 Otherwise no major effort to avoid it took place until 1940 when Franklin Roosevelt explicitly broke it.The 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1951 formally establishing in law the two-term limit—although it did not apply to the incumbent Harry Truman.The fact that "perpetuity in office" was not approached until the 20th century is due in part to the influence of rotation in office as a popular 19th-century concept.