Debating imperialism in the Anglophone world: Gaylord Wilshire and Wilshire’s Magazine,1900–1915

Introduction

Gaylord Wilshire (1861–1927) was a very particular figure in the socialist movement in the United States in the early 20th century. Of wealthy origins, Wilshire amassed a considerable fortune in the real estate business on the outskirts of Los Angeles during the 1890s. Simultaneously, he ran for local office as a member of the Nationalist Party, an organization associated with Edward Bellamy, and the Socialist Labor Party. In 1891, he traveled to Great Britain, where he spent 4 years and came into contact with the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), an openly Marxist socialist party, while familiarizing himself with the gradualist approach of the Fabian Society (FS). Upon his return to the United States, he joined the newly formed Socialist Party of America (SPA) and began publishing a socialist magazine, Challenge, later renamed Wilshire’s Magazine, while keeping contact with major figures of British radicalism.

Wilshire has received some attention from historians such as Kipnis (1952) and Quint (1964, 1974), who, in their works of American socialism, have noted his electoral career and the importance of his magazine. Peterson (1957), the author of an unpublished thesis on the foreign policy of the SPA, admitted that his study of imperialism did not include all the publications of Wilshire’s Magazine, and therefore did not draw conclusions about their theoretical positions. Norman Etherington (2014) has studied his thought in depth, dedicating an entire chapter of his book to his figure, particularly to his pamphlet Trusts and Imperialism (1901), situating him as one of the precursors of the imperialism thought.

However, no author has offered a comprehensive analysis of Wilshire’s positions on imperialism beyond that pamphlet, nor have they examined its impact within the SPA or how they developed within the broader framework of Anglophone political thought before 1914. It would be difficult to assume that a militant who had already developed his own interpretation of imperialism in 1901—in many ways ahead of later theories on the phenomenon—and who also directed his own magazine would not continue to reflect on the events related to imperialism that marked the period leading up to the outbreak of the First World War.

This article examines Gaylord Wilshire’s positions on imperialism and related issues—such as war, militarism, and national defense—as expressed in Wilshire’s Magazine between 1900 and 1915. This focus is particularly justified given the scope and influence of the publication. Although it functioned as a platform for his own views, it also attracted contributions from prominent radical intellectuals. George D. Herron, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jack London, William English Walling, and Charles E. Russell were among the notable figures who contributed articles to its pages. Howard Quint consequently described it as “the most interesting and certainly the most readable radical magazine of the Progressive period” (Quint, 1974: 77).

Moreover, the magazine itself circulated within the broader Anglo-American world. Between 1900 and 1915, its place of publication changed several times, moving from the United States to Canada in 1902, returning to New York by 1904, and later relocating to London in 1912. Despite these relocations, Wilshire could claim that by December 1905, the magazine had no fewer than 280,000 monthly subscribers. These transatlantic movements strengthened the magazine’s connections with British radicals and socialist circles, which included figures such as John A. Hobson, Henry Hyndman, Belfort Bax, H. G. Wells, or Bernard Shaw, who contributed articles to its pages. In this way, Wilshire’s Magazine functioned as a forum within a wider current of Anglo-American radicalism that debated imperialism, socialism, national defense, and projects for a political Anglo-Saxon Union.

This article argues that Wilshire’s interpretation of imperialism was shaped by this Anglophone political horizon. Although his pamphlet Trusts and Imperialism provoked a small controversy with Victor Berger—the revisionist leader within the SPA—his reflections on imperialism did not develop primarily within internal party debates. Rather, they were shaped through a broader transatlantic exchange with British socialist thinkers and radical intellectuals, who discussed issues such as the struggle against imperialist war, national defense, the causes of war and the means to prevent it, and projects for political union among the English-speaking peoples. While maintaining his rigid theory of the structural causes of capitalist expansion and imperialism, Wilshire gradually modified his political stance in response to these debates and to the course of global events, including the arms race, the diplomatic crisis between the United States and Japan, and the Mexican Revolution. By 1912, this evolution led him to endorse an imperial political scheme, distance himself from the SPA, and move toward revolutionary syndicalism.

In this respect, the article also engages with recent scholarship on Anglophone political imaginaries. In Dreamworlds of Race (2020), Duncan Bell examines different trajectories of prominent British and American intellectuals—including the novelist H. G. Wells, with whom Wilshire polemicized—who endorsed the political union of the U.S. and Great Britain, as well as the key elements of these projects. An analysis of Wilshire’s Magazine that contemplates these findings reveals how such ideas circulated within American socialism and how they were appropriate in the U.S. imperialist context. In this sense, Wilshire’s proposal for an Imperial Federation falls in line with the more maximalist projects advocating some form of political unification of the Anglo-Saxon world although it held a distinctive feature: he presented it as a means for the uplifting of Mexico and Central America and as a step toward the ultimate achievement of socialism.

The article begins by reviewing the central ideas developed in Trusts and Imperialism (1901), followed by an analysis of its reception within the SPA, particularly Wilshire’s controversy with Victor Berger. It then examines Wilshire’s exchanges with British socialist and radical intellectuals and how these debates shaped his interpretation of imperialism. Later, it analyzes how his views evolved in response to key international developments—the diplomatic crisis between the United States and Japan, the possibility of U.S. military intervention during the Mexican Revolution, or the potential annexation of Canada—and his gradual shift toward a militaristic and imperialistic position. It ends with Wilshire’s relocation to London, his turn toward revolutionary syndicalism, and the outbreak of the First World War.

