With A Vision- There Is A Future!

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Oakland Has A Great Future!

The Miracle Man

Robert IngrahamJul 5, 2026 

Henry Kaiser at the Richmond Shipyards

Henry J. Kaiser (1882–1967) — the Miracle Man. The man who accomplished—again and again—what others insisted was impossible. In addition to his personal virtues, the story we focus on here is the unprecedented explosion of production which he helped lead. Looking back on those years, what was done seems almost unbelievable today. But it happened. Kaiser’s triumphs weren’t achieved through magic. This was the American System, led by a man of courage and genius.

The son of immigrants, born in a small upstate New York town along the Erie Canal, Henry Kaiser epitomizes what the American Dream meant for immigrant families. His family was semi-impoverished, and Henry left school at the age of 13 to find employment. He never attended high school. His first job was a clerk at a dry-goods store where he made $1.50 per week. He became fascinated with photography, and at 15 years old found employment at a photography studio. For the next 10 years he led a somewhat nomadic life, traveling extensively, continuing his work in photography but also holding a variety of jobs, including a stint working in a brickyard, where he was exposed to the harsh realities of manual labor.

In 1906 Henry relocated to Spokane, Washington and became a hardware salesman. After a few years, he went to work for the J.F. Hill Company, a paving and road contractor. This was at a time when the explosion of automobile ownership had created a nationwide demand for more paved roads. In 1914 Henry formed his own construction company, and between 1914 and 1931 he became the leading road-builder in the Pacific Northwest. By 1931 Henry was 49 years old, and one might assume that road-building had defined his adult career, but he was just getting started.

Henry acquired a reputation for completing contracts with remarkable speed and at a lower cost than his competitors. One reason was that he developed an uncanny skill at coordinating the flow of workers and materials. He also adapted new technology to his construction techniques and he pioneered several inventions which had implications beyond the realm of road-building. In 1916 his company bid on and won the contracts to develop two irrigation projects, both in Oregon. These were, by far, the largest and most ambitious projects he had attempted up to that time. Then in 1926 he won the contract to build the Philbrook Dam in northern California. This would be the turning point of his career.

Kaiser had never built a dam. His partner in the project was Robert LeTourneau, a brilliant inventor of construction equipment and another un-sung hero of the American System. Experts predicted it would take two years to build the Dam. Kaiser and Le Tourneau did it in four months. LeTourneau’s mechanized “Earth Movers” were critical to achieving this speed, as more than $150,000 worth of mechanized equipment were used. These included tractors, powered shovels, a deep subsoiler (to rip up the hard ground) and much more. A 15 mile road was built to bring the mechanized equipment in from the nearest railroad junction. What was not found anywhere on the work site were horses and mules, which were standard at construction sites up to that time.

Kaiser also made sure that the worksite included tents, stoves, bedrolls, food and medical care for his workforce, another priority which became standard on all of his future projects. In his book Mover of Men and Mountains, Robert LeTourneau describes the significance of the Philbrook Dam:

“The Philbrook Dam was a milestone in the engineering business and in my life. It was the first major project in which the new broke entirely away from the old. There was not a mule on the site. We were still using men with shovels and pick axes for clean-up work, but the heavy labor was done with power shovels, mechanized dump trucks and, in the starring role, my scrapers. From the start it was clear that nothing short of an earthquake would stop us from setting an all-time record in dam building.

“For my part, I was getting lessons from a master organizer. At onetime we must have had 1,000 men on the job, with some crews working on digging and others on hauling, and some on concrete mixing, and others on 57 varieties of odd jobs. Kaiser had that big job timed to perfection. More, he knew how to get along with men even when the men didn’t know how to get along with each other.

