The Bedaux Belt

Introduction George Orwell, in his March 1940 essay “Inside the Whale”, wrote:

To say ‘I accept’ in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films, and political murders.

What was a Bedaux Belt? Here I look at the life of Charles Eugene Bedaux

1. Family and Early Life. Charles Eugene Bedaux was born on 10 October 1886 at Charenton le Pont a village in the Department of the Seine in France. His parents were Charles Emile Bedaux a railway engineer, and Marie Eulalie Bedaux a dressmaker. They had two older sons and later had a daughter and another son. They often moved due to the demands of railway work and because Marie Eulalie Bedaux liked change.

Charles Eugene Bedaux did well at French rural primary schools. He could not cope with the long lessons and strict discipline of the Jean Baptiste Say Secondary School in Paris; was a trouble maker and truant who spent much time in Paris’s red light districts; and left school aged sixteen. He worked briefly in a bookshop, a warehouse and a quarry; and for the boxer, gangster and pimp Henri Ledoux who taught him how to mess it in a scrap i.e. how to handle difficult situations. In return Bedaux persuaded shop girls and girls newly arrived in Paris to work for Ledoux.

In January 1906 Henri Ledoux was shot dead by an unknown woman who was probably one of those whose lives he had ruined. He died in Bedaux’s arms. The police questioned Bedaux but he was vague and the murderer was never caught. Bedaux briefly re-joined his family.

2. The American. On 6 February 1906 Bedaux left France on a cattle ship bound for New York. He worked in a cousin’s watch and clock shop, washed bottles and glasses in a saloon, and sold whiskey on the Lower East Side. It was all the same but had three prices for allegedly different qualities. He delivered journals to bookstores and coffee houses, was a waiter, laboured in a felt factory, and was a sand hog i.e. a digger on the Hudson River Tunnel where he suffered decompression sickness i.e. the bends.

Bedaux later lived and worked in Philadelphia where he taught French, St Louis, Kansas City, a Kansas ranch, an Oklahoma Indian reservation and Denver. In 1908 he got a job at a St Louis chemical works where he helped make cocaine (then legal) and morphine. In 1908 he became an American citizen and married Blanche de Kressier Allen. Their son Charles Emile Bedaux was born in 1909.

Bedaux became interested in work efficiency, noting for instance that women were struggling to move heavy objects, while big heavy handed men did delicate work. He became a freelance efficiency expert and also sold insurance. In 1911-12 he and his family briefly lived in France but they returned to America to avoid his criminal friends. By 1914 he was an efficiency expert for McKeeson and Robbins a business consultancy.

The science of work efficiency was founded by Frederick Winslow Taylor; Harrington Emerson; Frank Bunker Gilbreth and Lilian Evelyn Gilbreth of Cheaper by the Dozen fame; and others. Bedaux believed that they had mostly ignored the effect of physical exhaustion on manual workers. By 1914 he and his family were back in France.

In August 1914 the First World War started. Bedaux joined the Foreign Legion. On 1 December 1914 two soldiers unloading a crate of cannon parts accidentally dropped it on one of Bedaux’s feet. In hospital he developed bacillary hemoptysis. He was honourably discharged from the Foreign Legion on 26 December 1914. He and his family returned to the USA.

3. The multi-millionaire. Once back in the USA Bedaux and his family initially lived at Grand Rapids in Michigan. At first he was an aide for the engineering consultant A. M. Morrini but he then set up his own consultancy. His marriage broke up due to his womanising. In 1917 he and his wife divorced. He remarried that year, his second wife being Fern Lombard,, aged twenty nine. This marriage was childless.

In April 1917 the USA entered the First World War on the allied side. In the resultant spy mania Bedaux was suspected of being a German agent but was exonerated. His business consultancy flourished. In 1919 he moved to Cleveland, Ohio, and established an office there, and in 1920 he moved to New York.

Before Bedaux’s time efficiency experts set standards based on either the best workers or on the average worker. The first method penalised ordinary workers. The second allowed the stronger men to relax. Neither considered the tiredness factor as the day progressed. His system involved using good but not exceptional workers.

Bedaux calculated the time and effort a task (i.e. a B or Belt or Unit) needed and the rest needed in between tasks. Together these formed a Bedaux Unit. He looked for factors beyond the workers’, foremen’s or manager’s control such as obsolete or mal-functioning equipment, uneven movement of supplies, badly planned factories and bottlenecks caused by inefficiency. Under the system workers who met their targets were guaranteed their standard pay. Good workers at all levels got better jobs in the plant.