Wilshire’s first interpretation: Trusts and Imperialism (1901)

Wilshire’s first systematic interpretation of imperialism emerged from his reflections on the rise of trusts in the United States. Throughout most of his political career, Wilshire was particularly concerned with this phenomenon. Toward the end of the 1880s, he came to believe that free-market capitalism was being replaced by monopoly capitalism. He even boasted of being the first to notice that the formation of Standard Oil in 1888 marked the beginning of this transition. According to Etherington (2014), Wilshire’s adoption of the socialist creed was based on the explanatory power of the Marxist theory of emergence of trusts. In this regard, his trip to Great Britain between 1891 and 1895 was central, as there he came into contact with personalities from the FS such as the SDF. In particular, Wilshire adopted a gradualist and evolutionary view of socialism, influenced by the FS, which prioritized gradual reforms such as the nationalization of public services (Etherington, 2014: 37–38). In 1891, Wilshire edited George Bernard Shaw’s Fabian Essays in the United States, and in the preface, he expressed his evolutionary stance on the development of society:

That the tendency of the wealth of the United States is to concentrate into larger and larger masses, held by a constantly diminishing number of capitalists, is not disputed by anyone at all familiar with the statistics of the case. This process continued and followed to its logical conclusion must lead inevitably to Socialism (Wilshire, 1891: xiv).

In this evolutionary scale, the nationalization of services or companies could be an accelerating factor:

Nationalization of the railways in the United States would mean the immediate expropriation of all small capitalists by the big ones. If Gould, Vanderbilt & Co. cannot own railways, they will invest their money, both principal and income, in flour mills, gas works, cotton mills, etc., and the pseudo-owners of those industries will soon be enlisted in the ranks of the proletariat under the banner of Socialism. Nationalization of the railways could not possibly be effected without causing the crystallization of all capital invested in the other industries of the United States in the hands of such a comparatively small number of owners that the advent of Socialism would certainly be almost instantaneous (Wilshire, 1891: xvi–xvii).

From this conceptualization, Wilshire derived as a political platform the emphasis on the process of nationalization of companies and public services as a means to accelerate the inevitable transition from capitalism to socialism. To promote his views, he founded the monthly magazine Challenge in 1901, which was renamed Wilshire’s Magazine in 1902 and carried the motto “Let the nation own the trusts.”

In his magazine, Wilshire linked American imperialism to the rise of trusts in the United States and examined it not only in relation to territorial expansion but also to the growing international reach of American capital. In 1901, his ideas took the form of the pamphlet “Trusts and Imperialism.” As established in the introduction, this work has already been studied by Etherington (2014), so only the main points of the work are taken up here. Wilshire’s interpretation starts with the recognition of overproduction as an inevitable trend of the capitalist system, where:

over-production arises because our productive capacity has been developed to the highest degree with labor-saving machinery operated by steam and electricity, while our consumptive capacity is crippled by the competitive wage system which limits the laborers, who constitute the bulk of our consumers, to the mere necessities of life (Wilshire, 1901a: 5).

As a result, the process of wealth accumulation in the United States led to a rapid concentration of capital in the second half of the 19th century:

In 1880, there were 1,943 plants with a combined capital of $62,000,000 manufacturing agricultural implements; in 1890, there were but 910 plants, while the capital invested had more than doubled. The number of plants engaged in manufactures of leather decreased in the same period from 5,424 to 1,596, while the capital involved increased from 67 to 81 millions. When the statistics for 1900 are published, the trend to concentration will be still more clearly shown (Wilshire, 1901a: 12).

From this, he considered imperialism an inescapable consequence of the formation of trusts. While these were a “dam built to prevent the swamping of domestic industries by the rising flood of surplus capital,” imperialism was a “mean of diverting to foreign shores this threatening deluge of domestic savings” (Wilshire, 1901a: 18). This was manifested in the imperialist drift of the United States, which instigated a war against the Spanish Empire in 1898, after which it took control of its former colonies in the Caribbean and the Philippines, as well as in the changes that took place in the international financial markets, where the United States was transformed for the first time into a creditor nation with investments in other parts of the world, financing ventures such as Britain’s Boer War and the construction of railways in China (Wilshire, 1901a: 17). However, imperialism could only be a temporary and not structural solution. A similar logic applied to war. Wilshire argued that a conflict between the great powers—possibly followed by a prolonged civil war causing massive destruction of life and property—could temporarily reinforce the system in that the reconstruction of industries, infrastructure, and means of transportation in the United States would give labor unlimited employment and capital a great margin to invest and save (Wilshire, 1901a: 21).

