When Edward VIII less than a year ago abdicated the throne of England to marry Wallis Warfield Simpson, it was clear that almost anything he did thereafter would be a painful anticlimax. Last week, the activities of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor attained a crescendo of anticlimax that was almost as newsworthy as the abdication. The crescendo started with the arrival in the U. S. last fortnight of a Mephistophelean little Franco-American efficiency expert, named Charles E. Bedaux, as advance agent for the proposed Windsor tour of the U. S. to study housing and industry, scheduled to start this week (TIME, Nov. 8).
Bedaux Week. To most of the U. S., Efficiency Expert Bedaux has long been a mysterious figure known only as the proprietor of the Chateau de Cande where the Duke and Duchess were married last June and as the inventor of something called the "Bedaux hour."* To U. S. Labor, Efficiency Expert Bedaux is not mysterious at all. Labor regards the Bedaux hour as synonymous with the "stretch-out" and "speed-up," considers Efficiency Expert Bedaux, whose system is used in 1,000 plants throughout the world, one of its bitterest enemies. Arrival of Efficiency Expert Bedaux caused an immediate blast from the labor press which Efficiency Expert Bedaux began by ignoring. Apparently concerned mostly with the fact that the most gala entertainments arranged for the Windsors were a dinner at the home of the British Ambassador in Washington and a luncheon at the White House while Mrs. Roosevelt was away on a lecture tour, he set off for Washington to persuade the State Department to help put the Windsor tour on a more appropriate footing. By this time, he had informed the U. S. that the correct way to address the couple—whom he punctiliously avoided calling by name, referred to them as "my friends"—was "Sir for him, Ma'am for her."
In Washington, where he arrived with a representative of the New York advertising firm of Arthur Kudner, Inc., thus giving the Windsor tour an unfortunate commercial air, Efficiency Expert Bedaux's reception at the State Department was cool. Even cooler was his reception by a group of reporters invited to cocktails at the Mayflower Hotel, which hoped to accommodate Mr. Bedaux's friends when they arrived. Efficiency Expert Bedaux failed to improve matters when, asked whether he was paying for the Windsor tour, he gave a noncommittal answer indicating that he was.
Manifesto— Last year Baltimore's sage, Henry L. Mencken, stated the opinion of a large portion of the English-speaking world when he called the abdication the "greatest story since the Resurrection." Last week Baltimore's most noteworthy response to the Windsor housing tour came not from Sage Mencken but from an American Federation of Labor leader named Joseph P. McCurdy in the form of a resolution unanimously adopted by a meeting of the Baltimore Federation. Excerpts :
"Immediately preceding this visit [to the United States] the former King and his wife .. . visited Nazi Germany. . . .
"[They] have announced that they will study labor in this country under the guidance of Charles Bedaux. . . .