History
Historians point to George Washington's decision not to seek a third term as evidence that the founders saw a two-term limit as a bulwark against a monarchy, although his Farewell Address suggests that he was not seeking re-election because of his age. Thomas Jefferson also contributed to the convention of a two-term limit when he wrote in 1807, "if some termination to the services of the chief Magistrate be not fixed by the Constitution, or supplied by practice, his office, nominally four years, will in fact become for life." Jefferson’s immediate successors, James Madison and James Monroe, adhered to the two-term principle as well.
Prior to Franklin D. Roosevelt, few Presidents attempted to serve for more than two terms. Ulysses S. Grant sought a third term in 1880 after serving from 1869 to 1877, but narrowly lost his party's nomination to James Garfield. Grover Cleveland tried to serve a third term (and second consecutive term) in 1896, but did not have enough support in the wake of the Panic of 1893. Cleveland lost support to the Silverites led by William Jennings Bryan, and declined to head the Gold Democrat ticket, though he did endorse the Gold Democrats. Theodore Roosevelt succeeded to the presidency upon William McKinley's assassination and was elected in 1904 to a full term himself, serving from 1901 to 1909. He sought to be elected to a (non-consecutive) term in 1912 but lost to Woodrow Wilson. Wilson himself tried to get a third term in 1920, by deadlocking the convention. Wilson deliberately blocked the nomination of his Secretary of the Treasury and son-in-law, William Gibbs McAdoo. However, Wilson was too unpopular even within his own party at the time, and James M. Cox was nominated. In 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt became the only president to be elected to a third term; supporters cited the war in Europe as a reason for breaking with precedent. In the 1944 election, during World War II, he won a fourth term, but suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died in office the following year. Thus, Roosevelt was the only President to have served more than two terms.
Read more about this topic: Twenty-second Amendment To The United States Constitution
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)