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Election of 1940: On the Eve of War

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The election of 1940 was held as the Great Depression was beginning to fade away but the storm clouds of war were building. Franklin D. Roosevelt was renominated at the 1940 Democratic national convention for a third term, despite the precedent set by George Washington and maintained by every president since, that a president would serve no more than two terms.

The three top Republican contenders for their party's presidential nomination in 1940 were Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan, and Thomas Dewey, a well-known federal prosecutor from New York City who would later become governor of New York state. Wendell Willkie had no political organization supporting him and was not widely supported within the party, but by the time the 1940 Republican national convention opened in June, he was gaining favor among rank and file Republicans. On the 6th ballot, he gained the nomination.

Willkie tried to focus the public mind against the third term. In one speech, he said, "I say this in dead earnest -- if, because of some fine speeches about humanity, you return this administration to office, you will be serving under an American totalitarian government before the long third term is finished."

Both Roosevelt and Wilkie wanted to keep foreign policy out of the 1940 election campaign, but gradually Willkie began to suggest and than assert that Roosevelt's reelection would mean war within a year. In a speech in Madison Square Garden on October 28, 1940, Roosevelt responded in one of his most famous campaign speeches. He said, in part:

"Last week in Philadelphia I nailed the falsehood about some fanciful secret treaties to dry on the barn door. I nailed that falsehood and other falsehoods the way when I was a boy up in Dutchess COunty we used to nail up the skins of foxes and weasels. Tonight I am going to nail the up the falsifications that have to do with our relations with the rest of the world, and with the building up of our Army, Navy, and air defense. It is a very dangerous thing to distort facts about such things. If repeated over and over again, it is also apt to create a sense of fear and bout in the minds of some of the American people."

On election night in November, 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President for an unprecedented third term. Republican Willkie, while he carried only ten states, nevertheless polled more than 22 million popular votes, more than any Republican presidential candidate up to that time.

The 1940 outcome in Congress was also heavily in favor of Democrats, although not as massively as in 1936. In the Senate, the Democrats were given a 3:1 margin in the 1940 election. There were 69 Democrats and 23 Republicans when the dust settled. In the House, the ratio was a little less but still one-sided, with 267 Democrats elected in 1940 against 162 Republicans.

Election of 1940 Candidates	Party	Electoral Vote	Popular Vote
Franklin D. Roosevelt (N.Y.) Henry A. Wallace (Iowa)	Democratic	449	27,243,466
Wendell L. Willkie (New York) Charles L. McNary (Oregon)	Republican	82	22,304,755
Norman Thomas (New York) Maynard C. Krueger (Illinois)	Socialist	0	100,264
Roger Babson (Massachusetts) Edgar V. Moorman (Illinois)	Prohibition	0	57,812
Earl Browder (New York) James W. Ford (New York)	Communist	0	48,579
John W. Aiken (Massachusetts) Aaron M. Orange (New York)	Socialist Labor	0	14,861

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