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

by McGilligan, Patrick

  Still, resentment simmered until the union contract came up for its annual renewal in the fall of 1907. The international had spent the intervening months quietly importing hardened partisans to Kenosha and slipping them onto the Badger Brass rolls. The company suspected as much and anticipated a showdown. Presented with fresh union demands for reduced hours with higher pay, the company again refused to budge, and this time management announced that the weak economy was forcing the company to revert to the ten-hour workday for nine hours’ pay in most departments and job classifications. All but sixty of the three hundred Badger Brass workers marched out of the factory in September, with the rest following soon thereafter.

  This time, Badger Brass showed an iron fist. The company denounced the outside “agitators and disturbers” who had flooded into Kenosha to stir up discontent. Badger Brass was the largest unionized lamp factory in the United States, the company insisted in press statements, and it offered higher salaries and better working conditions than any other similar-size firm. Decent-minded Kenosha laborers were being led astray by outside ideological “fanatics.”

  With another Yule—George’s younger brother William—stepping in as the obdurate public spokesman for the company, management drew the line, declaring Badger Brass an open shop from then on. Strikers and picketers who were found missing from their jobs would be discharged and not hired back. Moreover, if the strike persisted, the Yules threatened grimly, the Kenosha factory would be shut down and all manufacturing moved to the New York branch.

  Thousands of workers from every factory in Kenosha attended mass rallies for the Badger Brass union, held at the same Rhode Opera House where the Welleses had spent so many evenings of carefree entertainment. National union executives and state labor officials visited Kenosha, trying to mediate a compromise acceptable to both sides, but Badger Brass refused to yield. The strike dragged on for two months, and the city’s other factory owners sided with Badger Brass, slashing payrolls and cutting hours across Kenosha.

  In mid-November, the metal and brass union began to knuckle under. Owing to the “unsettled conditions of business,” union leaders announced, the membership was willing to return under the same wages and conditions that had prevailed before the strike. Company officials flatly rejected this peace offer, announcing that Badger Brass had already transferred all its automobile lamp manufacture to New York. Going forward, only the increasingly secondary bicycle lamps would be made in Kenosha—“by machines and girls,” as William Yule declared contemptuously.

  A few dozen men quickly accepted individual contracts proffered by the company and returned to work at the embattled factory, inflaming the strikers who were still picketing. A judge issued an injunction against known militants, who tossed the court papers into the trash in front of reporters.

  The union radicals were persistently harassed by police and company operatives, and violence flared on both sides. There were many scuffles on the picket lines, and on at least one occasion paid company detectives from Milwaukee were swarmed by an angry unionist mob, beaten into submission, and shoved aboard a train heading north to home.

  Dick Welles joined the company’s effort to intimidate militants. One night, the week before Thanksgiving, he and a group of friends and business partners forcibly entered the home of a hard-line unionist named Louis Kekst and dragged him off to the county jail. Kekst later filed a court complaint asserting that he’d been subjected to “physical and mental ills” throughout that night, before being charged with assaulting a deputy sheriff on the picket line. Welles’s fellow vigilantes were William Yule; Charles Hall, Welles’s best friend among the Badger Brass executives; Thomas B. Jeffery, recently named president of the newly organized Kenosha Manufacturers Association; and finally, Charles Pfenning, the sheriff of Kenosha. Kekst sued the five for assault and false imprisonment, claiming that they offered him “immunity and large sums of money” to fabricate testimony impugning fellow strikers.

  Although industrialists often issued spurious warnings about “outside agitators,” Kekst appears to have been just that. He belonged to a small band of out-of-town anarchists who had rushed to the city at the start of the Badger Brass strike, setting several small fires near the factory while hatching plans to blow up the main plant. They left evidence behind—drawings of “infernal machines” they intended to wedge into ventilator spaces in the plant. Company detectives infiltrated the anarchist conspiracy and broke it up, and Kekst’s lawsuit fizzled when the troublemaker skipped town. By Christmas 1907, the war was all but over.

