The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part LII: “An Act of Divine Providence, or Otherwise”

    Returning to the Republican-controlled Congress in the late winter of 1947, it bears mentioning that the assembled legislators did have more to draw on by way of motivation than just lingering resentment towards their Democratic opponents and a record of the promises that they had made during the most recent presidential election. No doubt thanks in large part to their own efforts during that same public poll and the preceding Election of 1940 – during which time the Republican Party had expended no small amount of energy comparing a third term-seeking Roosevelt to contemporary European authoritarian leaders – the American people had begun to turn perceptibly against the continued absence of codified executive term limits. If Roosevelt’s reelections in 1940 and 1944 were any indication, the depth of this opposition took some time to build, but contemporary polling did show evidence of a definite trend in that direction. In April of 1943, when asked by Gallup whether they supported, “adding a law to the constitution which would prevent any President of the United States from being reelected in the future if he has already served two terms [,]” forty-five percent of respondents answered in the affirmative. Asked again in November/December, the “yes” vote increased to fifty percent. Asked for a third time in March of 1944, the response was fifty-seven percent in favor. Evidently, as time went on, the American people were growing less and less supportive of Roosevelt’s precedent-busting tenure in office. Or rather, they seemed to be turning against the idea of unlimited terms. Roosevelt, as aforementioned, clearly had popularity to spare. His victories in ‘40 and ‘44, it was true, showed a slow but steady weakening of support compared to his monumental win in ‘36, but it still would have been hard to argue that the country was about to turn against him. For the perspective of the American people, it seemed, Roosevelt’s third and fourth terms in office were more or less what he claimed them to be. That is, they were less attempts to set a new standard – as his Republicans opponents loudly claimed – as necessary concessions to contemporary domestic and international events. And once those selfsame events arrived at their rightful conclusion, so too, it seemed, would the indulgence of the American electorate for Franklin Roosevelt.

    Thus armed with a sense of their constituents’ increasingly ambivalent attitude towards the prospect of unlimited presidential terms – and having made more than a few promises to address the issue in exchange for electoral support – House Republicans accordingly set about using some portion of the first session of the 80^th Congress to formulate and approve a corresponding constitutional amendment. The result, House Joint Resolution 27, was quite straightforward. Notwithstanding several rounds of modifications, all that it sought to do was ensure that, “Any person who has served as President of the United States during all, or portions, of any two terms, shall thereafter be ineligible to hold the office of President.” Once submitted to the House floor for debate, many Democratic members were unsurprisingly displeased, doubtless as they hoped to perpetuate their party’s control over an Executive Branch whose scope and power had become much enlarged under the stewardship of the late President Roosevelt. Notwithstanding these selfsame complaints, however, nearly fifty Democrats ultimately voted to support the measure, the majority of which – thirty-seven – represented Southern states.

    Such a turnabout was arguably a long time coming. While Democratic voters in the South had certainly benefitted from many of the social and economic programs that made up Roosevelt’s “New Deal” – from the hydro-electrification projects undertaken by the Tennessee Valley Authority to the price stabilization measures mandated by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration – the South was also traditionally home to the most conservative faction of the Democratic Party. And the leaders of this faction, while initially supportive of the President’s efforts to ameliorate the worst effects of the Great Depression, had come to regard Roosevelt’s rapid expansion of federal authority and his favorable attitude towards organized labor with mounting suspicion between his first inauguration in 1933 and his landslide reelection in 1936. The publication of the “Conservative Manifesto” in December of 1937 – in large part the brainchild of North Carolina Senator Josiah Bailey (1973-1946) – gave evidence of the depths of the discontent which this group had begun to harbor. As Roosevelt, in the eyes of men like Bailey, had begun to move the country towards a kind of state-run collectivization, the Manifesto called for tax cuts, a balanced budget, increased local control over New Deal funds and programs, and a recommitment on the part of the federal government to the basic principles of free enterprise. While Roosevelt and his allies were initially inclined to ignore this nascent insurgency, the return of a sizable bloc of Republicans to Congress after the 1938 mid-terms resulted in the formation of a bipartisan Conservation Coalition, the efforts of which ultimately succeeded in sinking many a New Deal initiative between the late-1930s and the mid-1940s. Roosevelt’s death in 1945 obviously removed the primary target of this ad-hoc congressional pressure group, but it certainly did nothing to erase his legacy. The New Deal Coalition was still very much ascendent, and it doubtless appeared to the aforementioned cohort of conservative Democrats that their work would not be finished until they had removed even the possibility that someone might successfully take up Roosevelt’s mantle.

