In January 1943, Henry Kaiser, then the best-known living American industrialist, and one of the authors of the Allied victory in the Second World War, gave a New York Times reporter a tour of his shipyard at Richmond, California, one of seven Kaiser shipyards on the West Coast which together employed over a 250,000 workers — a sizeable fraction of America’s wartime work force.

At the time the Kaiser yards were turning out an average of one Liberty ship a day. Ultimately, they would produce over 800 of the freighters that maintained the life-giving supply line to Great Britain, as well as other 700 various vessels, many designed by the prolific owner-entrepreneur himself.

‘Where else in the world’, Kaiser asked the reporter, as they watched the multitude of male and female machinists below them busily prefabricating and assembling ships along five waterline miles, ‘where else in the world can you see anything like this?’

Where else indeed.

History is a funny thing. Nullities are remembered, while colossi fall between the cracks. And be in no doubt: in his day Henry Kaiser was a colossus.

‘The arsenal of democracy,’ Franklin Roosevelt called the lightning mobilisation of American industry that took place after Pearl Harbor. And Henry Kaiser, or ‘Mr. Can Do’ as he was popularly known,  personified it.

Later during the aforementioned tour, the driven industrialist confessed to the reporter that he often lay awake during the night grappling with ideas ‘because’, he fretted, ‘there is so much more I could do that it’s pitiful’. Specifically, he confided, he had been kept awake working on one of ‘eleven projects the country knows nothing about’.

Were any of them ‘startling’, the reporter asked?

‘They all are,’ Kaiser responded with a straight face.

So was Henry Kaiser’s career. Or one should say, careers, because Kaiser had numerous ones. Almost 11, in fact. Most of them had to do with building things, things he envisioned the world needed – roads, bridges, dams, freighters, aircraft carriers, cargo planes, pre-fabricated housing, automobiles, hotels, you name it.

Kaiser had already conquered two of the above industries, road-building and dam-building before he took on shipbuilding, the industry that made him a national as well as an international figure during the Second World War.

He did so with the same qualities he brought to all his enterprises, an innate innovativeness, a flair for sales and promotion, hard work, a contagious self-confidence and another quality which could be best described as  chutzpah. Kaiser wasn’t Jewish, but he certainly would have understood the concept.

Call it chutzpah, call it audacity, Henry J. Kaiser had it in spades.

It was chutzpah that triggered Kaiser’s career in business. In 1901 the ambitious then 18 year old, who had been toiling as a dry goods salesman in the upstate New York city of Utica since dropping out of school at 13 to support his family, learned that a part interest in a photo studio in the resort town of Lake Placid was for sale.

Seeing his chance, Kaiser offered the owner to work for free for a year, except for room and board during which time, he vowed, he would triple the studio’s business. If he succeeded, he said, he wanted to receive a half interest in the business.

Chutzpah.

The owner accepted his offer, whereupon Kaiser turned into a whirling dervish, working long hours, chatting up customers while he touched up their photos, and growing the business in every way he could think of. By year’s end he had earned his half interest. A year later, he bought out the owner and went into business on his own. ‘Henry Kaiser’, the sign in the window announced, ‘The Man With the Smile’.

It was chutzpah that got him his life’s partner. In 1905, an attractive 19-year-old named Bess Fosburgh, then on vacation with her family, sauntered into Kaiser’s Lake Placid photo studio. Smitten, the audacious 23-year-old asked her father, a wealthy Virginian lumberman, for his daughter’s hand.

Wary of the photography business, Fosburgh senior consented on condition that Kaiser first save $1,000, found a ‘regular’ job that paid at least $125 a month and built a house for his daughter.

No problem, Kaiser replied. Can do.

Deciding that his best chance for fulfilling his side of the bargain was out West, Kaiser boarded a transcontinental train and scouted several cities on the West Coast before settling on fast-growing Spokane, Washington.

After being turned down by dozens of businesses, Kaiser finally trained his sights on the place he wanted to work, a hardware store, McGowan Brothers, which catered to the booming regional construction business. Hired as a clerk, the future mogul was promoted to store manager, before being put in charge of sales for Spokane, while keeping up a fervent correspondence with his beloved.

In 1907, two short years after they met, a triumphant Kaiser was on a train back to Boston to marry Bess.

Another quality that set Henry Kaiser apart was his ability to see or foresee a need and fulfill it. During the years leading up to the First World War, as the horseless carriage took off, one of the country’s greatest needs, particularly in rural areas, was for serviceable paved roads. Kaiser hopped aboard the ‘good roads’ movement, working was a field supervisor with a paving and roads contractor, J.F. Hill.