  That Christmas was “one of the quietest holidays ever known,” but also one of the unhappiest, in the deeply divided city, according to the Kenosha News. Negotiations at the Hotel Eichelman failed to click, and by February Badger Brass had “practically gone out of business” in Kenosha. Not until mid-March did the union men throw in the towel, saying that the remaining strikers would return to their jobs, if and when they were offered individual contracts under the new open shop agreement. But local strike leaders and known radicals were passed over in the slow rehiring process, while others returned to jobs that now paid 10 to 12 percent less than they had before the strike. The union had been destroyed.

  Dick Welles had fought as hard on behalf of the company as radicals had for the union, and he became a hero to the industrialists of Kenosha and other factory owners trying to hold the line across America. The company brought its auto lamp business back from New York—it had been bluffing after all—and Badger Brass profits surged anew.

  Yet Orson’s father was also a leader behind the scenes as Badger Brass took steps to effect a lasting reconciliation. The company instituted unusual employee perquisites, including on-site night school for its workers and annual employee picnics and parties on holidays. And despite the ugly events of 1907, Badger Brass managed to preserve its reputation as a good place to work—one of the best in Kenosha—when it came to pay, conditions, and fringe benefits.

  The public persona Beatrice Welles presented during these dramatic times was as complex as her husband’s. She maintained a discreet profile as labor tensions simmered at Badger Brass through the first half of 1907, joining the Whist Club circuit and taking an increasing role in the Shubert Club. Among other speakers at the fortnightly afternoon meetings of the Woman’s Club, held at the spacious Simmons Memorial Library, Beatrice attended Reverend Florence Buck’s lectures on novelists Edith Wharton and Henry James and playwright George Bernard Shaw. In the winter, she and little Richard stole away for a month to Biloxi, Mississippi, on the Gulf of Mexico, and during the summer she embarked with her husband and friends on a special train from Kenosha to Highland Park, in northern Illinois, for an outdoor park presentation of one of her favorite Shakespeare plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, presented by the Ben Greet Players with music by the New York Symphony. And before the worst violence of that fall at Badger Brass, the Welles family spent two weeks mingling with other Kenosha businessmen and their families at the Quarles Camp near the northern town of Mercer. The Quarleses were an influential Kenosha family, with many lawyers and politicians among their number, and the Quarles Camp was probably where the Kenosha factory owners hatched and consolidated their union-busting plans.

  That fall, the Woman’s Club announced its annual schedule of programs extending throughout the rest of the year and into the spring of 1908—including, for the first time, piano recitals by Beatrice Welles.

  Until now, nearly four years after her arrival, Beatrice had never played the piano publicly in Kenosha. She was known to be a talented pianist, performing at dinner parties for friends, but it took the clubwomen by surprise when her first public performance in November—held in a temporary space, the Masonic Temple—filled the parlor to capacity, setting an attendance record. That afternoon, as strikers clashed with scabs and police on the picket lines just blocks away, the ladies heard Beatrice give a charming interpretation of “Six Poems After Heine” by Edward MacDowell, a contemporary American Romanti
c whose work she favored.

  Beatrice began to assume supervision of the club’s programs, arranging a diverse array of entertainment and fund-raising events. One Woman’s Club benefit she booked was an appearance at Rhode Opera House by John T. McCutcheon, the Chicago newspaper artist, who was a friend of hers and her husband’s. McCutcheon was feted in the Welles home. Later in one of his serials McCutcheon would create a character named “Richard Wellborne, alias Dick Wells,” whose disguise as a slovenly chauffeur with mechanical expertise concealed his affluent breeding.

  Beatrice was keenly aware of her husband’s complicity in crushing the Badger Brass labor union, and in 1908 she began to expand her activities into the broader community. At first her outreach to local immigrants and workers had an air of noblesse oblige, as she sought to “uplift” the less fortunate through the arts, public education, and material aid. She arranged musical guests for occasions at the Unitarian Church; one such guest was the celebrated organist Wilhelm Middelschulte, whom she knew from the Chicago Conservatory. After performing for the congregation one Sunday, the organist returned for a church benefit, alternating with Beatrice on her concert grand piano. Beatrice saw to it that tickets were rationed for visitors from Chicago and Kenosha Woman’s Club members who were not Unitarians.

