In 1940, for the first time since America’s founding, a sitting president sought a third term in office. But this was only one remarkable aspect of that year’s election, which was, as John Jeffries makes clear in his new book, one of the most interesting and important elections in American history. Franklin Roosevelt’s plan to pack the Supreme Court had failed; in the wake of a recent recession, his New Deal had hardened support and opposition among both parties; and the German advance across Europe, along with Japanese aggression in Asia, was stirring fierce debate over America’s role in the world. Adding to the moment of profound uncertainty was FDR’s procrastination over whether to run again. Jeffries explores how these tensions played out and what they meant, not just for the presidential election but also for domestic politics and policy generally, and for state and local contests. In the context of the Roosevelt Coalition and the New Deal party system, he parses the debates and struggles within both the Democratic and Republican parties as Roosevelt deliberated over running and Wendell Wilkie, a businessman from Indiana and New York City, got the nod from Republicans over a field including the rising moderate Thomas E. Dewey, the conservative Michigan senator Arthur Vandenburg, and the isolationist Ohio senator Robert Taft. A Third Term for FDR reveals how domestic policy more than international events influenced Roosevelt’s decision to run and his victory in November. A detailed analysis of the results offers insights into the impact of the year’s events on voting, and into the election’s long-term implications and ramifications—many of which continue to this day.

Presidential term limits restrict the maximum length of time that presidents can serve in office. They stipulate the length of term the presidents can serve between elections and the number of terms that presidents are permitted to serve. While comparative scholarship has long studied important institutions such presidentialism vs. parliamentarism and the effects of different electoral systems, we lack a comprehensive understanding of the role and effects of presidential term limits. Yet presidential term limits and term lengths are one of the most fundamental institutions of democracy. By ensuring compulsory rotation in office, they are at the heart of a democratic dilemma. What is the appropriate trade-off between allowing the unrestricted selection of candidates at presidential elections vs. restricting selection procedures to prevent the possibility of dictatorial takeover by presidents who are unwilling to step down? In the context of a long and on-going history of changes to presidential term limits and the many and varied ways in which term limits have been both applied and avoided, this book explains the factors behind the introduction, stability, abolition, and avoidance of presidential term limits, as well as the consequences of changes to presidential term limits, and it does so in the context of non-democracies, third-wave countries, and consolidated democracies. It includes comparative, theoretical, and practitioner-oriented chapters, as well as detailed country case studies of presidential term limits across the world and over time.

Suffrage at 100 looks at women's engagement in US electoral politics and government over the one hundred years since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. In the 2018 midterm elections, 102 women were elected to the House and 14 to the Senate—a record for both bodies. And yet nearly a century after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the notion of congressional gender parity by 2020—a stated goal of the National Women's Political Caucus at the time of its founding in 1971—remains a distant ideal. In Suffrage at 100, Stacie Taranto and Leandra Zarnow bring together twenty-two scholars to take stock of women's engagement in electoral politics over the past one hundred years. This is the first wide-ranging collection to historically examine women's full political engagement in and beyond electoral office since they gained a constitutional right to vote. The book explores why women's access to, and influence on, political power remains frustratingly uneven, particularly for women of color and queer women. Examining how women have acted collectively and individually, both within and outside of electoral and governmental channels, the book moves from the front lines of community organizing to the highest glass ceiling. Essays touch on • labor and civil rights • education • environmentalism • enfranchisement and voter suppression • conservatism vs. liberalism • indigeneity and transnationalism • LGBTQ and personal politics • Pan-Asian, Chicana, and black feminisms • commemoration and public history • and much more. Contributors: Melissa Estes Blair, Eileen Boris, Marisela R. Chávez, Claire Delahaye, Nicole Eaton, Liette Gidlow, Holly Miowak Guise (Iñupiaq), Emily Suzanne Johnson, Dean J. Kotlowski, Monica L. Mercado, Johanna Neuman, Kathleen Banks Nutter, Katherine Parkin, Ellen G. Rafshoon, Bianca Rowlett, Sarah B. Rowley, Ana Stevenson, Barbara Winslow, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Nancy Beck Young

A presidency unlike any other, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legacy in foreign affairs has been contested since the day of his passing. Few presidential statements have echoed through history like FDR’s charge to conquer “fear itself.” Yet immediately after the end of World War II, the United States was gripped by a pervasive sense of national insecurity. In Something to Fear, Ira Chernus and Randall Fowler demonstrate that Roosevelt’s rhetoric, vision, and policies promoted a broadly defined sense of American security over a period of thirty-three years, ultimately helping elevate security to its primacy in US political discourse by the end of his presidency. In doing so, however, he also heightened the prominence of insecurity in American public life, mediating the United States’ transition to superpower status in a way that also elevated fear in debates over foreign affairs. FDR’s presidency precipitated a complex shift in US foreign policy that defies any straightforward account organized along a linear isolationist-to-interventionist trajectory. Chernus and Fowler investigate the uncertainties and contradictions embedded in FDR’s presidential rhetoric, which drew from realist, racial, progressive, nostalgic, apocalyptic, liberal internationalist, and American exceptionalist discourses. In this way, Roosevelt’s rhetoric anticipated the ambivalences contained in American adventures abroad ever since. Something to Fear shows how FDR’s response to the Great Depression, the debates over intervention, and World War II left an immense rhetorical legacy that often stressed insecurity. This study of FDR’s entire political career also carefully links him to the Progressive Era before his presidency and to the Cold War era after it.

