The Election of 1940
Wendell Willkie, Republican candidate for president, 1940
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Political cartoon showing FDR knocking down the tradition of refraining from running for a third term.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was the only president elected to more than two terms. He was elected four times and served as president from 1933 to his death in 1945. In 1951, the twenty-second amendment set a term limit of two elected terms for the presidency.
While still coping with the Depression and the impending war, President Roosevelt decided to run for an unprecedented third term as president. Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace took John Nance Garner’s place as his running mate. The Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie, a corporate lawyer who had never held political office. Roosevelt received 27 million votes to Willkie’s 22 million—a clear victory, but less of a rout than his previous two presidential victories.
Lend-Lease Program
Concerned about the plight of Great Britain, President Roosevelt and Congress began shifting their position, providing increasing amounts of support to the British. The Lend-Lease Act of 1941 signaled Americans’ commitment of support to the Allied nations against the Axis powers. This law allowed the U.S. to provide aid to the Allies without payment, again so that no financial relationship would inadvertently bring the U.S. into the war. Lend-Lease signaled the end of American isolationism, and American factories increased production to fill Allie needs. The “arsenal of democracy,” Roosevelt’s term for America in his Lend-Lease speech, lurched into motion, leading America slowly into the war.
Although the United States was thinking primarily about saving Great Britain when it passed the Lend-Lease Act, they used it to help other countries, including the Soviet Union, after Hitler invaded that nation. Roll over the interactive map of Europe on the eve of war to see the borders and alliances prior to the war.
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Equipment to be sent overseas as part of the Lend-Lease Program
In his speech advocating the Lend-Lease Program, Roosevelt declared that the war was being fought for “Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Read an exceprt from FDR’s speech about the four freedoms and see Norman Rockwell’s illustrations of them in the Four Freedoms interactive.
Though supportive of some measures to help the Allies, Americans were still not ready to officially enter World War II. It took Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, to convince the United States to declare war. Click and drag on the World War II Timeline for 1940 to learn more about the war’s first year in Europe and Japan’s advances.