Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (6 page)

Their first full year in Kenosha was a decidedly happy one, and by early March 1905 Dick Welles was telling relatives that his wife was pregnant. On March 20 the couple headed to Chicago for the opening night of the Metropolitan Grand Opera season, with Enrico Caruso making his debut in the city as Edgardo in Donizetti’s
Lucia di Lammermoor
at the Auditorium. After the performance they attended a party for Caruso and initiated a friendship with the celebrated tenor. Caruso, a notorious masher, was not immune to Beatrice’s beauty, and in time he would hear her play the piano, admiring her musicianship. Caruso never sang in Kenosha, but whenever he appeared in Milwaukee or Chicago, or if Beatrice happened to be in New York when he was performing, she was in the audience. Later, when Orson’s mother returned to living in Chicago, Caruso faithfully attended her soirees when he was in the city.

“[Caruso] used to be in the house a lot before I was born and when I was a baby,” her son Orson Welles remembered decades later. “There’s a cartoon he made of my mother at the piano. He was a very good cartoonist.”

Business was good at Badger Brass. Solar brand acetylene lamps were selling widely now in England and Europe, and before long sales of Welles’s automobile variant overtook the original bicycle lamp. By late 1904, Badger Brass, with more than one hundred workers, had the seventh-largest payroll in Kenosha. In early 1905 the company moved into a new, larger plant on Lyman Avenue, touted in advertising and publicity as the “largest lamp making plant in the United States.” Dick Welles rushed to New York to organize an East Coast branch with a long-term lease on two floors of the Iron Age Building, at the corner of Twenty-Fifth Street and Eleventh Avenue.

After another protracted business trip east that fall, Welles had only just returned to Kenosha when, on October 7, 1905, Beatrice gave birth to a boy. The baby was christened Richard Ives Welles, his first and middle names a nod to his father and mother.

CHAPTER 2

1905–1915

“Mythically Wonderful” Parents

Though some books have portrayed her as a sophisticate trapped in a suffocating hamlet, Beatrice Welles, not quite twenty-one when she married Dick Welles, thrived in Kenosha, at least at first. Although she arrived as an outsider, she did not lack confidence or charm, and she swiftly found her foothold in the community. In particular, she found a home at the Unitarian Church, where her mother-in-law, Mary Gottfredsen, sat on the board; and at the Woman’s Club—two organizations that were every bit as important to Kenosha as Badger Brass.

The Unitarians were one of the first churches to ordain women, and their congregation in Kenosha was presided over by the young and charismatic Reverend Florence Buck. A highly intelligent and cultured speaker, Florence Buck gave public lectures on artistic and scientific topics, and was an outspoken activist for causes that included public education and feminism. Beatrice stepped up her involvement with the Unitarian Church in the year after her first son’s birth, growing close to Buck and Buck’s associate, Reverend Marion Murdoch. The two Unitarian ministers were so deeply attached in public and private that they were widely presumed to be lesbian lovers.

By Christmas 1906, with little Richard now a year old, Beatrice was ready to make her theatrical debut in Kenosha. The Unitarians were leaving their house of worship—the church building in Kenosha, dedicated in 1867—for a new structure that was in the early stages of construction, and Florence Buck was planning a benefit to raise money for the furnishings. The benefit would feature a dramatic recital of Charles Kingsley’s historical novel
Hypatia; or, New Foes with an Old Face
, set in Roman Egypt, and Beatrice Welles would direct the church and clubwomen in a series of tableaux corresponding to Buck’s recitation—a style of dramatic presentation that was in vogue at the turn of the twentieth century, based on the techniques, developed by François Delsarte, that Beatrice had studied at the Chicago Conservatory. Mrs. Z. G. Simmons, wife of the head of Simmons Manufacturing and president of the Woman’s Club, agreed to portray Hypatia, the fifth-century astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher. Besides directing, Beatrice would play Pelagia, a beautiful woman who lives as a hermit to atone for her sins.

