by Hardy Green
Most employment in Richmond involved semi-skilled labor. In prewar shipbuilding, skilled trades dominated, represented by such AFL craft unions as the Boilermakers. What Kaiser brought to the wartime enterprise was a promise of streamlined production, made possible by using prefabrication, an approach his company had helped to pioneer during its dam-building years.
Managers broke down skills into manageable parts or, where possible, eliminated skilled work to accommodate new employees. Large parts of a vessel including boilers, forepeaks, and deckhouses were put together in the prefabrication plant between Yard 3 and Yard 4. Then they were brought to the vessel’s hull one at a time and put in place. Wherever possible, welding, which could be learned relatively quickly, replaced the skilled work of riveting. The result was record-breaking productivity, much publicized by Kaiser and denounced as publicity-seeking by his rivals. In one of the most widely reported incidents, in late 1942, crews assembled the Liberty ship SS Robert E. Peary in four days, fifteen hours, and twenty-six minutes. Between 1941 and 1945, Kaiser produced ships faster than any other builder. The 1,490 vessels manufactured in the company’s Richmond and Portland/Vancouver yards included 821 Liberty ships, 219 Victory ships, fifty small aircraft carriers, and a bevy of other vessels. There were many other yards on both coasts—in fact there were twelve others in the Bay Area, including the venerable Moore Shipbuilding Co. But on its own, Kaiser was responsible for 30 percent of U.S. wartime shipping.6
It didn’t take long for America to take notice. Henry Kaiser, a school dropout and self-made upstate New Yorker, was hailed as “the master Doer of the world” by one press agency. His success had not come easy: In his youth, Kaiser had painstakingly opened a chain of photography shops and had moved to the West Coast only as a result of an ultimatum by his prospective father-in-law (“Make good or the marriage is off ”). In the 1920s, when he managed his own small road-construction outfit, Kaiser himself, along with his wife and two kids, had lived out of his car at times. Later, an alliance with Bechtel led to larger projects, and Kaiser moved to better quarters. He spent increasing amounts of time in Sacramento, where he honed his skills as a lobbyist. The bespectacled and cherubic man’s tool of choice was neither the rivet gun nor the blowtorch, but the telephone, which he used to massage bureaucrats and congressmen.
In the early 1930s, the Six Companies consortium won the bid to build Boulder Dam in an arid, remote area thirty miles south of Las Vegas. There, 3,000 workers toiled in 128-degree heat, exposed to explosives and a variety of other dangers and living in barracks-like dorms in a tightly controlled, liquor-free company town. Kaiser sweated it out as well—in an office in Washington, D.C., where he labored to keep the funding spigot flowing. As historian Kevin Starr has observed, Kaiser was anything but a field man. Instead, his genius consisted “in determining great projects, assembling teams, then handling the politics and finance.” During an interview, Inside U. S.A. author John Gunther expressed astonishment when he learned that Kaiser had never even visited the completed Boulder or Grand Coulee dams. “I have no interest in a thing once it’s done,” Kaiser told him.7
One might expect such a nose-to-the-grindstone personality to be dull. But Kaiser was never uninteresting—and just to make sure of that, he often mythologized his past with little stories. Asked how as a man in his twenties he’d been able to fund his chain of photo stores, he explained how a stranger on the street had noticed Kaiser’s forlorn appearance and responded by giving him the necessary money. In another tale, he described how, in a hurry to get to a meeting and win one of his early road-construction jobs, he’d risked life and limb by jumping from a moving train. And after Kaiser’s employee health-care plan had become famous, he suggested that he had been motivated to launch it because his mother had died in his arms, unable to afford a doctor. Common to these stories is the idea that in a crisis, timing is all-important—along with a measure of compassion.
