Preserving Local Politics: The John O. Pastore collection
Monday, Oct. 6, 2025, marked the 80th anniversary of John O. Pastore’s Rhode Island governorship. Providence College Archives and Special Collections invited WPRI’s politics and business editor, Ted Nesi, to explore Pastore’s papers and discuss the recent digitization efforts to preserve the legacy of this Rhode Island icon.
John O. Pastore (1907 – 2000) was a member of the Rhode Island Democratic Party and served in various capacities within the Rhode Island State Legislature from 1934 to 1944. In 1945, then-Lieutenant Gov. Pastore became Rhode Island’s 61st governor, stepping into the role following J. Howard McGrath’s midterm resignation. McGrath left the post to become the U.S. solicitor general. Pastore was elected governor for a full term in 1946 and held the position until 1950, when he was elected to the U.S. Senate.
Throughout his senatorial tenure, Pastore served on many key committees. He was appointed to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, where he supported the peaceful use of atomic energy. As a member of the Senate Commerce Committee Communications Subcommittee, he sponsored the Communications Satellite Corporation Act of 1962 and the establishment of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1967.
Upon his retirement in 1976, Sen. Pastore donated his papers to Providence College, joining several other Rhode Island politicians who transferred their collections to the archives.
A major component of Pastore’s papers are the extensive audiovisual materials, which are on their original, legacy media formats. Film and audio formats are fragile, susceptible to deterioration, and virtually inaccessible if not digitized. The PC Archives and Special Collections identified over 130 film reels in the Pastore collection and sent more than half of these out for digitization to preserve and make these resources available to researchers and the community. The digitized films include senate sessions, sit-down discussions between Pastore and fellow politicians, and campaign ads such as a 1958 spot by Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy on behalf of Pastore’s reelection bid in 1958. The collection also contains an extensive number of audio reels to be evaluated for digitization.
The John O. Pastore papers consists of correspondence, legislative materials, news clippings, reports, campaign and election materials, public speeches, press releases, audiovisual materials, and photographs.
