Horace Boies (7 December 1827-4 April 1923) was the Democratic Governor of Iowa from 27 February 1890 to 11 January 1894, succeeding William Larrabee and preceding Frank D. Jackson. He was the only Democratic governor of Iowa from 1855 to 1923.
Biography[]
Horace Boies was born in Aurora, New York in 1827, and he worked as a farm laborer in Wisconsin before becoming a lawyer in Hamburg, New York in 1849. He served in the state assembly as a Republican in 1857, and he moved to Waterloo, Iowa in 1880. He left the Republican Party in 1880 due to its support for prohibition, becoming a Democrat and winning the 1889 gubernatorial election, breaking longtime Republican dominance of state politics. He was a prominent populist and advocate of bimetallism, and he proclaimed Iowa's first Labor Day holiday. He failed to win his party's presidential nomination in 1892 and 1896, and he retired to Long Beach, California, where he died in 1923.