The Champagne Safari

In May 1934, Charles Bedaux proposed to venture 1,200 miles over the Rocky Mountains to Telegraph Creek, British Columbia. So began Bedaux's outlandish champagne safari. Floyd Crosby, an Academy Award-winning cinematographer, meticulously documented every stage of the trek. Bedaux had made his fortune as one of the greatest harnessers of mass labour since the Pharoahs. His connections were global, his political leanings suspect. At the age of 22, he discovered ways to make fellow employees work more efficiently, thereby increasing production. He established a consulting firm that not only analysed and streamlined industrial tasks, but also decided the pace at which tasks would be performed. By 1925 Bedaux had a string of blue-chip industrial clients. By 1927, at the age of 40, he was so rich that he bought the Chateau de Condé, a French castle in the Loire Valley which became his principal base of operations. Bedaux's goal was to remain rich and powerful no matter how the world shifted politically. Was Bedaux a Nazi? Historians have fiercely debated the question.