  The Chicago organist may have been the headliner, but “the greatest interest of the evening,” reported the Kenosha News, “centered on the piano solos by Mrs. Welles, which for brilliance of execution, perfection of memorizing and distinction of interpretation, could not have been surpassed.” Beatrice played a gigue by Bach, nocturnes by Chopin, a polonaise, and the Bal d’Enfants after thunderous applause demanded an encore. A few days later, she reprised her program, this time free of charge, for anyone who wished to attend, regardless of religious affiliation or social standing. Taking place at the same time as the looming defeat of the Badger Brass union, it was a distinctly public-spirited gesture.

  Also early in 1908, Beatrice helped to found a church activist group called the Woman’s Alliance to extend aid to the city’s poor. Its first goal was establishing a Progressive Club, offering beneficial training in domestic skills—sewing, cooking, millinery, and physical culture—for young “working girls” mired in factory jobs. “There will be no consideration of nationality or religious affiliation in carrying out the club work,” the Woman’s Alliance declared, marking a departure from the exclusive nature of the older, more staid Woman’s Club.

  In contrast to the elite Woman’s Club, the Unitarian Church, with Florence Buck and Marion Murdoch as its ministers and Beatrice Welles as their chief lieutenant, extended its welcome to all Kenosha citizens regardless of sex, race, ethnicity, or class. The church launched regular rummage sales to benefit the city’s impoverished, and congregants hosted Friday night fish suppers for financially struggling parents and children. These suppers often included entertainment, with Beatrice in charge of the programs, frequently highlighted by her own piano recitals.

  The membership of the Woman’s Club and the Unitarian Church overlapped. Yet owing in large part to Beatrice Welles’s growing activism, increasingly sharp distinctions began to divide the two groups of women, along ideological as well as generational lines.

  The Woman’s Club, led by the early settler families of Kenosha, the wives of the ruling class, prided itself on lofty lectures and artistic presentations. So did the Unitarian Church, which hosted similar recitals, travel lectures, and talks on art and poetry and music. Under Reverend Florence Buck, however, the Kenosha Unitarians increasingly adopted the view that poverty was immoral; that child labor and abuse, tuberculosis, and consumption were among the social ills disproportionately suffered by the underprivileged in society. From the pulpit, Florence Buck was quite capable of linking the teachings of the Bible to a stern critique of U.S. militarism abroad, and of adding her own reflections to the ideas of urban muckraker Jacob Riis; after Riis spoke in Kenosha, for example, she gave a Sunday sermon on “The Struggle of a Working Girl.” For many Kenosha Unitarians, their religious credo of joining their faith to action evolved naturally into a progressive political philosophy.

  Although the Woman’s Club was more conservative-minded, its members did align with the Unitarian Church on many community issues touching on children, family, or education. When Beatrice Welles and the Woman’s Alliance launched a drive to raise money for new playgrounds for the city’s less prosperous neighborhoods, for instance, the older clubwomen took up the cause alongside younger Unitarians. Together the two women’s groups pursued initiatives to stamp out child neglect, upgrade school buildings, and improve city beaches. The Club and the Alliance cohosted the opening-day ceremony for a new bathhouse at Washington Island, ferrying hundreds of children to the island, with peanuts and candy for every child.

  The older clubwomen and younger Unitarians also found a common adversary in longtime Kenosha mayor Matthias J. Scholey, a Democrat who stubbornly opposed additional government funding for public education. Mayor Scholey vowed to veto any legislation that authorized financing for new school buildings, the rebuilding of old ones, or the repairing of rural schools—often the most inadequate, with pupils of all ages herded together in small rooms. Scholey also opposed adding nurses to school staffs, decrying the extra costs, and he regarded the notion of sending four-year-olds to kindergarten as experimental foolery wafted in from Chicago like the stench of sewage. (At the time, public school was not required for city children under seven.)

