November 7, 1944: FDR Wins a Fourth Term — the President Who Would Not Stop

On November 7, 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt won an unprecedented fourth term as president of the United States, defeating Thomas Dewey while American armies were fighting on two fronts of the Second World War. No president before had served three terms; none after would serve more than two. Roosevelt’s fourth victory was both a war mandate and a farewell.

Running on D-Day’s Momentum

By the autumn of 1944, the Allied landings in Normandy had succeeded, Paris was liberated, and the war in Europe appeared — wrongly, as the Battle of the Bulge would soon prove — nearly won. Roosevelt, 62, was visibly frail: a polio survivor who hid his disability from the public, he was now also a cardiac patient photographed looking gaunt. Republicans ran Thomas E. Dewey, the energetic young governor of New York, on a platform of “too old, too tired” — a whisper campaign about the President’s health. FDR countered with vigor and humor, campaigning in an open car in a driving rain in New York and quipping that he felt like a “drum major” leading the parade. The country rewarded him with 432 electoral votes to Dewey’s 99.

The Mandate and the Warning

Seventy-five days after the election, at Yalta in February 1945, Roosevelt met Stalin and Churchill to shape postwar Europe — the last time the Big Three convened. On April 12, 1945, at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, he complained of a “terrific headache” and died of a cerebral hemorrhage. The man who had led America through depression and world war for twelve years was gone; Harry Truman inherited the presidency and, four months later, the atomic bomb’s decision.

The Amendment That Followed

Roosevelt’s four terms disturbed even his admirers. In 1947, a Republican Congress proposed the 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951, limiting presidents to two elected terms — the constitutional codification of Washington’s two-term precedent that FDR had broken. Eighty-two years after his final victory, November 7, 1944 stands as the election that tested America’s wartime democracy and found it sound — and the last time the country asked one man to carry it all.