Too Many Systems

A great success story of the 20th Century ended last week with its hero in jail.

Dark, affable, sharp-as-a-broken-bottle Charles E. Bedaux was nabbed in North Africa. Charged with trading with the enemy, he faced a maximum penalty of ten years' imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. Unofficially it was said he had tried to buy up the North African orange crop for the Nazis. Bedaux's record would indicate that his zest for chasing dollars had involved him more deeply.

Arriving in the U.S. in 1906, French-born Bedaux washed dishes, worked as a sand hog, finally evolved the Bedaux system of workmen's pay based on units of production. While organized labor screamed that the system was only the infamous "stretchout" and turned foremen into Simon Legrees, Bedaux made millions. He took out citizenship papers, found a new socialite wife in Michigan, hobnobbed with industrialists, finally became a pal of the Duke of Windsor, later openly admitted: "I am an out & out Fascist."

This admission was made at the time Bedaux's 14th-Century chateau in France was being used for the wedding of the Duke to Mrs. Wallis Warfield Simpson. Thereafter Bedaux's fascist tie-up became more evident. It did not involve Windsor except through Bedaux's attempts to convert the former British king, among others, to a new Bedaux system of "economic and social appeasement." This theory thinly disguised Nazi ideology by advocating the intervention of the state in labor controversies and class frictions (i.e., improving the lot of the masses by putting them in their place).

Last week Bedaux's place seemed reserved for him for some time to come.

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