OF THE SADDLE AND SIRLOIN CLUB 31 



Hoard's Dairyman has grown from a small four page paper 

 to a thirty or forty page weekly edition, and has an international 

 circulation of over seventy-five thousand- 



In 1888 he was elected Governor of Wisconsin. In this posi- 

 tion he succeeded in establishing a law to create a Dairy and Food 

 Commission. He championed honest food products, and thus 

 came into violent conflict with the then fraudulent trafiBc in oleo- 

 margarine, compelling it to sell on its own merits, and not under 

 the name of butter. He sponsored the Bennett Law, requiring 

 the teaching of English in all schools in Wisconsin. So violent 

 an opposition was raised by the proponents of the German paro- 

 chial school that he was defeated for re-election on this issue in 

 1890. Governor Hoard's concept of American Citizenship was 

 perhaps ahea-d of its time, but it contained the elements for 

 which we have so recently fought. He was a delightful com- 

 panion, and welcome to the friendship of the poorest workman, 

 or the wealthiest capitalist; appreciated by both the ignorant and 

 the most highly educated. He was intensely practical, and yet 

 a voracious student of the rural sciences. He has been compared 

 for his humor, his political honesty, his rugged character, and 

 his many sided personality to Abraham Lincoln (75). His 

 recognition of the specialized dairy cow as the foster mother of 

 the human race made him, if not the originator, at least the 

 world's greatest evangel, of the doctrine of specialized dairying. 

 His favorite expression was "Treat the cow as a mother, and her 

 calf as a baby." In 1915 Governor Hoard was officially honored 

 by the state government as Wisconsin's most distinguished citizen. 



