Freedom's Forge (9 page)

Then they approached San Francisco’s most distinguished building firm, MacDonald and Kahn. Felix Kahn was a shrewd, urbane German Jewish immigrant who also happened to be the brother of Big Bill Knudsen’s good friend Albert Kahn, the world’s most famous industrial
architect. Together with his brilliant, mercurial partner, Alan MacDonald, Kahn had made a fortune constructing some of the city’s most famous landmarks, such as the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Telegraph Hill, as well as $75 million worth of buildings, storm drains, sewers, and industrial plants.
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Felix Kahn had already been thinking of making a bid on the big dam when Harry Morrison walked into his office with their proposition. Kahn offered to put up $1 million. Years later someone wondered if some of the roughneck group didn’t want him there because he was a Jew.

Kahn laughed. “Why, once I put up a million dollars,” he said, “it’s amazing how fast I became one of the family.”
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So Henry Kaiser had his bond and his merry band. They would call themselves the Six Companies, although over time that number would fluctuate as new opportunities arose and new partners stepped in and old ones bowed out. The men who led it formed a personal as well as a professional bond. All of them had come west as young men in search of adventure as well as money. Most had left school early to do manual labor. Only Kahn and MacDonald had ever been to college, and MacDonald had been such a misfit that he was fired from fifteen different jobs before finding a man like Kahn, who recognized the genius behind the eccentricity.

The men’s talents also complemented one another perfectly. Shea had spent years doing water and tunnel work, and understood the challenge of big-scale hydraulics. Felix Kahn’s fine suits and elegant manners made him the king of the boardroom, while Dad Bechtel could ride herd on a construction site like an Oregon Trail wagon master. Morry Knudsen knew mules and horses: They were going to need those to get first men, then equipment and supplies, out to remote Black Canyon.
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Utah Construction’s Marriner Eccles had a keen grasp of the numbers side of the equation. And Morrison-Knudsen had the best engineer in the business, Frank Crowe, who would go on to design not only Hoover but Shasta Dam, as well.

As for Henry Kaiser, he understood the political players and forces involved in a big government contract, so it was not surprising that once the Interior Department accepted the Six Companies’ bid, the
others immediately chose Kaiser as their point man in dealing with Washington, DC.

It was an inspired decision. Not only would the Six Companies end up having to combat all the forces of nature in order to build their dam, they also had to fight the leading lights of the New Deal.

The Six Companies won their bid on March 4, 1931, and immediately set out to survey the site in person. They found a barren wilderness on the edge of the desert, where daytime temperatures soared to 120 degrees in summer, which lasted from May to late September, and plunged to 20 degrees in winter. Laborers would spend nearly a year living in tents and fighting heatstroke, dust storms, falling rocks (so much a problem that the Six Companies ordered thousands of steel helmets for safety, making Hoover Dam the nation’s first big “hard hat” construction job), poisonous snakes and Gila monsters, and a constant lack of clean water, until Kaiser and his colleagues managed to build a permanent site to house their workers (which became Boulder City).

When work was done, they squandered their hard-won paychecks in the flyblown bars, brothels, and gambling dens that soon sprang up in nearby Las Vegas.
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Radical union organizers from the International Workers of the World, or IWW, turned up to agitate and generate strikes. The worst broke out in the high-summer heat of August 1931, leading to violent clashes with Kaiser-Bechtel security men.

The men who worked seven days a week, ten hours a day on Hoover Dam, however, proved union-resistant. The Great Depression was in full tide, with national income nearly half what it was in 1929 and unemployment at 24 percent. Although ninety-six men would die in accidents and cave-ins, the thousands who worked on the dam were grateful for a job at a competitive wage when tens of thousands of others were on relief. Later one of them expressed their feelings in a poem:

Kaiser missed most of the physical drama of Hoover Dam, although one of the times he went out in the full blast of summer, Dad Bechtel caught him in his arms when he keeled over from heatstroke. Instead, Henry spent much of those three years in Washington, venturing out from his suite at the Shoreham Hotel to flatter and ease tensions with the man overseeing the entire Boulder Dam operation, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes—“the Old Curmudgeon,” as he was known.