    Received by the Senate on February 7^th, 1947, H.J. Res. 27 then slowly began to evolve into the final draft version known to history as the 22^nd Amendment. First, at the hands of the Judiciary Committee, the text of the proposal was altered to become substantially more specific. “A person who has held the office of President,” it now read, “or acted as President, on three hundred and sixty-five calendar days or more in each of two terms shall not be eligible to hold the office of President, or to act as President, for any part of another term.” Evidently, notwithstanding past efforts in pursuit of a constitutional amendment limiting presidential service, the assembled legislators of the 80^th Congress had settled on the two-term limit as the basis of their discussion. This was formally confirmed during a floor debate on March 7^th when a proposal to further modify the draft to create a single six-year term was defeated by a decisive margin of 82-1. Shortly thereafter, on March 10^th, Washington Democrat Warren Magnusson (1905-1989) then proposed perhaps the most meaningful modification yet, arguing to shift the focus of the draft away from service and towards election.

    There were, Magnusson asserted accordingly, at least two problems with the draft amendment as it then existed. First, it was too technical and begged certain complicated legal questions. If holding the office of President and acting as President amounted to the same thing in terms of disqualification from further service, it stood to reason that a rigorous definition of what it meant to be “acting president” would also need to be worked out. Likewise, it seemed unfair to place legal restrictions upon someone who had potentially never sought the office of chief executive but had rather been forced to accept it by way of constitutional necessity. If, say, in a moment of national crisis during which both the President and Vice-President either died or were incapacitated and the Secretary of State was forced to step into the role of chief executive – pursuant to the terms of the Presidential Succession Act of 1886 – the length of their emergency service would be counted against them if they ever decided to seek election in their own right. This theoretical individual had never pursued the offices of President or Vice-President and had only assumed the responsibility of the former in order to provide stable leadership in what would have had to have been a moment of unprecedented national calamity. Why, then, in exchange for performing their constitutional duty, should they be potentially disqualified from further public service? Such an outcome, Magnusson believed, was beyond the purview of the present discussion.

    The Senator’s second problem, broadly speaking, with the existing draft of H.J. Res. 27 was that it was more convoluted than it needed to be to serve the needs of the American people. The issue, he said, was not that certain individuals had attempted to make use of legal trickery to maintain their possession of the office of President. Rather, it was simply that the same man kept getting elected. Why not, then, just make it as simple as stating that, “no person shall be elected to the office of President more than twice [?]” Not only would the vast majority of the American people be able to understand such a restriction both in its purpose and its effects, but it would also speak directly and unambiguously to the issue at hand. Roosevelt had been elected four times between 1932 and 1944. Was that not the true cause of all the consternation that had followed? Was Roosevelt’s continual reelection not what Wendall Willkie and Thomas Dewey had both tried unsuccessfully to prevent? Barring more than a single reelection, it seemed to Magnusson, was likely to prevent this same scenario from occurring nine times out of ten. Granted, the question of what exactly constituted an “acting president” would remain unanswered, but that was neither here nor there. The 80^th Congress had committed itself to preventing another presidency like that of Franklin Roosevelt, not to pinning down the exact legal definition of all of the high offices of state. Magnusson’s proposal would serve, and so, he felt, it ought to.

    Some of Senator Magnusson’s colleagues, as it happened, tended to agree. The most prominent among these was Maryland Democrat Millard Tydings, who seemed to feel that Magnusson’s criticism of the existing draft’s complex formulation had hit the nail on the head. “What we are trying to do [,]” he said during debate,

Is to stop any man from being elected President more than twice […] But under the committee amendment a man could be prohibited from being elected President more than once, provided that he had served more than 1 year prior to the time he was elected President […] I think that provision is a little stringent.

Unlikely though it may have been to ever come to pass, the scenario put forward by Senator Tydings was indeed still possible under the terms of the existing draft amendment. The proposal, as it then stood, held that, “A person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, on three hundred and sixty-five calendar days or more in each of two terms shall not be eligible to hold the office of President, or to act as President, for any part of another term.” In practice, then, if a cabinet minister, during a national crisis of the kind cited above, was elevated to the office of President and served for a single year thereafter, they could only submit themself for formal election to that office once, placing a hard limit upon their tenure of service at five years in total. If they’d been elected in the first place, of course, rather than succeeded in the midst of calamity, no such limitation would apply. Was this right? Was this the outcome that the 80^th Congress had set out to ensure? Senator Tydings did not think so and argued vigorously to that effect alongside the aforementioned Senator Magnusson. Unfortunately for the pair of them, the majority of their colleagues remained as yet unconvinced.

