and reform, the federal government sprung into action as it had never before, assuming powers that would have been seen as overextending its mandate at any other time in history.
Roosevelt promptly declared a national bank holiday to stop the panic-driven runs on banks. He then passed the Emergency Banking Act, which provided for federal inspection of banks and their slow reopening under government supervision, oversight, and federal loans. The new administration followed it with the passage of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Federal Emergency Relief Act to help with the national unemployment, which hovered at around 25%. The Agricultural Adjustment Act that came next paid farmers subsidies to reduce surpluses, and the National Industrial Recovery Act set fair prices, wages, and working conditions across American businesses. The “Hundred Days” in office finished with, among other programs, the acts aimed at regulating the stock market.
FDR’s First Term as President
FDR speaking in Washington. Source: National Archives
Following the momentum set by his first hundred days in office, FDR’s administration continued implementing New Deal policies, further transforming the federal government’s role in American life from a less direct to a more hands-on approach. Roosevelt pushed programs through Congress at as fast a rate as it could handle, and even then, done with emergency powers before the Supreme Court could evaluate them. The latter would eventually catch up and strike down the Federal Emergency Relief Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act for being unconstitutional. Yet, none of this stopped the focus of FDR’s first term, which was the immediate recovery from the Great Depression.
“I am certain that the Special Session of Congress will go down in the history of our country as one on which, more than any other, boldly seized the opportunity to right great wrongs, to restore clearer thinking and more honest practices, to carry through its business with practical celerity and to set out feet on the upward path,” FDR would surmise.
The New Deal legislation continued to flow through Congress. The Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 regulated the stock market, and the Glass-Steagall Act established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, insuring public bank deposits. In 1935 came arguably the most significant piece of legislation of Roosevelt’s first term, the Social Security Act, which established a system of old-age benefits, unemployment insurance, and welfare programs for disabled people and needy children.
After several labor reforms to help unions organize, FDR introduced more relief programs, including the Works Progress Administration. Created in 1935 to provide jobs to millions of unemployed Americans, the WPA funded various projects from infrastructure to the arts, employing musicians, writers, and actors. For FDR, reelection in November 1936 was a forgone conclusion.
Second Term as President
Portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt taken in June 1936. Source: FDR Presidential Library and Museum
Roosevelt’s second term, presumably his last if he followed past precedent, was full of political and economic obstacles, further compounded by the increasingly tense global situation. Despite the recovery that started with FDR’s New Deal, the United States fell into a great recession in 1937. Reduced government spending, initiated by the Federal Reserve, hopeful that the worst was behind them, backfired with the drop in industrial production, rising unemployment, and a declining stock market. Roosevelt responded with increased spending and new legislation, but the recovery was slow, while the opposition to the president was rapidly amping up.
FDR’s political prowess took a severe hit in 1937 when, in response to the Supreme Court’s pushback to his countless New Deal programs, the president attempted to push the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill through Congress. The newspapers soon labeled the failed proposal to add up to six additional (and friendly to Roosevelt) judges to the Supreme Court the “court-packing scheme.” The opinion of the president was slow to recover. With more opposition from the coalition of conservative Democrats and Republicans arguing against FDR’s expanded government power, the Democratic Party suffered significant losses in the 1938 Congressional midterm elections. The president’s ability to pass new legislation was severely curtailed for the first time since taking office.
Stifled at home, FDR also had to contend with the dire situation abroad. The rise of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler and imperial Japan posed a significant threat to world peace, yet the Republican Congress continued mirroring the public’s isolationist sentiments. Although constrained by Congress, Roosevelt took a more direct approach to the global conflict on the horizon by advocating for increased military spending and greater support to American allies, namely Britain and France.
Wartime Necessity of a Third Term
FDR waving at his third inauguration, January 20, 1941. Source: FDR Presidential Library and Museum
When Hitler’s forces invaded Poland in 1939 and plunged the world into a world war of which the US wanted no part, FDR did the unprecedented and ran for a third term as America’s president. FDR publicly shied away from the nomination, as he did not want it to look like he was seeking it but that the nation and his party wanted him to continue.
Nominated by the delegates for the third term to chants of “The party wants Roosevelt… Illinois wants Roosevelt… The world needs Roosevelt… Everybody wants Roosevelt!” The incumbent president easily defeated his opponent, Republican Wendell Wilkie, with 449 electoral votes to 82.
With the world at war, Roosevelt shifted his focus away from the New Deal and toward preparing his country for the inevitable. The funding for programs passed during the president’s first two terms was gradually reduced as resources were diverted for war preparation. While battling isolationist opposition in Congress, Roosevelt passed the Selective Training and Service Act in 1940, instituting the first-ever peacetime draft in US history.
Slowly and cleverly, the president found ways to help support America’s European allies without directly entering the war. In a series of public speeches, FDR touted the US as the “Arsenal of Democracy,” needed to support democratic nations across the world lest they fall to fascism. When Congress finally passed the Lend-Lease Act authorizing Roosevelt to lend or lease military equipment to any country deemed vital to the defense of the United States, the country had all but abandoned its isolationist stance and neutrality.
Following the US entrance into the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Roosevelt navigated through the conflict while shaping its outcome in such a way that established the United States as a world leader.
FDR’s Fourth Term as President
Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill at the Tehran Conference in 1943. Photo by Dennis Charles Oulds. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Following a successful war mobilization and the strengthening of alliances through numerous conferences and diplomatic efforts, Roosevelt became a wartime president in every sense, one whose number one goal was seeing the conflict through to its conclusion and victory. In a way, this was as much about the post-war world as it was about the war, which by 1944, and the first wartime presidential election since 1864, was only a year away from the Allies’ ultimate victory.
Before the US entrance, Roosevelt and Britain’s Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, met secretly to draft the Atlantic Charter. The Charter outlined principles such as self-determination, economic cooperation, and freedom from aggression—the very same principles that would, after World War II, form the basis of the United Nations.
With his health in decline, the president took what he perceived to be his people’s and party’s mandate to see the war to its conclusion and ran for a fourth term. After the defeat of the Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey with Roosevelt’s 53% of the popular vote, the New York Times observed, “Franklin D. Roosevelt has been re-elected in a war year as a war President who could promise the country victory in the war and on the basis of victory, a lasting peace.”
After traveling to the Yalta Conference in February 1944 to discuss post-war Europe, the president could no longer hide his deteriorating health. Cardiovascular disease and exhaustion were affecting his physical capabilities and decision-making. With the war in Europe just weeks away from the ultimate Allied victory and just a few months from the end of World War II, Roosevelt died suddenly from a cerebral hemorrhage at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945.
Legacy
FDR in Warm Springs, Georgia, 1930. Source: National Archives
FDR’s unprecedented four terms in office expanded the role and power of the presidency at home and abroad. Yet, it only took Congress three years after his death to ratify the 22 Amendment to the Constitution, limiting all future presidents to two terms. While there are detractors who still view Franklin D. Roosevelt as a president who abused his power and turned the executive office into the face of the American political system, the prevalent consensus among historians and citizens alike is that, for better or for worse, FDR’s New Deal and wartime policies laid the foundation for modern social welfare and economic regulation in the United States, influencing subsequent administrations and shaping American society into what it is today.
President Roosevelt’s last written words on the day of his death were: “The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.”
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