The Silver-Tongued Sunbeam

The Senator from Arizona rose, and the chamber hushed to hear him. He was tall and greying, with an eagle's nose and a noble brow. He wore striped pants, a wing collar, a spade-tailed coat, and nose glasses leashed with yards of black, fluttering ribbon. He rolled out his words with infinite relish. "My faults," he cried, "are obvious. There can be no doubt I have my full share. I suffer from cacoethes loquendi, a mania or itch for talking, from vanity and morbidity, and, as is obvious to everyone who knows me, an inborn, an inveterate flair for histrionics." Democrat Henry Fountain Ashurst was off on one of the orations that were the delight of the Senate from 1912 to 1940.

The subject of his speech hardly mattered, for Ashurst could have held his audience spellbound by reciting the contents of a telephone book. The nation knew him as "Five-Syllable Henry," the ''Silver-Tongued Sunbeam of the Painted Desert." He described himself as a victim of "the inflatus of oratory" and a "veritable peripatetic bifurcated volcano." The Senate has not seen his likes since he left, and it will not soon again. For there was only one Henry Fountain Ashurst, and he died last week at 87.

Matter of Course. He was born in Nevada in a covered wagon, grew up in the Arizona Territory. His father was a rancher, but Henry himself had dreams of greater glory. In his blue-backed speller, when he was ten, he wrote: "Henry Fountain Ashurst, U.S. Senator from Arizona." To develop his voice, the young cowboy rode into the hills to address the landscape. He exhorted the boulders to rise against the iron heel of oppression. He demanded of the mountains that they nominate Grant for a third term. While other cowpunchers twanged The Old Chisholm Trail, Ashurst (who knew countless stanzas, both clean and dirty, of that song) quoted Shakespeare to the coyotes and the stars. "I could throw 56-pound words clear across the Grand Canyon." he said years later. "As a matter of course, I went into politics."

As a turnkey in the Flagstaff county jail, Ashurst read Blackstone voraciously, later took up the law. At 21 he was elected to the territorial legislature, then to the territorial senate. In 1912, when Arizona was admitted to statehood, he was a natural choice for one of the state's first two U.S. Senate seats (the other: Marcus A. Smith).

Washington loved his high-flown oratory, but Ashurst had too keen a sense of the ridiculous to take politics very seriously. He was an early supporter of F.D.R., but the New Deal could never count on him. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ashurst first defended F.D.R.'s Supreme Court-packing plan, but unaccountably changed his mind. "I am," he said, "the Dean Emeritus of Inconsistency." To a woman who wrote him praising him for his stand, he wrote back: "Dear Madam: Which stand?" He voted both for the 18th Amendment and for its repeal, cast his ballot twice for the soldiers' bonus and twice against it. In 1935, when most of his colleagues shuddered in fear of Louisiana's rabble-rousing Senator Huey ("Kingfish") Long, Ashurst took him on in one of the most devastating speeches the chamber ever heard. Ashurst spoke of the curious denizens of the deep that are cast to shore by the fury of a storm. "We find wriggling on the beach Crustacea, such as crawfish, shrimps, mud crabs and lobsters; among the fish we find the grunt, puffer, pike, topknot, toadfish, jellyfish--kingfish." He threw in a few references to physics, anthropology, cosmogony and medicine. He alluded pointedly to Burns's poem To a Louse . . . He recalled the Greek legend of an eagle who dropped a tortoise on the head of Aeschylus. Added Ashurst: "I express the hope that the American eagle will not be required to drop something upon the head of the Senator from Louisiana . . ." The speech left Huey speechless. When another Senator criticized him for his endless spouting in debate, Ashurst observed creamily: "I am a fountain, not a cistern."

Peace & Joy. Though Arizona voters returned Ashurst to the Senate four times, the Demosthenes of drollery visited his home state only infrequently. On one visit he told listeners: "I am not in Washington as a statesman. I am there as a very well-paid messenger boy doing your errands." By 1940 Ashurst had begun to feel Arizona and the world moving away from him. His wife had died the year before; he was childless. He had voted against conscription, lagged in his errand running for the folks back home. That year in the primaries, Judge Ernest McFarland surprised Washington by defeating the incumbent. Next day Ashurst took the Senate floor to describe his feelings. "The first half hour you believe that the earth has slipped from beneath your feet, that the stars above your head have paled and faded, and you wonder what the Senate will do without you . . . But within another half hour there comes a peace and joy." Then he added: "I think I shall sell apples. For almost 30 years I have successfully distributed applesauce in the Capitol. I ought now to be able to sell a few apples."

Ashurst stayed on in Washington--"It was a duty and a doom for me to stay away from Arizona." For two years, he held a job as a member of the Board of Immigration Appeals in the Justice Department. Then he retired altogether, emerging only occasionally into the spotlight. He appeared on TV's $64,000 Question, missed a question, won a consolation prize of a Cadillac, which he promptly sold. Hollywood gave him a bit part in Advise and Consent as "Senator McCafferty," who dozes through most of the picture except for intermittent mouthing of flowery rhetoric. When he had nothing else to do, Ashurst spent hours chatting with elderly ladies in the lobby of Washington's Sheraton-Park Hotel, where he lived. Always courtly and sprightly, he would sweep off his hat, bow deeply, and set the ladies swooning with his resonant "Good afternoon!" After Nebraska's Senator George Norris went down to defeat broken and embittered in 1942, Ashurst wrote to console him: "You speak of 'great'; no man is great unless he has had suffering, sorrow and humiliation . . . Defeat, at the summit of a notable career, is a symbolism so symmetrical that poets and dramatists never ask a more nearly perfect theme." The theme did not fit Henry Fountain Ashurst. But he had his own, which was to say what he felt, with eloquence.

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