Unlikely President: Henry A. Wallace Born in 1888 as a third-generation farmer-journalist (at Wallaces Farmer) Henry A.Wallace graduated from Iowa State in 1910. He went to work for the influential family publication after graduation and he became editor upon the appointment of his father Henry Cantwell Wallace as Hardings secretary of agriculture. Henry Agard himself became Franklin Roosevelts agriculture secretary 1933-1941 and was instrumental in turning around the depressed farm economy in the thirties, helped by a squadron of land-grant college graduates and county agents in running one of the most efficient government departments ever. FDR specifically chose Wallace as his running mate in 1940 to help win the Midwest. Wallace didnt care much for the job as vice president until be was given more responsibility after the war began. As agriculture secretary and later as vice president Wallace wrote and spoke widely, traveling across the United States and on missions abroad to Mexico, Latin America and the Far East. He spoke to his Spanish-speaking listeners in their own language and even managed some Russian in Siberia. In 1942 he gave a speech entitled The Century of The Common Man in which he recognized the dignity and potential of the common man, wherever he might live. It was reprinted and distributed and sold in 20 languages and millions of copies. His science training enabled him to represent the government in talks with the atomic bomb scientists and understand what they were doing. And later he was a prime mover in the development of hybrid corn, which revolutionized corn cultivation and made him, his family and his partners wealthy. To Wallaces great disappointment in 1944 Franklin D. Roosevelt dropped him and chose Harry S. Truman for vice president, who, of course, became president in April 1945 when FDR died. Truman was nominated and elected in his own right in 1948. But this book conjectures what might have happened if Wallace instead of Truman had been the choice of the Democratic party in 1944 and had succeeded Roosevelt, an unlikely president from 1945 to 1949. Wallace joined a third-party movement in 1948 and campaigned for the presidency. A naive idealist, he was cruelly taken in and humiliated by communists and others and received not a single electoral vote. He withdrew from public life after the election. In 1950 he broke with his party and supported the Korean War. He died in 1965 at 77.

Franklin D. Roosevelt pursued the U. S. presidency for more than 25 years. He served in that office longer than any other person, from 1933 until his death in 1945. To achieve the office of president of the United States, FDR practiced deception on a grand scale. He was a charming man, when he wanted to be, and he engaged the willing help of several specific individuals, as well as many others, in his quest for the presidency, and in his successful execution of the duties of that office. As president, FDR steered the U. S. ship of state (a deliberate metaphor) through two of its greatest crises: the Great Depression, and World War II, Roosevelt's War. In doing so, FDR, more than any other person, created the Superpower that the United States is today. This book will tell you how it all happened.

Abraham Lincoln once said that "history is not history unless it is the truth," and American history, as told to generations of Americans of all ages, is filled with lies and deceits that has led us inevitably to war after war. Despite all the deceptions, America has risen to become the greatest and wealthiest nation of all time. That is the paradox that is explored in this book.

The Guide to the Presidency is an extensive study of the most important office of the U.S. political system. Its two volumes describe the history, workings and people involved in this office from Washington to Clinton. The thirty-seven chapters of the Guide, arranged into seven distinct subject areas (ranging from the origins of the office to the powers of the presidency to selection and removal) cover every aspect of the presidency. Initially dealing with the constitutional evolution of the presidency and its development, the book goes on to expand on the history of the office, how the presidency operates alongside the numerous departments and agents of the federal bureaucracy, and how the selection procedure works in ordinary and special cicumstances. Of special interest to the reader will be the illustrated biographies of every president from Washington to the present day, and the detailed overview of the vice-presidents and first ladies of each particular office. Also included are two special appendices, one of which gathers together important addresses and speeches from the Declaration of Independence to Clinton's Inaugural Address, and another which provides results from elections and polls and statistics from each office.

Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt are widely considered the two greatest presidents of the past two centuries. How did these two very different men rise to power, run their administrations, and achieve greatness? How did they set their policies, rally public opinion, and transform the nation? Were they ultimately more different or alike? This anthology compares these two presidents and presidencies, examining their legacies, leadership styles, and places in history.