“The speed with which we completed the Philbrook Dam astonished the construction world, and Kaiser was swamped with offers of even bigger jobs”¹

The proposal to build a dam on the Colorado River, for flood control, irrigation and hydroelectric power had been authorized by Congress in 1928, but it was not until 1931 that the Hoover administration made the decision to move forward with construction. The scope of the project was far too large for one company, so Kaiser spearheaded the formation of Six Companies, Inc., a joint venture that brought together six major construction firms, including the Kaiser Construction Company, the Bechtel Corporation,² the Morrison-Knudsen Company and the Utah Construction Company. Kaiser personally directed the construction of the Hoover Dam and he would serve as Chairman of the Executive Committee for the Six Companies from 1931 to 1936,

The Hoover Dam was to be the largest Dam in the world, the largest ever built in human history. The project would have to tame the mighty Colorado River, which one engineer at the time characterized as a “torrent of red mud roaring through Black Canyon with the speed of a railway train.” The entire project would have to be carried to completion in a remote desolate location, under brutal conditions. During the long summer months daytime temperatures averaged 120◦ Fahrenheit, and during the summer of 1931 a dozen workers died of heat prostration in one week alone.

The project was straightforward:— build a dam more than 700 feet (60 stories) high and 660 feet wide at its base, with a reservoir 110 miles long and the foundations for a 1.2-million-horsepower hydro-electric plant that would generate enough electricity to illuminate seven states.

The job was so immense that nobody could predict the materiel and labor required for each phase. Eventually, more than 4.5 million cubic yards of concrete were used, more than the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had used in all previous federal construction jobs combined. An entire town (Boulder City) had to be built to house the 10,000 workers. Electricity and fuel had to be brought to the site. A railroad was built to bring in the machinery, equipment, raw materials and building supplies.

The engineering challenges were unprecedented, and the solutions were not to be found in textbooks. The builders had to combine current knowledge with imagination and creative insights. No one personified this more than Henry Kaiser, and his approach was hands-on. He visited the site repeatedly, driving thousands of miles round-trip from his home in Oakland. By the spring of 1931 Kaiser knew the canyon better than anyone but job superintendent Frank T. Crowe.

The Hoover Dam was completed in 1936, two years ahead of schedule, and under budget by $4 million. It provided enough water to irrigate 1 million acres, and its generators produced 4 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year (compared to the 16 million kilowatt-hours generated by Niagara Falls).

In September 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt visited the worksite of the near-complete dam. In his remarks, he said:

This morning I came, I saw, and I was conquered as everyone will be who sees for the first time this great feat of mankind. This is an engineering victory of the first order, another great achievement of American resourcefulness, skill, and determination.”

The Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams

Even while construction on Hoover Dam proceeded, Henry Kaiser had already proposed the next great project to his partners in the Six Companies—a dam across the Columbia River in Oregon. Initially, almost all of them opposed this.

The Columbia was treacherous, swift and deep. With a maximum flow of one million feet per second, it was five times as powerful as the Colorado River. Unlike the Hoover Dam site, there was no canyon of solid rock to form a bottleneck and the riverbanks were soft and far apart. There was no way to build diversion tunnels as at Boulder. Most who had studied the proposed site at Bonneville declared that erecting a dam at that location was impossible. As Kaiser said later, “My associates said, ‘You are going to break your heart. That can’t be done. It just can’t be done’. Some of my most intimate associates sat up with me until 4 o’clock in the morning and said, ‘Just don’t try that one.’”

Henry’s son, Edgar Kaiser, would later say:

“Bonneville was without question the most difficult construction project we have ever built. At the start there were no specifications, not even a solid plan. Engineers had to improvise as we went along. There were constant changes. Nothing ever stayed put. One stormy night when the water was high and really roaring, I was afraid we were going to lose our cofferdam so I phoned a supervisor at the dam site, a short distance upstream. ‘Everything is OK’, he reported, ‘I think we’re going to be all right’. Just then, I looked out the window and saw a dark mass approaching. It was one of our cofferdam cribs floating down the river. With it went the unlimited hours of work of hundreds of men. This was a real tragedy. But the will and determination of the men of the camp were unbroken. We could turn from that tragedy back to the drawing board, knowing that we would build again, and yet again, if it happened that way.”

Kaiser was convinced that the team that had built Hoover could build Bonneville. He had assembled a trusted team, including his son Edgar, Clay Bedford, and chief engineer George Havas. The Bonneville Dam—an immense 1,027-foot dam holding back a larger volume of water than Boulder Dam— took four years to build, but it was finished one year ahead of schedule. In addition to electric power generation, the Bonneville Dam was one of the most successful projects in flood control ever built. “They said it couldn’t be done,” Kaiser remarked, “but my kids went ahead and did it.”

