Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane by Patrick McGilligan

open-air schools. Both called for more truant officers and for stricter enforcement of laws that stipulated compulsory education from ages seven to fourteen. Both advocated “special classes” for delinquent, handicapped, and foreign-born children. Both supported retirement funds for teachers, and annual examinations of children by qualified physicians. Both sought public and private moneys to ensure adequate food and clothing for schoolchildren.
    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