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

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