Pat Williams, a retired Montana congressman whose left-leaning politics were forged in the hard-rock mining town of Butte, and who, to date, was the last Democrat to serve in the House of Representatives from Montana, died on Wednesday in Missoula, Mont. He was 87.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by his family.
Mr. Williams championed wilderness protection, federal arts funding and family-friendly social policies. He retired from the House in 1997 after 18 years, the longest consecutive tenure by a Montana congressman.
His most notable election came in 1992, when Montana had been chiseled down to a single congressional seat, from two, after the 1990 census.
Mr. Williams, who represented the state’s more liberal forested western half, faced Representative Ron Marlenee, a Republican who served the conservative ranchland of eastern Montana.
The left-versus-right showdown was fought over the use of the state’s vast natural resources and whether the New Deal-era safety net for the vulnerable still mattered. Mr. Williams won narrowly, with 51 percent of the vote.
In Washington, he was a co-sponsor of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which gave workers 12 weeks of unpaid time off to care for a newborn or a sick family member. Multiple attempts to enact the law under the Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush had failed. Mr. Williams called those administrations “frozen in the ice of their own indifference” to working people.
The law was signed by President Bill Clinton, who boasted of it nearly every day during his successful re-election race in 1996.
A former schoolteacher, Mr. Williams was also on the front lines of a conflagration over the National Endowment for the Arts. Conservative senators in 1990 sought to abolish the agency because of grants it had made that supported the photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, whose transgressive work was condemned by critics like Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association as blasphemous or obscene.
Mr. Williams was the chief author of a bipartisan compromise that preserved funding for the arts endowment while leaving decisions about obscenity to the courts. He became known as the savior of the N.E.A.
He was also the sponsor of a pet bill, the Professional Boxing Safety Act, which required safety standards for professional fighters. Congress passed it in 1996.
“Yeah, I fought as a kid in Butte,” Mr. Williams told The New York Times. “Back there you had to be a Democrat, and you had to be able to fight. Boxers are workers and deserve health protection.”
John Patrick Williams was born on Oct. 30, 1937, in Helena, Mont., the state capital. His parents, Shelton and Libby Williams, owned a candy shop in Butte.
Evel Knievel, the daredevil motorcyclist, was a cousin who was born in Butte one year later, and the two boys tussled and played often, according to a Knievel biography.
The family’s hometown was built on copper mining, which had attracted waves of Irish immigrants. It was staunchly pro-union and embraced the working-class populism of the New Deal.
Mr. Williams graduated from Butte High School in 1956 and earned a B.A. from the University of Denver in 1961.
He returned home to teach in the public schools from 1963 to 1969. Butte voters sent him in 1967 to the Montana House of Representatives, where he served two terms.
His wife, Carol Griffith Williams, whom he married in 1965, also became a state lawmaker, serving as the Democratic leader in the Montana Senate.
She survives him, as do a son, Griff; two daughters, Erin and Whitney Williams; and five grandchildren.
Mr. Williams first sought federal office in 1974 but lost the Democratic primary for a House seat to Max Baucus. Four years later, when Mr. Baucus moved up to run successfully for the Senate, Mr. Williams was elected to replace him in the House.
When he announced that he would not seek re-election in 1996, joining the faculty of the University of Montana at age 59, he said his greatest regret was not to have revived a bill vetoed by President Reagan that would have protected 1.4 million acres of pristine Montana wilderness.
Reagan said he wanted to protect jobs and mining development in the state. Mr. Williams considered the jobs-versus-the-environment trade-off a false choice.
“A clean environment,” he said in 1992, “has been and will be an absolute cash register for this state.”
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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