By Tom Debley, Director, Heritage Resources
Henry J. Kaiser was featured as "Shipbuilder No. 1" in a 1943 Real Heroes comic book.
It was a Roper Poll that spring that reported that—in the words of Stephen B. Adams, author of “Mr. Kaiser goes to Washington”—the American public “believed Kaiser had done more to help the president win the war than any other civilian.”
A Gallup Poll a few months later found Kaiser at the top of the list of people Americans thought should be president—with Kaiser trailing only Generals Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower. It is no surprise, then, that Kaiser was on President Roosevelt’s short list for vice president when he chose Harry Truman in the election of 1944.
Why not Kaiser? One answer comes from Michael Dobrin, guest curator of a special exhibit on Kaiser’s life at the Oakland Museum of California in 2004, who concluded Kaiser was too progressive for Democratic Party leaders.
“…Conservative party insiders—probably sensing coming postwar struggles over civil rights—balked at his overt advocacy of voter education, voters’ rights and support for unions,” Dobrin wrote in The Museum of California Magazine. “His name was dropped from the list.”
The public’s admiration for Henry Kaiser—whose most enduring legacy is co-founding with surgeon Sidney R. Garfield the medical care program that bears his name—lasted up to and beyond the end of his life in 1967. Indeed, he was so beloved that when he died in 1967 mourners flooded his memorial service with more than 20,000 white and red roses – said to be the entire supply of all florists in the San Francisco Bay Area. This was in addition to thousands of orchids and other flora from people in the Hawaiian Islands.
As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in condolences sent to Kaiser’s family, “Henry J. Kaiser embodied in his own career all that has been best in our country’s tradition. His own energy, imagination and determination gave him greatness—and he used that greatness to give unflaggingly for the betterment of his country and his fellow man.”
Today, of course, his efforts—and the legendary labor of almost a quarter million men and women of all races who worked for him in his West Coast ship building operations—are honored by the Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, Calif., which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.
In addition, the newly renovated Oakland Museum of California will reopen May 1 with its first major redo in nearly 40 years. Its completely new Gallery of California History will include Henry J. Kaiser. According to the museum, the theme of the gallery will be Coming to California—“an idea that evokes not only the arrivals and departures of people throughout human history and their interactions with the inhabitants already here, but also the notion of coming to terms with the influence of California on our individual and collective identities.”
Late last year, Kaiser also was inducted into the California Hall of Fame and is featured in an exhibit at The California Museum in Sacramento.
Interested in learning more about Henry J. Kaiser? Here are three good books, any one of which you might find in a local library (or for sale online):
“Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the Modern American West,” Mark S. Foster, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas, 1991.
“Henry J. Kaiser: Western Colossus,” Albert P. Heiner, Halo Books, San Francisco, Calif., 1991.
“Mr. Kaiser Goes to Washington, The Rise of a Government Entrepreneur,” Stephen B. Adams, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1997.
