As one of America’s early consumer advocates, Leonor K.
Sullivan authored many of the protective laws that
Americans have come to take for granted. Initially, it was
a lonely undertaking. As Representative Sullivan recalled
of her early years in Congress, “Those of us interested
in consumer legislation could have caucused in an
elevator.”1 During her 12 terms in Congress, Sullivan left
her mark on a variety of issues, becoming one of the more
influential Congresswomen to serve in the U.S. House
of Representatives.
Leonor Alice Kretzer was born on August 21, 1902,
in St. Louis, Missouri, one of nine children of Frederick
William Kretzer and Nora (Jostrand) Kretzer. Her father
was a second-generation German tailor. Since her parents
did not have the resources to send her to college, Kretzer
worked at a local telephone company and took night
classes at Washington University in St. Louis, focusing
on vocational psychology. During the 1930s, she worked
as an instructor in business and accounting at the St.
Louis Comptometer School; she later became placement
director there before becoming director of the St. Louis
Business School.2 On December 27, 1941, she married
John Berchmans Sullivan, a freshman Congressman
from St. Louis. Leonor Sullivan worked as her husband’s
administrative assistant and campaign manager in five
primary and election campaigns; during that time, her
husband was defeated twice, only to be returned to office in
the subsequent election.3
When John Sullivan died on January 29, 1951, Missouri
Democratic leaders refused to nominate Leonor Sullivan
to run in the special election to fill the vacancy. “We don’t
have anything against you,” they told Sullivan, “we just
want to win.”4 Their chosen candidate, Harry Schendel, lost
to Republican Claude Ignatius Bakewell. Leonor Sullivan,
meanwhile, took a year-long position as an administrative
aide to Missouri Representative Theodore Leonard Irving
because she lacked the funds to amass her own congressional
campaign without the backing of the Democratic Party. In
1952, Sullivan announced her candidacy for her husband’s
reapportioned district. She defeated seven contenders in
the Democratic primary, including the party-endorsed
candidate, who made a campaign promise that if elected,
he would give Sullivan a job on his staff. Running in the
general election as “Mrs. John B. Sullivan,” she defeated her
Republican opponent, Bakewell, by a two-to-one margin,
to earn a seat in the 83rd Congress (1953–1955). During
the campaign, Sullivan claimed greater experience and
qualification than the incumbent because of her years in
Washington working for her husband’s office, a message
that resonated with many of the late Congressman’s former
supporters. After that campaign, Sullivan, the first woman
elected to Congress from her state (and the only one until
the 1990s), was never seriously challenged; she captured
her next 11 elections with between 65 and 79 percent of
the vote.5
Congresswoman Sullivan quickly established herself as
a protector of working Americans and consumers. In 1953
she urged her colleagues to amend the income tax law to
allow widows and working mothers to make deductions
for childcare. Sullivan also delivered a speech on the House
Floor against proposed cuts to the Women’s Bureau of the
Department of Labor. In 1957 she wrote and successfully
guided into law the first Federal Poultry Products
Inspection Act. She also sponsored legislation to protect
consumers from hazardous substances, harmful food color
additives, and cosmetics. A committed consumer advocate,
in 1962 Sullivan urged her House colleagues to pass stricter
consumer protection legislation. “You are faced with an
arena of supreme importance to the lives and health and
safety and well being of the American people—all of the
foods we eat, all of the drugs and devices we use for health
purposes, all of the cosmetics used not only by women but
in increasing numbers by men, as well.”6
In 1959, working with Senator Hubert Horatio
Humphrey Jr. of Minnesota, Sullivan authored the
Food Stamp Act. Under the new legislation, low-income
Americans would no longer have to rely upon
disbursements of surplus food, but instead would be able
to use coupons to buy food at grocery stores. During the
second Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, however, the
Agriculture Department refused to allocate funds for the
program, which the conservative Secretary of Agriculture,
Ezra Taft Benson, considered improper. Upon the urging of
Sullivan, the John F. Kennedy administration reinstated an
experimental food stamp program in 1961. In 1964 Sullivan
authored legislation to increase the scope of the Kennedy
initiative, making food stamps available for poor Americans
nationally. On the House Floor, she maintained, “The States
and localities, which now bear a heavy financial burden
under the direct distribution system, would save added
millions under the food stamp plan. Who loses, then, under
the plan? Hunger. Only hunger loses.”7 President Lyndon B.