    Whereas Magnusson and Tydings seemed to think that the various loopholes that a focus on limiting eligibility for election would have left open were so unlikely to ever be utilized that they could safely be ignored, most of their fellow Senators were of the opposite opinion entirely. That is to say, they appeared to feel that having discovered the potential for the aforementioned loopholes, it was their collective responsibility to close them for good. Thus it was that Iowa Republican Bourke Hickenlooper (1896-1971) spoke in opposition to Magnusson’s amendment proposal by seeking to drawn attention to the “peculiar situation” that its adoption might ultimately create. Under the terms of Magnusson’s draft, said Hickenlooper, “An individual who becomes President by accident, an act of divine providence, or otherwise, and who was not originally elected to the position, is the only person who can hold protracted office in the Presidency.” Another skeptic, Ohio Republican Robert Taft (1889-1953), then elaborated further on what this might mean in practice. If, as Magnusson would have preferred, individuals were only barred from being elected more than twice, it still would have been possible for a given Vice-President to succeed to the office of President on the death of their predecessor, serve three for three and a half years, and then stand for election twice more, granting them a total tenure in office of eleven and a half years. Was this not exactly what the membership of the 80^th Congress had assembled to prevent? Had the county not just been made aware of the need for a constitutional amendment by the continuation in office of a single man for twelve years? Magnusson’s response, while honest, did little to help his case. All of the scenarios which his fellow Senators were painting, he said, did indeed represent an accurate reading of his proposal. All the same, he still did not feel it necessary to draft an amendment proposal that would, “deal with contingencies whereby a man because of circumstances beyond his control is elevated to a high office.”

    Given his evident unwillingness to bow to the concerns of his fellow Senators, Magnusson’s proposal unsurprisingly went down to defeat. It was at this point that Senator Taft, evidently unwilling to allow the efforts of his fellow Republicans in the House to go to waste, decided to pen a draft of his own that might strike the necessary balance. Said draft, introduced on March 12^th, essentially combined elements of both the Judiciary Committee proposal and Magnusson’s subsequent amendment, the result of which was a text that addressed both election and service. “No person,” it read,

Shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President or acted as President for more than 2 years of a term to which some other person was elected President, shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.

As far as splitting the difference between the various concerns that had thus far been expressed, Taft’s proposal would seem to have staked out a fairly reasonable middle ground. By the terms of the Judiciary Committee draft, someone elevated to the office of President through no effort of their own would have been limited to a tenure in office of five years in total. And by the terms of Senator Magnusson’s amendment, an individual placed in the same position might conceivably have remained in office for as many as eleven and a half years, all told. The former, as Magnusson argued, would seem set to punish those who only crime was serving their country in the midst of catastrophe. And the latter, according to the likes of Senator Hickenlooper, might conceivably allow someone not initially elected to the office of President to remain in that office for far longer than anyone else. By way of Taft’s proposal, an individual might serve as President for ten years at the utmost if the math worked out in their favor. But if they served for two years and one day of a term to which someone else had been elected originally, their maximum tenure would shrink to six years following a single reelection.     

    The floor vote that followed would seem to have amply validated the wisdom of Taft’s decision to seek a compromise. Every Republican present voted in favor of the amended resolution, as did another substantial cohort of Southern Democrats, providing for a final tally of 59-23. Several days later, after being sent back to the House so that the aforesaid modifications could be approved in turn, the resolution was endorsed by the assembled Representatives for a second time, likewise by a comfortable margin of 81-29. The result, on the part of congressional Republicans, was admittedly impressive. Not only had they managed to follow through on their promise to deliver the term-limit amendment they’d been talking about in some form since 1940 in the first session after they regained control of Congress in 1946, but they managed to do so within the space of only two months. And while the next stage in the process – that being ratification by the state legislatures – was almost entirely out of their hands, it nevertheless reflected upon them favorably that they’d held up their end. For seven years – since Roosevelt’s second reelection – Republicans had been calling attention to the dangers inherent in permitting anyone to remain in the office of President for an indefinite amount of time. And while, with the man’s death in 1945, they might very reasonably had declared that the aforementioned danger had substantially abated, the fact that they instead continued to pursue reform in the area of terms limits – instead of, for instance, trying to follow Roosevelt’s example – would seem to speak well of the party’s practical commitment to the scruples that its members claimed to uphold.

    Likewise to their credit, Republican legislators in the states showed themselves to be similarly dedicated to preventing the office of President from evolving into a kind of life-time possession. By the end of 1947, eighteen states had voted to ratify the approved draft of the proposed amendment, seventeen of which – Missouri being the exception – were solidly controlled by members of the Republican Party. With the ending of the annual legislative session in May of 1947, however, enthusiasm for the reform in question almost completely dried up. The following year saw only three states grant their approval (Virginia, Mississippi, and New York), followed by two more in 1949 (North Dakota and South Dakota), and only one (Louisiana) in 1950. Indeed, it was not until mid-winter in 1951 that the pace of ratification picked up again and finally carried the process to its conclusion. A further seventeen states voted to approve the draft proposal over the course of this final phase, the 36^th of which, Minnesota, secured its formal endorsement as the 22^nd Amendment. And while it is not clear exactly why this process proceeded, as it did, in two discreet stages with a trickle of activity in between – or why, after a period of relative inactivity during 1948, 1949, and 1950, interest suddenly seemed to reignite in 1951 – it is obvious at the very least that something about this particular amendment marked it out compared to its predecessors. No other constitutional amendment – save for the 27^th, which is its own special kind of anomaly – took as much time to ratify from the moment of its approval by Congress. In all, some four years passed between its second passage through the House in 1947 and its actual addition to the Constitution in 1951. And while it is true that, as aforementioned, the death of Franklin Roosevelt removed some amount of urgency from the contemporary discussion on the nature of presidential term limits, it nevertheless bears asking why things played out as they did.

