Henry Kaiser's has been called the "father of modern shipbuilding" and was considered the most powerful businessman in the U.S. West during World War II (1939-1945).
Background
Henry John Kaiser was born on May 9, 1882, in Sprout Brook, New York. Both of his parents were emigrants from Steinham, Germany. Henry grew up in a family of modest means. His father, Frank, was a shoemaker. His mother, Mary Yops, first worked in a cheese factory and then became a part-time nurse as the family began to grow. Henry, the youngest of four children, had three older sisters.
Education
Young Henry quit school following the eighth grade at age thirteen. It was not so much to support the family but simply because he was eager to work. His friends described Henry as an energetic, bright individual. He was very outgoing and assertive, yet pleasant. He found a job as a dry goods clerk in the nearby town of Utica. For the next several years through various sales jobs, Henry Kaiser honed his ability to readily sell others on an idea or product. Kaiser's strong combination of charisma and salesmanship made him a very persuasive young man.
Career
During the first decade of the twentieth century, automobiles were just coming into general use. While on his frequent travels as a hardware salesman, Kaiser became increasingly aware of the need for better public streets and roads for the growing number of automobiles. Seeing the business potential, Kaiser left the hardware business in 1909 and joined a cement and gravel company in Spokane to learn the trade. Before long, he began work for a Canadian road construction company. In December 1914 Kaiser took over the company, which was going bankrupt, and quickly rebuilt it. Through the following years, Kaiser gained respect in the construction industry as he built numerous roads in California, Oregon, and Washington. He played a major role in creating the infrastructure (public roads and key facilities) of the West. By 1921 he moved his company headquarters from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Oakland, California. Kaiser enjoyed the economic boom times of the 1920s as new construction nearly doubled in the United States. He established local sand and gravel companies to supply his own road materials. Besides roads, he built various other structures such as dams and levees. He even constructed a highway across Cuba that crossed swamp lands and included five hundred bridges.
With even bigger projects in mind, in 1931 Kaiser joined his company with several others to form Six Companies. They won a government contract to build the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River in southern Nevada. It would be the world's largest dam. Kaiser served as the communication link between the giant company and the federal government. He spent considerable time in Washington, D.C., between 1931 and 1935 gaining knowledge of government contracting processes and making many contacts with administrators of public works.
Of all the businesses Henry Kaiser founded during his career, he is best known for his World War II (1939–45) shipbuilding yards. In 1941 under the Emergency Shipbuilding Program, the U.S. Maritime Commission (USMC) began a massive expansion of the merchant marine fleet. A central part of the program was a standard designed cargo ship called a Liberty Ship. Designed for emergency production, President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945; served 1933–45) referred to them as "ugly ducklings." At first the USMC planned to construct 60 ships for the British, which grew to 112. The first Liberty Ship was completed on September 27, 1941. Over the next year, Kaiser shortened the time of production from 197 days for each ship to 14 days. The record was 4 days, 15 hours, and 30 minutes.
Each of the 441 foot-long ships cost about two million dollars. Each could carry nine thousand tons of cargo inside its hull and airplanes, tanks, or other equipment on its deck. A Liberty Ship could carry 2,840 jeeps, 440 tanks, or 230 million rounds of rifle bullets. A crew of forty-four would sail the ship and some twenty Naval Armed Guards would man the nine large guns, fitted for protection.
Constituting the largest production program for a single type of ship, a total of 2,710 Liberty Ships were built by sixteen shipyards in the United States. Another 119 revised Liberty Ships were also produced. The ships were built in assembly-line fashion, made from parts prefabricated at various other locations. Each ship had 600,000 feet of welded joints. Kaiser's seven yards built 821 ten-ton Liberty Ships and 219 Victory Ships, a slightly improved version of Liberty Ships. Liberty Ships comprised 27 percent of total World War II shipping. Of the 2,710 built, only 200 were lost in action.
The same day a ship was completed, its crew boarded and they set off to sea to join one of hundreds of convoys crossing the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans. The ships were named after prominent deceased Americans, with early American leader Patrick Henry (1736–1799) being the first. Any organization that raised enough money through the sale of war bonds to fund construction of a Liberty Ship could provide a name. In 2003 two Liberty Ships survived as public museums.
Projects. Kaiser also created Boulder City, Nevada, a planned community to house the Hoover Dam workers and their families consisting of about five thousand people. It was the first planned city in the United States during the twentieth century. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945; served 1933–45; see entry) came to dedicate the Hoover Dam in 1935 near its completion.
After completing the Hoover Dam, Six Companies won more government contracts to build the Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams in the late 1930s on the Columbia River in Oregon and Washington. It also won the contract to build the San Francisco Bay Bridge connecting the city of San Francisco, California, with the east side of San Francisco Bay. Though Six Companies failed to win the contract to build the Shasta Dam in northern California, Kaiser's own company became the key supplier of cement for the project beginning in 1939. In order to produce the six million barrels of cement required, Kaiser built the world's largest cement plant, Permanente Cement, that year south of San Francisco.
