CHICAGO - Former Rep. Sidney Yates, who fought efforts by conservatives to kill the National Endowment for the Arts and was the oldest and longest-serving member of the House when he retired last year, has died at 91.
Yates, who was 89 when he retired, died of kidney failure and complications from pneumonia Thursday in Sibley Hospital in Washington, D.C., according to Mary Bain, his former chief of staff.
Yates, noted for his success in getting Congress to finance the embattled NEA, had been honored with a send-off 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.
Yates 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 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. He was one of the few politicians to successfully walk a tightrope between the Chicago machine and its independent critics.
Before Republicans took control of the House in January 1995, Yates was chairman of the Appropriations 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 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 NEA as lawmakers bickered over whether tax dollars should support art that 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 from the 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.
Survivors include his wife, Adeline; son Stephen, a Cook County circuit judge; and three grandchildren.