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part LI: “The Unwritten Law of This Republic”

    As far as follow-ups go, the 22^nd Amendment – in terms of its content and the circumstances of its ratification – could not have been more different than its immediate predecessor, the 21^st. Whereas the latter was the subject of mass public enthusiasm at a time when the American people had very little reason to feel particularly enthusiastic about anything – one result of which was a progression of proposal to ratification that proceeded with truly remarkable speed – the former was the product of several years of consideration and debate which only really gained momentum after the problem that originally inspired it had effectively solved itself. That problem, of course, was the extension of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt into an unprecedented third term upon his re-election in 1940. Roosevelt had already been re-elected once before in a landslide against Republican Alf Landon (1887-1987) in 1936, and his entirely unopposed renomination by his fellow Democrats in 1940 raised more than a few eyebrows among certain segments of the American public. Yes, the United States was still feeling the effects of the Great Depression, and yes, events in Europe were definitely trending towards war, but was all that reason enough to break the two-term tradition? By openly pursuing a third term, wasn’t Roosevelt effectively declaring that he knew better than George Washington, the originator of the precedent in question?

    The resulting conversation, in the immediate, didn’t amount to very much. The attempts of the Republican nominee for 1940, a lawyer and businessman named Wendall Willkie (1892-1944), to paint his opponent as a tyrant-in-waiting met with very little success. Much the same sequence of events played out again in 1944 when the incumbent president determined to run for a similarly unprecedented fourth term in office. The Republican candidate, New York Governor Thomas Dewey (1902-1971), was able to make more headway against Roosevelt than any of his predecessors had managed, but his attacks on the increasing length of Roosevelt’s tenure in office made seemingly little impact with the voters. By then, of course, the American republic had become embroiled in the most destructive war the world had ever known. Not only did this fact lead many Americans to regard a sudden change of administration as exceptionally unwise, but Roosevelt’s canny leadership seemed to be producing success after success on the battlefields of Europe. But while Dewey’s campaign strategy of focusing on the potentially perilous implications of allowing any president, however popular, to continue to run for office indefinitely failed to usher him into the White House, the Republican candidate did make at least one lasting contribution to the conversation that had begun to take shape around Roosevelt’s ever more drawn-out presidency.

    As his run for the highest office in the land gradually wound down in October of 1944, Dewey gave a speech in Buffalo, New York in which he expressed his explicit support for a constitutional amendment limiting the number of terms that any chief executive could serve. “Four terms, or sixteen years,” he said at the time, clearly in reference to his opponent’s unusually lengthy tenure, “is the most dangerous threat to our freedom ever proposed.” The Republican candidate lost, as aforementioned, to the tune of three million votes, but his proposal to seek a constitutional solution to the problem that Roosevelt presented to his party finally gave his fellow partisans a potentially achievable goal on which they could focus their energies. Perhaps they could not defeat the overwhelming popular president at the polls, but maybe, through appeals to conscience, they could disqualify him from running again. In 1944, the idea carried little enough weight. Not only was Dewey unable to use the promise of a constitutional amendment to rally the final burst of support he needed to defeat the incumbent Roosevelt, but the various Republican candidates who ran for Congress on the issue were likewise unable to make a substantial dent in the Democratic majorities that had controlled both houses since the Election of 1932. By the 1946 mid-terms, however, a scant two years later, a great deal had changed in the United States of America.

    The war was over, the American republic had emerged victorious, and Roosevelt himself had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. But while this would seem to have removed both the main cause of Republican frustration and the primary reason that that cause had remained intractable, Republicans nevertheless continued to call for an amendment to the Constitution. Granted, it was not the primary issue upon which they campaigned in 1946. Newly elevated President Harry Truman (1884-1972) had given the party more than enough to work with by his poor handling of a succession of major industrial strikes in 1945-46 and by waffling on, and then fumbling, the end of wartime price controls. But Republicans nevertheless remained committed to preventing the emergence of another Roosevelt. And upon finally retaking both houses of Congress for the first time since 1932, the party wasted little time in pursuing exactly that. Thus it was, between February and March of 1947, that the newly convened House and Senate proposed, debated, and approved a proposed amendment which would have, once ratified, embedded the traditional two-term limit in the text of the Constitution.

