Pat Williams Interview, September 24, 2014

Pat Williams recalls his battle to obtain funding for the National Endowment for the Arts during his career as a United States senator from Montana. He describes serving on the Select Education subcommittee of the Education Committee from 1979-1997, and fighting to preserve the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) funding in the 1980s and 1990s, beginning with the Reagan Administration. Williams discusses reworking obscenity language in the NEA reauthorization bill in 1989, and creating language to mandate quality over content, including Supreme Court-mandated definitions of profanity and obscenity. He talks about various senators with whom he worked on arts funding, and several artists whose works prompted scrutiny of NEA funding. Williams discusses constituents’ reactions to the NEA and freedom of speech in the United States.https://scholarworks.umt.edu/mtpolitics_oralhistory/1011/thumbnail.jp