CONGRESS: Silver-Tongued Sunbeam

Abie’s Irish Rose ran for 2,532 performances. Tobacco Road is in its sixth year. Senator Henry Fountain Ashurst of Arizona has been running since March 27, 1912, which is easily the longest U. S. theatrical engagement on record.

Last week Congressional Record readers guffawed at the latest maneuver of the Prescott, Ariz. polysyllabist—an insertion of no less than 19½ pages (40,000-plus words) of Ashurstiana, the nearest thing there is to a complete collected edition of the famed, lush, Ashurstian magniloquence. Said debonair Henry happily:

“This doesn’t mean that I’m starting to run for another term. It means merely that I’m continuing to run.”

Record readers settled down to several hours’ solid entertainment, for no man in Congress has such a gift for making two long words do the work of one short one. The range of his sesquipedalian verbal achievements spread from masterly Johnsonian periods on the occasion of “Remarks of Senator Ashurst on the Steamship President Grant on Saturday, October 26, 1935. Presenting to Vice President Garner a Pair of Sox to be Worn When He Has an Audience with the Emperor of Japan,” to sombre views on mankind’s future, viz.: “It is still an open question as to whether mankind or insects shall ultimately inherit the earth. It is my opinion that mankind … has about a 50-50 chance. . . .”

Ashurst has been senior Senator from Arizona since its Statehood. He likes to hear himself called “the silver-tongued sunbeam of Painted Desert.” His favorite anecdote surrounds his biggest moment: the day in 1912 when a Senate expecting to see an Arizona Senator sworn in wearing cowboy chaps, high-heeled boots and bandanna, was dazzled at the resplendent perfection of a tall gentleman impeccably garbed in sugar-scoop coat, striped trousers, wing collar, sawed-off vest and ribboned pince-nez. “I mowed them down,” chuckles Ashurst.

But no bibble-babbler is Ashurst. His tongue can burn as well as bless. When the late Huey P. Long had the Senate buffaloed, hog-tied and helpless with his parliamentary agility, when few Senators even dared to cross him, Ashurst took the floor one day (July 15, 1935) to give Huey what still stands on the Senate’s books as the most comprehensive dressing down administered in the chamber in modern history, a flaying executed so neatly and yet so politely, rich in classical allusion and historical anecdote, that the garrulous Kingfish was for once stumped for an answer.

Ashurst on public speaking: “A speech is entertaining only when serenely detached from all information.” On John Garner: “You play a straight oftener than almost any other man I know.” On consistency: “But there never has been superadded to these vices of mine the withering, embalming vice of consistency.” On himself: “I suffer from cacoethes loquendi, a mania or itch for talking, and from vanity . . . and morbidity, and, as is obvious to everyone who knows me, an inborn, an inveterate flair for histrionics. … I am pachydermatous. … I am a veritable peripatetic bifurcated volcano on behalf of Democratic principles.”