Leonard Irving

Who was Leonard Irving?

Theodore Leonard Irving was a U.S. Representative from Missouri.

Born in St. Paul, Ramsey County, Minnesota, Irving moved with his parents to a farm in North Dakota. He attended the public schools of North Dakota. He worked for a railroad as a boy and during the First World War. He left the railroad to become manager of a theater in Montana. He moved to California and was manager of a hotel. He moved to Jackson County, Missouri, in 1934 and was employed as a construction worker and later became a representative of the American Federation of Labor.

Irving was elected as a Democrat to the Eighty-first and Eighty-second Congresses. He was an unsuccessful candidate for reelection in 1952 to the Eighty-third Congress. Defeated for Democratic nomination in 1954 to the Eighty-fourth Congress. Labor organizer and later president of a labor union in Kansas City, Missouri. He died in Washington, D.C., while on a business trip March 8, 1962. He was interred in Mount Moriah Cemetery, Kansas City, Missouri.