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By Root 2471 0

Bedaux seemed an unlikely dean of the American community in Paris. Three years before welcoming the embassy and hundreds of displaced Americans into his home, he had left New York in disgrace. Time derided him as ‘a Mephistophelean little Franco-American efficiency expert’. The description was accurate. ‘Mephistophelean’ Bedaux had charmed his way to a vast fortune by teaching American industrial barons how to earn more money without extra expense. ‘Little’ Bedaux then weighed only 112 pounds and was 5 foot 7½ inches tall. ‘He reminded himself of Napoleon, because, among other things, both of them were short,’ wrote the New Yorker’s Janet Flanner, who met and interviewed him before the German invasion. ‘Franco-American’ Bedaux was born in France in 1886 and became an American citizen in 1917. As Time noted, he was an expert in industrial efficiency, having refined Charles Winslow Taylor’s late nineteenth-century time and motion techniques to extract the maximum from workers. Bedaux’s life, the Chicago Daily Tribune commented, was ‘a real Horatio Alger story of a poor boy climbing to riches’. Associates called him ‘Charles-the-Man’.

Charles Eugene Bedaux, third of four children of a railway engineer and a seamstress, grew up near Paris at Charenton-le-Pont. Leaving school early, he broke away from his family to hawk for business at the cabarets-cum-brothels of Montmartre in the north of Paris. When a woman shot and killed Bedaux’s employer, a pimp named Henri Ledoux, he left France on a cattle boat for New York. Arriving aged 19 in 1906, he took a variety of low-paid jobs, including bottle washer in a saloon and sandhog, lugging sacks of earth, on the Hudson River Tunnel. That lasted a month, until the bends or exhaustion drove him above ground. He taught French at Berlitz in Philadelphia and took odd jobs all over the Midwest, Oklahoma and Colorado. In 1908, he applied for US citizenship and voted, he said later, in the presidential election for Republican William Howard Taft. Also in 1908, he took a job at the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in St Louis, Missouri, and married a local beauty queen, Blanche de Kressier Allen. A year later, they had a son, whom he named Charles Emile after his father.

At Mallinckrodt, Bedaux said later, he had a revelation: ‘I soon found that engineers had assigned units of measurement to power of all sorts –fuel, water, electrical. Why, I wondered, couldn’t a wholly scientific and mathematical measurement of manpower be ascertained?’ He devised this measurement himself and called it the ‘B’, for Bedaux, unit –sixty units of labour per hour, based on the average worker’s output, above which workers should receive extra pay. An Italian industrial engineer, A. M. Morrini, recruited Bedaux as interpreter on a trip to Europe with a group of consultants who were marketing the older Taylor efficiency system. When the Great War began in 1914, Bedaux was in France with Blanche and Charles Emile. He enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and, after an accident crushed his foot, he was discharged without seeing battle. Back in the United States, Bedaux founded his own company to advise on industrial efficiency. American labour unions would soon condemn the ‘Bedaux System’ as a ‘speed-up’ process that treated workingmen like machines to be measured and exploited to the maximum. Bedaux called it the ‘proper use of manpower for faster output with fewer men’. This was the era of streamlining, when Italian futurists and American industrialists alike were casting away the extraneous, the decorative and the unnecessary–in favour of undiminished speed and efficiency. In 1936, Charlie Chaplin would mock such industrial regimentation in his classic film Modern Times. Its villain was a manager called ‘Mr Billows’, a Bedaux-like efficiency demon and inventor of the ‘Billows Feeding Machine’ that force-fed workers on the assembly line to save time on lunch-breaks.

Bedaux’s mission, he explained to his engineers, transcended mere business: ‘Let us be the missionary. It is no longer our part to coax a man to install