Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (9 page)

Mary Bradford brought an air of respectability to the issues she embraced, and hers was one of the few voices that tended to unite the local women. Indeed, she seemed as popular with most Kenosha men as with the women, and larger Wisconsin cities repeatedly tried to lure her away with lucrative offers, which she invariably declined. In November 1911, Bradford was elected president of the Wisconsin State Teachers Association.

Mary Bradford, Beatrice Welles, and their circle of feminists looked ahead to the spring 1912 municipal elections. The two-term Democratic incumbent, Matthias J. Scholey, still a stubborn opponent of school improvements, was vulnerable, having served the past two years simultaneously as a state legislator. His liberal Republican challenger, lumberman Dan O. Head, embraced educational reform, improved public works, regular tax levies, and honest government, along with opposition to “bad houses, wine rooms, and evil dance halls.” The well-liked Head was another relative of Dick Welles’s: the nephew of the banker Welles had sued for the inheritance that helped seed the founding of Badger Brass.

Beatrice and Kenosha’s nascent branch of the National Political Equality League handed out hundreds of flyers and posters crying, “Women, You Must Vote for the Sake of Your Children.” On election night in April, Scholey’s forces were annihilated as Head clinched the mayoralty by a huge margin. A cheering crowd formed downtown, and local women headed up a parade that marched through the streets, shooting off fireworks.

The other election results, however, were discouraging for the sisterhood. Only 169 of an estimated 1,000 eligible women bothered to vote, and the school board results—all the winners were men, the majority of them illiberal—reflected weak support for the feminist agenda. The largest number of women voters in any Kenosha neighborhood, forty, showed up in the Third Ward, near the Welles’s home.

In the wake of the disappointing results, Beatrice, Mary Bradford, and Harriet Bain held many soul-searching conversations about how the movement should respond. The Kenosha Political Equality League announced a summer-long campaign to raise the political consciousness of local women and men, and to prepare for a suffrage referendum to coincide with the statewide fall 1912 election. A bitter debate was raging in the Wisconsin legislature over a proposed bill endorsing women’s suffrage, and as a compromise a state referendum on female enfranchisement had been added to the ballot in the fall. Beatrice and her fellow suffragists fought hard to promote the referendum, donning yellow ribbons emblazoned with “Vote for Women” and giving speeches at county fairs and picnics. Reverend Florence Buck returned to the city to give an address on the subject, and national activists such as Inez Milholland from New York and Jane Addams from Chicago’s Hull House headlined right-to-vote rallies.

Beatrice introduced Addams to a jammed fund-raiser at Rhode Opera House, where the pioneering settlement house worker and social activist described suffrage as the solution to “deplorable social conditions” in every dark corner of American society. “Those departments of city government which are most badly administered are nearest to the woman in the home,” Addams told the Kenoshans, “and only by exercising the privilege of the ballot will she be able to exert influence necessary to take those departments out of the hands of politicians.”

The Kenosha Political Equality League sponsored a full-page advertisement in the main city newspaper on the day before the referendum, invoking Abraham Lincoln and motherhood and explaining “The Reasons for Voting Yes on Women Suffrage.” The advertisement included six hundred women’s signatures, with the name Beatrice Welles conspicuously third on the list.

But many of the older Kenosha women were just as conspicuously absent from the petition, and the gulf between suffragists and anti-suffragists continued to widen. The battle over suffrage tore families apart, even separating some wives from their husbands. The older clubwomen urged Kenosha women to restrict themselves to family and education, warning that too much activism outside the home meant neglecting a woman’s duties inside the home. An “Anti-Suffragette” letter signed by older members of the Woman’s Club appeared on the front page of the
Kenosha News
, suggesting that the lack of significant progress on education issues—public playgrounds, early kindergarten, and clubhouses for the poor—could be blamed on the fact that activists had poured time, money, and energy into the all-consuming suffragist movement.

