The problem, we’d suggest, is that people simply think too small today. You can tick off a litany of examples: smartphones that function the same as desktop PCs, nanotechnology that makes microprocessors microscopic, and medical procedures that can be performed robotically. As a civilization, we may have turned 180 degrees from the world of Henry J. Kaiser. He conceptualized, and realized, the success of projects that left onlookers’ eyes pivoted skyward, their jaws dangling, faces slack with awe.
Like many monumentally successful entrepreneurs, Kaiser was able to dream in three dimensions, only the scale of his deeds were vastly larger than most of his peers’. We know Kaiser for his heritage in the auto industry, but decades after his death, the truth is that chapter of his life almost counts as a footnote. Kaiser was a patriot. He tamed the Colorado River. He laid down roads in areas thought impassable. He helped to win World War II by building ships in a way that most naysayers flatly thought to be impossible. The fact that Kaiser built cars pales before the fact that he did so much to build America, at least the great, yawning, wild expanses of the West. That was all before he built ships. And cars. And invented the modern HMO. All things that his detractors said were flatly impossible.
What looks like poorly stacked crates are actually forms into which millions of tons of concrete were poured to create today’s Hoover Dam on the Colorado River.
Kaiser was born in 1882 in the tiny village of Sprout Brook, New York, in the Mohawk River valley west of Canajoharie. History hasn’t recorded whether the young Kaiser ever gazed out at the Erie Canal or the New York Central Railroad and was inspired. The notion is logical. Born into a family of sisters, his first job–Kaiser earned his entrepreneurial chops through pure experience, not classroom attendance–was handling deliveries for a local dry goods retailer. That didn’t last. Kaiser was determined early on to be his own boss. He allowed himself the indulgence of photography as a hobby, and by age 16, he’d opened a camera shop in the booming tourist region that included Lake Placid. On his shingle, Kaiser called himself “The Man with the Smile.” The strategy worked. He opened a string of shops as distant as Florida.
His prospective father-in-law, however, pooh-poohed photo sales as inconsequential, and challenged Kaiser to improve himself. Kaiser left New York and traveled all the way to Spokane, Washington, where he swiftly earned a reputation as a master hardware salesman. That brought him to the attention of a succession of major construction companies that were undertaking big road projects in the western United States and across Canada. The contacts he made helped convince a Toronto banker to loan him $25,000, despite Kaiser’s having no equipment, employees or customers. But he got the loan and was in the construction business for himself.
World War I was beginning, and Kaiser was about to rapidly ascend into the pantheon of global business superstardom. Moving to Oakland, California, and realizing that the automobile was about to come into very wide usage, Kaiser tackled major highway construction projects, totaling thousands of miles, in California, Canada and even Cuba. He quickly gained a reputation for doing quality work ahead of deadline and under budget. It’s difficult to describe from afar, but Kaiser learned fast when it came to the organizational side of complex, high-dollar projects, a talent that would serve him extremely well throughout his life.
For an extremely wealthy guy, Kaiser had a deft touch with regular people. His employees considered him to be both fair and farsighted in his business practices.
It was inevitable that Kaiser would come to Washington, D.C.’s, attention at some point. He had already expanded into dam construction by the 1920s, building one across the Feather River in California, and then erecting levees along the Mississippi River. By the late 1920s, with the Depression looming, planners in Washington were taking a serious look at the potential for constructing a massive hydroelectric dam across the Colorado River, to tame its uncontrolled flooding. The site was Black Canyon in Arizona. It’s a struggle to grasp the sheer scale of this plan: Building the Boulder Dam, as it was originally known, would require 4.5 million cubic yards of concrete, more than all U.S. Bureau of Reclamation projects combined in history up to that point. The only intelligent way to proceed was through a consortium of major construction businesses, thereby spreading not only the work, but also the considerable risk.
Kaiser emerged as first among equals in the group that won the contracts in 1931, which became known as the Six Companies. The sheer scope of the dam project required the Six Companies to build a 19-mile railroad to the dam site (which, after the dam was completed, ended up submerged beneath Lake Mead), and an electrical line run in from California to power a huge refrigeration plant, where ice to properly cure the tons of poured concrete was processed. To speed excavation, a Kaiser manager rigged up a truck with a network of drill bits so blasting holes could be drilled as a group, not one at a time. The hot, dangerous work proceeded at a marked clip, until today’s Hoover Dam was finished in 1935, under budget and two years ahead of schedule. Kaiser was instantly the third-most-recognizable person in the United States, according to polls, trailing only Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Henry Ford.