Though highly successful and nearing the age of sixty, Kaiser would be further propelled into national prominence with the advent of World War II. As German forces expanded through Western Europe in early 1940, Kaiser became concerned about the limited U.S. industrial capacity, especially for steel and aluminum production. He also believed if the United States were drawn into the war, a great demand for shipping would exist. As a result, Kaiser became outspoken about mobilizing U.S. industry. Mobilization became the key word used to describe converting American industry from peacetime to wartime uses. Through his efforts, he built a close friendship with President Roosevelt.
The sudden death of President Roosevelt in April 1945 broke Kaiser's well-placed connection to Washington. With the war over and Roosevelt gone, Kaiser closed his Washington office. Kaiser could constantly predict future U.S. wants and needs. Back when war production was in full stride in 1943, he began planning for an anticipated postwar economic boom. One idea was to produce inexpensive automobiles. The manufacture of automobiles had been suspended during the war, and he anticipated a large demand afterwards. In 1945 Kaiser joined with Joseph W. Frazer, an automobile industry executive, to form the Kaiser-Frazer Corporation. They purchased the large Willow Run plant outside of Detroit, Michigan, that was no longer needed for war production. Sales of the Kaiser cars were good. By September 1947 the company was manufacturing fifteen thousand cars a month. They produced more than three hundred thousand cars in 1947 and 1948, earning $29 million. However, by late 1948 the big car manufacturers of General Motors (GM), Ford, and Chrysler were catching up, thanks to their larger research and development capabilities. The Kaiser cars steadily lost ground until the mid-1950s, when Kaiser stopped production. By then, this endeavor had lost 123 million dollars.
Kaiser's other industries prospered in the postwar period, including Kaiser Steel and Kaiser Aluminum. Kaiser Aluminum remained one of the top three aluminum producers in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1956 he formed Kaiser Industries to oversee the various companies, and in 1962 Kaiser constructed a new high-rise headquarters office building in Oakland, California. However, Kaiser's industrial domain proved less competitive during the Cold War. The Cold War was an intense political and economic rivalry from 1945 to 1991 between the United States and the Soviet Union falling just short of military conflict. Kaiser never gathered the scientists and engineers needed to keep up with the fast-appearing technological innovations. His leadership gave way to other newly rising West Coast industrial entrepreneurs such as Howard Hughes (1905–1976) of Hughes Aircraft.
In 1951 Kaiser's wife, Bess, died after a lengthy illness, and Kaiser married Bess's nurse only weeks later, creating a small scandal. In 1954 he semi-retired to Hawaii, where he built a large resort and cement factory. In 1961 he sold the resort to Hilton for more than twenty-one million dollars. Kaiser also led in the development of the planned community of Hawaii Kai on Oahu. He sponsored radio and television programs, including the popular television series Maverick. Kaiser died in Hawaii on August 24, 1967, after a brief illness. Throughout his life, Kaiser had founded more than one hundred companies. In 1986 the 677-foot long USNS Henry J. Kaiser, a naval refueling ship, was added to the U.S. Navy's Seventh Fleet. It was converted to a tanker in 1995.
Politics
Kaiser, however, was less popular among other industrial leaders. Many disliked his headline notoriety and suspected he was receiving favoritism from Washington because of his close association with the president. Through 1941 other industry leaders opposed some of Kaiser's project proposals, particularly his proposal to build a major steel mill in the West to supply his shipyards. Most steel was produced in the East. However, following the shock of the Japanese bombing of U.S. military installations at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in December 1941, Kaiser received millions of dollars in government loans to build a large steel mill east of Los Angeles in Fontana. Meanwhile, his Permanente plant produced a large portion of the cement used in the Pacific to construct military installations.
In a public poll conducted near war's end in the spring of 1945, the public listed Kaiser as the U.S. civilian who had done the most to help win the war. A 1946 public poll named Kaiser a strong prospect for U.S. president.
Membership
Member Associated General Contractors America (national president); Newcomen Society of North America; Beavers, Beta Gamma Sigma. Clubs: Automobile Old Timers.
Personality
Throughout his life, Henry would always credit his mother for giving him the principles of hard work and determination that led to his business success. Her untimely death at fifty-two years of age in 1899 profoundly affected young Henry and likely inspired his later interest in establishing preventative medicine systems.
Interests
Kaiser also became interested in photography and began developing his photography skills while away from the store. The Eastman-Kodak Company, located near Utica, was making major advances in photography during the 1890s inventing smaller cameras including the Brownie model that could be used by the general public and not just professional photographers. Inspired by these developments, Kaiser launched a new career as a photographer by age sixteen. Always ambitious, by 1901 he became part owner of a studio in Lake Placid, New York, and by 1903, after saving several thousand dollars, he opened several photography shops in Florida. He made postcards, promotional photographs for railroads, and portraits. Kaiser enjoyed the annual cycle of working the five summer months in Lake Placid and the remainder of the year in Florida.
Connections
Through a fateful portrait session, Kaiser met his future wife, Bess Fosburgh, in 1906. He soon proposed marriage. However, Bess's father, a wealthy Virginia lumber businessman, challenged Kaiser to gain more stable employment before marrying his daughter. More specifically, he was to go out West, make at least $125 a month, and build a home for his future wife. In response, Kaiser sold his Florida studios and moved to Spokane, Washington. There Kaiser became a very successful traveling salesman for the McGowan Brothers wholesale hardware business. He and Bess married in Boston, Massachusetts, in April 1907 and returned to Spokane, where they had two sons.