October 30, 2020

Nov. 7, 1940

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Eighty years ago, on November 7, 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was re-elected to an unprecedented third term in office, and The Weekly’s editorial on the front page of that issue commented on the significance of the result.

The editorial was optimistic on what the third term meant for American democracy, and it noted the result “indicates that American traditions are not rigid, but that when necessity arises they can and do adapt themselves to the exigencies of changing times.”

This “healthy sign of our nation’s development,” the editorial added, showed that traditions are not principles, but rather only customs.

The editorial continued:

“As such they should be observed only as long as they serve to point out to coming generations the best way towards certain ends. Once, however, there arises the need to hew new pathways toward such ends, then of necessity these ancient guideposts have to be discarded, and new ones, new traditions, gradually established in their place.

“And so with the third term tradition. At the polls last week the majority of the people decided that at the moment that tradition could be discarded, that the present crucial domestic and foreign situation called for the blazing of new trails for national progress, and that therefore there was no longer any real reason why the man who had been in the presidential office for two consecutive terms should not be allowed to remain in it for a third term.”

The editorial did not condemn the result, and underscored the sentiment that the third term for President Roosevelt would not lead the United States away from democracy.

“As long as the free and open use of the ballot box remains with us, democracy will ever reign here,” it continued. “Right now our immediate task and duty is to forget the rancors, the strong emotions and language of the presidential campaign and unite in support of our president. For great problems confront us, problems of recovery and national defense. They cannot be solved by a divided country.”

The 2020 presidential election has been called the most important in history, and as President Roosevelt reminded the American people at his first inauguration in 1933 during the Great Depression, “…the only thing we have to fear is… fear itself.”

Source: “The third term,” The Ukrainian Weekly, November 15, 1940.

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