Richmond learned all about speed, especially with the sudden arrival of thousands of newcomers. Elected officials called their town “the wounded city,” and the city manager penned an appeal for federal funds that he titled “An Avalanche Hits Richmond.” So where was Kaiser’s compassion? Why did he not do more to alleviate the catastrophe he’d loosed on the city?8
In time, he did. At first the parties turned to stopgap remedies for the housing crisis: The government urged citizens with empty rooms across the Bay Area to share space with war workers. Thousands responded, motivated by patriotism and the prospect of extra income. New roads linked Richmond with nearby communities where there might be lodging, and the government reopened old San Francisco-Oakland ferries. With federal assistance, the city even arranged to import a decommissioned New York City elevated train; it stretched sixteen miles between Oakland and Richmond and carried 11,000 commuters each day. Then the Federal Housing Authority funded such private developments as the seven hundred-unit Rollingwood homes in San Pablo and Brookfield Village in East Oakland. Here were prefabricated houses for the builders of prefabricated ships. But none of this sufficed. So in 1942 and 1943, Kaiser Shipyards and the Maritime Commission began constructing many two-story row houses within walking distance of the yards. Bearing such names as Harbor Gate and Richmond Terrace—and such unassuming appellations as Canal War Apartments and Terrace War Apartments—these cheap and standardized wood-frame structures sprawled across the harbor-front flatlands and came to house half of the shipyard’s workforce. The projects were racially segregated. Altogether, the 30,000 new units included 6,000 small houses, and the worst of the housing crisis was over by 1944.9
More striking, Kaiser became a welfare-capitalism pioneer. He’d begun offering medical care to workers in the late 1930s during construction work at Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state. At Richmond, he deepened his commitment to such benefits—much needed given that a large number of employees had escaped military service only because of their serious physical disabilities. For 80 cents a week, Kaiser Shipyard workers could get private medical coverage for themselves and family members. Of the Richmond workers, 95 percent signed up. Kaiser also set up emergency medical stations in the yards under Dr. Sidney Garfield—who’d pioneered similar prepaid medical programs at the Los Angeles Aqueduct construction site and at Grand Coulee—and organized the nearby 175-bed Permanente field hospital, where the seriously injured could get treatment. (The mysterious “Permanente” comes from Permanente Creek in Cupertino, near which Kaiser Industries had a large cement plant.) Those in critical condition went to the Kaiser Hospital in Oakland. Such steps were forerunners of the Kaiser Permanente health plan that remains Henry Kaiser’s preeminent legacy, today covering 8.6 million people in ten states.
At the Kaiser yards in Richmond and Portland, the company established twenty-four-hour-a-day child care centers funded by the Maritime Commission. Kaiser retained counselors to help with orientation, family problems, finances, and employee relations. Special counselors offered aid tailored to women, African Americans, Chinese, Native Americans—and teenagers, who were given special dispensation to work a restricted number of hours per day. A weekly Kaiser newspaper, Fore ’N’ Aft, contained articles targeted to women and minorities. The company also organized a variety of sports teams and recreational events.
All of this was facilitated by organized labor’s haughty abstention from such concerns. In the 1940s, Kaiser never made a move without a union contract—perhaps because of labor’s clout within the Franklin Roosevelt administration. Earlier, during his dam-building years, Kaiser had not been a particular friend to unions, and at one point his supervisors had brought in goons to break a strike at Boulder Dam. But at Richmond, organized labor was a key player—and there, organized labor was the conservative Boilermakers union, by agreement with the federal War Labor Board. The Boilermakers opposed prefabrication but went along in exchange for a “closed shop,” meaning employees were required to join up. Yet the Boilermakers made it quite clear that they had no interest in represe
nting the newly arrived low-skill workers or in tending to their very evident needs. (“The bottom of the barrel was being scraped,” the union said of the new workers, in one publication.) The newcomers were not like the native-born older union members: They were Okies, Arkies, and Texies. They were African American—numbering 10,000 in a town where there once had been only about 400 blacks. Perhaps worse in the eyes of the union, they were women, a group that constituted over a quarter of Kaiser’s workers by 1944. The Boilermakers made special arrangements for blacks and women, establishing special “auxiliary locals” for the African Americans—they got to pay dues but had no business agent and no grievance procedure. The union amended its men-only constitution to allow women to join. And to make sure these newcomers had no ability to make trouble, the Boilermakers provided for direct control of certain locals by the national union.
