By 1930, Barbour and his family took their house in
Locust Point, Monmouth County, N.J., as their official residence, while also maintaining a home in
New York City. Barbour continued his work in various industrial enterprises, primarily including the family thread manufacturing business, of which he was president. On December 1, 1931, New Jersey Governor
Morgan F. Larson appointed Barbour, a Republican, to the
United States Senate to fill the vacancy created by the death of
Dwight W. Morrow. The appointment was confirmed the following year when he was narrowly elected to the U.S. Senate on
November 8, 1932, with 49% of the vote, in a year when more than half of the Republican incumbents running for the Senate were defeated when
Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party won in a landslide. He served in the Senate until January 3, 1937. After completing Morrow's unfinished term, Barbour was unsuccessful in his 1936 reelection bid. For the next two years, he resumed his former pursuits, including service as a member of the New Jersey unemployment compensation commission in 1937. Barbour regained his Senate seat on November 8, 1938, when he was elected to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of
A. Harry Moore. Popularly elected to the office in 1940 after completing Moore's term, he served as U.S. Senator from New Jersey until his death in 1943. The plight of victims of
Nazi genocide stirred Barbour deeply. In April 1943, along with many other Congressmen and Senators, Barbour may have attended a performance of
We Will Never Die, a
pageant written by
Ben Hecht and produced by the
Bergson Group to commemorate two million European Jews who had already been murdered. In the fall of 1943, he was one of a small group of senators and congressmen who, together with the vice president, met with 400
rabbis who
marched with the Bergson Group in Washington in 1943, shortly before
Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. It was hoped their march would encourage the United States government to take a formal stand against the
Holocaust. While President
Franklin D. Roosevelt did not meet with the rabbis, Senator Barbour, along with a handful of Congressional colleagues, met them on the steps of the
United States Capitol and expressed his commitment to their cause. On October 14, 1943, barely a week after meeting with the rabbis, and despite strong public and political opinion against allowing further
immigration to the United States, Barbour introduced a bill that would have permitted as many as 100,000 victims of the Holocaust "who are now being persecuted either because of racial or religious belief" to come to America and to remain in the United States as visitors for the duration of the war. This would have been a significant change from the existing policy limiting immigration to only 2% of the number of their countrymen who had been in the United States as of the
1890 Census. Barbour's death just a few weeks later in November 1943, prevented him from working toward passage of the bill. His support of the rabbis, however, and his subsequent actions in the Senate did much to increase political and public awareness of and compassion for the victims of the Nazi genocide. ==Death and burial==