Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (18 page)

Soon after the Armistice of 22 June, four members of the library’s staff came back to Paris. They had taken refuge at Angoulême, where they assisted the emergency American Hospital facility. The library remained closed all summer, but Miss Reeder allowed subscribers who rang the bell to borrow and return books. The staff, meanwhile, wrapped books that the American Red Cross, YMCA and Quakers delivered to British prisoners of war in German camps. Some French prisoners wrote to the library requesting English books. ‘It is a funny point that the Germans would allow requests of this kind to come through,’ Miss Reeder noted, ‘but would not allow us to fulfill them.’ Only French books could go to French soldiers. The occupation meant that the supply of new publications in English from Britain and America stopped, but Miss Reeder declined German offers to order them through Berlin.

German officials paid regular calls on the library. Miss Reeder recalled that they always spoke French, because she knew no German and they did not like to use English. She told Clara about one ominous visit from the German
Bibliotheksschütz
(Library Protector), ‘a stiff Prussian-looking officer with full authority to do as he deemed proper in regard to the administration of such centers of intellectual activity, whether in Holland, Belgium, or French occupied territory’. She told Clara that the official in full-dress Nazi uniform made her afraid. But, several minutes into his inspection of the library, she recognized him as the director of the Berlin Library, Dr Hermann Fuchs. They had met at international library conferences before the war and ‘held each other in high esteem, so everything went very smoothly from that moment’. Dr Fuchs praised the library, stating nothing in Europe compared with it. He assured her that it could reopen on two conditions. ‘You will necessarily be bound by the rules imposed on the Bibliothèque Nationale,’ he said, referring to the French National Library, ‘where certain persons may not enter and certain books may not circulate.’ ‘Certain persons’ were Jews, and ‘certain books’ were those on the so-called ‘Bernhard List’ of publications that the Nazis had already banned in Germany and the other occupied territories.

Dorothy Reeder asked whether the banned books had to be burned, as they were in Germany. ‘No, my dear young lady,’ he assured her. ‘What a question between professional librarians! People like us do not destroy books! I said they must not circulate!’ Works by Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis and the journalists William Shirer and H. R. Knickerbocker, along with ten volumes in French, were removed from the shelves and held in Miss Reeder’s office, taking a total of forty books from the stock of 100,000 out of circulation. The American Library fared better than the libraries of the Alliance Israelite and the Freemasons, both of whose entire collections were seized and sent to Germany ‘for purposes of study’. The Germans destroyed the Polish Library.

‘No Jews are allowed in the Library by the Nazi police regulations,’ Miss Reeder complained to the countess. ‘Some of them are our best subscribers, and I don’t see how we can permit them now to take out their books.’ Clara was not troubled. In her brisk, Yankee manner, she dismissed the problem.

On 18 September, the American Library reopened. The New York board of directors sent a telegram: ‘GREETINGS BEST WISHES DR. GROS CONGRATULATIONS COMTESSE CHAMBRUN REEDER ON REOPENING LIBRARY.’ In a letter to the Rockefeller Foundation dated 19 September, Miss Reeder wrote, ‘We are now open to the public between 2 and 5 every afternoon. During the morning, we try to take care of the necessary work which cannot be done when dealing with the public. We still take care of books to the prisoners of war as best we can. We are a staff of four including myself. I do hope this arrangement will continue and that we shall be able to carry on.’ Most of the active subscribers were now French. ‘Few people came to the Library, as a matter of fact,’ Dorothy Reeder wrote, ‘in the first day or two, but as soon as word got round that we were open, there was a rush, which has been growing in size ever since.’ Within a month, the Library had lent 1,500 books.

In September, the Germans introduced food rationing at a mere 1,300 calories a day, about half what an adult needed to survive. The concierge began cooking for staff in the Library. Miss Reeder remarked, ‘It is enough to say that the first day she gave us fried chicken, so you can imagine our joyfulness. The only bad part is that we are all gaining weight.’

Clara had the ‘rare opportunity of sending a letter out of the zone where we are now living’ to Edward Alleyne Sumner in New York on 26 September, eight days after the Library reopened. Sumner had been the Library’s third vice-president. Before his departure from Paris with his wife Ernestine in June, he had lent cars from his American Radiator Company to evacuate staff, particularly the British and Canadians who would be interned, from Paris to Angoulême. In New York, he became chairman of the executive committee with responsibility for the library’s survival in the most difficult moment of its existence. Clara wrote to him on her personal writing paper with ‘58, rue de Vaugirard, VIe’ printed at the top. The typed letter reached Sumner’s New York office on 29 October 1940.

