For part I, see "Henry J. Kaiser, Entrepreneur"
In 1940, Henry J. Kaiser joined with the Todd shipbuilding company to
bid on a contract to build 60 merchant ships for the British government,
which desperately needed ships to import supplies during the war. Todd
would build half the ships in its East Coast shipyards, while Kaiser
would build the other half from a yet-to-be-built shipyard in Richmond,
California.
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Kaiser’s Oregon Shipyard on Swan Island in Portland. |
Kaiser, of course, had never built either a ship or a shipyard in his
life, but that didn’t faze him. When he told British and, later,
American officials how fast he thought he could build ships, they
thought he was delusional — no one had ever built ships that fast. Yet
he revolutionized the shipbuilding business, bring assembly line
techniques to an industry used to custom, one-off designs.
With the help of other members of the Six Companies, Kaiser built seven
shipyards in Portland and Richmond capable of building 58 ships at one
time. By the end of the war, these yards had built 1,490 ships, an
average of about one per day. Most of the ships were the type of
merchant ship known as Liberty ships. But Kaiser also built 12 other
kinds of ships, including troop transports, landing ship tanks, and
escort carriers. In all, Kaiser supplied more than a quarter of all U.S.
ships built during the war.
Large parts of the ships were built as modules that were later fitted
together. Where most metal ships before the war had been riveted, Kaiser
used welders. Production was not only fast, it was high in quality:
while the U.S. government found that more than 20 percent of the ships
made by other builders had serious defects, the defect rate of Kaiser
ships was less than 10 percent. Welded ships did prove to have some
problems in cold waters, but those problems were eventually solved.
When directing crews who were paving roads and building dams, Kaiser
learned the value of competition: he would reward the fastest crews in
his employ, thus encouraging the others to work faster as well. He
quickly adapted this technique to his shipyards, encouraging each one to
break the shipbuilding records of the others.
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Oregon Governor Charles Sprague, Henry Kaiser, and FDR attending the launch of the first Liberty ship built in just 10 days. |
In 1940, ship builders expected to take close to two months from laying a
keel to launching a ship, and several weeks more before having the ship
ready to turn over to the customer. The Kaiser shipyards were soon
launching ships in less than four weeks; the Portland and Richmond yards
took turns beating each other’s records. In 1942, the Portland shipyard
launched a ship in 10 days, finishing it in just five more. “We could
have launched it in eight days,” said Kaiser, “but we waited two days so
President Roosevelt could attend the launch.” Not to be outdone, the
Richmond shipyard launched a ship in four days and 17 hours.
When the war led to a West Coast labor shortage, Kaiser not only hired
tens of thousands of women but recruited tens of thousands of workers
from the Midwest and East Coast. “If they know one end of a monkey
wrench from the other, we’ll take them as helpers,” said Kaiser. “If
they don’t, we’ll label each end.”
Many of the people recruited by Kaiser were black. When some unions
tried to bar black workers, Kaiser got the federal government to
overrule them. “We do not ask what their color is,” said one of his
recruiters.
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Though hastily constructed, Vanport included many schools, playgrounds, and other amenities. |
Such a large migration quickly resulted in housing shortages: for
example, the population of Vancouver, Washington more than doubled. When
the government failed to immediately act, Kaiser hastily built an
entire city of more than 10,000 homes, complete with schools, a library,
post office, and a college — the forerunner of Portland State
University — on the south shore of the Columbia River. Sometimes called
“the miracle city” or “Kaiserville” but officially named Vanport, this
was probably the nation’s largest wartime housing project.
Vanport quickly became the second largest city in Oregon, housing as
many as 40,000 people — 15,000 of them black (more than in the entire
rest of the state). The homes were admittedly poorly built because they
were supposed to be only temporary. After the war, most people moved out
but about 18,500 remained, nearly a third of them black. In 1948, a
dike protecting the city from Columbia River flooding failed and the
entire town was wiped out. Fortunately, only 15 people died, and most of
the residents relocated into Portland.