Soon he was supervising road paving and other construction projects around the US and Canadian Northwest while learning the art of aggressively bidding for contracts.

In 1914, by which time he was working for another Canadian-based construction company, the firm, which had just gained a major contract, suddenly filed for bankruptcy. Seeing his chance, Kaiser pounced, moving to buy the company and finish the contract himself.

First, however, he had to get the money to do that, which meant having to go to a bank. This explains why one day he found himself sitting at a desk in a Vancouver bank, eagerly detailing his plans for his future enterprise to a sceptical bank officer and asking for a $25,000 loan.

‘You mean to sit there and inform me, young man, you want me to loan you $25,000’, the incredulous bank officer told him, after the aspiring builder finished his earnest presentation, ‘and you don’t even have a company, you don’t even have any equipment, you don’t have any men? All you have is a contract and an idea that you think might work and might make a profit, and you want me, on that basis to loan you that sum of money?’

The banker then leaned back and wrote a note on a piece of paper, and told Kaiser to show it to the bank’s head cashier.

Perplexed, Kaiser’s first thought was that the note instructed the cashier to have the pushy young man escorted out of the bank. Instead it instructed him to give Kaiser $25,000.

America’s Master Builder was on his way.

‘Henry J. Kaiser Company, Ltd’, he called his start-up construction company.

Up to the early 1920s, the Kaiser Company laid hundreds of miles of roads in Washington and California. Kaiser was helping to build the ‘new’ West, and falling in love with it: although  Kaiser had to spend much of his time in the East over the years, especially in Washington, D.C. and New York, his heart always belonged to the West.

With the region’s growing need for power it was only a matter of time before Kaiser began building dams. In 1926 the rising builder took on his first dam project, the Philbrook Dam in the high lakes country of Butte County, northern California.

Although the dam itself was rather small compared to the mammoth ones Kaiser would later build – 87 feet high and 750 feet long – it made construction history because Kaiser and his crew built it in a matter of months, and because it was the first earth-fill dam built entirely by mechanised equipment and without the use of horses or mules.

The following year, 1927, Kaiser got his breakthrough project, not in California, but in faraway Cuba. The $20 million subcontract called for him and his men to build 200 miles of road and 500 bridges. The Kaiser Company was in the big time.

While still in Cuba, Kaiser learned that the Hoover administration was soliciting bids to build a mammoth dam in the Black Canyon River of the River Colorado, at the junction of Nevada and Arizona. The projected monolith, soon to be called Boulder Dam, now known as Hoover Dam, promised to be one of the largest structures ever contemplated by man.

‘I lay awake nights in a sweltering tent in Cuba’, he later recalled, ‘dreaming of this great day and thinking it over and over.’ Now it had arrived.

Kaiser also realised that he needed partners to make it happen, and big ones. He found them. Six Companies the combination called itself. Kaiser became its chairman. The first order of business was to put together a bid for the mammoth concrete arch-gravity dam. The Six Companies bid of $48,890,955 – the equivalent of roughly a billion dollars in 2025 – was the lowest of the three valid bids, and within $24,000 of what the government estimated the enormous edifice would cost.

Kaiser’s group got the bid. Now they just had to build the elephantine edifice.

Easier said than done. Such an immense concrete structure had never been built before, and some of the river diversion and rock clearance and other techniques had never been tried before. An entire city – Boulder City, it was called – had to be built to house the 10,000-plus labour force. No problem.

The torrid heat was a problem. Black Canyon was – and still is – one of the hottest places in the continental United States. Daytime temperatures at the site during the summer of 1931, the first year of construction, averaged 120 degrees fahrenheit. A dozen workers died of heat prostration in one week alone.

There were myriad other difficulties. Nevertheless, Kaiser and his desert army forged on. The first giant buckets of concrete were poured into the columns of the dam in June 1933, 18 months ahead of schedule; ultimately over three million cubic yards of concrete were used at the history-making project.

Boulder Dam was formally dedicated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt two years later, in September 1935. Among other things, the project marked the beginning of the relationship between Kaiser and FDR, then at the end of his first term. The two men would do a lot of business together over the next decade, hydroelectric and otherwise.

