The Capitol: 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 cacoëthes 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).