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Kaiser’s
daycare centers were divided into rooms for 25 children. Some people
worried that locating the daycare centers next to shipyards made them
vulnerable to Japanese attack, but the location was also convenient for
easy drop off and pick up of the children |
In addition to providing health care for all Portland, Vancouver, and
Richmond workers, Kaiser provided 24-hour, state-of-the-art daycare
facilities for the many women workers who had families. Unlike the
medical clinics, these did not survive past the end of the war, partly
because the shipyards closed and partly because Kaiser expected most
women to stop working after the war.
Among the ships built by Kaiser were 50 escort carriers, sometimes known
as “baby flattops” for their small size — a little over 500 feet
compared with nearly 900 feet for full-sized World War II carriers. The
Navy had given another shipyard a contract to convert 50 cargo ships to
escort carriers, but Kaiser was convinced that it could use 100 more and
that he could build them from scratch. When the Navy rejected his
proposal, he made his pitch to President Roosevelt, who ordered the
admirals to give Kaiser a contract for 50.
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One of
Kaiser’s baby flattops, the HMS Searcher, built in the Vancouver
shipyard and lend-leased to the United Kingdom. The Searcher survived
the war and was used as a cargo ship until scrapped in 1976. |
Kaiser’s carriers were sometimes called “Kaiser coffins” for their
rumored lack of seaworthiness. In fact, they proved their worth in
hunting submarines and in several major sea battles with Japanese
forces. In the Battle of Leyte Gulf, a handful of escort carriers held
off a major Japanese task force including the Yamato — the largest
battleship ever built — and several other battleships. Incidentally,
Kaiser earned less profit for each escort carrier he built than he could
have earned building other types of ships.
In 1943, an airplane company called Brewster Aeronautical was failing to
meet its contract to produce 120 fighter planes per month. Kaiser’s
reputation as a miracle worker led the government to put him in charge
of the company and get it back on schedule. Working entirely without
compensation from the government, Kaiser and four of his employees were
able to boost Brewster’s production from 14 to 123 planes per month.
Kaiser had a hand in another famous plane, the Spruce Goose. In 1942,
Kaiser proposed that the government build thousands of cargo planes that
could carry materials to the front far faster than ships. The
government wasn’t interested, partly because of resource shortages and
partly because he had never built a plane before. When he partnered with
Howard Hughes, the government reluctantly gave them a contract for
three planes.
Since Kaiser’s mass production techniques wouldn’t apply to an order for
just three planes, Kaiser dropped out. Lacking Kaiser’s discipline,
Hughes ended up spending far more money and taking far longer to build
one plane than Kaiser had proposed to use building many.
Having brought tens if not hundreds of thousands of new residents to the
West Coast, Kaiser worried that the end of the war would bring high
rates of unemployment. To prevent this, he proposed to bring new
industries to the West, starting with steel.
The government wanted to build a steel mill in Utah, near abundant
deposits of coal and ore, but was leery of building one in California,
where it could be vulnerable to Japanese attack. So the government
contracted with U.S. Steel to build the Geneva, Utah, steel mill for
$200 million. At Kaiser’s insistence, it loaned him $100 million to
build a mill in Fontana, California. He also built a mill to refine
magnesium, which was needed as a light-weight substitute for steel.
After the war, the government sold the “surplus” Geneva mill to U.S.
Steel for about 20 percent of its value. Kaiser argued that it was only
fair for the government to reduce his outstanding loan for the Fontana
mill, but the government wouldn’t agree and in 1951 he repaid it in
full.
Kaiser’s ship building and other war efforts made him an international
celebrity. He was frequently featured in Time, Life, and other
magazines. After the war, he used his status to expand into several new
industries.
Next: "Henry J. Kaiser, Industrialist"
Randal O'Toole wrote this piece for The Anti Planner published by The
Thoreau Institute, a non-profit organization that seeks ways to protect
the environment without big government. The Institute has prepared
comprehensive analyses of the Forest Service, Park Service, Bureau of
Land Management, more than 150 state land and resource agencies, dozens
of transit systems, and more than a dozen metropolitan planning
organizations.
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