It was not a shock to the Democratic Party when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced that he would run for a fourth term in 1944. Both Roosevelt and his cabinet believed that no one was quite as adequately suited to deal with the issues of the country as the incumbent President himself was. The country as a whole agreed: polls showed Roosevelt consistently ahead of any Republican challenger, often by double digit margins. Like they had in 1940, the American people once again rejected the idea of having a new commander-in-chief while in the midst of war, even if it further shattered George Washington's two-term precedent. To Democrats, another four years in the White House was almost inevitable.
What did send fear into the hearts of Democrats, however, was something that could not be controlled by any voter. It was not a well-kept secret amongst the party's elites that the President was in ill health. And, should he perish in office- a possibility that looked all too likely- the nation's highest office would then be occupied by Vice President Henry Wallace. Wallace was a wild card- his beliefs bordered on socialism, and was rumored to be a Communist sympathizer. He would, they Party bosses reasoned, make a fool out of the party on the national stage, and the county on the world stage, should he ascend to the presidency. If FDR is to run for a fourth term, they reasoned, Wallace must be jettisoned from the ticket.
Yet when the party officials took the issue to the President himself, Roosevelt adamantly refused. Wallace was a friend of his, he said, and to abandon him would weaken the ticket. After a long debate, Roosevelt proposed a compromise choice: one of his top aides, James Byrnes. Byrnes had done it all: he had been a Congressman, a Senator, a Supreme Court Justice, and now a key player in the administration, controlling the rollout of many of the President's social programs. Yet the party machine balked at Byrnes: he was a segregationist, an ex-Catholic; and notoriously anti-labor. However, with FDR threatening to retire without either Byrnes or Wallace on the ticket, the DNC reluctantly agreed on Byrnes.
And so, at the 1944 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, FDR was easily renominated. Byrnes, too, was nominated for Vice President on the fourth ballot. With a series of Allied success on the war front, FDR's reelection was never in doubt. The Roosevelt/Byrnes ticket cruised to victory in November, defeating the ticket of New York Governor Thomas Dewey and Ohio Senator John Bricker by over 2.5 million votes.
Just four months later, on April 12, 1945, President Roosevelt was sitting for a portrait in his vacation home of Hot Springs, Georgia, when he announced that he "had a terrific pain" in the back of his head. Hours later, he was dead of a brain hemorrhage. Vice President Byrnes, back in Washington presiding over the Senate, was told that he must report to the West Wing immediately. He didn't know it yet, but James Francis Byrnes, sixty-two years young, was now President of the United States of America.