Personal tragedy brought Marilyn Lloyd into the House
of Representatives where, for 20 years, she represented
the science and technology interests of her Tennessee
district. When her husband, Mort Lloyd, died shortly after
winning a Democratic nomination to the U.S. House
of Representatives in 1974, local leaders named Marilyn
Lloyd to succeed him as the party candidate, despite the
fact that she had no elective experience. When she defeated
the GOP incumbent, Lloyd won a string of relatively easy
re-election campaigns. But her political fortunes were tied
to the fate of several large federal projects in the district as
well as its shift toward a more competitive makeup in the
early 1990s.
Rachel Marilyn Laird was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas,
on January 3, 1929, daughter of James Edgar Laird and Iva
Mae (Higginbotham) Laird. Marilyn Laird attended schools
in Texas and Kentucky and studied at Shorter College in
Rome, Georgia. She married Mort Lloyd, who eventually
became a well-known Chattanooga, Tennessee, television
newsman. The couple raised three children: Nancy, Mari,
and Mort. Marilyn Lloyd and her husband owned and
managed WTTI, a radio station in Dalton, Georgia, and an
aviation company in Tennessee.
Mort Lloyd ran for Congress in 1974 as the Democratic
candidate in a southern Tennessee district including
Chattanooga but was killed just weeks after securing the
nomination when the light airplane he was piloting crashed.
The district’s Democratic leaders convinced Marilyn Lloyd
to run in her husband’s place. Her supporters wore buttons
from her husband’s campaign with a piece of black tape
covering “Mort,” leaving visible the words “Lloyd for
Congress.”1
When her principal competitor, Chattanooga
millionaire Franklin Haney, dropped out of contention rather
than split the party, Lloyd’s nomination was sealed. Though
she had no prior political experience and was running in
a district that regularly voted Republican in presidential
elections, Lloyd benefited from public backlash against
the Watergate Scandal. She unseated two-term incumbent
Republican LaMar Baker with 51 percent of the vote.2
For her entire career, Lloyd served on the Committee on
Science, Space, and Technology, which had jurisdiction over
much of the legislation related to the atomic energy facilities
at Oak Ridge in her district. During the 97th Congress
(1981–1983), she began chairing the Subcommittee on
Energy Research and Development—a post she held until
she retired from Congress in 1995, when she was the second-ranking Democrat of the full committee. Lloyd also
served on the Committee on Public Works (later Public
Works and Transportation) from the 94th through the 99th
Congresses (1975–1987). From the 98th Congress through
the 103rd Congress (1983–1995), she had a seat on the
Armed Services Committee, serving on its Subcommittee on
Military Acquisition. Lloyd also served on the House Select
Committee on Aging for much of her congressional career
and was appointed chair of its Subcommittee on Housing
and Consumer Interests in January 1990.
In 1978 Lloyd married engineer Joseph P. Bouquard, and
she served for several Congresses under the name Bouquard.