Johnson incorporated the legislation into his “War on
Poverty” in 1964, but not before a sharp partisan battle
within the Agricultural Committee and the President’s
decision to couple the food stamp measure with increased
subsidies for wheat and cotton farmers.
One of Sullivan’s great legislative triumphs came when
she served as the House Floor manager for the 1968
Consumer Credit Protection Act. The bill established
“truth in lending” provisions, requiring lenders to provide
consumers with information about the cost of credit. “Now
we come to the moment of truth in truth in lending,”
Sullivan declared to her colleagues during debate. “Will
we give the consumer the whole truth in lending, or
just part of the truth?”8 When President Johnson signed
the groundbreaking legislation, he praised “that able
Congresswoman from Missouri,” noting that Sullivan
“fought for a strong effective bill when others would have
settled for less.”9 Two years later, Sullivan continued her
efforts to protect American consumers when she authored
the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a bill prohibiting credit
companies from distributing false credit information.
By 1969, after 15-term veteran Representative Frances
Bolton of Ohio had retired, Sullivan emerged as the
doyenne of women in Congress. The first woman appointed
to the House Democratic Steering Committee, which
determines Democratic committee assignments, she also
was elected secretary of the House Democratic Caucus
for five terms. During her 24 years in the House, Sullivan
served on the Banking and Currency Committee; the
Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries; and the
Joint Committee on Defense Production. During the
93rd and 94th Congresses (1973–1977), she led Merchant
Marine and Fisheries, making her only the sixth woman in
congressional history to chair a committee. As chairwoman,
her accomplishments included passage of the 1976 Fishery
and Conservation Management Act, an environmental bill
which established a 200-mile fisheries conservation zone off
the coasts of the United States.
Though she defended the rights of women consumers,
Sullivan did not embrace the larger feminist agenda. She was
the only woman Member to vote against the Equal Rights
Amendment (ERA) in the 92nd Congress (1971–1973)
because she thought it threatened home life and existing
legislation which protected women in the workplace.
“I believe that wholesome family life is the backbone of
civilization,” Sullivan said. Passage of the ERA would
“accelerate the breakup of home life.”10 She also feared that
the amendment would break down hundreds of protective
labor, marital, and family statutes in the states. Finally, the
ERA of fended her sensibilities. The “ERA says you are my
equal,” she once observed, but “I think I’m a whole lot
better.”11 Sullivan also opposed efforts by younger women
Members to create a special caucus for women’s issues,
which came about only after her retirement.12 Nevertheless,
Sullivan supported the Equal Pay Act of 1963, a first
step toward the equal pay for equal work doctrine. She
also backed an amendment to the 1964 Civil Rights Act
that stipulated an end to sexual discrimination in the
workplace. In 1961 Sullivan and her fellow Congresswomen
marched into Speaker Sam Rayburn’s office to request
the appointment of Representative Martha Griffiths of
Michigan to the influential Joint Economic Committee.13
In 1976, at age 74, Sullivan declined to seek a thirteenth
term and was succeeded by Richard Andrew Gephardt, who
eventually became Democratic Leader in the House. Her
age, but principally her disaffection with the institution
of Congress, accounted for her decision to retire. She
explained in a post-Watergate interview that despite
contemporary attempts at congressional reform, she was
“disturbed at what’s happening to the whole government . . . the corruption that always goes on . . . the lack of morals . . . too many people thinking, ‘So what?’”14 She returned
to St. Louis and moved into a home she had bought long
before on the south side of the city, atop a bluff overlooking
the Mississippi River. Passing riverboat captains often
blew their ships’ horns to salute Sullivan, who had been
a benefactor of the barge industry during her time on the
Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee.15 In 1980
she married retired millionaire businessman Russell L.
Archibald. He died in March 1987. Sullivan died in St.
Louis on September 1, 1988.
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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