Carl Hayden: Arizona Sheriff Who Quietly Built the West Over 56 Years

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Carl Hayden was born in 1877 in the Arizona Territory, where his family ran a river ferry; his father was a merchant and local judge and his mother a teacher who campaigned for women's suffrage. At Stanford he lost a race for student body president and blamed his own overconfidence, resolving to always campaign as if he were behind. His father's illness forced him home before graduation to settle the family's debts. Elected Maricopa County sheriff in 1907, he once commandeered an early automobile to chase train robbers, and in 1912, on the day Arizona became a state, he handed over his jail keys and left for Washington as its sole congressman.

In the House he started the San Carlos project by tucking money for a small downstream diversion dam into an Indian affairs appropriations bill, then argued it was useless without the upstream reservoir, which became Coolidge Dam. Elected to the Senate in 1926, he filibustered for nine hours against California's Boulder Canyon Project, then took a colleague's advice to be a worker rather than a performer and gave no major floor speech for 20 years. He wrote highway funding formulas weighted by land area, tied road money to driver's licenses and uniform traffic laws, and retired in 1969 after a record 56 continuous years in Congress.

• As a candidate he refused to say his opponents' names in public.
• During World War I he served as an army major and targeted draft loopholes that let the wealthy buy exemptions.
• After his wife's 1945 stroke he served as her primary caregiver while running Senate committees.
• In 1962 his feud with the House appropriations chairman over where to meet froze billions until they chose a room halfway between the chambers.
• He won the Central Arizona Project by attaching it to a package of other lawmakers' projects while a House rival was on vacation.