In 1983 the couple divorced, and she went back to using the
name Marilyn Lloyd. In 1991 she married Robert Fowler,
a physician.3
Lloyd had a voting record that largely was moderate on
social and economic issues but hawkish on defense and
foreign policy matters.4
In 1979 she successfully steered
through the House legislation for the completion of the
controversial Tellico Dam in Tennessee, despite President
Jimmy Carter’s threat to veto the bill because of the
danger the dam might pose to the snail darter fish.5
In
1989 Lloyd was elected as the first woman to chair the
Congressional Textile Caucus. She advocated for textile
quotas to make American garment makers more competitive
against overseas manufacturers. “I think the textile issue
is a women’s issue,” Lloyd said. “Clearly there are more
women employed in textile-apparel production than there
are men. You have women with only one skill, who do not
have the education that allows them to transfer to another
occupation. Many of these women are also the breadwinners
in their families.”6
However, when the Congressional Women’s Caucus was
founded in 1977, Lloyd was one of three women Members
who did not join, citing the fact that she felt she did not
have the time to make the commitment. Patricia Schroeder,
a founding member of the Caucus, speculated that Lloyd
and Republicans Marjorie Sewell Holt of Maryland and
Virginia Dodd Smith of Nebraska might have been hesitant
to join because they would be “labeled” as feminists.7
Yet,
relatively late in her congressional career, Lloyd began to
advocate women’s issues. In 1992 she spoke out about
accusations of sexual abuse in the military, noting, “Men
must accept women as human beings, not sex objects.”8
Her
own experience with breast cancer led her to work for
the Breast Cancer Screening Safety Act and to introduce the Breast Implant Informed Decision Act. It was her experience in seeking treatment for her cancer which led
her to switch to a position in support of abortion rights in
1992. “I have had to fight to make decisions about my own
options for recovery, which I feel should have been mine
alone,” she said, “I have made my own choices and have
been blessed by a full recovery. This has led me to take a
long, hard look at the position I have held so long against
access to abortion services.”9
Lloyd’s principal work was to care for and augment the
Oak Ridge atomic energy facilities as well as to support
the construction of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s
controversial Clinch River breeder reactor. The breeder
reactor created the by-product plutonium, a highly toxic
substance used to create atomic weapons. Critics argued
that, besides posing an environmental threat, the breeder
would increase the risk that terrorists or rogue states could
acquire more readily the ingredients for a nuclear bomb.10
Opponents also complained about the reactor’s exorbitant
costs. More than $1 billion was spent on project planning,
and millions more would be required once construction
was scheduled to begin. From 1974 to 1982, Lloyd was
one of the Clinch River project’s principal advocates, but
a coalition of antinuclear environmentalists and fiscal
conservatives in Congress eventually killed off the project.
Lloyd, who had been elected comfortably in the five prior
elections (by as much as 89 percent of the vote in 1978),
suddenly found herself in a series of relatively tight races—
winning by 52 percent in 1984, 54 percent in 1986, 53
percent in 1990, and edging out a win in 1992 with one
percent of the vote (about 3,000 votes out of roughly
216,000 cast). In 1987 poor health had caused her to
announce she would not run in 1988, but she reversed her
decision and ran, winning 53 percent of the vote.11
In 1990 Lloyd had gained enough seniority to make a
bid to become chair of the Science, Space, and Technology
Committee, but she was defeated easily by George Edward
Brown Jr. of California, 166 to 33.12 Following the 1992
elections, Lloyd and New Jersey Congressman William
John Hughes became the top-ranking Members on the
Select Committee on Aging, which held little legislative
influence on the House Floor but provided a high-profile
position from which to advance issues important to elderly
constituents. Lloyd solicited support from her colleagues
for a bid to chair the committee in the 103rd Congress
(1993–1995); however, Speaker Thomas S. Foley selected Hughes over Lloyd, reasoning that “H” came before “L” in
the alphabet. Lloyd expressed her outrage and frustration
with the seemingly arbitrary decision, which she attributed
to gender discrimination. As a conservative Democrat,
however, Lloyd’s frequent breaks with the majority had
often put her at odds with the leadership. When the
House convened in 1993, however, the select committee
was abolished.13
In October 1993, Lloyd announced she would not run
for re-election, citing a desire to “enjoy my family, friends,
and community.” She also told reporters, “During my
congressional career, I maintained one goal. That goal was
to work for the good of Tennesseans with the energy and
honesty that all my constituents deserve.”14 At the time,
she was the third-ranking woman in the House, behind
Democrats Cardiss Collins of Illinois and Patricia Schroeder
of Colorado. The following year, in a controversial and
surprising political move, she supported the Republican
candidate whom she had barely defeated for re-election
in 1992, Zachary Paul Wamp. Wamp went on to defeat
Democrat Randy Button with 52 percent of the vote.15 Lloyd
died on September 19, 2018, in Chattanooga, Tennessee.16
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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