Theodore F. Green

Until the 1934 United States elections, the Republican Party dominated the Rhode Island Senate. This resulted in part from the unequal nature of senatorial districts; every municipality in the state was represented by a senator, despite significant imbalances in population between different towns. For example, both the 485 residents of West Greenwich and the 275,000 residents of Providence were represented by one senator each. Republicans won small towns with majority Protestant populations, while Democrats won larger cities with significant immigrant Catholic populations; as a consequence, even when Democrats won the statewide vote, Republicans would win more senatorial districts. The Senate additionally held much of the executive and appointment power in the state, such as the power to name judges. This left the state governor oftentimes a figurehead, especially if they were a Democrat. Democrats called this system "feudal" and analogized it to the United Kingdom's rotten boroughs, even though unequally-sized state legislative upper houses were common in the United States prior to the 1964 Supreme Court decision in Reynolds v. Sims.[3][4]

The 1934 elections were a national Democratic landslide, with Green winning re-election as governor, and Democrats winning control of the Rhode Island House of Representatives. However, they fell just short of controlling the Rhode Island Senate, winning 20 seats to Republicans' 22. Democrats claimed fraud in two races where Republicans had won. On January 1, 1935, Lt. Gov. Robert E. Quinn refused to allow two Republican senators who were certified as elected to take office. A committee of three senators (two Democrats and one Republican) was appointed to recount the ballots for these two races. Behind closed doors, the committee reviewed the ballots and then unanimously proclaimed the Democrats as the winners. With the Senate in Democratic control, the General Assembly quickly reorganized state government, vacated the Supreme Court, and purged many Republican-dominated boards and commissions. A Providence Journal editorial likened this incident to a Central American "coup d'etat".[5][6] However, state Democrats celebrated the incident as overturning a long period of minority rule, and would later refer to it as the "Bloodless Revolution."[3]

At the age of 69, Green was elected to the United States Senate in the Democratic landslide of 1936 and served four terms, retiring in 1961. Described as "the president's man", he was loyal to the Democratic presidents with whom he served and, to a larger extent than many other northern Democrats, to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican. Green vigorously supported domestic New Deal measures, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt's controversial "Court packing" bill in 1937, but that failed. He voted for the wages and hours and low-cost housing bills in 1937, and advocating farm and work relief, he sustained continuing appropriations for New Deal relief measures.[7]

As a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Green took a strong internationalist position in world affairs, especially regarding opposition to Nazi expansion in Europe. Green advocated expansion of the Navy and the Army, revision of the neutrality laws despite isolationist opposition, and passage of the Lend-Lease Bill, which in one of his many radio talks he called "Aid to America".[8]

Green with President Harry Truman and U.S. Senator J. Howard McGrath in 1947

During World War II Green vigorously objected to a proposal to exempt farm workers from the draft as a means to increase agricultural production and secured passage of a law releasing government-owned silver for war purposes. He supported a law providing for absentee voting for servicemen stationed in the United States and headed a Senate committee investigating violations of the Hatch Act. The committee reported in favor of repealing the law, But that proposal failed in the face of conservative opposition.

Throughout his senatorial career Green supported civil rights legislation. He struggled to enact laws to ban the poll tax, to make lynching a federal crime, and to change Senate rules to make it easier to end filibusters. Consistently working closely with Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, he helped secure eastern liberal support for the Civil Rights Act of 1957. As the nation moved to the right at mid-century, Green retained his liberal faith, voting to uphold President Harry Truman's vetoes of the restrictive McCarran-Walter Immigration Bill of 1952 and the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950. During the McCarthy controversy, he voted for censure of his Republican colleague Senator Joseph McCarthy.[9]

For 20 of his 24 years in the Senate, Green served on the Foreign Relations Committee, beginning in 1938 and interrupted from 1947 to 1949. An early and steadfast internationalist committed to the United Nations, he stoutly sustained President Truman's Cold War initiatives, including the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and intervention in Korea. At the 1952 meeting of the UN General Assembly, to which Truman appointed him as a delegate, Green expressed his faith in the world organization as the "last great hope of mankind."[10] He stood with the minority of 31 senators who by one vote prevented the two-thirds majority necessary to pass an amendment initiated by Senator John W. Bricker to limit the president's powers in foreign policy.[11]

In April 1943, a confidential analysis by British scholar Isaiah Berlin of the Foreign Relations Committee for the British Foreign Office succinctly characterized Green as:

a former Governor of his State, he is, for all his years, a typical "progressive" pro-New Deal businessman. While he is a man of limited intellect, he is right-minded to a degree and a completely reliable ally of the Administration. He is a free trader with a particular hatred of the "Silver Bloc" in the Senate.[12]

Though wary of reductions in foreign aid programs with the coming of the Eisenhower administration, Green was one of the few northern Democrats to support administration measures in the Republican-dominated Senate of the Eighty-third Congress. In the Eighty-fifth Congress (1957–1958) Green served as Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He was a loyal ally of Democratic Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson.[13]