Selection of Nominees for the Presidency

Report Outline
The Tradition Against a Third Term
Leading Candidates Before Conventions
Presidential Influence on Nominations
Party Machinery in Nominating Conventions

The Tradition Against a Third Term

Although trial balloons are being sent up for many candidates, the line-up for the 1940 presidential race will not be clarified until President Roosevelt definitely states his position with respect to a third term. The history of national conventions in the past indicates that in the year that will elapse before the major party nominations are made the changing status of various candidacies should not be taken too seriously.

The validity of the third term tradition will be hotly argued unless or until the President eliminates himself from consideration. Secretary of the Interior Ickes, writing in the June 20, 1939, issue of Look, said:

To deny the people, through political humbug, the opportunity to decide for themselves whether they want the President for a third term is to deny democracy itself. Some persons honestly believe there is a tradition against a third term which has all the force of a constitutional prohibition. Yet on the subject of a third term the Constitution is eloquently silent…George Washington is usually credited with the founding of this “tradition.” Yet in 1788 he wrote to Lafayette: “I can see no propriety in precluding ourselves from the services of any man who, on some great emergency, shall be deemed universally most capable of serving the public.” And it is not too much to say that were Jefferson president today, he would consent to run for a third term in order to defeat economic royalism——or fascism. At the Constitutional Convention, Washing-ton never mentioned a limit on presidential terms. It is curious that the founding fathers should not have set a limit if they wanted one.