Top Rhode Island lawmakers are pushing legislation to rename T.F. Green Airport as Rhode Island International Airport, a shift designed to strengthen the Warwick airport’s recognition.
The state Airport Corporation thinks the name change will increase passenger awareness of the airport’s location and destination. According to a corporation news release, most of the nation’s largest airports have a region or state in the name.
“Of the 376 primary mainland airports in the country as defined by the Federal Aviation Administration (airports serving more than 10,000 passengers annually) only 32, including T.F. Green, do not have a city, state or region in its name,” stated an airport corporation news release.
In the northeast, at any rate, some large airports –including Kennedy and LaGuardia in New York, Bradley Field north of Hartford and Boston’s Logan Airport do not have a state name attached.
Yet, many 21st Century Rhode Islanders likely have scant idea who Theodore Francis Green was.
In his 20th Century day, he was a very influential Democratic political leader who served as Rhode Island Great Depression-era governor and later for 24 years as U.S. Senator. Here is a look at Green’s career.
Eighty three years ago, Rhode Island Democrats took over state government with one fell swoop in a coup that became known as the Bloodless Revolution. The event has set the template for Rhode Island politics ever since.
In just 14 minutes at the State House on New Year’s Day, 1935, the Democrats took control of the General Assembly, replaced the entire Rhode Island Supreme Court, consigned to the dustbin of history more than 80 boards and commissions and fired Republican appointees who had run state government forever.
Watching and waiting from his office near the Assembly chambers was the politician behind the plot – Gov. Theodore Francis Green, a Democrat.
The 1934 general elections put Democrats within a whisker of control of the legislature. Democrats won control of the governorship and the House, but control of the malapportioned Senate was up in the air.
State election authorities had ruled the GOP candidates winners of two close state Senate races, in South Kingstown and Portsmouth, giving the Republicans narrow domination of the Senate.
Then, on New Year’s Day, Democrats moved to overturn the election results and declare Democratic candidates winners, capturing control of the State House for the first time in the state’s long and florid political history.
The move had been planned for weeks. Green and a tiny coterie of Democratic leaders plotted the upheaval after the election, meeting secretly at Green’s mansion on John Street on Providence’s East Side. It all went according to script; there were no media leaks. Republicans could do little but complain.
Green had encircled the Assembly chambers with state police; the GOP had no avenue of appeal.
Later, in a statewide radio address, Green told Rhode Islanders the moves were made in the best tradition of democracy.
Green and his Democratic acolytes had played the Rhode Island political game with the same rough-and-tumble tactics Republicans had used to run the state for decades.
Green’s admirers praised him for finally overturning a Republican-run state government that was regarded as the most corrupt state political system outside the deep south. Opponents saw Green as a despot who flouted the law and made Rhode Island appear to be a lawless state.
For example, Colonel Robert McCormick, editor of the right-wing Chicago Tribune, described Rhode Island as a rogue state. McCormick protested by cutting a star representing the Ocean State from the American flag that flew above the Tribune’s building in downtown Chicago.
Green seemed a strange choice to lead the Democrats, then the party of Roman Catholic immigrants and labor union workers. A pedigreed Yankee Protestant, wealthy lawyer and Brown University professor of Roman Law, Green had by the 1930s become a perennial losing candidate for a variety of offices.
First elected to the Assembly from Providence in 1906, Brown-graduate Green advocated for such reform measures as eliminating property qualifications for voting, voter initiative and ridding the House and Senate chambers of lobbyists.
Green twice lost elections for governor and once for U.S. House. “It does seem at times that Rhode Islanders were the easiest and most willing dupes in the universe,” he said after one of his losses.
Yet, he was relentless. A millionaire among the poor, the Italian-American and Irish-American activists who led the Democratic Party may not have had a deep reservoir of affection for Green, who lived by himself in an 18-room red brick mansion.
But he had campaign money and as the grim cloud of Depression wafted over Rhode Island, Democrats turned to Green, then age 65, as their gubernatorial candidate. He won.
To say that Green was eccentric would be an understatement. He was well-educated –a graduate of Brown University and Harvard Law School. Green was lifelong bachelor who battled rumors that he was gay. A vigorous man who didn’t drive a car, he walked the mile and a quarter from his house on Providence’s East Side to the State House every day while governor, drank just one cocktail per day and enjoyed physical exercise.
At one point, he actually purchased a full page ad in the Sunday Providence Journal- to bat down the rumors that he was gay. The ad depicted Green in various poses, chosen, said his biographer, to “amplify Green’s obviously muscular physique.” One photo showed him stripped to the waist, chopping down a tree. Another showed him in his U.S. Army uniform and another photo had him carrying a huge boulder while building a stone wall.
