Gaylord Wilshire’s Boulevard of Marxist Dreams

Running from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica, through Beverly Hills, the Millionaire’s Mile, and the Miracle Mile, Wilshire Boulevard has been called the “Champs-Élysées of the Pacific.” Norma Desmond’s home in Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder’s 1950 dark valentine to Hollywood, was actually a real mansion on Wilshire. The house was owned by the Getty family until it was demolished in 1957. Harrison Gray Otis, the very conservative publisher of the Los Angeles Times, was another of the city’s powerbrokers who had a mansion on Wilshire. Today, the tallest building in the US west of Chicago is the Wilshire Grand Center at 900 Wilshire Boulevard in downtown LA.

The irony in all this is that the boulevard was named after a socialist, Henry Gaylord Wilshire (1861–1927).

Gaylord Wilshire, as he was called, is better remembered today as a real estate developer and pioneer of billboard advertising. He was born rich, got richer, and then went bust, ending his business career in stock fraud and medical quackery. A typical capitalist biography, right? As historian Mark W. Nelson writes, Wilshire was also “a Marxist, a self-described revolutionary socialist, possessed with an inveterate conviction that his economic and political analysis amounted to an objective—indeed thoroughly ‘scientific’—understanding of a historical process.”

“I classify all men into two great classes—Fools and Socialists,” declared Wilshire, who had a portrait of Karl Marx above his desk. No stranger to declarations, Wilshire also had an “ostentatiousness and high-flown sense of self,” Nelson writes, noting that everyone who has written about Wilshire gets his “egoism and flamboyance” right. But Wilshire’s politics have largely been swept under the rug, or, perhaps more apropos, under the boulevard.

Wilshire’s 1900 publication The Challenge soon morphed into Wilshire’s Magazine, “one of the largest and most influential socialist magazines in the country.” For a while, he edited the monthly in New York while having it printed and mailed from Toronto to avoid US post charges aimed at suppressing radical publications.

“Exiled to Canada by order of the US Post-Master General” proclaimed the cover of the July 1903 issue. By April 1904, the magazine was again being published in the US “by gracious permission of His Imperial Highness, President Roosevelt.”

Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Karl Kautsky (“the world’s preeminent Marxist theorist”), George Plekhanov (“the founder of Russian Marxism”) and many others were published in Wilshire’s, while Wilshire’s editorial eye glared at middle-class reformers, Fabian socialists, and other “step-by-step” not-quite-radicals.

A self-claimed “millionaire socialist,” Wilshire declared his adherence to socialism in 1887, although as Nelson notes “he would never state precisely why.”

Wilshire predated the socialist bandwagon sparked by the 1888 publication of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000–1887. This enormously popular time travel novel inspired more than a few to what Bellamy, leery of using the word “socialism,” called Nationalism. Nationalization of property was the basis of the “fraternal civilization” Bellamy imagined existing in the utopian year of 2000. (“Nationalism” as it is now generally defined is unrelated.)

Wilshire did join one of the sixty Nationalist Clubs founded in California in the wake of Bellamy’s runaway success. This was, he later claimed, because he found the club’s secretary attractive.

However he got there, Wilshire was one of the first Americans to run as a socialist in the Congressional election of 1890. He ran on the abolition of poverty, the 8-hour day, and the nationalization of the railroads, telegraph, and public utilities. He would not be elected, nor would he be in elections for California Attorney General (1891), Congress again (California, 1900), Congress yet again (New York, 1904), and the Los Angeles City Council (1909). By the second decade of the twentieth century, Wilshire gave up on electoral politics and embraced Syndicalism and the general strike, at least in print.

He also gave up on Wilshire’s Magazine, which had ended up draining all his money. (Nelson thinks that while rich, Wilshire was never a millionaire in his day.) For a while, publication was subsidized by another well-off socialist, and then it was paid for by the sale of stock in a gold mine. That gold mine venture was ultimately declared a fraud. Wilshire’s folded in 1915.

Afterwards, Wilshire tried citrus farming in Pasadena and then real estate again, but the glory days were gone. He died in 1927 just before the American Medical Association came out strongly against the “medical device” he invented and marketed. This electric belt, which he called the I-ON-A-CO, was supposed to improve health and/or cure anything and everything that ailed you.

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