The 1912 election brought statewide defeat for the suffrage referendum. But while the referendum also lost by 1,809 to 1,338 in Kenosha proper, real progress had been made. The measure had received strong support in the Third Ward, for example, and the overall high number of votes cast in its favor throughout the city attested to the growing legitimacy of the movement. Mary Bradford, who worked hand in glove with the suffragists but escaped the opprobrium heaped on the younger generation, announced that the Kenosha Political Equality League would continue to agitate until women were fully enfranchised.

Not long thereafter, Beatrice Welles, officiating at a tea of seventy-five women at the Unitarian Church, was elected vice president, and Harriet Bain was named as president of the new permanent Kenosha County Political Equality League.

Ironically, while women could vote for the local school board, they could not vote on the suffrage referendum itself. It was crucial therefore that the Kenosha County Political Equality League attract male voters to its cause. Husbands did not always agree with the politics of their wives, and in some notable instances it was the men in Kenosha, not their wives, who waved the suffragist flag. On the day before the November 1912 election, an advertisement in the
Kenosha News
stirred controversy by listing, for the first time, thirty Kenosha men willing to declare they were in favor of suffrage. Richard H. Welles was prominently featured on the list—the only Badger Brass executive listed—along with five ministers and two doctors. Edward Jordan, husband of Lottie Jordan; F. C. Hannahs, Lottie’s father; and H. B. Robinson, husband of suffragist Emma Robinson, were among the brave thirty who went public with their support.

Dick Welles kidded about the subject—he told the
Kenosha News
that his feminism predated his wife’s—but he buttonholed his businessmen friends to sign petitions and contribute money to the cause. He appeared with his wife at public events promoting a wide array of progressive causes, nodding as Beatrice delivered her speeches. And when Dick Welles himself spoke up, as he occasionally did, people listened.

In 1911, Dick Welles had introduced the first jitney “auto buses” to Kenosha. To Welles this was a sideline investment but also a civic improvement, a much-needed supplement to the city’s limited railway service, extending public transportation to its poor and rural areas. In his typical form, Welles promoted the jitneys by driving one of the buses around the streets of Kenosha himself.

The jitney buses quickly became unpopular among certain Library Park elements. Some complained that they whizzed around city streets unsafely, but there was another motive: The jitneys competed with the city’s electric railway line. Moreover, many of the jitney drivers were socialists, opposed to railway monopolies. When the Kenosha city government proposed legislation to restrict and regulate the jitney operators, the drivers denounced the move as a step toward suppression of their profession, and hordes of angry jitney men flocked to a city council hearing to jostle with their well-heeled adversaries.

The crowd hushed when Dick Welles rose to speak at the city council hearing. Everyone knew Welles as a businessman with a heart—and as a man who had a financial interest in the jitneys, and friends among the jitneys’ enemies. “He drove the jitney men from fervid cheering to groans by a really fair discussion,” reported the
Kenosha News.
“He declared that the jitney bus had a right to exist and in the same breath he declared that it was the duty of the council to regulate them. He held that the jitney brought a new economic problem” to Kenosha, but “that it was helping to solve the problem of transportation in cities. He held right after this that reasonable regulation was necessary to have the jitney bus continue.”

It wasn’t the last time Dick Welles made himself heard at a public forum. At a mass meeting on child labor organized by his wife and Mary Bradford, Welles made a speech demanding that the federal government penalize any business that exploited underage workers in the manufacture of newly patented inventions and products. Welles, of course, was an inventor himself, and a man who was careful with money in his professional and personal life, and the crowd was impressed that his commitment to children’s safety inspired him to take such a stand.

Most of the time, Dick Welles left the activism to his wife. He was preoccupied with Badger Brass, which was steadily expanding, adding employees, and logging impressive earnings. But Orson Welles’s father was hardly apolitical, or reactionary, as some accounts—including Orson’s own sketchy musings—have suggested. Dick Welles was especially a kindred spirit to his wife, Beatrice, in the years leading up to Orson’s birth, and he was a complement to her in most ways, including her progressive political activism.