    Franklin Roosevelt, in fairness, was not the first incumbent or former president to ever raise the issue of breaking this seemingly sacred institutional taboo. While every president since Washington had indeed served no more than two terms in office, the reason that the officeholders in question had adhered to this tradition was not always a matter of philosophical or moral principle. Washington himself effectively retired from office in 1796 out a combination of fatigue and frustration. Having served in some public office or other for over forty of his sixty-four years, he felt that he was no longer able to effectively meet the demands of the office of President and had also grown tired of what he viewed as the excessively rancorous partisanship that had come to characterize the 1790s. Halfway through his own second term as president a little over a decade later, Thomas Jefferson came to the conclusion that this gesture of voluntary retirement had the potential to do far more good than just allowing an old man a well-earned respite. “If some termination to the services of the chief magistrate be not fixed by the Constitution,” he wrote accordingly to the legislature of Vermont in December of 1807, “or supplied by practice, his office, nominally for years, will in fact, become for life; and history shows how easily that degenerates into an inheritance.” Washington’s example, if followed, would give rise to the desired practice. So overwhelming was Washington’s reputation as the so-called “Father of his Country” that any American statesmen who even contemplated exceeding two terms in office as president would be forced to restrain their ambitions in the face of what was almost certain to prove to be an overpowering public outcry.

    Ever eager to appear conscientious in the eyes of his countrymen, Jefferson naturally chose to adhere to this selfsame precedent. As did his direct successor, James Madison, Madison’s successor, James Monroe, and every other sitting president down through the end of the 19^th century. Indeed, for a period between the 1840s and 1860s, party organizations, members of Congress, and even some sitting presidents began advocating for even greater restraint, describing a single four-year term as the ideal of republican forbearance. But while statesman after statesman bowed to the wisdom of the inaugurator of their office and took themselves voluntarily out of the running lest they become, as Jefferson feared, a kind of hereditary sovereign for whom elections were mere formality, not every one of them did so as a matter of course. Indeed, one Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885), Commanding General of the United States Army during the decisive final phase of the American Civil War and President of the United States between 1869 and 1877, actively contemplated a third term in office on two separate occasions. The first time, in 1875, came about as his second term in office was nearing its end.

    Grant’s fellow Republicans, convinced that he remained as widely popular with the American people as had been the case on his first triumphant election in 1868, urged him to run for a third term in 1876. The economy was suffering, to be sure, and Grant’s administration had become mired in scandals, but there simply didn’t seem to be another Republican available with anywhere near the former general’s national following. Listening to this argument from the mouths of numerous party officials and close advisors, Grant came very close to agreeing to effectively scrap the two-term precedent. He did not embrace the idea wholly without reservation, to be sure, and that was just as well. As news began to trickle out that the president was considering running for a third term, Republican party organizations in a number of states responded by sending remonstrances to the White House urging Grant to abandon the idea immediately. The response from Pennsylvania was particularly vehement, expressing, as it did, local Republicans’ “unalterable opposition” to the possibility of a third term. Seeking to calm his fellow partisans in the Keystone State – while still leaving himself a degree of wiggle room – Grant responded in turn by penning a letter explaining his thinking. He was not, he declared, a candidate for renomination and, “would not accept a nomination if it were tendered unless it should come under such circumstances as to make it an imperative duty--circumstances not likely to arise.”

    The caveat which Grant cited – that he would only accept nomination for a third term “under such circumstances as to make it an imperative duty” – was, on its face, a fairly reasonable one. There was nothing in the Constitution which might have forbidden anyone otherwise qualified from serving more than two terms in office as president. And in case an actual emergency did arise just as an incumbent president was preparing to step down, it would have made a certain amount of sense to allow said incumbent to continue in office if that was what the American people truly desired. Reasonable as this kind of argument may have been in a vacuum, however, it did not succeed in convincing certain key political actors active in the United States in the mid 1870s. When the House of Representatives caught wind of Grant’s public ruminations on the possibility of a third term, the majority – made up of Democrats for the first time since 1857 – passed a resolution on December 15^th declaring that a departure from the two-term precedent would have been, “unwise, unpatriotic, and fraught with peril to our free institutions [.]” As capable as anyone of seeing the writing on the wall, Grant thereafter made a point of abandoning any plans to seek a third term in office. The Republicans, meeting in Chicago the following June, accordingly chose Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes (1822-1893) as their nominee for president. And his campaign, in spite of everything, ultimately met with success. The Republicans held on to the White House and Grant, like Washington before him, settled into a well-earned retirement.

    Unfortunately, in 1880, essentially the same problem reared its head. Hayes, as it turned out, was inclined to follow the example set by certain prominent American statesmen in the 1840s and 1850s. That is, rather than seek even a second term as president, he opted to retire at the end of a single four-year term. In truth, this was not merely the result of conscientiousness on Hayes’ part. In four years, by advocating civil-service reform, offering patronage positions to Southern Democrats, and abandoning the traditional Republican practice of promoting racial equality in the South, Hayes had made himself the enemy of the prominent “Stalwart” faction of his party – opposed by the pro-reform “Half-Breeds” – thereby essentially sinking his chances of being renominated by his fellow partisans. Ulysses S. Grant, meanwhile, after travelling the world for four years and receiving triumphant welcomes nearly everywhere he went, appeared more popular than ever and enjoyed the vocal support of the aforementioned pro-patronage Stalwarts. The result, it seemed to Grant and to his Stalwart supporters alike, was something on the order of a fait accompli. In exchange for his allowing them to decide to whom various federal appointment would go, Stalwart mainstays Donald Cameron (1833-1918), John Logan (1826-1886), and Roscoe Conkling (1826-1888) accordingly agreed deliver to him the Republican nomination on a veritable silver platter. In actual fact, however, this proved much easier said than done.