  Scholey also scorned the idea of open-air schools, another of Beatrice’s pet causes. An avid hiker, swimmer, and physical culture enthusiast, Orson’s mother was in the forefront of the local open-air campaign, which had roots in England but was spreading fast across the United States. Open-air enthusiasts believed that physically weak or sickly children from the poorest families would benefit from special public schools with open windows and outdoor classes. The daily schedule would incorporate fresh air and sunshine, periods of physical activity and rest, and a nutritious diet. Beatrice coaxed many Unitarians and some Woman’s Club members into signing petitions and holding fund-raisers for open-air education.

  Mayor Scholey’s intransigence on public education gave a special urgency to the city’s biennial school board elections, which were always heavily contested. Women still did not enjoy full suffrage in Wisconsin, but as mothers they were granted the right to vote for school board commissioners in Kenosha and elsewhere. In 1909, a new state law was adopted, for the first time also allowing women to run for office as members of local school boards. Beatrice Welles and her friends in both the Unitarian Church and the Woman’s Club, young and older mothers alike, set their sights on electing one of their own to the Kenosha school board.

  Five years before the birth of Orson Welles, a number of leading characters in his parents’ early Kenosha years exited the stage, supplanted by new dramatis personae who would play important roles in the years ahead.

  To general dismay, Reverend Florence Buck announced that she was taking a yearlong leave of absence, relocating to southern California to help care for her partner, Reverend Marion Murdoch, who was seriously ill. Florence Buck’s last public lecture addressed the subject of Halley’s comet, which was soon to reappear, as it does about once every seventy-five years. As usual, during the lecture, she employed a stereopticon—or “magic lantern”—to project photographic slides. Beatrice outdid herself rehearsing the choir for Florence Buck’s final church service, a performance of the cantata Faith and Praise by Chicago composer John A. West. Beatrice conducted the choir, with fourteen interweaving voices accompanied by an organist and by herself at the piano, for an audience of hundreds of parishioners and out-of-town guests.

  Florence Buck would return to Kenosha now and then, but always fleetingly, and she never resumed her ministry there. Yet Beatrice and others in the congregation never forgot her—and Buck and Marion Murdoch never forgot their favorite parishioner. They kept in touch, and Murdoch dedicated a poem to
“B.I.W.” in her slender volume of published poetry, The Hermit Thrush. “White Butterflies” recalled how Beatrice’s music transported hearts to a higher dimension:

  O art, that in her touch o’erwhelms,

  What witchery can be,

  To lend release from lower realms,

  And set the spirit free

  Florence Buck was replaced by the renowned Reverend Rowena Morse, a graduate of the University of Chicago Divinity School. Rowena Morse was every bit the activist that her predecessor was, and during her tenure the meetings of the Woman’s Alliance featured presentations on the persecution of Jews in Russia and on the socialist ideas of the German philosopher Ferdinand Lassalle. But Morse left Kenosha after a year, and though the local Unitarians scrambled for another pastor, the position stayed vacant for months on end.

  In the same month that Florence Buck departed, Mary D. Bradford arrived to lead the Kenosha public schools. Many of the older women knew Mary Bradford from their youth—she was a graduate of Kenosha High School, and later taught there—and she had since earned a national reputation as an educator. When the position of school superintendent opened up in Kenosha, she announced that she was willing to leave her job as a state kindergarten specialist for Wisconsin’s normal schools if the school board would make her the city’s first female head of public education, following a precedent recently set in Chicago.

  The Kenosha school board decided unanimously to offer Bradford a three-year contract, doing away with the customary one-year term. She took a house on Park Avenue in the Library Park district, on the same street and block where the Welles family would move a year or two later. For Beatrice Welles, the void left by Florence Buck’s departure would be filled by Mary Bradford’s friendship, while the flux within the church would consolidate her own role as the leader of the Woman’s Alliance.