22nd Amendment would have been devastating in 1940
The New Yorker presented this frightening scenario in a recent article:
At the 1940 Republican National Convention, in Philadelphia, an uneasy affair marked by bomb scares, a British espionage scandal, and the imminence of global conflict, ten names were placed in nomination. On the sixth ballot, a corporate executive from Indiana named Wendell Willkie finally emerged as the challenger to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was running for a third term. Desperate to find a way to compete with F.D.R., a political colossus who had lately engineered the New Deal and ended the Great Depression, Willkie challenged him to a series of radio debates.
This was something new in American life. F.D.R. hardly feared the medium—he’d been delivering his homey yet substance-rich fireside chats to the nation since 1933—but he nonetheless dodged Willkie’s invitation, citing scheduling conflicts. In November, he crushed Willkie, and by the end of 1941 he was engaged in the struggle against fascism.
Editorial, The New Yorker, September 29, 2024
I never really understood the importance of the 1940 election until I read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer-Prize winning tome entitled “No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. I did not realize how important FDR was to the war effort in World War II even though my history profs in college had emphasized how well he did on so many levels.
The Pulitzer nomination for her excellent treatise today emphasizes how well the former Harvard historian told this narrative:
“Presenting an aspect of American history that has never been fully told, Doris Kearns Goodwin writes a brilliant narrative account of how the United States of 1940, an isolationist country divided along class lines, still suffering the ravages of a decade-long depression and woefully unprepared for war, was unified by a common threat and by the extraordinary leadership of Franklin Roosevelt to become, only five years later, the preeminent economic and military power in the world.”
“The 1995 Pulitzer Prize Winner in History,” The Pulitzer Prizes.
The Isolationist Country, riven by fascism
What happened in the U.S. was a result of the economic devastation caused by the stock market crash of 1929 that ended in the Great Depression. However, the isolationism was also a result of the anger that America became involved in World War I.
That led to the far-right evolution of people like Father Charles Coughlin and a former hero turned demon, Charles Lindbergh, who embraced Hitler and rooted for Germany in the 1936 Olympics. It led to a huge Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939 attended by approximately 20 thousand people.
What occurred to cause America to allow Hitler to rise to power?
American Isolationism in the 1930s
During the 1930s, the combination of the Great Depression and the memory of tragic losses in World War I contributed to pushing American public opinion and policy toward isolationism. Isolationists advocated non-involvement in European and Asian conflicts and non-entanglement in international politics. Although the United States took measures to avoid political and military conflicts across the oceans, it continued to expand economically and protect its interests in Latin America.
The leaders of the isolationist movement drew upon history to bolster their position. In his Farewell Address, President George Washington had advocated non-involvement in European wars and politics. For much of the nineteenth century, the expanse of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans had made it possible for the United States to enjoy a kind of “free security” and remain largely detached from Old World conflicts.
During World War I, however, President Woodrow Wilson made a case for U.S. intervention in the conflict and a U.S. interest in maintaining a peaceful world order. Nevertheless, the American experience in that war served to bolster the arguments of isolationists; they argued that marginal U.S. interests in that conflict did not justify the number of U.S. casualties.
Milestones 1937-45, Office of the Historian, United States Government
As a result, President Roosevelt’s efforts to slow the efforts of Adolph Hitler in Europe were thwarted at every turn — until the Japanese decided to take the efforts into their own hands and bomb Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
What FDR accomplished
Doris Kearns Goodwin explained in a lecture at Kansas State University why the election of FDR in 1940 was so vital,
One of those moments that became so critical was the spring and fall of 1940, after Germany had conquered most of Western Europe. Knowing that the mood of the country was still isolationist, that we wanted little to do with Europe's war, he began a long, slow process of leading our country to a greater and greater commitment to her Allied cause.
In that spring of 1940 the situation could not have been more perilous. America was only 18th in military power. We had only 500,000 soldiers in our Army compared to 6 million for the German army. The Depression had depleted our military might to the point that we had no modern tanks, weapons or ships to speak of. No modern munitions industry at all. So his first step was to reach out to the business community that he had fought with so violently in the 1930s.
He knew the government couldn't build the ships and tanks and weapons, only business could. So he had to end the cold war that had marked his relationship with business in the '30s; give business a piece of the action; bring business leaders in to run production agencies; offer generous loans and tax incentives; government help in building the factories; and as a result, an extraordinary partnership between government and business was forged, one that would eventually allow the United States not only to catch up with Germany by 1942, but to produce more weapons than Germany, all the Axis powers combined, all the other Allied powers combined, so that our miracle of production was supplying weapons to our allies in all the far corners of the world.
And in many ways that production miracle, where people went to those factories and worked 24 hours a day, was largely responsible, along with the courage of our soldiers, for allowing us to win that part of the war that Americans contributed to.
Doris Kearns Goodwin, 1995 Pulitzer Prize winner in history, 109th Landon Lecture, April 22, 1997, Kansas State University.
His greatest accomplishment was convincing the private sector to convert their businesses into a war-time effort to save America and destroy Hitler.
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Ph.D.
Was FDR trying to be a dictator?
Wendell Wilkie argued that Franklin Roosevelt was trying to become a dictator by running for a third term, but as Kearns Goodwin notes, without him, a victory in WWII would have been problematic.
Every four years for the past 218 years, the United States of America has elected a president. In the history of the United States, only the thirty-second president was elected for more than two terms.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran a unique reelection campaign against Wendell Willkie in 1940 to win an unprecedented third term. The campaign was waged in the midst of spreading war across Europe and growing fear of American entrance into international hostilities. Due to the intensity of the political issues that were debated, the campaign season was particularly compelling.
However, the campaign was not unique because it was run during a time of uncertainty; it was unique because it was posing a question to the American people that had never been posed before: is the two-term tradition bigger than the presidential candidates?
Despite facing an opponent who attempted to liken a third term for Roosevelt to an American adoption of dictatorship, as referenced in the campaign collateral above, Roosevelt was able to overcome the third-term issue and win reelection.
Rob Sobelman, “Influence of the Third-Term Issue: The Roosevelt and
Willkie Presidential Campaigns of 1940,” 2008.
The 22nd Amendment was passed after FDR had won four terms, though he passed away early in his fourth. That was a good move, but it would have been disastrous in 1940.
Wendell Wilkie was probably a good man, but he had no clue how to run a government — or win a war.
Perhaps the 2024 election is vital to the survival of democracy; however, the Election of 1940 may have been the one that saved America.
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