Beyond these two means, the advancement of the trust on a global level was inevitable. The logical consequence of their existence was the collapse of the capitalist system: the growing concentration of capital in a few trusts would eventually cause an economic paralysis marked by a scarcity of investment opportunities, an increase in unemployment, and a subsequent drop in consumption. So, the trust, which at this time “is an invaluable and absolutely necessary weapon of defense for the capitalist in industrial warfare,” would leave owners defenseless when a complete cessation of demand for products occurs (Wilshire, 1901a: 20). Given this situation, Wilshire removed from the political agenda the proposals of the Democratic Party, such as protectionist tariffs or bimetallism, and advocated for the establishment of industrial democracy: “revolution and not reform must be our battle cry. The main plank and in fact the only necessary plank in our political platform should be: We demand, The Nationalization of Industry” (Wilshire, 1901a: 26).

Wilshire’s conception of imperialism was appreciated by British economist John Atkinson Hobson, who was known for his studies on imperialism, and who sent him a letter in recognition of his article “The Significance of the Trust,” ¹ which he considered to be the “most scientifically accurate account of the relation between capital and imperialism that has yet appeared” (Hobson, 1902a). ² Hobson’s correspondence coincides with Etherington’s (2014) statement that Wilshire was the “first socialist to conjecture that capitalists threatened by overproduction and a ‘surplus of capital’ would resort to foreign investment, armaments, and a bellicose foreign policy in order to delay the collapse of their system” (p. 45).

More importantly, Wilshire’s interpretation sparked an early controversy within the newly formed SPA regarding the relationship between crisis and imperialism, which well be analyzed in the next section.

Berger and Wilshire: A brief exchange on imperialism (1901)

Wilshire’s pamphlet received some attention within the SPA and was promoted in several newspapers such as Appeal to Reason, International Socialist Review, and Social Democratic Herald. ³ His interpretation of imperialism broadly aligned with the dominant position within the party. On several occasions, the SPA loosely framed overseas expansion as a structural necessity of the capitalist class in response to overproduction and the search for external markets. This was particularly evident during the presidential election of 1900, when imperialism became one of the central issues debated by both Democrats and Republicans. ⁴ Viewing overseas expansion as an inevitable consequence of U.S. capitalism, the SPA did not take part in the broader anti-imperialist movement led by the Democratic Party and the American Anti-Imperialist League despite using its press as a means to criticize the annexation of the Philippines and the denial of self-government in Cuba. ⁵

A brief controversy nevertheless arose between Wilshire and Victor Berger, an editor of the Social Democratic Herald and a representative of the revisionist wing of the SPA. Berger challenged Wilshire’s prediction that a crisis of overaccumulation would bring down capitalism in the near future. In “The Praise of an Utopian,” he reproduced a letter that Gaylord Wilshire sent to his newspaper, in which he stated:

I maintain that the two thousand million dollars surplus we are producing every year, according to Mr. Depew, ⁶ and which he says must be shipped abroad, is an important economic fact for us to consider. I say that the foreign trade is no solution of the problem presented, and I also agree with Depew that if it is not a remedy, we will have within three years a tremendous and insoluble unemployed problem. My solution is Socialism. What is yours? (Wilshire, 1901b: 1).

Berger differed in his analysis. He considered that the time frame of a socialist revolution in 3 years was utopian, as socialists did not have enough power either in elections or in the use of arms to promote an uprising in such a short time. More importantly, Berger held an opposite interpretation about the place of crises in capitalism. He argued that the crisis of overaccumulation to which Wilshire referred could easily be avoided through an increase in wages that would absorb the surplus—an argument that closely resembled the one later developed by Hobson (1902b) in Imperialism: A Study. As Berger put it:

If the two thousand million dollars is all that Mr. Wilshire, the business man, is basing his revolution upon, then let me tell him that is a small sum for us proletarian Socialists. . . . The least little rise in the standard of living of our population—let’s say a rise of $30 for every head during the year, hardly a noticeable change—would be sufficient to wipe out that surplus. And as long as our working people cannot compel the capitalists to raise the standard of wages even as little as that, how are they to compel them to give up everything? (Berger, 1901: 1).

But he also emphasized that capitalism had a lot of room for development in Mexico, South America, Asia, and even the South and North of the United States. He declared that it would take at least 10 years before “full-fledged socialism” would be established in the United States. In a personal attack on Wilshire, he encouraged him to give up his wealth:

if Mr. Wilshire believes similarly that the Co-operative Commonwealth is so near at hand, why don’t he do the same, and donate his wealth . . . then people might at least be convinced that he is in earnest about his prophecy. (Berger, 1901: 1)

Wilshire responded that “the number of votes or rifles of the working class” was not a valid criterion for evaluating economic development. He stated that the existence of a real surplus of two billion dollars per year exceeded the capacity of the world market to absorb the surplus. In the future, an imminent “unemployment problem” would be encountered, and he questioned the political program of the Milwaukee social democrats:

I am not at all in accord with your theory that “we are going to have a great deal of Socialism before we die.” We are going to die unless we get the whole thing. There is no partial step towards Socialism which will solve the coming “unemployed problem,” and I challenge you to prove the contrary. Probably you think that if you could get the gas works of Milwaukee municipalized you would be several hours nearer Socialism. I do not (Wilshire, 1901c: 4).