    Senator Conkling, true to form, made full use of his oratorical prowess when he rose to formally nominate Grant at the Republican National Convention in Chicago in early June of 1880. “New York,” he said, “is for Ulysses S. Grant. Never defeated–never defeated in peace or in war, his name is the most illustrious borne by living men.” The crowd’s reaction, by and large, was rapturous as Conkling proceeded to talk up Grant’s honesty and loyalty and then upbraided those who would have denied his desire to serve his country further by calling attention to the two-term precedent as though it had the force of law. But while the moment, and the momentum, certainly seemed to belong to Grant, the first round of balloting showed how illusory this was in fact. None of Grant’s principle Stalwart backers – Logan of Illinois, Cameron of Pennsylvania, or Conkling of New York – were able to deliver the whole of their state’s delegation for Grant on the first vote, the result of which was a far more protracted process than anyone seemed to anticipate. Over the course of two days and thirty-four ballots, hardly anything shifted at all. In spite of the fact that he enjoyed the backing of the leadership of the Stalwarts – to the tune of three hundred and seventeen votes out of the required three hundred and seventy-nine – there were evidently enough delegates present who disdained the idea of allowing anybody to serve a third term as president to keep Ulysses S. Grant from simply running away with the nomination. Finally, on ballot thirty-five, frantic backroom negotiations swung fifty votes in favor of a dark horse candidate, Ohio Congressman James Garfield (1831-1881). Struck by Garfield’s sudden and apparent viability – and desperate, whatever the cost, to keep the Stalwarts out of the White House – Half-Breed leaders James Blaine (1830-1893) and John Sherman (1823-1900) instructed their delegates to shift their support to the Ohioan. Accordingly, on the thirty-sixth ballot, Garfield received three hundred and ninety-nine votes to Grant’s three hundred and six and was thereafter declared to be the Republican candidate for president.

    But while Grant’s defeat in 1880 – and his death shortly thereafter in 1885 – effectively put an end to any possibility that a sitting president might seek more than two terms in office for what remained of the 19^th century, the topic itself was still on the minds of certain party officials at least into the 1890s. In 1896, for example, as incumbent Democrat Grover Cleveland’s (18371-1908) second term was winding down, his own party determined to include a plank against seeking three or more terms in its official platform for the forthcoming election. “It [is] the unwritten law of this Republic,” it read,

Established by custom and usage of a hundred years, and sanctioned by the example of the greatest and wisest of those who founded and maintained our Government, that no man should be eligible for a third term of the Presidential office.

In fairness, the inclusion of such a plank almost certainly had more to do with the reformist zeal of the populist forces then in the process of taking over the Democratic Party – led by the famously charismatic William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) – than any desire on Cleveland’s part to seek a third term in office. Nevertheless, it is worth noting the degree to which the notion of an incumbent seeking a third term as president was still being talked about almost twenty years after anyone came particularly close to achieving the same. Evidently, simply serving two terms was enough to raise certain people’s hackles; doubly so when the incumbent neglected to disclaim an interest in serving longer.

    Such was certainly the case with Cleveland’s immediate successors. Soon after being elected to a second term in in office in November of 1900, Republican William McKinley (1848-1901) almost immediately began being considered by his fellow Republicans for a third term. The resulting speculation only ceased when McKinley made a point of declaring that he had no intention of being elected more than twice. His Vice-President and successor, the colorful Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), seemed to follow a similar path when, after being elected to a full term of his own in 1904 – having succeeded to the office of President upon McKinley’s assassination in September of 1901 – he declared that he considered the three years he had served as the completion of McKinley’s second term to be the equivalent to his own first term. “Under no circumstances [,]” he famously declared at the time, “will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination.” But while, outwardly true to his word, Roosevelt did not offer himself as a potential nominee during the 1908 Republican National Convention – promoting, in his stead, Secretary of War William Howard Taft (1857-1930) – the direction favored by his immediate successor (he claimed) forced a change of attitude. President Taft, it seemed, had broken so completely with the policy positions which Roosevelt had laid down over the course of his two terms in office that the latter felt compelled to cut short his retirement and make a play for the Republican nomination at the party’s convention in 1912. When accused of hypocrisy, Roosevelt’s answer was simple. While he had served, for all intents and purposes, for two full terms, he had only been elected to one term himself. If he was elected again in 1912, therefore, it would have only been for the second time, a state of affairs which (he claimed) did not violate the customary limit.