Most efficiency experts read each other’s books. Bedaux and his subordinates worked in the businesses they investigated including doing manual work. His business became a multi-national consultancy with many subsidiaries. He enjoyed hunting, fishing, shooting and reading and in 1927 he and his wife bought the medieval Chateau de Cande in the Touraine region of France. They had it restored into a luxury residence.

Bedaux’s system had enemies. Workers saw it as a cover for speed-ups and sweating. It was blamed for industrial disputes on both sides of the Atlantic: in 1927 at Campbell’s Soup; in 1928 in New Jersey and American Southern cotton mills which turned violent; in 1929 at the Rover in Coventry; by women workers in 1931 at Wolsey in Leicester; in the Pacific Northwest logging camps in the early 1930’s; at Richard Johnson and Nephew in 1934 in Manchester; and elsewhere including at FIAT in Mussolini’s Fascist Italy during the Great Depression. Professor Peter Davison has an interesting note to Orwell’s mention of Bedaux in the Complete Works*1.

Some criticisms were unfair. For instance, pay cuts were blamed on Bedaux’s system though he strongly opposed them.  In reality bosses cherry-picked the bits of his system they liked while Bedaux failed to answer his critics.

The 1929 Wall Street Crash ruined many businesses but Bedaux had not gambled on the Stock Exchange and his efficiency expertise was needed more than ever. Film cameras had long been use to watch workers working. He streamlined the process to make it less intrusive.

4. The Adventurer. Bedaux and friends toured North Africa by car in 1929-1930 crossing much rough country. He developed the idea of a road and water pipeline across the Sahara. He bought a luxury yacht and toured the Pacific.

In 1934 Bedaux led an expedition across British Colombia in Canada from Edmonton to Telegraph Creek. It first used tracked vehicles. They broke down so he then used pack horses. He was prospecting for a road to link the Pacific Northwest to Alaska in case of a war with Japan.

In 1936 Bedaux visited Russia and examined the Stakhanovite movement. This was allegedly a spontaneous working class productivity drive; but was actually a speed-up imposed from above. George Orwell was later to portray the betrayal of the Stakhanovites in the fate of Boxer in Animal Farm. At first the Russians feted Bedaux but eventually they realised that he had seen too much. He and his wife escaped from Russia with the help of the American Embassy in Moscow.

5. High Stakes. Bedaux and Mrs Wallis Simpson nee Warfield an American divorcee had mutual friends. On 11 December 1936 King Edward VIII of Great Britain abdicated so that he could marry her. In March 1937 she accepted an offer from Bedaux and his wife and took up temporary residence in their Cande Chateau in France. She was later joined by her fiancé who had been created Duke of Windsor.

On 3 June 1937 the Duke of Windsor and Mrs Simpson married at the Cande Chateau in a civil ceremony performed by Charles Mercier the Mayor of Montz. There were sixteen guests. The next day the newly- weds left for an Austrian honeymoon. They then toured Nazi Germany and were warmly greeted at the highest levels

Bedaux’s German subsidiary had been closed by the Nazis in 1933 when they had mistakenly believed it was Jewish owned. It was returned to him in July 1937 in return for a fifty thousand dollar bribe. He never received any income from this restored company and it was closed again six months later.

It was claimed that Bedaux had introduced the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to high level Nazis. In fact they already had strong Nazi links and Bedaux used this in his own interests. He planned to accompany them on a tour of the USA but it met with intense hostility and his tour was cancelled. The upper class allegedly despised a former sandhog while the workers loathed a man who had used his knowledge of manual work to organise speed-ups.

Bedaux returned to Europe pursued by American taxmen who claimed that he owed them $252, 684. He lost control of his American and British companies. He countered by developing interests in Turkey, Greece, India, South Africa and elsewhere. He visited Germany again and allegedly contacted high level opponents of Hitler. He got out on the last flight before the Second World War began in September 1939.

6. A neutral in France. Bedaux then lived in France. He worked with the French government and industrialists to improve industrial efficiency. He opposed counter-productive schemes such as seven day working and concentrated on improving efficiency inside plants.

After the fall of France Bedaux’s company and the homes of his employees were temporarily confiscated by the Nazis. Posing as a willing collaborator he got them restored and did what he could to help his Jewish friends. According to his apologists he allegedly arranged for factories to appear productive when in fact they were not. Some of his work such as organizing the reconstruction of factories that had been badly damaged in air raids did benefit the Nazis; but America was then neutral.