Six Companies turned the dam over to the federal government on 1 March 1936, two years ahead of schedule. Soon the waters of Lake Mead, the majestic, 250-square mile reservoir created by the dam began flowing into its two 2,000 megawatt turbines, electrifying the Southwest. The 60 story high, two football field-wide megalith was called one of the wonders of the world.

It still is.

Meanwhile, Kaiser and Six Companies rolled on, building more monster dams. After Boulder came the  Bonneville Lock and Dam, a long, ungainly structure intended to span the River Columbia between the states of Oregon and Washington.

After Bonneville came the Grand Coulee, a mammoth concrete dam on the Columbia, which quickly became known as the eighth wonder of man and inspired the folk singer Woody Guthrie:

Now the greatest wonder is in Uncle Sam’s fair land. It’s the big Columbia River and the Grand Coulee Dam.

The Grand Coulee had another notable feature: company-wide health care. Kaiser’s eldest son, Edgar, who by now was one of his father’s lieutenants, learned of a pioneering doctor named Sidney Garfield, who had developed an employment based health-care model, which he had developed at two remote job sites and convinced his father to bring him to the dam site.

Kaiser readily agreed. Under Garfield’s plan, Six Companies would foot the bill for a hospital on site, while all of the workers agreed to have a small deduction from their pay checks in return for access to treatment on request.

The world had its first HMO. It was an idea that Kaiser would bring forward to his next career, as a shipbuilder, along with Garfield, who became his latest partner.

Meanwhile Kaiser continued to build and invent.

By 1938, on the eve of the Second World War, Henry Kaiser had been involved in over 1,000 projects worth a total of $400 million. He was a wealthy 56-year-old man. He could legitimately say that he had helped build – and empower – the American West. He also could have retired.

But Mr Can Do was just getting started.

To be sure, although Henry Kaiser’s accomplishments as a builder had made him renowned in the construction industry, and to some degree, in the American West, but he was still an unknown quantity to the American public, as well as in Britain, when he entered the shipbuilding industry in 1940.

That would soon change.

All Kaiser knew was that there was a need to fulfill, as well as an opportunity to grow his business. Once the global war began in earnest and Karl Dönitz’s submarine wolf packs went to work, he saw that Britain was dangerously short of freighters, and that the existing ones were being sunk faster than they could be replaced.

The need was there. So was the opportunity: but there were no shipyards on the West Coast.

Kaiser, by his own admission, knew nothing about shipbuilding. He would partner with someone who did.

Joseph Todd, chairman of Todd Shipyards, an established ship-repair firm with several shipyards on the East Coast, took a liking to the brassy industrialist and decided to give Mr Can Do a chance. In December 1940, just as the Battle of the Atlantic was heating up, the US Maritime Commission authorised Kaiser to build an emergency shipyard at Richmond, California – then a small city of 25,000 directly across San Francisco Bay – in order to build 30 freighters for Great Britain over the next two years.

The gawky vessels, modelled after an earlier British design, were called EC-2, for emergency cargo.

Spurred on by the need for speed, as U-boats continued to sink Allied freighters at a dizzying rate, Kaiser and Clay Bedford, his chief engineer, had an epiphany about the fastest way to build the ships. When they started out, the customary way was for one designated crew to fabricate a vessel right on the ways from the keel up. Kaiser and Bedford didn’t know that and couldn’t care less. Ships had to be built as quickly as possible, they were builders, and that was that. How was the challenge to be met?

Answer: pre-fabrication. The way to go, they decided, after a visit to an auto factory, was to institute the modular construction and assembly techniques then in use in the car industry, and weld – not rivet, as had been the norm – a ready-made ship.

Welding held several advantages. First, it was faster. It also required less skill then riveting, which was important, because Kaiser’s workforce included those new to shipyard work, including women, who were now streaming into Richmond to pitch in, because able-bodied men were being drafted to serve in uniform – a development which the novice shipbuilder welcomed. The Kaiser Company was also in the vanguard of companies hiring beyond the colour bar.

Local officials, who weren’t thrilled about the thousands of black workers who poured into Richmond, weren’t as open-minded as Kaiser, and were reluctant to build housing for them, so Kaiser built the housing himself.  He also built schools and churches for his rapidly expanding work force, which saw the population of Richmond reach 100,000. And he brought Sidney Garfield in to provide health care for his employees and their families.

In September, the first EC-2 ship, the Patrick Henry, named after the American Revolutionary War patriot, was launched at a competing shipyard in Baltimore, on the other side of the country. In a speech delivered at the vessel’s christening, FDR, quoting from Henry’s famous ‘Give me liberty or give me death’ speech, said that the new class of ships would bring liberty to Europe.

