Carl Hayden

Congressional efforts to memorialize Senator Carl Hayden began in 1969 upon his retirement. They culminated in 1983 with a Senate concurrent resolution providing for a portrait bust to be placed in either the Senate wing of the U.S. Capitol or in one of the Senate office buildings. To satisfy the resolution, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater proposed that an existing bronze bust of Hayden by Stafford Rolph be replicated. This bust was approved by Hayden after its execution in 1969 and was acquired by the Bureau of Reclamation. It is displayed at the Carl Hayden Visitor’s Center at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Page, Arizona.

Although Rolph offered to create a new bust from a compilation of photographs of the senator, he suggested to Goldwater that a duplicate of the visitor’s center sculpture might produce a more accurate likeness because Hayden had sat for the original. The decision was made to copy the existing bust, as Goldwater had proposed. During 1985 the Tallix Foundry of New York cast the second bust; it retains the date of the original model–-1969. The replica was dedicated and placed in the Russell Senate Office Building on April 17, 1986. The bust was appropriately located in the northwest corner of the building on the first floor, near the office that Senator Hayden had occupied for more than 20 years.

At the unveiling, Roy Elson, Senator Hayden’s administrative assistant and close friend, commented, “I feel that Carl Hayden would still oppose any memorial to himself–not out of any false modesty–but because of his oft-expressed belief that only those who have been dead for half a century or more should be so honored.” Elson continued: “But I am proud that what would have been his veto has been overridden, for Carl Hayden was more than a man. He was an epoch.” [1]

A successful architect, Rolph pursued a parallel career in sculpture. He was a Chester Dale Fellow at the National Gallery of Art, and his sculptural works are located at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and in numerous private collections.


1. Congressional Record (30 April 1986) vol. 132, pt. 7: 5047.

Carl Trumbull Hayden, a U.S. representative and senator from Arizona, was born in Hayden's Ferry (now Tempe), Arizona. Educated at Stanford University, Hayden worked in the family flour-milling business and served as sheriff of Maricopa County. He was elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives when Arizona became a state in 1912; he remained in the House until 1927, when he began the first of seven terms in the U.S. Senate. Hayden rarely spoke on the floor, preferring to work behind the scenes in committee. He considered himself a "workhorse" rather than a "show horse," and concentrated his efforts on western water and transportation projects. He was floor manager of the bill that established the Grand Canyon National Park, and he sponsored the 19th Amendment to the Constitution giving women the right to vote. As chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee from 1955 to 1969, Hayden won praise from members of both parties for being a master of compromise. He also served as president pro tempore from 1957 to 1969.

At a testimonial dinner in 1961, President John F. Kennedy remarked of Hayden: "Every Federal program which has contributed to the West–-irrigation, power and reclamation–-bears his mark. And the great Federal highway program which binds this country together...in large measure is his creation." [1] Hayden retired to his home in Tempe, Arizona, in 1969 after serving an unprecedented 56 consecutive years in Congress. He died in 1972 in Mesa, Arizona.


1. U.S. Congress, Tributes to Honorable Carl Hayden, Senator from Arizona, to Commemorate the Occasion of His Fiftieth Anniversary of Congressional Service, February 19, 1962, Delivered in the United States Senate and the House of Representatives (87th Cong., 2d sess., Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1962), 22.