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 Easte
r 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.
Finally, Harriet Bain and Mary Bradford approached Beatrice Welles. Beatrice was reluctant: she considered herself more an artist and a charitable reformer than a political zealot, and above all she feared that running for office would limit her artistic opportunities.
Mary Bradford, who was old enough to be Beatrice’s mother—but was far more of a progressive social crusader—reminded her that running for office would mean safeguarding the future for children like her own son, now eight years old. This argument touched a nerve. Beatrice and her husband worried about little Richard. He was a bright boy who enjoyed reading and music and magic tricks, but he stuttered, and he hadn’t taken to school or made friends easily. Richard needed special attention—the very kind of individual treatment that was a constant issue for the school board. Beatrice was sold.
The news that Beatrice Welles had decided to throw her hat into the ring—coming just days after the Woman’s Club showdown, in which her friends and supporters had been steamrollered—electrified Kenosha. The “antis” had been thrown a gauntlet, and young and old voters, female and male, poured out across the city. And the results gave Kenosha activists the victory they’d long been seeking: Beatrice Welles defeated her opponent, John I. Chester, vice president of the N. R. Allen and Sons tannery, by a vote of 293 to 189.
Though the results were tempered by a disappointment at the top of the ticket—where liberal Republican Dan O. Head had declined to run for a second term as mayor, and Democrat Matthias J. Scholey was returned to office—the headlines were all about Beatrice Welles, the first woman elected to public office in Kenosha’s history. After months of fractiousness, the vast majority of the city reacted with pride and joy, and when Beatrice took her seat at the first meeting the following week, she was greeted with bouquets of flowers and a tremendous ovation from a swarm of well-wishers.
Beatrice Welles’s school board victory enhanced her local celebrity. On June 1, 1914, Kenosha’s only female officeholder gave her first musical performance outside woman’s clubs, church events, or the privacy of her home—an “illustrated recital” at the Guild Hall, featuring the music of Schumann, Wagner, and MacDowell with stereopticon slides, to benefit the Girls’ Progressive Club, her signature community project. “This is the first opportunity the Kenosha public had to enjoy one of these programs,” the Kenosha News reported.
That month Beatrice reached another milestone, launching an activist alternative to the Woman’s Club called the Kenosha City Club, composed of women “from many walks of life” who felt committed to “civic problems.” The club would take up all the issues the Woman’s Club had ignored: health conditions, municipal garbage, and growing poverty and inequities in the city. Convening a luncheon of friends and supporters at the downtown Hotel Borup, Beatrice invited Superintendent of Schools Mary Bradford to be the main speaker, and also gave a talk herself, emphasizing “the real need of Kenosha of a strong organization to take the right side in dealing with all great questions in the municipal life of the city.” For the second meeting, Beatrice called on her friend Zona Gale to address the activist-minded group.
The emergence of the Kenosha City Club outraged the “antis,” who viewed the upstart club as a rebuke of their traditional values. The exodus of suffragist members embarrassed the older clubwomen, especially when it received coverage in the Chicago papers. And now the older, more established club was forced to compete for guest speakers like Gale, Wisconsin’s most famous woman. A conciliator at heart, Beatrice tried to mend fences with the Woman’s Club, giving a piano performance at its last meeting before the summer. But she also threw sharp elbows, and her personality—viewed by some as self-important—made her a divisive symbol of social change among many of the older members.
For the time being, Beatrice redoubled her efforts for the cause. She and Mary Bradford organized a mass meeting marking National Suffrage Day, with Beatrice conducting the Shubert Club choir in “a song of spring” and leading the audience in a sing-along finale of “America.” In June, along with Lottie Jordan, Harriet Bain, and Mary Bradford, Beatrice attended the national suffrage leaders’ banquet at the Congress Hotel in Chicago.
Late in the summer, the group launched “Self-Denial Suffrage Day,” in which local suffragist leaders trimmed unnecessary household expenses and donated the savings to the cause. The brainstorm of Harriet Bain, the idea was picked up nationally. In the fall, Beatrice, Mary Bradford, Harriet Bain, and Lottie Jordan took the train to the state suffragist convention in Milwaukee, joining a peace rally at Immanuel Church and attending a special showing of a pro-suffrage moving picture, Your Girl and Mine, at the Butterfly Theater. Your Girl and Mine was coproduced by William Selig with a company run by suffragist leader Ruth Hanna McCormick, who was head of the congressional committee for the National American Woman Suffrage Association and whose husband was Robert Medill McCormick of the family that owned the Chicago Daily Tribune.
The Kenosha chapter of the Political Equality League was neither the largest nor the most militant of the many affiliated leagues that sprang up across Wisconsin, but in some ways it set the standard for the organization. And the leade
rship’s family ties to the thriving industrialists of Kenosha often made it the state’s most successful chapter in raising money for the cause.
Summer was always full of pleasant distractions. The circus came to town, and so did Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West Show, and a host of barnstorming wrestlers and magicians.
In July 1914, aviation fever swept Kenosha. Dick Welles, the man who had driven the first automobile and the first jitney bus on the city’s streets, now brought the first hydro-aeroplane for three days of exhibition flights. In more than one interview, Orson Welles credited his father with having invented a peculiar air-travel machine—“a glider attached to a steam-driven engine,” according to Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles—with a Negro servant piloting the glider into a crash landing while Dick Welles controlled a wheel from below. But the local press—diligent in covering the Welles family—never made any mention of such an invention, and the claim probably originated with that consummate fictioneer Dr. Maurice Bernstein. (Similarly, biographer Charles Higham insisted that Dick Welles had “presented young fliers at the first air show in northern Wisconsin in 1903, shortly before Orville and Wilbur Wright made their successful pioneer flight at Kitty Hawk.” Again: highly dubious.)
But Dick Welles was genuinely smitten with air travel, and air shows were all the rage by 1914. That summer, on behalf of the Kenosha Retailers Association, Welles lured Chicago aviator Charles C. Witmer to the city to headline an aviation festival, intended to promote Kenosha’s modern firefighting and lifesaving stations. A private pilot for Harold F. McCormick, another member of the influential Chicago family, who was International Harvester’s chairman of the board, Witmer was a pioneer of aviation photography who aspired to be a filmmaker. The aviator brought with him a camera crew and a small group of performers, including Florence Smith, a stage actress well known in Chicago. Witmer planned to involve local citizens and airplane maneuvers in a moving picture comedy set in Kenosha.
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane Page 7