Review by Bill Doughty
He was a giant of American industry and friend of the Navy, yet he’s nearly forgotten today.
Leading his own companies and as the elected chairman of a group of other companies, Henry J. Kaiser built roads, bridges, dams, and factories. And during World War II he became known as the father of modern shipbuilding as he –– and the men and women he hired –– produced Liberty Ships, Victory Ships, LSTs, CVEs, and tankers. He is credited for producing 1,500 vessels during the war effort.
Kaiser helped build:
- Dams –– Grand Coulee, Bonneville, and Boulder (later renamed Hoover Dam)
- San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge
- Shipyards, ships, and a shipping company
- Kaiser Steel and Kaiser Aluminum
- Complex highway tunnels in Western states
- Kaiser Gypsum Company
- Kaiser Jeep Corporation (sold to AMC in 1970)
- Subdivisions, businesses, and other entities*
Marsh notes, “Concrete he manufactured at the Permanente Plant built docks, runways, and bases in the Pacific Theatre.” In fact, he shipped much of the concrete to Pearl Harbor for the Navy and then built a concrete-producing plant in Hawaii. On the mainland, “Electricity generated by the dams he built fueled war industries on the Columbia River and in the Bay Area.”
As an art project, Kaiser built a stunning summer retreat at Lake Tahoe (later selected by Francis Ford Coppola as the Corleone home in “The Godfather Part II”).
“Liberty Factory” describes in detail how Kaiser’s workers built a ship from keel to launch in ten days and kept top secret a visit by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Portland, Oregon. FDR’s daughter Anna Boettiger launched the Liberty ship SS Joseph N. Teal on Sept. 23, 1942, less than a year after the attack on Pearl Harbor and Oahu.
Henry J. Kaiser showed how infrastructure for workers and families starts with concrete and steel but doesn’t end there.
One of Henry J. Kaiser’s most lasting achievements was the creation of Kaiser Permanente, which is a non-profit foundation, health plan, and group of for-profit hospitals and medical groups. “On his 85th birthday, he told reporters, ‘Of all the thing I’ve done, I expect only to be remembered for my hospitals. They’re the things that are filling the people’s greatest need –– good health.’”
According to Marsh, “Affordable health care was a new idea in 1961 where people could prepay for health services at Kaiser’s hospitals and clinics rather than to higher cost fee-for-service providers…”
Kaiser teamed with a military medical officer to provide TRICARE-like healthcare to his shipyard workers during WWII after success in earlier projects.
“The Kaiser Corporation had adopted the ‘pre-payment’ health care system devised by Doctor Sidney Garfield on an earlier project on the Colorado River Aqueduct. In 1939, he moved his operation to the largest construction site in history –– the Grand Coulee Dam –– to provide care for the 6500 workers and their families. He recruited a team of doctors and nurses to work in a ‘prepaid group practice’ in a local hospital that he turned into a state-of-the-art facility. But as the dam neared completion in 1941, it seemed that the grand experiments reaching the end of its life, until world history intervened. Now, Henry J. Kaiser had a bigger problem: how to provide health care for a workforce that would grow to 30,000 in the first Van-Port yard alone.
Kaiser was convinced that Dr. Garfield could scale up his system, but according to the Kaiser Permanente archive, he first had to persuade the US Army to release the good doctor from military service. This may have been the first favour Henry asked of FDR during the war effort, but it was definitely not the last!”
The first women welders arrived at the Oregon Shipbuilding Company April 15, 1942 –– exactly 79 years ago this month. One of the first two women welders hired had lost a son in the Battle of Bataan in Luzon, Philippines.
The Kaisers paid their workers the highest wages around. By 1944, 30 percent of their workforce was women. They also hired wounded warriors and “found places for amputees, paralyzed workers, the deaf and dumb, the blind and many other individuals who were previously considered unemployable.”
Marsh pulls the story together from various archives, including Kaiser’s company magazine “The Bo’s’n’s Whistle.” “Liberty Factory” includes captivating photos of the men and women who worked together to help win the war in less than four years.
“After Pearl Harbor, the entire USA was mobilized in the war effort in many ways that seemed unimaginable just a year before –– and only appear more remarkable in retrospect. The emergency shipbuilding program on the West Coast immediately began drawing unemployed people from all over the western states and would eventually create over 1.5 million jobs nationwide. Throughout the country, the small cities around the new shipyards were completely unprepared for the dramatic changes the war effort would bring … Needing still more workers, Henry Kaiser scoured the country for recruits, finding thousands of willing volunteers in the prairie states where mechanization had displaced thousands of farm workers.”
Kaiser also sent trains, known as “Kaiser Karavans,” into New York and throughout the south and provided new employment opportunities to African American workers.
Kaiser, who had dropped out of school at 13 and considered a career in photography before finding his passion as a builder, was a consummate communicator and promoter. He believed in open communication and collaboration with his workforce; efficient production and innovation; and incentive, competition, and recognition. He worked closely with Rear Adm. Emory S. Land, Rear Adm. Howard Vickery, and Vice Adm. Lewis Strauss, who introduced the Battle E award.
He embraced challenges and in the footsteps of Teddy Roosevelt, was a champion of progressive practices. In 1950, when the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific picketed a Panamanian-flagged Liberty ship that tried to hire a foreign crew, “Henry Kaiser decided to support the union, bought the ship, and it became the first American ship to be crewed entirely by union members. Kaiser renamed the ship after the union president –– the SS Harry Lundeberg –– and became a public supporter of labour, stipulating union wages on all of his jobs,” according to Marsh.
To learn more about the great titan of shipbuilding and other industries, Marsh recommends Mark S. Foster’s “Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the Modern American West,” a 1989 biography of the great business leader and philanthropist.
The Navy recognized the achievements of Kaiser with the naming of a class of fleet replenishment oilers. Its lead vessel, the first ship named for Henry J. Kaiser, (T-AO-70), went into service for the Military Sealift Command in 1986. One can occasionally see the ship docked at concrete piers at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.
*(Kaiser established the Kaiser Family Foundation in 1948, a private nonprofit organization focusing on healthcare issues. He formed Kaiser-Frazer and Kaiser Motors. He built the Hawaiian Village –– now Hilton Hawaiian Village. And, he ventured into the entertainment business, producing the Maverick TV series starring James Garner as well as Hawaiian Eye, a precursor to Hawaii Five-0. He designed and built the Hawaii Kai community in East Honolulu. And he started Kaiser Broadcasting with TV and radio stations in Hawaii.)
Chief Logistics Specialist Andre Stetz, from Krakow, Poland, monitors the distance between the Military Sealift Command fleet replenishment oiler USNS Henry J. Kaiser (T-AO 187) and the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Sterett (DDG 104) during a replenishment-at-sea while underway conducting routine operations in the Pacific in 2020. (MCSA Drace Wilson)
Military Sealift Command Fleet replenishment oiler USNS Henry J. Kaiser (T-AO 187) departs Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam Aug. 5, 2016 following the conclusion of Rim of the Pacific 2016. Twenty-six nations, more than 40 ships and submarines, more than 200 aircraft and 25,000 personnel participated in RIMPAC in and around the Hawaiian Islands and Southern California. The world's largest international maritime exercise, RIMPAC provides a unique training opportunity that helps participants foster and sustain the cooperative relationships that are critical to ensuring the safety of sea lanes and security on the world's oceans. RIMPAC 2016 was the 25th exercise in the series that began in 1971. During RIMPAC 2012 USNS Henry J. Kaiser took on 900,000 gallons of a 50/50 blend of advanced biofuels and delivered the biofuels to platforms participating in the Great Green Fleet demonstration during the exercise Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 2012. (MC1 Rebecca Wolfbrandt)
Top photo: Henry J. Kaiser is pictured second from left, next to son Edgar, standing, in an open car with FDR visiting the Kaiser Oregon shipyard, St. Johns, Oregon, September 23, 1942, for the launching of the SS Joseph N. Teal; Oregon Gov. Charles Sprague is at left.
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