This Week in National Press Club History: Baldwin appears subdued during 2012 Luncheon

This Week In National Press Club History

April 16, 2012: Alec Baldwin, the outspoken stage and screen actor, and activist for Americans for the Arts, in an unexpectedly subdued appearance at a Press Club Luncheon, says that “the arts are beyond essential” and that the United States should look to Europe for examples of far greater government support of the arts.

The Club's Ballroom has been the stage for many other like-minded advocates for the arts. Opera star Beverly Sills in 1996 declared that “the government will sooner bail out a savings and loan bank disaster than to think that art must be an integral part of a human being’s life.” Rita Dove, the youngest person and the first African-American woman to serve as Poet Laureate, spoke in 1994 of her desire to encourage the spread of poetry, and then head of the National Endowment for the Arts, poet Dana Giaio, spoke in 2002 of his efforts to restore the NEA “to its rightful place as one of the premier public agencies in the United States, after the great damage done to it in the nineties.”

This Week In National Press Club History is brought to you by the History & Heritage Committee, which preserves and revitalizes the Club’s hundred-plus year history through lobby displays, events, panel discussions and its oral-history project.

To learn more about the cmmittee, or to join it, contact Chair Gilbert Klein at [email protected].

And for more of the Club’s dramatic history and impact, visit our website at www.press.org/about/history.