They did, and the name stuck. Ultimately, over 2,700 Liberty ships were built between 1941 and 1945, making them the largest class of ships ever built. The Kaiser Company built over a third of them at its Richmond yards, as well as two others he acquired in Vancouver and Oregon, as well as 200 Victory ships, as their faster, slightly longer successors were called.

In December 1941, after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, the US formally became a combatant and the shipbuilding effort, including the Liberty ship push, went into overdrive.

The headlines told the story. Every week, it seemed, the Kaiser yards were breaking records. ‘KAISER BUILDS SHIP IN 35 DAYS’, ‘KAISER SHIP NEARS RECORD’, and so on. In the dark days following Pearl Harbor and Corregidor, America was in need of heroes, and Builder Number 1, as a comic book labelled him, was judged to fit the bill.

Leading the cheers was President Roosevelt. It was no secret that FDR did not like most industrialists, but he liked Henry Kaiser, and he liked his ideas. Or most of them.

For Kaiser, FDR was the man who controlled the federal spigot from which the bulk of his contracts, as well as his own personal wealth, flowed, but the bond between the two men went beyond that. They saw themselves as fellow generals engaged in a war for democracy.

On 23 September 1942, Henry Kaiser’s Oregon Shipbuilding set a new record, when the Liberty ship Joseph Teal was launched in a mere 10 days after the keel was laid, cutting 14 days from the extant record.

‘Her boilers were in and her steam was up,’ the New York Times exulted. Kaiser, there for the christening along with Bess and his sons, promised his workers that they would soon beat the Teal record, too, as they would. In November, Richmond’s No. 2 yard launched the Robert Peary in the astounding time of four days and 15 hours.

One of the things that the New York Times did not report, for security reasons, was that Roosevelt was also present. One of the enduring images to emerge from the war is that of the presidential limousine at the Oregon yard dockside, as the president looks at the thousands of workers cheering him with his trademark grin. A beaming Henry Kaiser looks on from the back seat.

After fulfilling his original contract for the British Liberty ships in record time, Kaiser was also adopted by Britons. ‘Men like Henry Kaiser have faith that moves mountains,’ declared Sir Arthur Salter, head of the British Shipping Mission.

Kaiser was moving ships, but not enough. Although the tide of the Battle of the Atlantic was turning, the outcome of the struggle was still in doubt. So Kaiser had another one of his periodic epiphanies: give the Liberty ship wings. Modelled on the biggest cargo plane then in existence, the Mars flying boat, the aircraft he envisioned, promised to be the largest aircraft ever. Kaiser’s aerial behemoth would boast six engines and carry 150,000 pounds – 750 fully equipped troops or two 30 ton M4 Sherman tanks. The super plane would be built mostly of wood, it would be assembled at his shipyards, and its engines would be supplied by the auto industry.

Kaiser’s fellow megalomaniac, Howard Hughes, the aerospace engineer and business magnate, liked the concept enough to offer to design the HK-1, as it was dubbed. The US War Production Board liked it enough to give Kaiser the go-ahead to build 500 of them.

The US Navy, however, had its doubts. Would such a Jules Vernes-like craft actually be airworthy? Would Kaiser actually be able to convert shipyards to aircraft production so quickly? And where would the engines come from?

Still credit where credit is due. The man had chutzpah, but it wasn’t sufficient to overcome the very real logistical challenges involved in producing the HK-1. Development dragged on, which frustrated him. He also had problems with Howard Hughes. Who didn’t?

In 1943 Kaiser withdrew from the well-intentioned, if delusory, project, while Hughes continued on his own, producing one of the aircraft, the celebrated Spruce Goose, which made one flight with Hughes at the controls, well after the war, in November 1947.

Meanwhile Kaiser had another idea which worked, and helped win the war in the Pacific – the escort carrier.

As the US Navy pushed west in the Pacific, the loss of four of its fleet carriers earlier in the war, along with the increasing pace of offensive operations, underscored the dire need for more naval aviation.

The solution: smaller carriers. With the mass production techniques he had used for the Liberties, Kaiser told the navy he could build 50 of the vessels in two years.

The admirals, who were less susceptible to Kaiser’s powers of persuasion than their colleagues at the US Maritime Commission, resisted. So he sped over to the White House and got the president to sign off on the idea.