The Kenosha wellborn packed the large Guild Hall auditorium, paying fifty cents a ticket to hear Florence Buck narrate as Beatrice Welles and other costumed society women assumed dignified poses “illustrating the most dramatic points of the story,” reported the
Kenosha News.
The resulting spectacle was “one of the most novel and artistic ever enjoyed” in the city.

Over at Badger Brass, however, clouds darkened the horizon. Almost as soon as it was founded, the company ran into friction from labor activists. After some early skirmishes with workers who wanted improved wages and conditions, the management, under Welles’s enlightened leadership, shrewdly recognized a union shop affiliated with the International Metal Workers Union.

The early twentieth century was a period of tremendous growth and transformation in Kenosha. The city’s earliest settlers had come mainly from New England and New York. When the population exploded, immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia took the skilled positions in city industry, and a later wave, primarily from Italy or eastern Europe, claimed the remaining jobs, largely unskilled. At Badger Brass the skilled metal polishers, buffers, and molders drew better pay and had better working conditions than the less skilled solderers, screw machine hands, press room riveters, and drillers—and this disparity became a sore point for the union.

Like many American cities, Kenosha proved a hotbed of labor agitation in the early years of the century. Unrest dogged all the major factories: Simmons Manufacturing (bedroom furniture), Chicago-Kenosha Hosiery (stockings), and N. R. Allen’s Sons (leather goods). But the city’s brass- and metalworkers were the most comprehensively organized, with thousands of members employed by the Jeffery Company, Chicago Brass, Bain Wagon, and Badger Brass. Thanks to its progressive history with the union, Badger Brass stood out as a bellwether for potential union action, and flare-ups there spread fast to the other brass and metal workshops.

As the company grew, with record earnings again reported in 1906, the union became balky. The less skilled laborers, who worked ten hours but were paid for nine (their wages averaged $2.10 a day), were always the most militant faction and perhaps the largest, but they were constantly outflanked in negotiations by buffers, lamp makers, and other groups that regularly exacted concessions from the company. When Badger Brass union officials reached out to the international organization, the leadership dispatched operatives from Cincinnati and Chicago to rally union solidarity and stage a walkout for uniform higher pay and shorter hours. The advances they sought would set a new national standard for the brass and metal industry.

The trouble came to a head in February 1907. The militant unskilled workers walked out in a job action, sympathetic lamp makers and buffers joined the incipient strike, and soon the Badger Brass factory found itself at a standstill. Dick Welles spoke publicly on behalf of management and represented the company in round-the-clock talks with the strike committee at the downtown Hotel Eichelman. George A. Yule was never very far away from the action, but despite his otherwise liberal politics, he did not care for ultimatums—or unions, for that matter.

Sitting across from Dick Welles and other Badger Brass executives, the brass and metal unionists demanded ten hours’ compensation for a nine-hour day, for all employees. Welles stood his ground, insisting that Badger Brass would not tamper with a contract that was still in force until the fall, but offered a temporary and voluntary nine-hour day for nine hours’ wages, covering most but not all workers. (Some would still be obliged to work ten hours, while earning only nine hours’ pay.) That winter, as it turned out, the union had no appetite for a long work stoppage; within a week the union rescinded the walkout, and the strikers were all hired back.

Still, resentment simmered until the union contract came up for its annual renewal in the fall of 1907. The international had spent the intervening months quietly importing hardened partisans to Kenosha and slipping them onto the Badger Brass rolls. The company suspected as much and anticipated a showdown. Presented with fresh union demands for reduced hours with higher pay, the company again refused to budge, and this time management announced that the weak economy was forcing the company to revert to the ten-hour workday for nine hours’ pay in most departments and job classifications. All but sixty of the three hundred Badger Brass workers marched out of the factory in September, with the rest following soon thereafter.

