Ashurst Out

At the age of 10, Henry Ashurst wrote in his speller, in a childish but firm hand: Henry Fountain Ashurst, U. S. Senator from Arizona. Thus he announced the great ambition of his life.

His father and mother (who had borne Henry in 1874 in a covered wagon near Winnemucca, Nev.) had trekked to Flagstaff, Ariz., where the elder Ashurst went into the cattle business. Summers, young Henry punched cows, more often tethered his horse and strode around the lonely Arizona landscape, exhorting the cacti and the boulders, making speeches to the mountains, like Demosthenes on the beach. He was practicing for his chosen career. He studied law, at the age of 21 got himself elected to the Arizona Territorial Legislature. He served later in the Territorial Senate. In 1912, Arizona was admitted to Statehood, and Orator Ashurst achieved his great ambition: he was elected as the State's first U. S. Senator. Arrayed in a black sombrero, high-heeled cowboy boots, he went to Washington.

There he stayed. Senator Henry Fountain Ashurst became a Washington character. Tall, with the suave manner of a Shakespearean actor, he gave up his cowboy clothes for sleek, striped trousers, spade-tailed coat, pince-nez on a wide black ribbon. His speeches were orations, models of polysyllabic splendor. He described himself as a "veritable peripatetic bifurcated volcano in behalf of the principles of my party." But meatily between the thick-hunked verbiage were sandwiched slices of wit and wisdom. He was one man who dared to tackle rough-&-tumble Huey Long in debate on the Senate floor. He left the Kingfish lacerated, pop-mouthed, speechless.

Ashurst's legislative road was an amiable meander. He voted both for the 18th Amendment and for its repeal, he voted twice for the soldiers' bonus, twice against it. Colleagues complained that his expressed views were contrary to the principle of Franklin Roosevelt's Court-packing bill, but that when the controversial bill came to Senator Ashurst's Judiciary Committee he defended it. Was that consistent? Said he:

"My faults are obvious. ... I suffer from cacoethes loquendi, a mania or itch for talking. . . . But there never has been superadded to these vices of mine the withering, embalming vice of consistency. . . . Let me quote Emerson: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen.' "

But Arizona was consistent about its senior Senator, four times returned him to the Senate. This year he was opposed in the primaries by stocky, good-natured Judge Ernest W. McFarland, farm boy, schoolteacher, lawyer. Ashurst, in the Senate, opposed conscription. McFarland, in Arizona, was for it. But McFarland made a bigger issue out of the Senator's long absences from the State. For the past ten years Ashurst has scarcely stirred from Washington. This year he did not even bother to go back and campaign in the primary. Few, least of all Ashurst, thought this indifference would make any difference. But last week, when the primary poll was counted, the curtain was rung down on the long Senatorial career of Henry Fountain Ashurst.

Next day, he rose in the Senate. The floor was crowded. Lining the walls were members of the House, who had heard that Ashurst was to deliver his valedictory.

Smiling, the Senator told his colleagues about the taxi driver that morning who had asked him what he was going to do now for a living. Said Ashurst: "I said, '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.' "

He described how it felt to be defeated: "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. . . ."

The 66-year-old Senator, whose going will leave no hole in the sky but will take something fresh and honestly wise from Washington, had some advice for his colleagues. Said Ashurst, solemnly: "... I shall not waste any time on such miserable twaddle as to say that I ought to have been elected. ... It is the undoubted right of the people to change their servants, and to remove one and displace him with another at any time they choose, for a good reason, for a bad reason, or for no reason at all. If we are to remain a free people, it is the duty of public servants not grumpily and sourly to accept the verdict of the majority, but joyously to accept that verdict. . . ."

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