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.
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