    Public reaction to Roosevelt’s about face on the prospect of a third term in office was mixed, to say the least. While his fellow progressives in the Republican Party were willing enough to swallow whatever qualms they might have nurtured if it meant returning their standard-bearer to the White House, other Republicans, and essentially the whole of the Democratic Party, were nowhere near so gracious. Taft’s supporters accused Roosevelt of harboring “inordinate ambition” and warned that his indefinite continuation in office would amount to a de facto dictatorship. When the Republicans met in their quadrennial National Convention in Chicago in June, these same naysayers then succeeded in securing the nomination for Taft on the first ballot, thereby blocking Roosevelt’s attempt to retake control of the party. Meeting that same month in Baltimore, the Democrats arguably went one further by proposing, as part of their platform, an amendment to the Constitution baring reelections altogether in favor of a single, six-year term. Stymied but unbowed, Roosevelt responded by bolting from the Republicans and declaring the formation of the Progressive Party whose convention, held in August, summarily nominated him for president.

    The election that followed was more than a little chaotic by the standards of the era. Not only did the incumbent, President Taft, come in a deeply disappointing third, but Roosevelt secured more electoral votes – eight-eight in total divided between six states – than any third-party candidate ever had or ever would. The winner, of course, was Democrat Woodrow Wilson, an academic possessed of little political experience but whose progressive bona fides had been well established during his brief tenure as the Governor of New Jersey. Wilson’s victory, in the immediate, not only laid Roosevelt’s third term ambitions to rest, but also seemed to quiet the political agitation that had arisen as a result. While the Democrats who took control of the Senate in 1912 followed through on their platform promise to pursue a constitutional amendment limiting presidents to a single term – the relevant resolution being passed in February of 1913 – the House neglected to respond in kind as President Wilson quietly distanced himself from the notion. As the world seemed to be teetering on the brink of all-out war, there doubtless appeared to the former Princeton professor to be more important matters to address. The “third-term question” was accordingly laid to rest once more as the country instead moved on to considering its place in global affairs while also taking up seemingly more pressing constitutional issues like national prohibition and women’s suffrage. As 1918 eventually gave way to 1919 and 1920, however, the question of whether a third term as president was permissible was once more thrust into the national spotlight.      

    As the Great War drew to a close along with President Wilson’s second term, it appeared increasingly likely that the next presidential election – to be held in November, 1920 – would be eventful one regardless of who ultimately emerged victorious. Having mended fences with his fellow Republicans in the aftermath of his insurgent campaign in 1912, Roosevelt was once more positioning himself to be his party’s nominee for president, an ambition much aided by his bullish support for what had proven to be a very successful war for the American republic. Wilson, of course, had been the nation’s leader during said conflict, and could claim – and did claim – more than his share of plaudits. But on the subject of the settlement which would see the war to its conclusion, the two men – and the country more broadly – were deeply and irrevocably divided. Wilson, in a grand gesture of statesmanship, spent months in Paris attempting to implement both an equitable resolution to the ongoing conflict – the terms of which would not unduly punish or indemnify any of the relevant belligerents – and a post-war balance of power wherein all nations pledged themselves to the collective policing of global aggression. The former initiative, known as Wilson’s “Fourteen Points,” was met with deep and abiding resentment on the part of both European leaders and the constitutionally belligerent Roosevelt, neither of whom much cared for the notion of allowing the German government to escape retribution for having engineered the deaths of so many British, and French, and American young men. And as to the latter, Roosevelt was just as vehemently opposed. The United States of America, he and his newly reunited Republican supporters attested, could not possibly surrender the power to deploy military force to any international body of which the American republic was but one member. If American lives were to be sacrificed for any cause, only the representatives of the American people had the right to send them into harm’s way.

    Notwithstanding the tremendous damage he had done to his reputation over the course of the American republic’s involvement in the Great War – from his internment of German Americans as enemy aliens to his refusal to support the cause of Irish independence during the negotiation of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), both of which served to effectively destroy Democratic support in the immigrant-heavy cities – President Wilson remained undaunted as the Election of 1920 approached. Indeed, while the Republicans were in the process of actively excoriating his so-called “League of Nations” as the most significant threat to American sovereignty ever devised, Wilson was actively contemplating running for a third term in office. He had, after all, just led the nation through a devastating war. From a certain perspective, in fact – a decidedly non-European perspective – his decision to get involved in the Great War had actually helped to draw it to a speedy conclusion. Not only that, but it was thanks to Wilson’s support that Congress had approved – and the states had ratified – constitutional amendments baring the sale and manufacture of intoxicating beverages and granting American women the right to vote nationwide. Reflecting on all of these accomplishments, why shouldn’t the sitting president have at least considered pursuing the Democratic nomination for a third time? Who else could even hope to boast of such an impressive domestic and international profile? Who else but the president who’d brought peace to a warring world was truly fit to see that peace firmly and fully established? As 1918 came to a close and 1919 appeared on the horizon, the stage seemed thus to have been set for a truly history-making showdown. In 1920, if they each of them had their way, the presidential contest would be between former President Theodore Roosevelt and sitting President Woodrow Wilson. A third term, on someone’s part, seemed very much in the offing.  