Racial segregation was the rule for shipyard work. Although Henry Kaiser insisted on fair treatment for African Americans, management justified separating the races on the grounds that there would be fewer clashes that way. Whether such segregation helped or only made things worse, racial strife was certainly an issue, particularly if novelist Chester Himes’s nightmarish treatment of life in the Los Angeles shipyards, If He Hollers, Let Him Go, is to be believed. Although Himes’s gangs are segregated by race, his novel features ceaseless racial and sexual banter that occasionally bursts forth in violence. In Richmond, management concentrated African Americans in the difficult outdoor work. Women, on the other hand, worked alongside men and made up 40 percent of the welders. For the most part, supervisors were older white males.10
As of V-J Day, when Japan surrendered, Kaiser’s shipyards had turned out $1.8 billion worth of ships. But war work had begun winding down a year earlier, and in 1945 employment fell to fewer than 35,000 workers from a high of nearly 100,000. Recruiters back in the early 1940s had not been altogether honest about postwar prospects—or much of anything else. They said workers would learn a trade, get high wages in a sunshiny area, and have employment for the duration of the war and likely thereafter, when the United States would turn to rebuilding its merchant marine fleet. (They also promised workers “pleasant homes at moderate rentals.”) Instead, shipbuilding activities all but ceased by 1946. Kaiser closed its health-care facilities and child-care centers. What would happen to the migrant workers now?11
In a company survey conducted just before the end of the war, more than 60 percent of the immigrant workers said they wanted to stay in California when peace arrived—and 34 percent said they wanted to remain in Richmond. If that came true, postwar Richmond’s population would be about double that of its prewar years. Assuming that the federal government would demolish the temporary blocks of row houses and that only one shipyard would remain open, city officialdom promised to build a community of worker homes in the former industrial areas. Rehabilitation would cost $6 million to $7 million, they said in an appeal to the federal government, and should include a new civic center, a library, firehouses, a hospital, and a police station.
Five years later, half of the town’s population was still living in the temporary war housing, including three-fourths of the town’s African-American population. The war workers, many unemployed now, had in fact stayed on—and, moreover, more immigrants had arrived, a quarter of whom were nonwhite and half of whom were veterans. Within the next few years, the town evicted thousands of these renters, particularly minorities and those with low income. It also razed hundreds of acres of the war housing, which was seen as crime- and poverty-infested. The area would not in fact become the site of new worker housing. Instead, the demolition opened up the lowlands for commercial development: In 1953, Harbor Gate, which had housed white workers, was among the last to fall, making way for a huge warehouse for the Safeway supermarket chain.
But even if the shipyards closed, continued military spending after the war helped to keep the Bay Area economy humming. New retail outlets offered employment—not equivalent employment, but jobs all the same—to the women who had once operated cranes or wielded welding torches. Many male shipyard workers turned to the docks and other industrial jobs. GI Bill financing helped many locate replacement housing in the burgeoning working-class suburbs.12
Kaiser Industries had a hand in constructing some of these postwar suburbs, notably Panorama City in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley. The prefabrication techniques perfected in the shipyards were now turned to home-building, allowing two-bedroom, single-family structures to sell for as little as $9,100. The corporation included eighteen to twenty enterprises, including a steel mill at Fontana, fifty miles east of Los Angeles. But Kaiser’s empire, it turned out, much depended on applying the man’s personal magic. When Henry Kaiser died in 1967, most of his company’s properties were sold off. 13
Today, what most people remember when Henry Kaiser’s name arises is the health-care plan, which in 1945 began enrolling thousands of members of the public at large. The value of that legacy is debatable in 2010, a year when the proper avenue to national health care is being much discussed. Immediately after the war, Kaiser Permanente was denounced by the American Medical Association as noxious socialized medicine. At roughly the same time, Kaiser himself was arguing against New York Senator Robert Wagner’s proposal for federal health insurance, asserting that his private-sector approach was preferable.14 Over sixty years, it seems, the debate has hardly advanced at all.