Even while the Bonneville Dam was under construction, and before the Hoover Dam was complete, Kaiser bid on a third dam project, what became the Grand Coulee Dam, 350 miles east of the Bonneville Dam, on the Columbia River. He won the bid for the second (construction) phase of the project. Again, it was an enormous undertaking.

At 550 feet tall, the Grand Coulee Dam was somewhat shorter than Hoover, but, at 4,173 feet, it was much wider. It was, up to that time, the largest structure ever built. Three times the concrete used on the Hoover Dam project was needed. To hold back the enormous water pressure, the walls of the Dam were 550 feet thick. Behind the Dam, a reservoir named Lake Roosevelt stretched for 151 miles, with an average width of 4,000 feet and depth of 375 feet. The Dam provided hydro-electric power and water for irrigation through an extensive network of canals.

Toward the end of the 1930s, Kaiser, Bechtel and some of the other partners took on a series of other projects, including the Shasta Dam in northern California. The Six Companies lost the bid for Shasta Dam, but Kaiser (on his own) bid successfully for the contract to supply all the sand, gravel, concrete and cement for the project. At the time Kaiser didn’t own a cement factory and knew nothing about making cement. This put him into the cement business, and this was to be his first entry into industry, as opposed to construction. Later, during World War II, his concrete plant supplied most of the concrete used by the military in the Pacific Theater.

Shasta would prove to be Kaiser’s swan song in dam building, and simultaneously the end of his career in construction. By 1940 he began a second career in manufacturing, and his accomplishments were to prove even more dazzling.

“What man can conceive and imagine he can accomplish. Impossibles are only impossible as thinking makes them so.”
— Henry J. Kaiser

Henry Kaiser’s relationship with the Roosevelt administration was somewhat complicated. On the one hand he and Franklin Roosevelt developed a very close personal bond, but his dealings with many administration officials were often strained or even hostile. Many of the “New Dealers,” e.g., Harold Ickes, considered him an outsider and didn’t want to work with him. Then, when the World War II mobilization arrived, he found himself in constant conflict with William Knudsen, head of the War Production Board, and Jesse Jones, head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. They generally viewed him as the “wild man” of dam building with no experience in manufacturing, and both were very leery to allow him a major role in the war mobilization.

Kaiser’s view was that he and his team could accomplish the impossible, even in a field they knew nothing about. And he would prove that this was true.

Kaiser’s opportunity appeared with a plea from the British. By the winter of 1939/1940 German U-boats were sinking British merchant ships three times faster than they could be replaced. Winston Churchill made a desperate appeal to FDR that the United Kingdom needed 60 new freighters. He stated that without these ships Britain would face starvation, and the war would be lost. He asked, ‘could America help’?

The reality was that American shipyards had never built that many ships in so short a time. At the same time, the nation’s biggest ship companies, the so-called Big Five, didn’t want the contracts. They had all down-sized during the depression years and were already at their limit producing ships for the U.S. Navy.

On his own, with no U.S. government backing, Kaiser invited a group of senior British officials out to California to show them where he would build their new ships. To their amazement he took them out to a series of desolate mudflats on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay. Shivering in the cold, the Britons looked around in confusion.

“But where are your shipyards?” one of them asked.

“There are the shipyards,” Kaiser declared, pointing to the empty mudflats. “It’s true you see nothing now, but within months this vast space will have a shipyard on it with thousands of workers building the ships for you. This is an ideal place.”

One thing that was often said about Henry Kaiser was that he could talk anybody into anything, and on December 21, 1939, with nothing but mudflats and a vision, he signed a contract with the British to produce their ships, with the British government underwriting all of the costs. Next he telephoned his right-hand-man Clay Bedford in Texas. This is how it went:

“Clay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re going to build me a shipyard.”

“Where?”

“Richmond.”

Clay Bedford had earlier held top-level positions in the building of the Boulder, Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams. But in 1939 he had never even seen a shipyard. One week later, Bedford’s top foreman stood in a driving rain and gazed on the mudflats that were to be the site for the new shipyard. He ordered one of his men to drive a bulldozer into the marsh to clear a service road. The bulldozer immediately sank out of sight. This was the beginning of what would become the most famous shipyard in the world.