The president of the American Library was Dr Edmund Gros, who was also director of the American Hospital. Directing the two primary American institutions in Paris, at the same time operating on war wounded alongside his surgical colleagues, had taken a toll on a man of seventy years. Dorothy Reeder wrote on 19 September, ‘Dr. Gros has been quite ill and plans to go to the States.’ By the time he left Paris later that month, he had suffered an emotional and physical breakdown. With his departure, the library fell to the charge of Dorothy Reeder and the hospital to Dr Sumner Jackson. Clara worked with Miss Reeder at the library, and Aldebert de Chambrun, for years on the hospital’s board of trustees, assisted Dr Jackson. Edward Sumner found Clara’s letter reassuring, as he did the earlier one from Miss Reeder, and he circulated both to the other trustees. He sought library funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institute. Without financial support, Dorothy Reeder’s and Clara de Chambrun’s hard work would not be enough to preserve the American Library.

AT THE CHÂTEAU DE CANDÉ among his diplomatic and unofficial guests, Charles Eugene 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 this or that efficiency method on the strength that it will save him money. Let us make him understand that he must do it if he loves his business, if he loves his home, if he loves his workers, if he loves his flag.’ With this spiel, the Charles Bedaux Company signed Campbell’s Soup, Gillette, Eastman Kodak, DuPont and Goodrich Rubber. Workers did not share their employers’ benevolent view of Bedaux. The American Federation of Labor claimed that his system, ‘stripped of its pseudo-technical verbiage, is nothing more than a method of forcing the last ounce of effort out of workers at the smallest possible cost in wages’. John L. Lewis’s rival Committee, later Congress, of Industrial Organizations called it ‘the most completely exhausting, inhuman “efficiency” system ever invented’. At a textile plant in Rhode Island and other factories, workers went on strike when management imposed his recommendations. With labour discontent and employer satisfaction, Bedaux’s fortunes increased.

The newly rich Bedaux jettisoned beauty queen Blanche Allen for socialite Fern Lombard. At 5 feet 11 inches, Fern stood 3½ inches taller than Bedaux. She was also several rungs higher on the social ladder. A native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a Christian Scientist, she was the child of a rich industrialist, belonged to the socially pretentious Daughters of the American Revolution and introduced Charles to millionaires with whom he now had a personal, rather than purely business, connection. Among them was ‘Colonel’ Archibald Rogers, whose property in upstate New York adjoined the Hyde Park estate of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy. Charles married Fern in 1917, the year he gained full US citizenship and the United States declared war on Germany. The next year, his first Charles Bedaux Company opened in Cleveland, Ohio. His ex-wife married another millionaire and moved to California with Charles Junior, whom Bedaux rarely saw during his childhood.

Charles and Fern moved to New York in 1920, living in suites that they furnished at the Plaza Hotel and then the Ritz. They also bought a large apartment on Fifth Avenue with a view over Central Park. His first offices were downtown at 17 Battery Place. Wherever he had a long-term consultancy, Bedaux rented a grand house nearby. He claimed later to have lived in twenty-four of the then forty-eight American states. He leased an estate in Marblehead, north of Boston, from the Crowninshield family, one of whom, Frank, edited
Vanity Fair
. The Paris-born Boston Brahmin Frank drew Bedaux into a fashionable and literary world that included Ernest Hemingway, Babe Ruth, financier Bernard Baruch, drama critic Alexander Woollcott and the beautiful playwright Clare Boothe. Bedaux became a figure in the speakeasies and nightclubs of Prohibition-era New York, where he indulged his erotic appetites. He kept an apartment in Greenwich Village for a succession of mistresses. Fern came to accept his infidelities so thoroughly that she brought women to him and occasionally took part in their trysts. ‘Men, women, children, and animals all found Bedaux attractive,’ wrote Janet Flanner, who thought he had a ‘worldly, boldly battered face, dominated by his fine, dark eyes.’ Bedaux, using his wavy brown hair to good effect, exuded Gallic charm, dressed in the finest flannel suits that his tailor could stitch and suavely smoked fifty cigarettes a day.