Site X, the government called it at first. The advantages: a rural, middle-of-the-country location that allowed few prying eyes. Lots of hydroelectric power, plentiful water, a sizable labor pool, and loads of land available for under $50 an acre. Only 1,000 families would have to be evicted, according to preliminary studies.
In October 1942, the U.S. government went into federal court and filed a “declaration of takings” for 56,000 acres. Five months later, six architects from the New York firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill were handed train tickets in sealed envelopes and dispatched to the unknown destination, where they would scout out the turf. By mid-February, they had an initial plan for a town. Residents—small farmers, some of whose families had lived there for generations, and tenants—got as little as two weeks’ notice that they were being ousted. Many came home to find eviction notices posted on their doors or nailed to a tree in the yard. As they moved out, often before the government purchase was completed, some crossed paths with the thousands of construction workers who were on their way to make the area into a city.
Site X, later known as Clinton Engineer District and ultimately as Oak Ridge, would be one of three supersecret locations central to the Manhattan Project, which produced America’s first atomic bombs. (The name Oak Ridge, strictly speaking, applied only to the fourteen-square-mile residential area within the larger Clinton reservation.) The other locations were Hanford, Washington (also known as Site W), and Los Alamos, New Mexico (Site Y).
It was the U-235, produced in Tennessee, that in 1945 reduced Hiroshima, Japan, to a cinder, killing 140,000 people. Located twenty miles from Knoxville and only sixteen miles from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Norris Dam, the Clinton Engineer District was the largest of the three primary Manhattan Project facilities. Hanford, the second-largest, was the major source for plutonium, which was used in the somewhat different bomb that fell on Nagasaki. Los Alamos, even though it was the smallest facility, became the most well-known since it was where the renowned scientists led by J. Robert Oppenheimer worked at the best-equipped physics lab in the world.
In almost every sense, Oak Ridge was a company town. It was, of course, a community planned and owned by management—the U.S. government.
Among the great number of workers at Oak Ridge was a large pool of unskilled young women, many of whom were housed in dormitories—and so Oak Ridge harkened back to the model established at Lowell.
The labor needs of the Clinton works were massive, prompting massive residential construction. In 1943, the government estimated that 13,000 p
eople would be required, but the project’s demands kept growing. By 1945, around 75,000 worked in what had become the fifth-largest city in Tennessee. The federal government and its subcontractors built thousands of housing units, much as at Richmond, California. During one period, single-family houses were being erected in Oak Ridge at the rate of one every half-hour.
Oak Ridge was a closed community. The 59,000-acre reservation was surrounded by fences, with signs reading MILITARY RESERVATION, NO TRESPASSING posted every six hundred feet. Five lookout towers loomed above the perimeter, and guards carefully screened would-be entrants at each of seven gates. Even more elaborate fencing topped with a foot of barbed wire surrounded each of the plants within the reservation. A system of coded badges regulated entry, and there were a great many armed cops: 4,900 members of the Safety Forces, 740 military police, and 400 civilian police. Such precautions were elaborate, yes—but also reminiscent of the closed-community approach at mining towns in Colorado and Appalachia.
Also like mining towns, loss of employment meant immediate expulsion from Oak Ridge. This time the offense that might have you deposited outside the gates with all of your belongings was not mere union activity—it was a breach of Manhattan District security, perhaps only loose talk or a wrong word in a letter written to a relative. Spies and informants infiltrated every part of the culture at all Manhattan Project locations. Agents from an Intelligence and Security Division tracked rumors out of Oak Ridge across the globe, examined the press for any sign of leaks, and fingerprinted more than 300,000 people.