American History TV

The Presidency: The War Elections: 1940 & 1944

Presidential portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1947)

Hyde Park, New York
Sunday, February 24, 2013

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s last two presidential campaigns – in 1940 and 1944 – took place while the world was at war. The 1940 election secured FDR an unprecedented third term, and the 1944 contest was the first wartime White House campaign since the Civil War. But it elected a chief executive who would not live to see the war’s end.  The Roosevelt presidential library recently convened panels of scholars to consider all four of FDR’s elections and this excerpt focuses on the war years.

Updated: Monday, March 4, 2013 at 10:25am (ET)