This exchange within the SPA reveals less a fully developed theoretical dispute over the nature of capitalist crisis and imperialism than a clash of political orientations and personal polemics. Berger’s intervention was directed primarily at Wilshire’s prediction of an imminent collapse of capitalism and his rejection of gradual reforms, rather than at the broader implications of imperialism or global capitalist expansion. Unlike the major theoretical controversies unfolding in European socialism—most notably the revisionist debate ⁷ —this discussion remained limited in scope and did not generate a sustained debate within the party over the nature of imperialism.

Wilshire’s response nevertheless reveals a key feature of his political outlook: a strongly deterministic reading of capitalist development combined with a deep skepticism toward gradual reforms. As the following section shows, rather than developing primarily through exchanges with party leaders such as Berger, Wilshire’s reflections on imperialism increasingly took shape within a broader Anglophone intellectual milieu.

Wilshire and British socialists: Imperialism and the Anglo-Saxon World (1901–1902)

Following the assassination of President McKinley in 1901, postal authorities in New York adopted measures restricting the circulation of radical periodicals through the mail. Wilshire’s Magazine was among the targets, and in response, Wilshire relocated its editorial offices to Toronto. This move placed him more firmly within an Anglophone sphere of debate on imperialism, as Wilshire’s Magazine became a forum for a series of exchanges with several figures of British socialism and radicalism—including Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Henry Hyndman, and Belfort Bax—whom he had met during his stay in Great Britain. These interactions had an initial impact on his gradual gravitation toward a more favorable view of British rule and an increasingly Anglo-Saxonist position.

This can be seen in the first issue published from its new headquarters in Canada, whose cover bore the declaration: “Suppressed by the United States ‘I’ Be [sic] Now Under Protection British Crown.” In the accompanying editorial, he denounced the undermining of freedom of the press and the right of petition in the United States after the Roosevelt administration refused to intervene against the postal authorities of New York (Wilshire, 1902a: 1–2). He therefore drew a sharp constitutional contrast between England and the United States. In doing so, he expressed an early appreciation for the British constitutional system, he argued, “if the Postmaster-General offend an Englishman, he can have the Prime Minister questioned thereto,” and any refusal to respond would risk parliamentary sanction. By contrast, he maintained that “President Roosevelt (. . .) has taken a far more arbitrary stand than any ruler of Europe would dare to take against his humblest subject, with the possible exception of the Sultan of Turkey and the Czar of Russia” (Wilshire, 1902a, 2). A similar assessment appeared in a letter from the Fabian George Bernard Shaw: “What did I tell you? You thought you were in an advanced country because you were under the Stars and Stripes. And now you’ve had to cross the border into Canada to enjoy the ordinary freedoms of monarchical Europe” (Shaw, 1902a: 78).

Wilshire’s Magazine became the forum for a series of indirect exchanges between Shaw and Belfort Bax, one of the major figures the SDF, regarding the attitude of the British toward imperialism and the Second Boer War (1899–1902). Although Wilshire did not comment on these letters, they brought his own positions on imperialism into contact with those debates. The exchange began with an attack by Shaw on the SDF’s antiwar stance. The Irish playwright accused Bax of holding an “ultra-nationalist” position in his defense of the Boers, thereby contradicting the socialist principle of internationalism (Shaw, 1902b). Bax defended himself by alleging that being a pro-Boer and internationalist was by no means a contradiction and maintained that opposing imperialism and defending the independence of nations against financial plunder meant restraining the expansion of capitalism. In a rhetoric similar to that used by Wilshire, he told him:

As you well know, so long as the capitalist can effectively open up new markets, the old civilized ones, as you have so ably shown, being played out for him, and so long as he can get ever fresh supplies of cheap black labor, the capitalist system will continue. It is the final giving out of all available markets that will finish the system. Now, “progress” as understood in the present day, simply means the exploitation of new peoples and new regions of the earth for the purpose of giving capitalism a longer lease. But we Socialists don’t want to do that. The Fabians apparently do (Bax, 1902: 89).

Although Bax’s interpretation of how imperial expansion sustains capitalism fits with Wilshire’s own view, Wilshire’s silence in this debate suggests that he did not endorse the pro-Boer movement, particularly since he had not joined, together with the rest of the SPA, the opposition to the Spanish–American War (1898) or the Philippine–American War (1899–1902). For Wilshire, imperial expansion appeared historically inevitable and therefore politically futile to oppose. Thus, although he was not yet openly advocating imperialism, his position on tactics aligned more closely with that of the Fabians, who supported British aggression in South Africa.

Another axis of discussion that involved Wilshire and British radicals concerned the emergence of the United States as a world power and the possibility of an Anglo-Saxon Union. This was part of a broader discussion among British and American intellectuals who, according to Duncan Bell, held a common notion of unity and world historical destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race. The proposals considered were varied and shifted from one end of the spectrum, known as minimalist, who proposed defensive or offensive treaties or the establishment of a system of common citizenship, to maximalists, who propounded some kind of formal political (re)unification, typically either confederal or federal (Bell, 2020: 13). Wilshire took notion of this project as he reproduced the perspectives of British authors such as Stead and Wells, who believed that the development of the English-speaking world would gravitate toward the United States and could lead to a union of the Anglo-Saxon countries (Wilshire, 1902b).