Bedaux developed a social theory called equivalism based on co-operation out of mutual self-interest. He experimented with it in the town of Roquefort but his changes were mostly uncontroversial such as arranging for firebreaks in forests producing timber for the local paper mills.

7. An enemy alien. On 7 December 1941 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Three days later Germany declared war on the USA and Bedaux as an American citizen became an enemy alien in German territory. He and Fern were held in custody at their Cande Chateau home until February 1942 and his company was again confiscated. He got it restored by getting it transferred to his brother Gaston.

Bedaux had before Pearl Harbor got involved in an Abwehr (German military intelligence) plan to capture the Abadan Oil Refinery in Iran. It would then be protected from allied sabotage until German troops advancing from North Africa and Caucasia could secure it. El Alamein and Stalingrad intervened and the plan came to nothing. Bedaux probably guessed this but it looked bad to allied intelligence later on.

In December 1942 Bedaux was in Algeria discussing plans with the Vichy French and the Nazis to build water and peanut oil (sic) pipelines from Nigeria to North Africa on behalf of the Axis powers. After the success of Operation Torch i.e. the allied landings in French North Africa in November 1942 he was arrested by the French and handed over to the Americans who held him a prisoner.

8. The end. On 16 December 1943 Bedaux left North Africa on an American flight. It flew via Nigeria and Brazil and on 23 December 1943 he arrived in Miami. He was initially released but was questioned by the American immigration authorities about his citizenship status. It was established that he was an American citizen. On 15 January 1944 he was arrested and charged with treason.

Bedaux was held in Dade County Gaol in Miami. On 15 February 1944 he took an overdose of barbiturate sleeping pills. He never recovered consciousness and died in the Jackson Memorial Hospital on 18 February 1944. He was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery at Cambridge near Boston, Massachusetts. Fern Bedaux died of natural causes in 1974 aged eighty six. Bedaux’s only known child Charles Emile Bedaux died of natural causes in 1993 aged eighty four.

Conclusion. Charles Eugene Bedaux was a complex man who lived in complex times. The American journalist Janet Flanner wrote a three part article about him that appeared in the New Yorker on 22 September, 6 October and 13 October 1945. It denounced him as a Nazi collaborator and a traitor.

Janet Flanner claimed that Bedaux had got the Duke and Duchess of Windsor involved with the Nazis. In fact they were already closely connected with leading Nazis most notably Joachim Von Ribbentrop, the German Ambassador to London, who became Hitler’s Foreign Minister and was convicted as a war criminal at the Nuremberg Trials and hanged in 1946.

The Canadian Jim Christy’s book The Price of Power – A Biography of Charles Eugene Bedaux (Doubleday, 1984) portrays Bedaux as a brave man who was a resistance fighter from an early date. He allegedly sabotaged industrial production, saved Jews, and had contacts with German resistance figures. It should be said that many Germans who eventually joined the resistance to Hitler only did so when it was obvious that Germany would lose the war.

I take a middle viewpoint. Bedaux was a brave opportunist who was loyal to himself and his friends. To do this he trod an uneasy path between collaboration and resistance. He could have successfully defended himself in a treason trial but this would have endangered his family and friends. Concerning his alleged tax evasion this was a false charge.

Wikipedia links his system to strikes in the Northern French coalfields in 1941. They were triggered by a shortage of soap and inflamed by such proposals as making miners work seven days a work, which he would never have advised. Though they cost the Germans half a million tonnes of coal production, they cost the miners many lives either executed or worked and starved to death in concentration camps or as forced labour in Germany.

The Bedaux System was the basis for the big four European business consultancies that dominated the field for a generation after the Second World War. He was airbrushed from business consultancy history and became a un-person. From the 1960’s the focus of such work changed from improving efficiency in factories or offices to strategic restructuring i.e. deciding what facilities to open or close.

A final note. With a man such as Bedaux we enter the Wilderness of Mirrors. If anyone can prove that I have made any mistakes in this article please let me know.

*

*1 “In London, it [the Bedaux system] led to a major bus strike in 1937, dramatised as Busmen (1938). A document supporting the play’s text, printed in the Nottingham Drama Texts series (1984) refers to Bedaux and provides valuable background to understanding Orwell’s point of view.”