Rash's Surname Index
Notes for Livingston Ludlow Jr. BIDDLE
Associated Press Archive - May 4, 2002
Deceased Name: Livingston L. Biddle Jr. - Former head of National Endowment for the Arts dies
Livingston L. Biddle Jr., who as a congressional aide helped write the legislation that created the National Endowment for the Arts and later was chairman of the federal arts agency, has died. He was 83.
Biddle, who had been in ill health for some time, died Friday at Sibley Hospital, said Pat Sanders, a family friend.
The NEA's acting head, Eileen Mason, said Biddle was "one of the arts community's most ardent and effective advocates."
Biddle was born in 1918 in Bryn Mawr, Pa., to a wealthy Philadelphia banking family with a long line of influential ancestors. His great-great grandfather, Nicholas Biddle, was a contemporary of Thomas Jefferson and founder of the Second Bank of the United States. Another relative, Francis Biddle, was attorney general under President Franklin Roosevelt and served as the chief judge at the Nuremberg Nazi trials.
As an aide to Sen. Claiborne Pell, the Rhode Island Democrat who was a longtime friend, Biddle drafted the legislation that in 1965 created the NEA, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Council on the Arts.
In 1977, President Carter named Biddle NEA chairman, where he served until 1981.
Biddle was a lifelong advocate of excellence in the arts and of government funding to make the arts accessible to the population at large. He argued that the NEA helped stimulate the development of vital arts communities outside the large urban centers where they had before existed almost solely.
"The arts are so fragile, like flowers in your garden," he said in 1985. "If you don't water them, they'll wither and blow away."
Biddle fought President Reagan's attempts to cut federal dollars for the arts. He later lamented the threat posed to the agency after conservatives in Congress discovered in 1989 that endowment funds were used to support an exhibition by the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe that included homosexual and sadomasochistic themes and pictures of nude children.
Biddle is survived by his second wife, Catharina Baart Biddle; two children, Cordelia Biddle and Livington L. Biddle IV; and five grandchildren.
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