The work that caught his attention the most were the series of articles of Herbert Wells’ “Anticipations” for the North American Review in 1901. ⁸ Here, he outlined a scheme favoring the realization of an Anglo-American unity in an imperialistic formation that consisted in:

a great Federation of white English-speaking peoples, a federation having America north of Mexico as its central mass, (. . .) [with] a common fleet to protect or dominate or actually administer most or all of the non-white states of the present British Empire, and in addition much of the south and middle Pacific, the East and West Indies, the rest of America, and most of Black Africa (Wells, 1901, cited in Wilshire, 1902c: 61).

Wells emphasized that this would be a gradual process in which certain developments pointing toward the formation of this “New Republic” were already underway, such as proposals for a transferable citizenship between the United States and Great Britain or the fact that American trusts were wresting control of major British industries. On this point, Wells cited Wilshire’s Magazine as a reference in the analysis of the development of trusts. Wilshire sent a letter to Wells expressing his gratitude for the recognition and for the appearance of his name in the North American Review; however, he raised objections regarding Wells’s position on the trust and capitalist development (Wells, 1901, cited in Wilshire, 1902c: 62).

In Anticipations, Wells argued that there existed the possibility that a “confluent system of trust-owned business and of universities and reorganized military and naval services may presently discover an essential unity of purpose and presently begin thinking a literature and behaving like a State” (Wells cited by Wilshire, 1902c: 59). Wilshire responded that far from being a possibility, the trusts were already the State, and “the political organization at Washington, which Mr. Wells aptly styles the formal nation, simply registers what is decided upon in Wall street” (Wilshire, 1902c: 59).

For this reason, he could not understand how Wells—who himself admitted “that capitalist industrial organization has reached a world synthesis”—would then “deviate on a tangent” by proposing forms of political synthesis based not on industrial organization but on racial origin, that is, his scheme for a federation of English-speaking peoples (Wilshire, 1902c: 61).

For Wilshire, the closer political association between the United States and Great Britain was an acceptable program that, in some way, was already in progress. He also referred to proposals for shared citizenship between the two countries and recalled that he was a living example of this true international citizen, as he recalled that he himself had once been a candidate for the SDF in Britain. Yet he argued that such anticipations ultimately lacked practical significance. In his view, Wells failed to grasp the decisive point: the capitalist system that had produced this global integration was approaching its limits and could not continue for many more years (Wilshire, 1902c: 63).

In this sense, these exchanges surrounding Wilshire’s Magazine in 1901–1902 already contained the intellectual seeds of the more explicit Anglophile turn he would adopt more openly a decade later.

Wilshire and the prospect of a U.S.–Japan War (1907–1908)

Consistent with his deterministic interpretation of capitalist development, Wilshire interpreted the events related to imperialism that marked the period leading up to the outbreak of the First World War. One of the issues that concerned him most was the role of imperialist wars in the dynamics of capitalism. As he had already argued in Trusts and Imperialism, wars constituted a central mechanism for resolving the crises of capitalism. This was developed in a new article, “The Why of the Slumps,” that offered a historical reading of American economic depressions where armed conflicts served as drivers of periods of prosperity. Thus, the 1889–1890 recession led to a prolonged depression, only interrupted toward the end of the 19th century by the demand generated by the Spanish-American War (1898). This war produced a brief boom, which was then prolonged by the Second Boer War (1899–1902), until a new price drop triggered another recession, which was reversed only 6 months after the start of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), leading to a new cycle of prosperity until the beginning of 1907 (Wilshire, 1907b: 7).

Wilshire illustrated this pattern by comparing the evolution of leading railway stock prices with periods of war, showing that armed conflicts—and even exceptional events like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—could trigger economic recovery. He also accurately anticipated the financial panic of October 1907, when stock market assets fell by 50% compared to the previous year, noting that “a period of depression is now due” (Wilshire, 1907b: 7).

In July 1908, Wilshire was even more blunt, arguing that only a major war in the next 5 years could save the capitalist system. It did not matter which countries were fighting or who won: The essential thing was that enough was spent to reactivate the industry and contain the threat of unemployment and widespread bankruptcy (Wilshire, 1908a: 5, 1908b: 13).

From his perspective, the most likely adversary in a future conflict with the United States was Japan, as the two countries were then embroiled in a diplomatic crisis over the immigration of Asian workers on the West Coast, a dispute that intensified the risk of war (Wilshire, 1907c: 4). Within the SPA, immigration became a major source of internal debate. Along the lines of the majority of the party, and contrary to the directives of the Second International, Wilshire took a position against it:

We may talk as much as we please of the brotherhood of man, but under the competitive system, the brotherhood of man has no place. Every man for himself and the devil takes the hindmost is the rule to-day. A California workman wants a job, and he finds a Japanese worker has taken it away from him; therefore, he naturally wants the Japanese excluded. He can’t starve for brotherhood. We might as well recognize now as later that there is soon to be an irresistible demand for the exclusion of the Japanese (Wilshire, 1907a: 6).