    Fate, as it happened, sought to intervene on both counts. Having led what he described as “the Strenuous Life” for more years than was likely wise, Roosevelt’s exposure to various tropical diseases finally caught up with him in January of 1919. A lifelong sufferer of asthma, the former president began experiencing breathing problems on the night of January 5^th, received treatment from his physician, and died in his sleep the next morning, aged sixty. Later than year, as prominent members of the Republican party began to barnstorm the country in opposition to the League of Nations while also attempting to determine precisely who they would nominate for president in 1920, President Wilson suffered his own health crisis in October. Having survived a bought of the flu while attending the negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles, Wilson drove himself even further to exhaustion trying to counter Republican publicity efforts with a series of public speeches in the Western states, the result of which, on October 2^nd, was a debilitating stroke. Left partially paralyzed and half-blind, and with his impulse control and decision-making severely damaged, it certainly seemed as though the President’s political career was well and truly at an end. This, however, was not Wilson’s conclusion. With his closest advisors and his wife shielding him from excessive scrutiny, the President attempted to proceed as though he was on the way to a full recovery. By staving off questions, avoiding public appearances, and relying on the indecision of his Vice-President, Thomas Marshall (1854-1925), he hoped to ride out the League of Nations controversy, receive his party’s nomination in 1920, and sail to a third term as the great savior of world peace.

    In February of 1920, however, Wilson’s plans came to a screeching halt. An astounding four months after his initial incapacitation, information finally reached the American public as to the physical condition of their chief executive. The Democrats, for their part, had no qualms with Wilson’s policy program, having substantially endorsed the League of Nations along with his various other progressive initiatives. But as rising unemployment and inflation seemed to be driving the country towards recession – combined with industrial strikes, race riots, and the ongoing demobilization of millions of underpaid, traumatized soldiers – Democratic Party leaders began to question Wilson’s fitness to lead. It was troubling enough, given the apparent severity of the stroke he had suffered, that he was no more inclined to remove himself from power than were the members of his cabinet to remove him of their own accord. But was it really in the best interests of either the party or the country to renominate Wilson and allow him to govern for four more years? Was he up to the task? Would he even survive that long? The events of March 1920 cast even more doubt on the whole idea. When Republican Senate Majority Leader Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924) finally worked out a compromise with the Democrats which would have allowed for the ratification of Wilson’s coveted Treaty of Versailles with only a handful of modifications, Wilson responded by expressing his adamant rejection of the same. Consequently, by rallying a sufficient number of Democratic Senators to his banner, the President succeeded in defeating the modified treaty, thus placing the American republic on the record, in the eyes of the world, as having rejected the very peace settlement on which Wilson had worked so hard. Evidently, rather than allow for the approval of an agreement which would have accomplished most, if not all, of his foreign policy objectives, Wilson was willing to discard the whole project. He wanted, it seemed, what he wanted, and not one iota less. Faced with a prospective nominee thus willing to indulge in fits of frankly breathtaking public pettiness, the Democratic Party was given even further reason to think long and hard about whom it wanted to serve as its standard-bearer in the forthcoming Election of 1920.

    In the end, of course, Wilson failed to receive the nomination. Though his ambition was to offer himself as a compromise candidate once it became clear that neither of the frontrunners – Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer (1872-1936) and former Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo (1863-1941) – had sufficient support to eke out a victory, it was Ohio Governor James Cox (1870-1957) who actually ended up playing that role. Indeed, notwithstanding his former influence over the rank-and-file of the party, Wilson never received more than two votes at any point in the process. Not only, it seemed, had his actions during the war made him extremely unpopular with large swathes of the Democratic base, but his physical and emotional condition – not to mention his attempts to conceal the same – more or less marked him as being no longer suitable for office. Cox’s nomination was thus the final nail in the coffin for any third-term speculation in 1920. Indeed, it seemed to put the whole idea of a third term to bed for the next several presidential terms. The Republicans, led by Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding (1865-1923), went on to win in 1920, inaugurating a decade-long period of GOP control of the White House during which none of the incumbents ever expressed any third-term ambitions. Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) arguably came the closest, though really only by implication. Having served the remainder of his predecessor’s first term upon Harding’s sudden death in 1923, Coolidge was elected in his own right in 1924 and then declined to seek the nomination again in 1928. At the time, what he said was that he did not “choose” to run again, thereby seeming to indicate that he believed had the right to do otherwise. But for this subtle nod, however, the third-term issue was effectively laid to rest. Laid to rest, that is, until the Democratic National Convention of 1940.