Even friends described Green as having the soul of a proof reader. One said, Green was “too intent on minutiae, exasperatingly insistent on correct grammar, factual accuracy and precise meanings.”
Green’s lieutenant governor, Robert Quinn of West Warwick, a crucial architect of the Bloodless Revolution, said, “He was an educated man but he wasn’t the kind of fellow that you’d enjoy going to the baseball or football games with.”
As the Depression sunk in, Rhode Island was a state that was bitterly divided. By the early 1930s, there was no state where the class, religious and ethnic disputes were so deeply embedded. The state was run, said writer John Gunther, by a “glacially aristocratic” group of old families who were rich, Protestant, Yankee and Republican.
The bedrock of Republican political power was a malapportioned state Senate and laws that put up roadblocks to voting by the poor and newly-arrived. In the Senate, each community had one senator, which gave Jamestown, population 1,633 as much clout in the chamber as Providence, which had a population of 237,595.
Before Green, the governor was a mere figurehead; all real authority lay with the legislature. A governor could appoint only his own secretary and one member of a board that had jurisdiction over barbers. Legislators served on state boards and commissions and sometimes also held paying state jobs.
The sons and daughters of the immigrants who had made Rhode Island the most Catholic and urban state in the country were not as willing as their parents to endure long hours for low pay among the mind-numbing clatter of a textile loom.
They fought back, organizing unions in the factories and getting involved in Democratic politics. They did not want their children to live in a calcified state where one’s ancestry dictated one’s lot in life.
“Seems to me that my father used to think it was a crime for any Irishman to vote for the Republican ticket,” Quinn said in a 1972 oral history that is in the archives at Providence College.
As a young lawyer, Quinn represented textile workers arrested on trumped up charges during labor strikes.
Quinn also said years later that the Bloodless Revolution would not have occurred without the gloom of the Great Depression. In this he was surely correct – both Connecticut and Massachusetts had somewhat similar government upheavals during the Depression in the 1930s.
After taking office, Green modeled his administration after his friend and fellow Democrat , President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Green supported labor unions, public works programs and road-building, all with an idea of creating jobs. Green also brought ethnic balance to a Democratic Party that had largely been an Irish-American barony.
Rhode Islanders of Italian, Cape Verdean, French-Canadian, Portuguese and African-American descent received shares of state employment and political patronage.
As was the case with Roosevelt, Green was called a traitor to his class. “As long as I got beaten, my conservative friends tolerated my liberal views as an amiable idiosyncrasy, as though I had taken up Buddhism. But when I won and began to get results and make reforms, they were angry. Many cut me on the street, turned their backs on me in the clubs.”
Initially, many reforms that made life better for working people were ushered in by the Bloodless Revolution. They included restricting to 48 the number of hours women and children could work in factories per week and establishing a worker’s compensation system. Other changes included establishing a state minimum wage and setting up a pension system for state workers.
The Democrats also made it more difficult for state courts to end labor strikes by using injunctions sought by mill owners.
Yet, Rhode Island historians have long debated over whether the Bloodless Revolution made strides against the Rhode Island trope of government corruption. It certainly didn’t end government chicanery.
But it did set the future of Rhode Island. The Bloodless Revolution resonates still.
“In the long-run it replaced one party rule and patronage by the Republicans for the same kind of single-party system by the Democrats,” wrote Brown University historian William McLoughlin. “None could deny, however, that at least the state was run by its majority.”
Green would win election to the U.S. Senate in 1936 at age 69. He served 24 years in the Senate, carving a reputation as a liberal Democrat who never shed his New Deal adherence. An internationalist, Green was a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for most of his tenure and served as chairman.
He steadfastly supported FDR’s foreign policies, including the president’s support for Britain and the Lend-Lease deal in the run up to World War II. He was among those in the 1930s who saw the German threat. Green was also among the few northern Democratic senators who supported FDR’s Supreme Court packing plan. Rhode Island political legend says that this is the reason FDR put the U.S. Navy Seabee base at Quonset Point.
He didn’t run for reelection in 1960, retiring at age 92. Democrat Claiborne Pell won the Senate seat that year, when his friend, John F. Kennedy was elected president. Pell served 36 years in the Senate, deciding in 1996 against running again. Democrat Jack Reed defeated Republican Nancy Mayer in 1996 and holds the seat still.
Green died in 1966 at age 98. He is buried at Swan Point Cemetery, not far from his John Street home in Providence.