III
The other guest at the dinner was likewise a person worth hearing about. Gaylord Wilshire had made a fortune in billboard advertising in Los Angeles (Wilshire Boulevard is named after him). Then out of a clear sky he announced his conversion to socialism, made a speech in one of the city parks, and was sent to jail for it. He started a weekly; he then brought it to New York and turned it into a monthly. He was spending his money fast, offering prizes such as grand pianos and trips around the world for the greatest number of new subscribers. He had a standing offer of ten thousand dollars to William Jennings Bryan to debate socialism with him, but the canny “boy orator” never took that easy money; he knew nothing about socialism, and the quick-witted editor would have made a monkey of him.
Wilshire always insisted that his conversion was purely a matter of intellect; he had become convinced that capitalism was self-eliminating, and that its breakdown was near. But as a matter of fact, a sense of justice and a kind heart had much to do with his crusade. To hear him talk, you would think him a cynical man of the world, a veritable Mephisto; but his greatest faults were generosity, which made it impossible for him to keep money, and a sort of “Colonel Sellers” optimism, which made him sure he was going to get a lot more at once. The advertising men in New York had assured him that the problem of a monthly magazine was solved when it got four hundred thousand subscribers, because at that mark the advertising made any magazine self-sustaining. Hence the prizes; but alas, when the four hundred thousand mark was reached, it was discovered that the big national advertisers would not patronize a magazine that in its reading columns threatened their privileges. So Wilshire was “stuck,” and went into the business of mining gold in order to keep his magazine going in spite of the advertisers. That is a tale I shall tell later.
The editor took me uptown and introduced me to two sisters, of whom the older soon became his wife. The couple came to Princeton on their honeymoon and became our intimate friends. Mary Wilshire was a sort of older sister to me—though as a matter of fact I believe she was younger. “Gay” printed my picture in his magazine, and introduced me to the socialist movement as a coming novelist. I wrote for his columns—I remember “The Toy and the Man,” wherein I poked fun at the desire of grown-up Americans to accumulate quantities of unnecessary material things. If you look about you at the America of sixty years later, you will see that my sermon failed entirely of its effect.
It was either that summer or the next that the Wilshires took us with them for a two-week trip to Halifax, the editor having got transportation in exchange for advertising. We drove about and saw the Nova Scotia country, at its loveliest in early summer, and went swimming by moonlight in an inland lake. Incidentally, I discovered some cousins—it seems that a branch of the Sinclairs had left Virginia after the Civil War; so here was a surgeon at this British Army station. Somehow I got the impression that he was not entirely proud of his young genius relative, with an unmodish wife who took care of her own baby. He did not invite us to meet the wealth and fashion of the British Army, and we had time to ramble alone on the beach, where the baby filled his chubby fists with masses of squashy starfish.