The following year, he offered, in a new article, a general diagnosis of the development of imperialism on a global scale. He ruled out South America, Oceania, and Africa as viable markets for the U.S. investment given their low demand and European competition. The only potential market was East Asia, considered the world’s last great commercial prize. However, Japan had already established its dominance there—especially in China and Manchuria—through military force, even displacing American companies from trade in the Pacific. Wilshire advertised that this sphere of domination was “rapidly being pushed to completion, a domination which, having been made possible by force of arms, can only be transferred to another power by the same method” (Wilshire, 1908c: 3).

He emphasized that the diplomatic crisis with Japan could be resolved by ceding the Philippines:

we might even up matters by giving Japan the Philippine Islands. It would relieve us of the worse-than-useless expenditure of twenty million dollars a year for which we get no benefit, and it could certainly do no harm to the Filipinos, for the government we are giving them now is worse than anything the Japanese could possibly give them (Wilshire, 1908c: 3).

In apparent contradiction with his earlier claim that imperialism was historically unavoidable, Wilshire thus momentarily adopted an anti-imperialist stance in an acute moment of diplomatic tensions between the U.S. and Japan. Nevertheless, the persistence of economic rivalry and immigration conflicts on the Pacific coast led him to consider the prospect of a future war between the United States and Japan as inevitable. As the next section will show, this led him to adopt an openly militarist and imperialist position, one that, in some respect, converged with the arguments advanced by Anglo-Saxon unionists.

Wilshire’s turn toward militarism and Imperial Federation (1909–1912)

Wilshire believed that under existing conditions, a war with Japan was increasingly unavoidable and that, if it occurred in the immediate future, the United States would likely suffer defeat. So instead of reiterating the possibility of ceding the Philippines, he endorsed an openly militaristic stance in favor of urgent preparations on a democratic basis. He declared:

If we are to have war, and I think we are to have it, we either must build a navy now or after war begins . . . As for the army, there is much more opportunity for us to get a democratic popular control of it to-day, when there is no war feeling, than there is if we wait until war has arisen. An army raised under these circumstances can easily fall into the hands of a military dictator, who will use it for his own purposes. The time to act is right now (Wilshire, 1909a: 1).

Moreover, in the same year, he partially revised his statements regarding the war and the crisis. Since the world economy showed signs of recovery without a war breaking out, Wilshire admitted that he had been wrong in his interpretation and pointed out that the global arms race had had an economic effect similar to that of war:

Every large nation in the world is either building “Dreadnoughts,” or contemplating building them, and now England finds that she must build an indefinite number more of these ten-million-dollar ships. The cost of building of “Dreadnoughts” is about equivalent to the cost of war itself as things were a few years ago. If things continue, the world will actually be spending much more every year on preparations for war than two nations would have spent in actually carrying on war ten years ago (Wilshire, 1909c: 6).

Wilshire recognized that he had been mistaken in assuming that only a great world war could pull capitalism out of its crisis, but he corrected his diagnosis by pointing out that the war economy—even if only preparatory—could have similar effects on accumulation and the economic cycle. In this respect, he closely followed developments in military technology, particularly the emergence of aircraft. For instance, he reviewed H. G. Wells’s novel The War in the Air (1908), which anticipated the outbreak of a global conflict and emphasized the role that aerial warfare—especially zeppelins—would play in it (Wilshire, 1909b: 17–18).

However, this did not lead him to reject the construction of a navy. On the contrary, in 1911, he reaffirmed its necessity in light of ongoing discussions within British socialism, particularly the controversy between Henry Hyndman and Herbert Burrows over naval policy. Commenting on this debate, he emphasized that:

The whole amount of the matter is that this discussion is between the idealist, like Burrows, with both head and feet in the clouds, and the more practical idealist like Hyndman, whose head may be in the clouds, but who at any rate keeps his feet on terra firma. . . . If the vast majority of people of England were convinced that a fleet is not only necessary for England to hold her empire, but also to actually protect her from invasion, it may be accepted that there would be a fleet.

With the increasing dominancy of Germany in the industry of the world it would seem a foregone conclusion that this must be followed up by a tendency for Germany to likewise gain a world military dominancy.

We may deplore war as much as we will, but inasmuch as competition itself is war, it is logical that as long as competition remains in the industrial world that militarism must remain in the political world (Wilshire, 1911c: 2).

In this context of diplomatic crisis and growing fears of war, Wilshire reformulated his views on militarism and imperialism within the framework of the Anglophone sphere of debate. Consequently, he adopted a position in favor of building up a navy, thereby distancing himself from both the Second International and the SPA, which at the time was openly critic such policy. ⁹

This shift also led him toward an increasingly imperialist outlook, as he embraced a position fully aligned with an anglophile perspective that closely resembled Wells’s scheme as outlined in Anticipations. This change occurred in the context of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and the discussions of a reciprocity treaty with Canada in 1911, two central historical events that announced the possibility of U.S. intervention in both countries. ¹⁰

Regarding Canada, we have seen previously how he had showed an increasing affinity for the British political system and even accepted the scheme for a stronger union between Great Britain and the United States outlined by Wells but only rejected it because of the final capitalist cataclysm was soon to come. As the reciprocity treaty was discussed, Wilshire emphasized that the possible path to achieving socialism was through the establishment of an Imperial Federation, where the British colonies would have representation in parliament:

Of course, sooner or later there must be formed a new body, the present British Parliament must have within it representatives from the Colonies. This is not as easy a solution of the difficulty of how the Colonies are to be represented as might be at first glance thought, because being represented in Parliament naturally diminishes the very thing now most jealously guarded, autonomy.

However, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Sooner or later the Colonies must surrender some of their autonomy in order to get the complete benefits of Imperial Federation. I say “Imperial” because “Imperial” is the word now in use in this connection, but at the same time I know that the final federation will be fully democratic and be without either King or President.

We may have to wait for this however until we have the “Federation of Man” (Wilshire, 1911e: 2).

Wilshire argued that the British imperial union offered better conditions for achieving socialism more quickly and “with much less friction and rupture” than the United States, which were “unhampered by an absurd Supreme Court and antiquated constitution.” This view was expressed together with speeches of the Prime Minister Asquith, who emphasized the combination of local autonomy of dependencies, protectorates, and colonies, within a common imperial framework while serving loyally to the metropolis. Wilshire took this notion as progressive, allowing for “the unlimited possibility of absolute change” (Wilshire, 1911e: 6).

This anglophile turn had an impact on his views on Mexico, which he analyzed closely. In agreement with the majority of the SPA, Wilshire saw the Madero revolution as a favorable and a necessary step in the nation’s social and economic evolution:

The Diaz régime, a despotism based on peonage, or practically slave labor, must eventually give way to the modern wage labor system, under which property interests are quite as secure, if not more so. Though the change will be of little immediate benefit to the Mexican working class, it is none the less a necessary step in the progress of the nation, and will afford a more favorable field upon which to continue the struggle which will eventually lead to the abolition of the wage labor system itself and the final emancipation of the workers through collective ownership of the means of life (Wilshire, 1911a: 8).

He even took an active role in defending the freedom of speech and liberation of some political prisoners, who had spoken out against the Diaz regime. In 1909, Wilshire had already organized a meeting in New York in support of the freedom of Carlo de Fonaro, author of the book Díaz, Czar of Mexico: an arraignment (1909) (Wilshire, 1911d).

When the United States deployed its troops on the border with Mexico in 1910, in what was known as the “Maneuver Division,” he predicted that they would invade, suppress the Mexican Revolution, and eventually annex Mexico (Wilshire, 1911b). Instead of opposing a possible intervention, Wilshire embraced this possibility as a convenient mean for its political development. In “The Collapse of the Diaz legend,” he pointed out that Madero was too weak to hold power and that the country was not ready for true democracy, as the population was “too indigenous, superstitious, and ignorant” to sustain a democratic system (Wilshire, 1912a: 2). Consequently, he openly proposed that the United States intervene in Mexico to arrange an Imperial Federation that bonded together the North American continent, from Canada to Panama. Consistent with his previous criticism on the American government, and in line with many Anglo-Saxon unionists, he holded that this political scheme could only be feasible along the lines of a Canadian government:

the best future for Mexico would be for the United States to abolish her Constitution and adopt the Canadian system of responsible party government, tempered with the initiative and referendum and then unite with Canada for a federated North America from pole to Panama (Wilshire, 1912a: 2).

In short, Wilshire came to embrace an imperialist plan grounded in his positive assessment of the political system of the British Empire, a position that placed his proposal for an Imperial Federation within the more maximalist projects—such as that advanced by H. G. Wells—that advocated some form of political unification of the Anglo-Saxon world. Indeed, Wilshire’s proposal contained key elements of this type of project, as described by Bell (2020), insofar as it rested on assumptions of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority and was limited by the logic of the “color line.” These assumptions were evident in his vision of a federated North America, in which he denied the Mexican population the capacity for self-government on openly racial grounds and supported restrictions on Asian immigration to the United States.

Yet two important differences distinguished Wilshire’s project from other contemporary schemes since he envisioned his federation within the specific context of American imperialism. First, while the most ambitious projects for Anglo-American union foresaw the political unification of the English-speaking world, Wilshire proposed a federated North America extending from Canada to Panama and incorporating non-Anglo-Saxon populations. Second, whereas “the most ambitious projects for Anglo-American synthesis promoted the idea of a global racial peace—the abolition of war through the unification of Britain and the United States” (Bell, 2020, 303) or presented ambiguous schemes such as Well’s “New Republic”, Wilshire regarded an Imperial Federation primarily as a means of achieving socialism “with much less friction and rupture.” As the next section will show, he contended another remedy for avoiding war.

From trust theory to revolutionary syndicalism: Wilshire and the First World War (1912–1915)

In 1912, another significant turn occurred in Wilshire’s political career. In June of that year, the magazine’s editorial headquarters was moved to Great Britain, a change that coincided with a reduction in the number of pages and the interruption of its monthly publication. The publication abandoned the motto “Let the nation own the trusts,” and references to the trusts largely disappeared from its pages. This reflected a shift in Wilshire’s concerns, from the dynamics of capitalism to the organization of labor and its capacity for direct action, as he adopted a revolutionary syndicalist stance and distanced himself from the SPA. ¹¹

From 1912 onwards, Wilshire’s Magazine was decidedly focused on unionist themes. It covered the London dockers’ strike in that year and highlighted the participation of key figures in British trade unionism such as Thomas Mann and Guy Bowman. ¹² He declared:

I will not now declare that political action in America is altogether superfluous, but I unhesitatingly do declare that the direct action of the workers when industrially united will not only be of much the superior importance, but that the industrial organization which the workers will form will itself be the beginnings of the framework of the future Industrial Democracy which is destined to absorb and destroy our present political government.