The experts predicted it would take Kaiser, Bedford and their team six months to build up enough solid ground before they could begin work on the shipyard itself. It took Kaiser’s men three weeks. Truck after truck brought up 300,000 cubic yards of rock and gravel around the clock. In more or less continuous rain, gangs of workmen sank 24,000 iron piles for the shipways and piers. 637,000 cubic yards of silt had to be dredged out of the canal and launch basin where completed ships would get their final outfitting.

When finished, the yard had seven shipways, each 425 feet long. Adjacent to the shipways was a massive building housing the plate shop and assembly bay, as well as a large open area where preassembled parts could be moved and stored until hoisted into place. Each shipway was serviced by cranes that moved along steel tracks set on either side, so that the crane could swing from one slipway back to another. These were the same cranes that Bedford had used building Grand Coulee Dam. He ordered for them to be dismantled and shipped to Richmond.

The key that made it all work was that Kaiser and his top staff took the assembly-line mass production approach of Henry Ford and applied it to ship-building. Prior to this ships had been built one at a time by hand. Hundreds of workers, handling heavy and dangerous tools, swarming into cramped quarters to perform many different functions. Kaiser, his son Edgar and Clay Bedford visited a Ford manufacturing plant and studied the assembly-lines and work-flow. They were convinced this could work in shipbuilding. In addition to simplifying and streamlining the whole process, they made two crucial changes. First, they decided to prefabricate large sections of a vessel separately and then bring the individual sections to the ship’s hull, using the massive cranes. Second, in assembling the parts into a whole, they replaced the use of rivets with welding.

Kaiser had by this time assembled a very close team of trusted engineers and site managers, but among the tens of thousands of individuals hired to work in the shipyards, almost none of them had ever been anywhere near a ship, with backgrounds in farming, construction jobs, sawmills, and lumber camps, not to mention the later army of women who arrived almost completely unskilled. Kaiser knew the work had to be made simple, straightforward and safe.

Most importantly, what Kaiser depended on was the ingenuity of Bedford and his group of engineers to lay out the yard and make the whole process work. Constant improvements in the manufacturing process were a matter of course.

Pearl Harbor and Liberty Ships

The keel of the first ship was laid on April 14, 1941. Two days later the government approved construction of a second shipyard at Richmond. The initial goal—prior to Pearl Harbor—was to build 45 ships a year. This all changed dramatically after December 7, 1941. In January 1942, the Maritime Commission approved a third shipyard at Richmond, and then a fourth. Kaiser was also authorized to build three shipyards in Oregon. There were now a total of fifty-eight shipways in the seven yards.

From the beginning the Kaiser shipyards focused on the production of what were called Liberty Ships, the merchant ships which carried thousands of tons of weapons, equipment, food and other supplies to Britain, Russia and U.S. troops in the war zones. Before Pearl Harbor, the estimate of the U.S. government was that five million tons of shipping would be needed in 1942 and seven million for 1943. Most experts believed this was unachievable. But in February 1942, Franklin Roosevelt ordered the Maritime Commission to reach targets of 9 million tons of new ships for 1942 and a staggering 15 million for 1943. Everyone in the U.S. Navy, the War Production Board and the Maritime Commission was certain that this was impossible.

It was at that moment that the full genius of Kaiser and his team reveled itself.

Three weeks after Pearl Harbor, on December 31, the first Liberty Ship, produced at Richmond Yard #2, was launched. What followed was staggering. The construction pace became furious. In the summer of 1941, there were only 4,000 employees working at Richmond, most living in ramshackle shacks. By the end of 1942, some 80,000 men and women were employed in the yards; a year later there were 100,000. From all over the nation they came— New York, Boston, Texas Oklahoma, Montana, and many black Americans from the deep south.

Kaiser and Bedford’s production genius worked near flawlessly. In 1940 the average time it took to build a ship in the United States was 220 days. This is what Kaiser accomplished in 1942:

• February 154 days (Portland)
• April 86 days (Richmond)
• May 73 days (Portland)
• July 43 days (Portland)
• August 24 days (Richmond)
• September 10 days (Portland)
• 
  

Kaiser simply revolutionized ship-building.

