As a result of reading books such as Laurence Gronlund's The Cooperative Commonwealth and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Wayland became a socialist.

In July 1895, he left Ruskin and moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where in August 1895, he started another socialist journal, Appeal to Reason.

In 1904, Appeal to Reason commissioned Upton Sinclair to write a novel about immigrant workers in the Chicago meatpacking houses.

[8] He had been depressed by the recent death of his wife, his failure to convince a majority of Americans of the merits of socialism, and the smear campaign mounted against him by the conservative press.

Afterward, his children and the Appeal to Reason editor Fred Warren successfully sued for damages from newspapers that had published libelous material about Wayland.