This time, Badger Brass showed an iron fist. The company denounced the outside “agitators and disturbers” who had flooded into Kenosha to stir up discontent. Badger Brass was the largest unionized lamp factory in the United States, the company insisted in press statements, and it offered higher salaries and better working conditions than any other similar-size firm. Decent-minded Kenosha laborers were being led astray by outside ideological “fanatics.”

With another Yule—George’s younger brother William—stepping in as the obdurate public spokesman for the company, management drew the line, declaring Badger Brass an open shop from then on. Strikers and picketers who were found missing from their jobs would be discharged and not hired back. Moreover, if the strike persisted, the Yules threatened grimly, the Kenosha factory would be shut down and all manufacturing moved to the New York branch.

Thousands of workers from every factory in Kenosha attended mass rallies for the Badger Brass union, held at the same Rhode Opera House where the Welleses had spent so many evenings of carefree entertainment. National union executives and state labor officials visited Kenosha, trying to mediate a compromise acceptable to both sides, but Badger Brass refused to yield. The strike dragged on for two months, and the city’s other factory owners sided with Badger Brass, slashing payrolls and cutting hours across Kenosha.

In mid-November, the metal and brass union began to knuckle under. Owing to the “unsettled conditions of business,” union leaders announced, the membership was willing to return under the same wages and conditions that had prevailed before the strike. Company officials flatly rejected this peace offer, announcing that Badger Brass had already transferred all its automobile lamp manufacture to New York. Going forward, only the increasingly secondary bicycle lamps would be made in Kenosha—“by machines and girls,” as William Yule declared contemptuously.

A few dozen men quickly accepted individual contracts proffered by the company and returned to work at the embattled factory, inflaming the strikers who were still picketing. A judge issued an injunction against known militants, who tossed the court papers into the trash in front of reporters.

The union radicals were persistently harassed by police and company operatives, and violence flared on both sides. There were many scuffles on the picket lines, and on at least one occasion paid company detectives from Milwaukee were swarmed by an angry unionist mob, beaten into submission, and shoved aboard a train heading north to home.

Dick Welles joined the company’s effort to intimidate militants. One night, the week before Thanksgiving, he and a group of friends and business partners forcibly entered the home of a hard-line unionist named Louis Kekst and dragged him off to the county jail. Kekst later filed a court complaint asserting that he’d been subjected to “physical and mental ills” throughout that night, before being charged with assaulting a deputy sheriff on the picket line. Welles’s fellow vigilantes were William Yule; Charles Hall, Welles’s best friend among the Badger Brass executives; Thomas B. Jeffery, recently named president of the newly organized Kenosha Manufacturers Association; and finally, Charles Pfenning, the sheriff of Kenosha. Kekst sued the five for assault and false imprisonment, claiming that they offered him “immunity and large sums of money” to fabricate testimony impugning fellow strikers.

Although industrialists often issued spurious warnings about “outside agitators,” Kekst appears to have been just that. He belonged to a small band of out-of-town anarchists who had rushed to the city at the start of the Badger Brass strike, setting several small fires near the factory while hatching plans to blow up the main plant. They left evidence behind—drawings of “infernal machines” they intended to wedge into ventilator spaces in the plant. Company detectives infiltrated the anarchist conspiracy and broke it up, and Kekst’s lawsuit fizzled when the troublemaker skipped town. By Christmas 1907, the war was all but over.

That Christmas was “one of the quietest holidays ever known,” but also one of the unhappiest, in the deeply divided city, according to the
Kenosha News.
Negotiations at the Hotel Eichelman failed to click, and by February Badger Brass had “practically gone out of business” in Kenosha. Not until mid-March did the union men throw in the towel, saying that the remaining strikers would return to their jobs, if and when they were offered individual contracts under the new open shop agreement. But local strike leaders and known radicals were passed over in the slow rehiring process, while others returned to jobs that now paid 10 to 12 percent less than they had before the strike. The union had been destroyed.