Attending the September christening of the “10 day” ship at the Portland Yards, Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed:

“I am very much inspired by what I have seen, and I wish that every man, woman, and child in these United States could have been here to see the launching and realize its importance in winning the war.”

Henry Kaiser, at the same christening, stated:

“Our original contract called for the delivery of ships in about 150 days. The average in the first World War had been more than 200. Many experts shook their heads and said we could not do it. Yet, here beside us is this great craft — only ten days from keel laying to launching; and in a few days she will be on the ocean bearing cargo to our allies and to our soldiers. It is a miracle no less — a miracle of God and of the genius of free American workmen.

“How long will that ten-day record stand?” Kaiser was asked. “I expect that record to go by the boards in the very near future. Never in my long experience have I seen men so imbued with the joy of achievement as these shipyard workers. I have gotten a tremendous lift myself from the manner in which these men have taken hold and responded to opportunity.”

Kaisers prediction proved accurate. In November 1940 Richmond Yard #2 produced a finished Liberty Ship in 4 days and 15 hours (!), an unchallenged record.

821 Liberty Ships were built in Kaiser shipyards, but they also built more than 600 other ships, including troop transports, tankers, landing craft, and more than 100 warships, including 50 “baby flattop” aircraft carriers. At their peak the seven shipyards employed 197,000 workers. Between 1941 and 1945 the shipyards produced 1,490 ships, 26 percent of the total shipbuilding program of the United States. This for a company that didn’t even exist in 1939.

Between January 1942 and August 1945 the Kaiser shipyards produced 392 ships per year, an average of well more than 1 per day. No other shipyard in the United States came even remotely close to this.

Severe steel shortages were chronic during the war, and in 1941 there were no major steel mills west of the Rockies. Major delays in shipbuilding were the result. On April 21, 1941, in a private meeting with Franklin Roosevelt, Kaiser presented plans for a $150 million steel complex in Fontana, California. FDR was enthusiastic,³ and given that the nation was facing a 4.2-million-ton steel shortfall just two months into the war, other administration officials fell into line. The problem was how to pay for it. Eventually, Jesse Jones of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation reluctantly agreed to loan the money.

Kaiser established Kaiser Steel, and the first integrated steel mill in the history of California began operation on December 1, 1941. By 1943 this plant was producing almost all the steel plating for the ship-building yards on the Pacific coast. After the war, the Fontana plant increased operations, and although it never approached the output of the big steel producers like Bethlehem or Republic, by the 1950s it did supply the majority of steel for use in the western states. Kaiser Steel continued in operation until 1983 when it closed because it could not compete with cheaper Japanese and Korean imports.

Steel was not Kaiser’s only concern as to what was needed for the war mobilization. In February, 1941, Kaiser met with Jesse Jones, now the Federal Loan Administrator, to obtain a loan to build a magnesium factory. Magnesium was called by some the “miracle metal,” because it possessed some of the durability and toughness of steel, but it was much lighter. In 1940 Nazi Germany was producing 100,000 tons of magnesium annually (which they were using in their Stuka dive bombers and other military hardware), while American production was a pitiful 6,500 tons.

Usable magnesium does not occur in nature; it must be refined from magnesite ore. Kaiser built a plant on property his company owned at Permanente, California, in Santa Clara County. Kaiser employed Dr. F. J. Hansgirg, an Austrian scientist and a refugee from the Nazis, who had developed a revolutionary method, called the “Carbothermic Process” to refine the ore. Then Kaiser built a second plant in Manteca, California, which utilized an even more advanced technique, called the “Ferrosilicon Process,” to produce magnesium. During the war, with the exception of one East Coast plant operated by Dow Chemical, the Permanente and Manteca facilities produced all of American magnesium. Total U.S. production increased from 12 million pounds in 1940, to nearly 600 million pounds in early 1944.⁴

A Word about Financing

There are some who accuse Henry Kaiser of amassing his corporate empire off of “big government” spending. The reality is that Kaiser’s career epitomizes the correct approach to the American System of Economics. Kaiser never received one dime in government grants, except for payment on what he produced (e.g., Liberty Ships). The great dams and other infrastructure he built in the pre-war years paid for themselves many times over and created an avalanche of new industries, new cities and millions of productive jobs for the American people. As for his shipyards, steel and magnesium plants and other industrial projects, these were all built with borrowed money, not handouts.

