This is the man for whom Wilshire Boulevard, in Los Angeles, is named. The Monty Python line, "Zany Marxist Tycoon", describes this eccentric well. He ran for Congress in New York State as a Socialist candidate in 1904 - this Columbia
cylinder dates from that campaign - and the rhetoric in this speech hasn't aged a day since then. What you will hear is part one of the speech; I have been looking for the other parts and have not found them yet so, for the moment, this is
all there is. Mr. Wilshire later parlayed some cheap land in Los Angeles into a decent fortune (he was a Socialist, not a Communist). He also marketed an electromagnetic healing device called the "I-On-A-Co". (The
American Artifacts web site has an interesting write-up on this device and its successor, the "Theronoid".) My sample of this cylinder has been on-line
since the year 2000, and for its tenth anniversary I re-processed the sample with newer software. The results are much clearer than earlier attempts.
