Photographic portrait of Gaylord Wilshire, [s.d.]. He is shown in a head-and-shoulders portrait with his shoulders turned to the right and his eyes gazing to the left. He is visible wearing a suit and bow tie. He is posed in front of an indistinguishable background. Photo courtesy of Portrait of Henry Gaylord Wilshire. Photo courtesy of the University of Southern California Libraries and California Historical Society.

California historian Kevin Starr’s excellent book Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era (the second in an epic seven-volume history of California) includes a section on a colorful character named Henry Gaylord Wilshire, who was one of the initial developers of Fullerton. He partnered with the Amerige brothers to establish the town, and Wilshire Ave. is named after him. Although he owned an orange ranch here, Wilshire did not confine his activities to Fullerton. He made his millions in real estate and other Southern California business ventures; however, he was mainly known for being one of the most outspoken socialists of his era. Though in the minority politically, he was not alone in his political views.

“Turn-of-the-century California sustained an active Socialist minority whose disgust with the excess and corruption of the corporate hold on California politics fed directly into the Progressive reforms,” Starr writes.

The publication of Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887 inspired the formation of Nationalist Clubs [which were socialist] throughout the United States. The California Nationalist Club was formed in Los Angeles in 1889. By 1900, there were 62 local Nationalist Clubs in California alone. H. Gaylord Wilshire, president of the Fullerton and Anaheim Nationalist Clubs, ran for Congress as a Socialist in both 1890 and 1900. Wilshire was born in 1861 in Cincinnati to a wealthy banker. He dropped out of Harvard and, after failing in a business venture, moved to California where “he pursued two seemingly contradictory ambitions–success and socialism (to which he converted in 1887),” according to Starr. He and his brother made a lot of money in the Southern California land boom of the 1880s.

“The brothers Wilshire, helped along by some family money, speculated in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Pasadena, Long Beach (they bought up the shorefront), and Orange County real estate, making money in each instance,” Starr writes. “Settling on a ranch near the city of Fullerton, where he helped to develop, Wilshire had transformed himself by 1890, the year the Nationalists nominated him for Congress, into a wealthy rancher-entrepreneur, growing walnuts and citrus on his property and pioneering the introduction of the grapefruit.”

Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles is named for the brothers Wilshire. After losing the congressional election in 1890, he moved briefly to New York (where he ran and lost an election for state attorney general) and then to London, where he met and befriended his hero, George Bernard Shaw. He returned to Los Angeles in the late 1890s, and ran once again for Congress in 1900, again as a Socialist, and got four thousand votes, “the largest single vote thus cast for a Socialist candidate in the United States—but still not enough to get him into Congress.”

Ultimately, it was not as an elected official that Wilshire would leave his mark, but rather as a journalist and publisher.  He founded the Weekly Nationalist magazine in Los Angeles in 1889 before launching the socialist magazine The Challenge (a title he later changed to Wilshire’s Magazine). The Challenge was banned from the United States mail for being subversive. To get around the ban, Wilshire moved the magazine to Toronto, where, by international agreement, it could be mailed to the United States.

“Wilshire built the circulation of Wilshire’s Magazine to an impressive 425,000 copies per issue,” Starr writes. “During the Progressive Era, Wilshire’s Magazine was the most influential Socialist journal in the United States.”

Wilshire mainly advocated a type of Fabian socialism (inspired by his friend George Bernard Shaw), which was nonviolent, nonrevolutionary, and non-Marxist, although his views changed over time.

“Wilshire argued for the nationalization of railroads and utilities, the municipal ownership of water, gas, electricity, telephones, and streetcar service, women’s suffrage, public reclamation projects to put the unemployed to work, an eight-hour day, an end to child labor, free public schools (to include hot lunches and textbooks), unemployment insurance, a social security system, a national public highway trust—and other, similar ideas,” Starr writes.

Other notable California socialists of this time period included poet Edwin Markham and novelist Jack London. In his later years, Wilshire dabbled in health improvement. He sold the Ionaco, an electric belt that supposedly improved health but was ultimately denounced by health professionals. He died in 1927 in New York, having lost most of his fortune.

“In his [Wilshire’s] eccentricities and solid accomplishments, his paradoxical entrepreneurism, his flirtation with quackery and his sound, even prophetic, notions of social reform,” Starr writes, “no Socialist Californian could have better exemplified the paradoxes of Socialism, Southern Californian style, than this young Fullerton rancher-entrepreneur.”

A book about Wilshire’s life was published in 2012 entitled Henry Gaylord Wilshire: the Millionaire Socialist by Lou Rosen.

Follow Jesse La Tour’s ongoing research and writing at http://www.fullertonhistory.com.