Kaiser’s Vancouver shipyard produced the desperately needed carriers as quickly as promised. Between April 1943 and May 1944 the yard launched 50 of them, nearly one a week. Resistance to the smaller carriers faded as they proved their usefulness in both oceans. In the Atlantic they led five of the roving ‘hunter-killer’ groups that chased down Hitler’s rump U-boat fleet, sinking 53.

The escort carriers’ finest hour came in October 1944 when, during the Battle of Samar, the central action of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Taffy 3, a task unit of six of the carriers along with their destroyers and escorts covering the US landings at Leyte was forced to take on a full Japanese battle fleet.

In the matter of a few frantic hours during which one of the carriers, the Gambier Bay, was sunk and several of its gallant covering craft sacrificed themselves, the fighting unit managed to sink three Japanese cruisers and persuade the Japanese commander, Admiral Kurita, to withdraw, winning the day and turning the tide of the entire battle.

The following day, the builder, who was in Washington at the time, had a celebratory lunch with one of his long-time backers, Admiral Howard Vickery, the vice chairman of the US Maritime Commission, along with his friend Gerard Piel, an editor of Life Magazine, at the capital’s Mayflower Hotel.

‘When the first martinis were put on the table,’ Piel later recalled, ‘Admiral Vickery raised his and with a tear rolling down his cheek he told Henry Kaiser that if there was one of our fellow citizens to whom we owe this day, it is to you.

‘And then proceeded to review the story of Henry Kaiser’s contribution to the war effort. First he built the Liberty ships, and then he put ten feet on the keel and turned them into Victory ships, and then he turned the Victory ship into a carrier and no one wanted it so by golly he got the president to make the Navy buy the carriers and those carriers won the Battle of the Philippine Sea.’

Little wonder that FDR gave serious thought to making Kaiser his vice-presidential running mate that autumn. But Kaiser wasn’t interested. He knew his place – he built things.

In 1945, his urge to build took a surprising turn when he decided that what postwar America really needed was an inexpensive compact car.

As he had with the other industries he took on, Kaiser decided to partner with someone who knew the business, in this case Joseph Frazier, the chief executive of the moderately successful Willys-Overland Motors Company.

Suddenly America had a new car company, Kaiser Frazer. In 1946 it launched its first line of cars. The front-wheel drive cars were well-designed and met with some success. However postwar inflation prevented them from being as inexpensive as he had hoped. The Big Three auto manufacturers – Ford, Chrysler and General Motors – didn’t take kindly to newcomers and were determined to squeeze him out, which they eventually did. Kaiser-Frazer was Kaiser’s greatest failure.

For every failure, however, he had at least as many successes, as William Goetzmann, the American historian, declared: ‘Henry Kaiser was a wildcatter’, after the old American expression for those who dug ‘wildcat’ or exploratory wells, somewhat like the oiler Daniel Day-Lewis plays in the movie There Shall Be Blood – sans blood: ‘He loved to take chances on new projects.’

‘He gambled on his intuition, his charm, his public relations skills, his persistence. And he usually won.’

Or as Kaiser himself said: ‘I always have to dream up there against the stars. If I don’t dream I won’t make it. I won’t even get close.’

One of the mould-breaking industrialist’s more notable successes was in the steel and materials industries.  Sensing that his fellow industrialists were reluctant to expand to meet what he believed – correctly – would be a surge in postwar demand for raw materials, he had opened his own magnesium plant in 1941 in Permanente, California; a steel plant in Fontana, California in 1942, which supplied his shipbuilding yards; and an aluminium plant outside Spokane in 1946.

By the mid-1960s the combined revenues of Kaiser Industries, Kaiser Aluminum and Kaiser Steel, the conglomerate that emerged from those visionary operations, exceeded a billion dollars, placing them among the 50 largest American companies. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson consulted with Kaiser, who by then had moved to Hawaii, where he broke into his last industry, the hotel industry, erecting a sprawling, multi-million dollar resort he called Hawaiian Village. It was later sold to Hilton, and became the setting for the Elvis Presley movie, Blue Hawaii.

Kaiser died in his sleep on 24 August 1967, aged 85, still dreaming.

Somewhat ironically, Builder Number 1’s most enduring legacy is not something he physically built but the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program, the heir of the revolutionary health care model he founded with Sidney Garfield. The program that emerged from the dam-site hospitals Kaiser built in the 1930s for his men today has over eight million subscribers in eight of the American states, making it the country’s largest not-for-profit health care organisation.

Yet few of Kaiser Permanente’s subscribers know anything about its founder, or even his full name.