Former Rep. Sidney Yates Dies At 91

Former U.S. Rep. Sidney Yates, the oldest and longest-serving member of the House when he retired at age 89 last year, has died.

Yates died of renal failure and complications from pneumonia on Thursday at Sibley Hospital in Washington, according to Mary Bain, his former chief of staff. He was 91.

Yates, noted for his success in getting Congress to finance the sometimes controversial National Endowment for the Arts, had been honored with a sendoff by the National Symphony Orchestra at a performance at the Kennedy Center in 1998.

“I've always wanted Washington to be the artistic capital of the country as well as the political capital,” Yates said afterward.

A fervent liberal throughout his 24 terms in the House, Yates was first elected in 1948 when Harry Truman was president.

“In addition to being a wonderful human being, he was a great congressman,” Bain said Friday.

Yates, whose seat is now filled by Democrat Jan Schakowsky, sat out one House term after running unsuccessfully against Sen. Everett M. Dirksen, R-Ill., in 1962. Had he not gambled on a Senate race, he would have gained enough seniority to become chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee.

Despite that loss, the soft-spoken Yates was overwhelmingly popular in his House district along Chicago's north lakefront and in its northern suburbs. For more than four decades, he trounced every challenger to face him in congressional elections.

On his home ground, he was one of the few politicians to successfully walk a tightrope between the Chicago Machine and its independent critics. He was popular with both sides.

After the Democratic election debacle of 1994, Yates urged his colleagues not to be discouraged by their defeat.

“What a gale but I am sure we will not be blown away,” Yates wrote in a letter to Democratic House members.

Before Republicans took control of the House, Yates was chairman of the Appropriations Committee's interior subcommittee. The panel holds the purse strings for matters ranging from national parks to the arts.

He failed on the House floor in 1995 to remove a controversial proposal to exempt salvage logging on national forests from environmental laws. Yates called it a “timber lobbyist's dream.”

In earlier years, Yates helped to rebuff efforts by conservatives to kill the National Endowment for the Arts as lawmakers bickered over whether tax dollars should support art many considered offensive.

Music, dance, theater and arts programs nationwide thrive thanks to the agency, Yates said. “It is not the cesspool of pornography or the cesspool of horrible activities,” he declared.

In 1993, Yates was awarded a Presidential Citizens Medal for his efforts on behalf of the arts and humanities.

Yates was born in Chicago. He received his undergraduate and law degrees frothe University of Chicago. He served in the Navy for two years during World War II.

During the first Eisenhower administration in 1953, he joined other liberals in a successful battle to prevent the scuttling of the federal program that was building public housing units in the nation's big cities.

Yates also was credited with keeping Adm. Hyman Rickover, the father of atomic submarines, in uniform. Passed over for promotion to admiral, Rickover was about to quit the Navy. Yates arranged the public hearings that prompted the Navy to promote Rickover in the early 1950s.

In 1957, Yates was one of 28 House Democrats urging consideration of their proposals on foreign aid, civil rights, education and housing as an alternative to Eisenhower programs.

The group made little headway at the time, but in the 1960s much of their plan became the basis for New Frontier and Great Society legislation.

Yates made his only real political blunder when he tried to wrest the Senate seat held by Dirksen, the GOP minority leader. He lost but got more votes than any other Democrat who ever challenged Dirksen.

After serving as U.S. representative to the United Nations Trusteeship Council, Yates won his House seat back in 1964.

In the 1960s, Yates consistently fought against federal aid to develop a U.S. version of the Concorde, the supersonic airliner. In 1971, when a House rules change finally forced a roll-call vote on the issue, Yates led the forces that scrapped further SST funding.

He took over the interior subcommittee in 1975, becoming a consistent advocate for more federal funding for the arts and getting enmeshed in fights over development of Alaska's petroleum resources.

Yates is survived by a son, Stephen, who is a Cook County circuit judge in Chicago, a daughter-in-law and three grandchildren. Funeral services have been scheduled Sunday at 11 a.m. Central at Temple Shalom in Chicago.