Kaiser was not afraid to borrow. He once said, “Debts are assets. It’s through debts that you get the money to meet payrolls and buy the plants and equipment. Then you finish the job and pay off your debts and everybody is happy.” Alexander Hamilton could not have said it better.

One of the primary, but not sole, lenders to Kaiser was the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. They did not just give the money to Kaiser. Jesse Jones was scrupulous of where the money went, and he and Kaiser had a respectful but often contentious relationship. Yet, by 1950, Kaiser had paid back every cent he had borrowed from the RFC. The final payment of $91,476,989.92 was 

made on November 1 of that year. This is how Public-Private partnerships are supposed to work.

As the War drew to a close in 1945, many economists were predicting a severe post-war recession, if not something worse. Kaiser combated this doomsday mentality and intervened repeatedly with initiatives which would ignite post-war production. He was concerned about the future of America, but also about the future of American citizens—millions of returning soldiers and domestic defense workers—all of whom would soon find themselves without employment.

Kaiser fought as long as he could to keep his shipyards operating. One of his ideas was to transform the Richmond Yards into a center for building up the U.S. Merchant Marine, to build the largest and most modern merchant fleet in the world. He made an official proposal to the administration as early as the Summer of 1944, stating, “We now enjoy strategic location, low-cost production, and an inter-national reputation through established records and world-wide publicity. There is an instant need to capitalize on these fully if favorable competitive position is to be assured.” Kaiser even offered to build half of the vessels at cost, plus a one-dollar profit. Both Maritime Commission Chairman Emory S. Land and FDR himself were very favorable to this proposal, but it died under the Truman administration.

By the summer of 1946, most of the Kaiser shipyard workers had been laid-off, with the Richmond Shipyard #3 down to only 3,500 workers. In October 1946 the Maritime Commission closed the great yards permanently. Kaiser never got over what was done to his shipyards, and he believed that the shipyard workers and the City of Richmond had been betrayed.

Despite this tragic setback, Kaiser was nothing if not an eternal optimist, and he waged a relentless fight for post-war economic expansion. In a 1945 speech he said:

“The new world of the postwar period will have to be supported by a volume and variety and a quantity of production heretofore unknown. That challenging prospect will be met in many regions of the earth, but nowhere will its fulfillment be more convincing than here on the Pacific coast where the outlines of the future are traced in bold relief for all who have the courage to read.”

Two key recommendations which Kaiser stressed were, first, a national plan for public works, dwarfing even what had been accomplished in the 1930s. Kaiser proposed that up to ten billion dollars’ worth of self-liquidating public works projects be undertaken following the war.⁵ Second, perhaps with the tragic example of the Richmond shipyards in mind, he proposed the rapid reconversion by private employers of wartime manufacturing plants for peace-time production.

None of what Kaiser proposed, except in a piecemeal way, was adopted in the immediate post-war years. Kaiser bitterly criticized small-minded Washington, DC bureaucrats, but he placed the bulk of the blame on America’s corporate leadership. In a speech at Washington State College, Kaiser lambasted business leaders:

“Unhappily the remnants of monopoly and vested interests are still with us. They are always selfish, short-sighted, anti-social. They are willing to pay any price to perpetuate their privilege and to prolong that which they think is to their advantage.”

For his part, Kaiser continued to produce. In August 1945 he formed a partnership with a man named Joseph Frazer and went into the automobile business. The next year they purchased the Willow Run factory that Ford had used during the war to produce airplanes but which now stood empty. They were in business.

