The United States ratified the 22nd Amendment, formally limiting presidents to two elected terms. The measure was a direct response to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had won four consecutive elections between 1932 and 1944, breaking the two-term tradition set by George Washington that no earlier president had dared to challenge so thoroughly.
George Washington had voluntarily stepped down after two terms in 1797, and every president for nearly a century and a half honored that unwritten norm, even when tempted otherwise. Theodore Roosevelt flirted with a third term in 1912 and lost badly running as a third-party candidate, reinforcing the taboo.
Franklin Roosevelt shattered the precedent entirely. Facing the Great Depression and then World War II, he argued the nation needed continuity in crisis, and voters agreed four times over, electing him in 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944. He died in office in April 1945, having served longer than any president in history, and Republicans in Congress, still smarting from over a decade out of the White House, moved quickly once they regained control in 1946.
Congress passed the amendment in 1947, but ratification by the required three-quarters of states took four more years, finally completed on February 27, 1951, when Minnesota's ratification (or, by some counts, a later state) pushed it over the threshold. Ironically, the amendment exempted no one retroactively, meaning it could not have applied to Roosevelt himself. The debate over term limits echoes today whenever a popular president's supporters muse, mostly rhetorically, about a third term.
Key people: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman