Mr. Kaiser Goes to Washington: The Rise of a Government Entrepreneur

Mr. Kaiser Goes to Washington: The Rise of a Government Entrepreneur, is the latest entry in a growing stack of books looking at Henry J. Kaiser, one of America’s outstanding industrialists of the twentieth century. This is no biography of Kaiser, however, that job already having been tackled commendably by two (very different) books written within the last ten years. Thankfully, author Stephen B. Adams does not replow the well-tilled ground of Kaiser’s career and life milestones but instead approaches Kaiser from a fresh angle. I found myself frequently turning to the notes section to see how Adams pieced together aspects of his story from multiple sources (personal papers, secondary accounts, magazines of the period, interviews with Washington or Kaiser insiders, government documents, etc.), and I always came away impressed with how Adams wove all the disparate bits into a coherent whole.

Adams picks up the story in the 1930s, well into Kaiser’s career as a builder. Giving little attention to Kaiser’s early years, the author jumps right into the period when Henry J. began to get his construction jobs from Washington, and therefore began needing access to decision makers in the capital. With noteworthy thoroughness, Adams details how Kaiser’s men in Washington gained that access for Kaiser and why Kaiser was so appealing to people like FDR and Harold Ickes. He leads the reader through points in Kaiser’s industrial career that needed government help, such as the fascinating discussion of how Kaiser broke down the oligarchical power of western concrete makers with federal assistance—government leaders had wanted more competition in concrete anyway. Adams’s real contribution comes at this point. He persuasively demonstrates how Kaiser fit the ideological outlook of New Dealers, how they looked to him to achieve success, and how in response to the government Kaiser effectively used its great power to achieve his own ends. Adams scuffs a bit of the luster off of the “Henry Kaiser, Great Man” mantle with his portrayal of Kaiser as a dependent variable in the federal government-regional development equation, but it is not deprecating of Kaiser in any way. Adams argues that the New Deal provided real opportunities for businessmen, “government entrepreneurs,” of whom Kaiser is the outstanding example.

Regrettably, Adams abruptly ends his story of this government entrepreneur with the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. Kaiser’s relationship with the government did not end with FDR’s death, although, as the author correctly argues, it changed dramatically. He explains his premature conclusion by writing that “A detailed post-World War II study of Kaiser’s governmental relations and an analysis of the subsequent performance of the various components of his empire are the grist for another study’s mill” (p. 181). Such a longer study would have made for a more interesting book, a book more about governmental influence broadly speaking and less about the New Deal, which is where all the attention is here. Still, Adams titled his book “The Rise of a Government Entrepreneur,” and not “The Story of a Government Entrepreneur,” so it was no oversight on his part to omit more.

This is a subject that has needed to be addressed by a book-length treatment for some time. Because of Kaiser’s prodigious influence he has been referred to often, and his connection to the New Deal has been alluded to frequently, but until now that connection has never been mined thoroughly for all of its interpretive power. Multiple histories of the modern American West (Kaiser’s home turf), Mark Foster’s biography Henry J. Kaiser (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), Mike Davis’s City of Quartz (London and New York: Verso, 1990), Jordan Schwarz’s The New Dealers (New York: Knopf, 1993), which devotes a chapter to Kaiser as the prototypical New Deal industrialist, all paved the way...