Kaiser-Frazier Automobile was at first very successful. In 1948 they produced 181,316 vehicles, capturing 5 percent of the American market. Ultimately, Wall Street and the Big Three automakers—Ford, GM and Chrysler—acted to crush the new upstart. By 1949, Kaiser found that he could not buy steel, engines and specialized parts. The Big Three, with their deep pockets, simply cornered the market in these critical materials. The same thing happened with car dealerships, as the Big Three wooed away (or bribed) many of his independently owned car dealerships. Wall Street used loan shark tactics to deny credit and squeeze him for payments. Kaiser-Frazer was simply frozen out.

Kaiser struggled on through the mid-1950s, but eventually he merged the company with Willys-Overland Motors of Toledo, Ohio. At this point Kaiser essentially stopped making automobiles and Kaiser-Willys focused almost exclusively on Jeeps. This continued until 1970 when Edgar Kaiser sold off his interests and pulled out of the auto-business completely.

Kaiser’s other major post-war manufacturing venture had a happier outcome. During the war Kaiser had become convinced of the growing importance of aluminum. In 1946 he moved directly into aluminum production with the creation of the Permanente Metals Corporation in Spokane, Washington. Between 1946 and Henry Kaiser’s death in 1967, Kaiser Aluminum grew exponentially, with facilities all across the United States. No more will be said about it here, except that it still exists to this day.

Today, of course, Kaiser’s name is mostly associated with the Kaiser-Permanente health care system. Kaiser-Permanente is far too vast a topic to discuss here, but there are a few things important to know. It originated not as part of a corporate scheme, but out of compassion for his workers. While building the Grand Coulee Dam in 1934, Kaiser was convinced by his on-site medical advisor, Dr. Sidney Garfield, to oversee the health of his workers. What they decided upon was to establish a voluntary medical withholding payment from each paycheck to provide health insurance in case of injury or illness for every worker and their family members. This began the Kaiser Health Plan—the biggest and most successful private health insurance plan ever established by a business.

At the Richmond shipyards, as tens of thousands of desperate job-seekers arrived looking for employment, emergency medical stations were set up in each shipyard, and a 175-bed field hospital, staffed by sixty doctors, was built. This was so successful that 95 percent of the shipyards’ employees joined the Kaiser Health Plan. Kaiser would build his first permanent hospital 1943, and in 1945 he opened his Health Plan to the general public.

Perhaps it was his hardscrabble existence as a youth, working his way through many jobs involving physical labor, or maybe it was the deeply religious faith of his mother that was a lifetime influence on him, but unlike many of the other titans of industry, Henry Kaiser never considered his workers to be adversaries, let alone enemies. In a speech at LaSalle College in 1944, Kaiser said:

“Some years ago I ventured to say that labor relations were nothing more than human relations. As I understand it, humanity is a broad term which means not only mankind as a whole; it also denotes certain virtues which mark man’s progress toward perfection: kindness, forbearance, sympathy, and understanding.

“It is my belief that the Christian faith rests wholly on a humanitarian basis. The rank and file of labor and management accept Christianity, even though they do not always practice it. Nevertheless, the principle should, and does obtain in all human relationships which build, rather than destroy. I know I speak for countless thousands when I say that both labor and management want to build. When we generalize our hopes in the thought that we want to build a better America, we really mean that we want to build a more abundant life for every American. And this, again, is a Christian precept, preserved in the immortal words: ‘I am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly’. 

There is neither secret nor mystery about labor relations. There is no need for a complicated formula, or for cumbersome legislation. The only approach is the humanitarian one: the ‘give and take’ between men of good will; the wholehearted desire to agree; the will to work together.”

Kaiser believed in taking care of his employees, including higher pay and good working conditions. At the Richmond yards he hired more than 100,000 completely unskilled workers, trained them and then paid them premium wages. Throughout most of his life he rarely experienced a serious labor dispute. The only violent exception was during the first year of building the Hoover Dam, but that was due to the initial horrific working conditions and the presence, in the workforce of IWW and other radical agitators. Kaiser acted as fast as he could to improve conditions, build housing, provide decent food and improve safety conditions, and the labor problems resolved themselves.

