His distant cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, ran unsuccessfully as a third-party candidate in 1912, after declining to run in 1908. Grant also sought a third term in 1880, but he lacked enough party support to get a nomination. The first president, Washington, set the two-term precedent in 1796 when he decided to pass on a third term, setting up a scramble between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in the fall race. In 1799, a friend urged Washington to come out of retirement to run for a third term. “The line between Parties,” Washington said, had become “so clearly drawn” that politicians “regard neither truth nor decency attacking every character, without respect to persons – Public or Private, – who happen to differ from themselves in Politics.” Washington made his thoughts quite clear, especially when it came to new phenomena of political parties. Washington’s voluntary decision to decline a third term was also seen by many people as a safeguard against the type of tyrannical power yielded by the British crown during the Colonial era. That message wasn’t lost on Theodore Roosevelt, who considered running in 1908 despite his public pledges to the contrary. Instead, he backed William Howard Taft as a surrogate candidate, but the urge to control his own political party drove Roosevelt back to the campaign trail in 1912. In 1940, Franklin Roosevelt decided to break the Washington precedent after World War II broke out in Europe and Nazi Germany overran France. The move caused some key Roosevelt supporters within the Democratic Party to leave the Roosevelt campaign. The Republicans campaigned heavily against a third-term president, and the Democrats countered with claims that Wilkie was a “third-rate” candidate. Later in the campaign, Roosevelt insisted that he was in the race to keep America out of the war in Europe, and he easily defeated Wilkie on Election Day.īut talk about a presidential term-limits amendment started in 1944 when Republican candidate Thomas Dewey said a potential 16-year term for Roosevelt was a threat to democracy. That is one reason why I believe that two terms must be established as the limit by constitutional amendment." In a speech in Buffalo on October 31, 1944, Dewey said, "four terms or sixteen years is the most dangerous threat to our freedom ever proposed.
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