The aim of Socialists should be to assist the workers in perfecting their industrial organizations until those organizations shall have become powerful enough to dictate to the present State (Wilshire, 1912b: 3).

Likewise, Wilshire closely related the use of the general strike to the outbreak of war. This was a historically debated topic at the congresses of the Second International, where it found its detractors who considered it a utopian means and those who openly embraced it. Wilshire believed that a general strike could prevent a European war, which brought him closer to figures such as Édouard Vaillant or Keir Hardie (Wilshire, 1912c).

However, when the First World War broke out, he adopted, together with many British socialists, an anti-German stance. He argued that German despotism was a threat to European freedom, and that a German victory would lead to the “prussianization of the world”. Consequently, he saw in an Allied victory a great step toward freedom and democracy, as well as the eventual reduction of military expenditures (Wilshire, 1915: 2). He therefore maintained that there was no faster way to end the war than with American intervention:

I am not advocating America joining with the allies against Germany through any animosity against the Germans as individuals, but because of my repugnance to the feudal autocracy which her victory would surely impose upon the rest of the world, America included. If Americans wish to retain their present liberties, then the time to strike for them is now, when they will have the help of France, Russia and England (Wilshire, 1915: 2).

By the early 1910s, Wilshire’s political thought had undergone a profound reorientation. His growing Anglophilia and open defense of imperial federation coincided with a gradual abandonment of his earlier deterministic belief in the imminent collapse of capitalism. In its place, he increasingly emphasized the role of workers’ organization and direct industrial action as the motor of social transformation. This shift was reinforced by his relocation to London and his engagement with the militant trade unionism that characterized British labor unrest in these years. As a result, Wilshire came to combine an imperial and Anglophone geopolitical outlook with a revolutionary syndicalist conception of social change. These tensions would become even more evident with the outbreak of the First World War, when he fully embraced a position in favor of the U.S. intervention.

After returning to the United States during the war, Wilshire’s influence rapidly declined. His magazine ceased publication in 1915, and he adopted an increasingly nationalist stance, attacking antiwar socialists. Although he initially condemned the Bolshevik Revolution, he later interpreted the Soviet system as a possible outcome of syndicalist theory. In the postwar years, he withdrew from political life and died in 1927 (Quint, 1974: 80–81).

Conclusion: Wilshire and the Anglophone sphere of thought

What does Wilshire’s trajectory reveal about the American socialist thought on imperialism in the early 20th century? First, it illustrates that the analysis of imperialism—and of related questions such as war, colonialism, militarism, and national defense—were not always linear or internally coherent. On the contrary, socialist thinkers frequently faced complex tensions between their commitment to internationalism and peace and the practical question of how socialism could be achieved within a political context deeply marked by racism, nationalism, and imperial rivalry. In Wilshire’s case, this tension was particularly visible in the relationship between theory and political practice. His early interpretation of imperialism, grounded in a deterministic reading of capitalist expansion and crisis, left little room for political action. Yet when confronted with concrete political crises—such as the prospect of war with Japan or the growing likelihood of a European conflict—Wilshire did not hesitate to abandon parts of his earlier theoretical framework in favor of concrete political positions, such as the proposal of an Imperial Federation or the general strike.

Second, Wilshire’s trajectory also reveals how difficult it was for socialist thinkers to escape the ideological constraints of their political context. Like many contemporaries, Wilshire’s views were shaped by racial assumptions and by the broader culture of Anglo-Saxonism that permeated political debate in both the United States and Great Britain and were directly opposed to the principles of international brotherhood. His opposition to Japanese immigration and his characterization of the Mexican population as incapable of self-government illustrate the extent to which socialist critiques of imperialism could coexist with racial hierarchies and exclusionary national visions. In this respect, Wilshire’s trajectory presents some parallels with figures such as Eduard Bernstein, who partially accepted the “civilising mission” of European colonialism, or Henry Hyndman, who by the outbreak of the First World War had adopted a nationalist and pro-militarist stance against Germany while remaining formally committed to socialism.

Third, Wilshire’s intellectual development highlights the importance of the Anglophone sphere of debate in shaping socialist discussions of imperialism in the United States. Rather than emerging solely from domestic political debates within the SPA, Wilshire’s reflections were deeply embedded in transatlantic exchanges with British socialist thinkers and publicists. His engagement with authors such as Herbert Wells revealed his growing sympathy for schemes of Anglo-American political union and illustrates how these ideas were received and adapted within the context of American imperialism.

In this sense, Wilshire’s career reveals a striking paradox. The first American socialist to develop a systematic interpretation of imperialism ultimately ended up, however briefly, defending some of its concrete political manifestations. Far from being a simple inconsistency, this evolution reflects the ideological ambiguities that shaped socialist responses to imperialism during the age of global rivalry and war.