In 1914, the Kenosha activists waged another battle. Wisconsin Republicans had reintroduced the suffrage referendum for the election of November 1914, but the Republican governor, Frances E. McGovern, broke with the progressive La Follette wing of the party and vetoed a second statewide referendum on the issue. The Political Equality League dispatched Beatrice Welles and other local feminists to the state capital, in an effort to overturn the governor’s veto and reinstate the state suffrage referendum for the fall election. Beatrice whipped up a letter-writing campaign and made several trips to Madison to meet with lawmakers. She also reached out to playwright and author Zona Gale, living in the nearby town of Portage, who would become the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for drama, for her 1920 feminist play
Miss Lulu Bett.

Beatrice deeply admired Gale, already a national figure in the suffrage movement, and enlisted her as, in a sense, a guardian angel of the Kenosha feminists. At the fall 1913 meeting of the Political Equality League, Beatrice gave a reading of Zona Gale’s story “Extra Paper.” This spoken-word recital, combining her politics with artistic expression, marked her debut as a diseuse. A short time later, Gale visited Kenosha and shared a podium with Beatrice, extolling the value of public playgrounds.

At the same time, Beatrice’s pet Unitarian Church project, a Progressive Club for young working girls, came to fruition. In October, the Woman’s Alliance took over a small house on Bond Street, offering the girls access to a kitchen (where they learned cooking and nutrition), living room, bathroom, and reading room with books and newspapers, as well as outdoor activities including tennis, volleyball, and hiking. Beatrice had cut back on her public music recitals in favor of social activism, but she often performed for the Girls’ Progressive Club—including on Easter Sunday 1914.

The tensions between the conservative and activist factions in the Woman’s Club had never really gone away, and early in 1914 they would spike. The club was preparing to send three delegates to the upcoming biennial convention of the National Federation of Women’s Clubs in Chicago. Beatrice Welles and her allies asked that at least one suffragist represent their membership in Chicago, to bring the issue of enfranchisement in front of the national organization, which, like the Kenosha club, was reluctant to engage the topic. The suffragists put forth as their candidate Harriet Bain, the head of the Kenosha County Political Equality League, who had exhorted the Woman’s Club to broaden its scope from art and literature to include social inequities. Harriet and Beatrice had annoyed the club’s conservative members repeatedly by pointing to the Chicago Woman’s Club as a model of social commitment.

When the delegates for Chicago were announced in late January, however, Beatrice and her friends were “astonished and indignant,” according to newspaper accounts, to discover that all three were “dyed in the wool” anti-suffragists. When Harriet Bain’s supporters demanded a roll call vote of the full membership, the president, Mrs. L. D. Grace, gaveled them down. The suffragists then called for the club, historically limited to one hundred women of standing, to open itself up to a broader, more “cosmopolitan” (i.e., egalitarian) membership, which would of course bolster their side. The chair tabled their motion. Mrs. Grace brought in a lawyer to block further appeals by the activists, and five wealthy older members resigned, signaling an irreparable breach between the “antis” and the suffragists.

Throughout Kenosha, the public standoff pitted family members and onetime friends against one another. Beatrice Welles’s mother, Lucy Ives, and mother-in-law, Mary Gottfredsen, were close, and they sided reluctantly with their peers among the “antis.” Other Gottfredsens, including Alice, a music teacher who helped Beatrice with the Unitarian choir and the Shubert Club, discreetly aligned themselves with the suffragists. Harriet Bain and Hazel Lance—the latter an “anti” who received an official invitation to the Chicago convention—had been chummy since their schoolgirl days at Kemper School. Although the former classmates lived within two blocks of each other in the Library Park district, they and many others in the feud would “detour to avoid meeting,” as the
Chicago Tribune
, covering the ruckus, reported. Beatrice had a long amicable relationship with her downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Levi C. Graves, a former Woman’s Club president, but Mrs. Graves was anti-suffrage, and their friendship too was now suspended.

The spring 1914 municipal elections became a matter of do or die for the Kenosha County Political Equality League. The activists had to gain a school board seat finally, or all their efforts would look like a fool’s errand. There was only one problem: no woman would offer herself up for the public ordeal of electioneering.