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Up for sale a RARE! "16th Governor of Wisconsin" William Hoard Signed 2.25X3.5 Card.
ES-722A
William Dempster Hoard (October
10, 1836 – November 22, 1918) was an American politician, a newspaper editor,
and the 16th Governor of the U.S. state
of Wisconsin
from 1889 to 1891. Born
in Stockbridge, New York, he moved to Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. During the American Civil War,
Hoard served in the 4th Wisconsin Volunteer Regiment
as a musician until he was discharged for medical reasons. He went back to New
York to recover and served to the end of the war in the 1st New York Artillery
Regiment. Returning to Wisconsin, he got involved with the hops industry, but the
glut and decline in the industry left him without money. He was a member of the
Republican Party, but was
an outsider and an amateur in politics. He was a leading promoter of the dairy
industry, through his weekly magazine Hoard's
Dairyman.
In 1889, Hoard asked the legislature to pass
the Bennett Law,
the state's first compulsory school attendance law.[3] It required all public and private
schools to teach major subjects in English. The German Lutherans and German
Catholics, who each had a large parochial school system that used
German-speaking teachers, strenuously objected. Hoard made the extremely
controversial law the centerpiece of his reelection campaign, rejecting the
advice of professional politicians that it would doom the GOP. The law, and
Hoard, were repudiated by the state's large German community. Hoard was
defeated in an intense campaign by Democrat George Wilbur Peck, the Yankee mayor of
Milwaukee. The
Republican establishment was outraged at Hoard. In turn the moralistic rank and
file bridled at the boss rule. Hoard joined forces with Robert M. La Follette Sr. and created the
Progressive faction of the state GOP. It propelled La Follette to the
governorship and the U.S. Senate, but Hoard, still an influential publisher,
broke with La Follette in 1912.