Kaiser was attacked publicly by other corporate leaders for his “softness” on labor. This hostility came to a head in 1946 with the threat of nation-wide strike by U.S. Steelworkers. A government mediation board recommended a pay raise of 18 ½ cents per hour. The Steelworkers accepted it, but the steel companies refused, demanding a raise of only 15 cents. A nation-wide steel strike loomed. At that moment, at a press conference in Washington, DC, Henry Kaiser, representing Kaiser Steel, announced he would accept the 18 ½ cents raise. The other steel producers caved in, but they never forgave Henry Kaiser.

Later at a conference of business leaders in Washington, Kaiser told his audience, “If you spent as much time on your labor as your sales, you wouldn’t have any problems with getting the best workers and raising productivity.”

On November 7, 1943, speaking to 7,500 workers at the Brewster Aeronautical plant at La Guardia Airport, the 61 year-old Henry Kaiser began his remarks with the words, “I feel so cheerful I could sing to you.” Then without pause he burst into the refrain from Oklahoma:

Oh, what a beautiful morning,

Oh, what a beautiful day,

I got a beautiful feeling,

Everything’s going our way.

This was not just momentary exuberance. Years earlier, speaking to a reporter at the Richmond shipyards, and gazing out at the multitude of male and female machinists busily assembling ships, Kaiser asked:

“Where else in the world, where else in the world can you see anything like this? . . . Our main business is building people, building ourselves, and those who join us to take on bigger and tougher jobs, building the courage, the faith, the imagination, the will and joy of work. . . I always have to dream up there against the stars”

It is certainly not possible to know for certain what motivated Henry Kaiser, but one aspect of his life is clearly worth considering. Like Abraham Lincoln, he never stopped praising the influence his mother had on his formative years, particularly on the principles he adopted for his life work.

Kaiser’s mother was deeply religious, and he was raised in the Lutheran Church. Later, as he moved around he also joined both Episcopal and Presbyterian churches. He was very active in these churches and served for a time as a lay leader in one of them. Later, as his career overwhelmed his time, his church activities dropped off, but the lasting effects of these past influences stayed with him. Many of his closest friends were devout Christians, including Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, Minister of the Marble Collegiate Church in New York City and Robert Le Tourneau, the inventor who had supplied him with his earth-moving equipment. Le Tourneau was a very religious man, and Kaiser recounts that as they drove on unpaved dusty roads from worksite to worksite, the two men would occupy their time by singing religious songs that both of them knew.

Kaiser loved his workers. He loved to build. He hated small-mindedness and pettiness. His vision for America was much grander. A land of opportunity; a land of manufacturing and technological progress; a productive future for hard-working young Americans, all within the economic power-house of the American System. That is the American Dream.

— END —

Bibliography:

Colby, Robert, “Philbrook Dam: Where Giants Made History,” from Tales of the Paradise Ridge, Butte County Historical Society

Cousins, John, The Man who Built America: Henry J. Kaiser, BizB Press

Foster, Mark, Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the Modern American West, University of Texas Press, 1989

Heiner, Albert, Henry J. Kaiser: Western Colossus, Halo Books, 1991

LeTourneau, R.G. Mover of Men and Mountains, Moody Publishers, 1967

Most, Doug, Launching Liberty, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2025

1 In Mover of Men and Mountains, Le Tourneau went on to say, “There are no big jobs; only small machines. The Panama Canal and the Suez were big only because they were measured with a team of mules and a hand shovel. Today we have machines that could dig a canal across Nicaragua or Arabia so fast they would make most of those “big jobs” an exercise in ditch digging. In the 1920’s the small machine attitude wasn’t just strong, it was a set procedure. One man who didn’t think that way was Henry Kaiser.”

2 Kaiser had formed what would become a deep friendship with Warren “Dad” Bechtel in 1921.

3 FDR thought so highly of Henry Kaiser that he seriously considered him as a Vice-Presidential running-mate in 1944. According to FDR’s cousin, Daisy Suckley, Roosevelt told her that if he decided to not run for reelection, he believed that Kaiser was the most suited to take his place.

4 The magnesium plant was only one part of vast production facilities that Kaiser operated at Permanente. All of these were shut down in the early 21st century, following repeated lawsuits by the Sierra Club and other environmentalist groups.

5 It is useful to note here the proposal, 15 years later, by the former Kaiser employee Ralph Parsons to build the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), which would have been the largest infrastructure project in human history.

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