Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation

by Charles Glass

  Miss Reeder told Clara about her work for the American Embassy at the Hôtel Bristol since 14 June. For two and a half months, she had been living in the hotel and had ‘pasted U.S. seals on U.S. and British property, helped take over the British Consul General’s office and tried to console those left stranded … My job was to check to see that only American passports were admitted and to inform all others they could not live there.’ Miss Reeder was either unaware of or ignored the non-American Jews whom Anne Morgan had smuggled into the hotel for their safety. Of her employment by the embassy, she insisted, ‘This in no way interrupted or interfered in my work at the Library.’ She added that she regularly carried books from the library to the Bristol so the Americans there would have something to read. Some were too old to walk to the library, and reading filled the long curfew hours that confined the Americans to the hotel at first from 9 p.m., later relaxed to eleven and finally to midnight.

  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.

  My simple solution recalled the old story of Mahomet and the mountain. I fear it hurt her feelings. I went on: ‘I possess a pair of feet, so do [staff members] Boris [Netchaeff] and Peter. I am ready and willing to carry books to those subscribers who are cut off from them by any such ruling, and feel sure that every member of the staff would be happy to do the same.’

  Would that all of our difficulties could have been so easily arranged?

  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.

  I want particularly that you know what remarkable work Miss Reeder has done during these troublous times. There has never been a day when she has not been at her post at the Library, more than that, except for about twelve days, our institution has been open and accessible to all those who really needed it. For the last week, we have been and shall continue to be open to the public. What I most particularly want to say is this: we on the spot are the only possible judges of what can and must be done; without flattering Miss Reeder or myself, I may say that we are both people of intelligence and are extremely well advised [‘extremely well advised’ is underlined in black ink]. What is done here has been, and will be, the right thing to do, and if you can persuade those who are interested over there to realize this, we shall succeed in keeping the American Library in Paris going and maintain its spirit alive until better times. I am afraid that you will be much shocked upon seeing our president who will whortly [sic] arrive in New York, if not already there. He has had what I fear will prove a knock out blow in all these happenings.

  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, an
d 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.

  TEN

  In Love with Love

  AT THE CHTEAU 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.

  In 1924, Bedaux founded the Washington-Lafayette Institute to improve relations between the United States and France. He brought business and political contacts onto the board. Two members of President Calvin Coolidge’s cabinet, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover and Postmaster General Harry New, belonged, as did the former commander of American forces in France, General John ‘Black Jack’ Pershing. The institute worked out of Bedaux’s company premises on Battery Place, until he moved his offices uptown to an oak-panelled storey of the new and more glamorous Chrysler Building.

  The Bedaux
s, who had no children together, thrived on adventure. No journey was too exhausting or too expensive, and every trip was a new honeymoon. On tyres made by his client Goodrich, they drove across the African continent, east to west, then the full length from the Cape to Cairo, pausing in Southern Rhodesia to inspect mines at their owners’ request. They sailed a schooner across the South Pacific, rode ponies into Tibet and made the first long-distance car journey from the mountains of British Columbia through uncharted brush to Alaska. Much of their route provided the basis for the Alcan Highway that later linked Alaska to the state of Washington. Bedaux loved inventing –patenting a crêpe-soled shoe, data-storage on film to replace paper and several children’s games.

  Bedaux’s business empire expanded beyond the United States–to Britain in 1926, then to France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Holland. In a speech to American businessmen, he reflected on the expansion of commerce beyond national borders: ‘A man loves his country. He makes laws for the glory of his flag. He traces the outline of a national ideal he would like to live up to, but his stomach, his need for trade are essentially international. He is a patriot, and a sincere one, but when his money is concerned, he blissfully commits treason.’