The Six Companies went on to other dam and aqueduct projects as World War II approached. With the growing likelihood of a two-front war in Europe and the Pacific, military planners took worrisome note that much of the nation’s shipbuilding capacity had been idled by the Depression, amid a glut of older ships from the previous conflict. Once the war began, that existing tonnage was being sunk virtually at will by packs of German U-boats. The generally accepted story today is that somebody in the Pentagon casually asked Kaiser if he’d ever considered building ships. It was an outlandish proposition. So, of course, Kaiser agreed.
Kaiser deserves credit equal to anyone with stars on their shoulders when it comes to winning World War II for the Allies. He started out in Portland, Oregon, before setting up a massive network of shipyards in Richmond, California. The enormous yard was the first “integrated” fabrication facility on the West Coast, as Kaiser built his own steel mill there, taking a page from Henry Ford’s playbook when he built the sprawling River Rouge complex. Though he admitted never having seen a ship launched previously, Kaiser did the impossible, building Liberty and Victory ships on an assembly line basis, something never previously attempted. To speed construction, Kaiser specified that the ships be welded together from steel sheet rather than using time-consuming hot rivets. To the astonishment of many, it worked. Kaiser employees (including hundreds of women) sent 1,490 ships down the Richmond ways through the end of the war, providing crucial ocean transport for war matériel as the invasion of Europe drew closer. In another advance, their hulls served as the basis for some of the U.S. Navy’s first light aircraft carriers.
By all indications, Kaiser’s commoner background made it easy for him to bond with laborers of all races and both genders. It likely also piqued his interest in a new industry to conquer, knowing that demand for cars would explode after World War II ended. This, of course, became Kaiser-Frazer, formed in 1945 after Kaiser had not-too-subtly teased the public about getting into the car business. The actual partnership between the men was unconventional, Kaiser being the do-it-all business mogul and Joseph Frazer, a former protégé of Walter P. Chrysler who had run Willys-Overland before buying a controlling interested in the staggering brand that was Graham-Paige, which gave the new firm its first dedicated assembly facility in Detroit. That changed soon as Kaiser took over the gigantic assembly plant at Willow Run, Michigan, where Henry Ford had been building B-24 Liberator bombers during the war. The excitement was palpable; a showing of prototypes caused Kaiser-Frazer stock to zoom to $24 a share, its all-time high, before a single production car was built.
That Kaiser-Frazer lasted as long as it did was both predictable and miraculous. The manufacturer had its share of cars that were at once conservative and innovative. Think the Vagabond sedan, which could be converted into a camper, and the compact Henry J. The startup issues that the company faced, attempting to introduce highly complicated consumer products in an overheated market, were monumental: Expensive machine tools had to be located and installed on short notice, and Kaiser-Frazer coped with chronic steel shortages in its early years. Still, the first cars arrived in 1947 to positive reviews.
There were changes. Joseph Frazer left the company in 1953, the same year that the now-redubbed Kaiser Motors acquired Jeep from the remnants of Willys-Overland. A stock-offering deal imploded into six years of costly litigation. Significantly newer model cars were late to come to market, thus Kaiser’s dealer network began to fracture. By 1949, the firm was claiming only 1.5 percent of the new-car market. Even the new Henry J, introduced in 1951, saw its sales tumble by more than 75 percent in a single year. Despite the merger with Jeep and Willys-Overland, losses mounted. The suspension of domestic auto production that followed was inevitable.
Kaiser did continue to build his cars successfully for some time thereafter in venues that ranged from Argentina and Brazil to Israel. The firm kept manufacturing Jeeps as Kaiser, before his death in 1967, contemplated leaving the auto business entirely. The deal that sold Jeep to American Motors was consummated in 1970. In addition to his civil engineering triumphs, Kaiser’s greatest legacy is Kaiser Permanente, the health-care consortium that he founded for his workers in 1945. It grew by the 21st century to become the largest managed-care provider in the United States.
