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

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