In 1940, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was re-elected for an unprecedented 3rd term as President of the United States. He was the first and last President inaugurated for a 3rd term after the 22nd Amendment to its Constitution limited future Presidential terms to 2 of 4 years each.
At his inaugural address in 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt observed, "The destiny of America was proclaimed in words of prophecy spoken by our first President in his first inaugural in 1789 – words almost directed, it would seem, to this year 1941....America has been the new world in all tongues, to all peoples, not because this continent was a new-found land, but because all those who came here believed they could create upon this continent a new life."
"Lives of nations are determined not by the count of years," Franklin Roosevelt believed, "but by the lifetime of the human spirit...A nation, like a person, has a body – a body that must be fed and clothed and housed, invigorated and rested, in a manner that measures up to the objectives of our time. A nation, like a person, has a mind – a mind that must be kept informed and alert, that must know itself, that understands the hopes and the needs of its neighbors – all the other nations that live within the narrowing circle of the world. And a nation, like a person, has something deeper, something more permanent, something larger than the sum of all its parts...It is a thing for which we find it difficult – even impossible – to hit upon a single, simple word. And yet we all understand what it is – the spirit – the faith of America...It is not enough to clothe and feed the body of this nation, and instruct and inform its mind. For there is also the spirit. And of the 3, the greatest is the spirit.”