Ickes was a true believer in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, a rock-ribbed progressive who wanted Boulder Dam (as it was soon renamed) to be a showcase of enlightened labor relations. In the middle of the Depression, Ickes wanted the Six Companies to hire as many unemployed men as possible. Kaiser had to point out they needed men with genuine skills, not just people willing to turn up for a paycheck. Ickes wanted the door open to union organizing; Kaiser persuaded him the best route to happy workers was paying them well, not giving them a union card. In addition, Ickes wanted every federal safety regulation to be rigorously enforced; Kaiser patiently showed him that doing so would mean the dam would never be finished on time, let alone on budget.
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The progressive Interior secretary was also deeply suspicious of all capitalist enterprise, and he constantly accused the Six Companies and their subcontractors of trying to cheat the government. At one point Ickes drew up a list of no fewer than 70,000 separate violations of the letter of the contract, and considered imposing a $300,000 fine.

Kaiser struck back—not by confronting Ickes directly but by having a pamphlet with color illustrations drawn up, called “So Hoover Was Built,” celebrating the heroic achievements of the Six Companies and its engineers and employees, which Kaiser intended to mail en masse to congressmen and members of the media.

A week before the pamphlet was supposed to go out, Kaiser dropped a copy off on Ickes’s desk. The prickly Interior secretary saw he was about to lose a massive public relations battle, and backed down. The fine was reduced to $100,000, and when the dam was finally finished
Ickes wrote Kaiser a grudgingly conciliatory letter. “Your company has made a remarkable engineering record,” it read. “I have been very impressed with the fair attitude of you and other officials, which resulted in a satisfactory working relationship.”
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The two men remained friends until Ickes’s death, and Henry Kaiser had learned another valuable lesson. It paid to stay close to government officials, even the hostile ones. In exchange for loyalty, he had discovered, they would offer loyalty in return.

On July 26, 1935, the dam was all but done. The last of the racks for catching trash as it flowed through the intake towers was in place, and the water began rushing in, lapping at the dam’s concrete foundations. On September 30 came the ribbon-cutting ceremony, with President Roosevelt himself presiding while Harry Morrison, Charlie Shea, Felix Kahn, Steve Bechtel, and others of the Six Companies team sat with senators, congressmen, Secretary Ickes, and Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins. Behind the reviewing stand rose a dam more than 700 feet high and 660 feet wide at its base—with a reservoir 110 miles long and the foundations for a 1.2-million-horsepower plant that would generate enough electricity to illuminate seven states. The epic work had all been done ahead of schedule and under budget by some $4 million.
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“This morning I came, I saw, and I was conquered as everyone will be who sees for the first time this great feat of mankind,” Roosevelt said as the sunlight glinted off the mammoth lake where once there had been only cactus and desert. “This is an engineering victory of the first order,” he concluded, “another great achievement of American resourcefulness, skill, and determination.” Roosevelt then looked into the face of his audience. “That is why I have the right once more to congratulate you who have created Boulder Dam and on behalf of the nation to say to you, ‘Well done.’ ”
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“Before you work yourself out of the last job,” Henry Kaiser used to say, “line up a bigger one to pull yourself out.” Kaiser had skipped the ceremony out in Nevada. He was back in Oakland, already working on the next big project for the Six Companies, a dam on the Columbia River at Bonneville in Oregon. He and his partners had already submitted their bids. When his son Edgar and thirty-year-old Clay Bedford had finished supervising the work at Bonneville in the spring of
1937, they would be ready to move on to Grand Coulee, which would become the biggest concrete structure in the world.

The building of Boulder Dam had changed Kaiser’s company, and changed Kaiser. He had honed his management team to a level of perfection unknown anywhere else in the industry. The sense that they could do anything anywhere was now a given. He had also added another twist. As his workers swarmed to work on the high dam at Grand Coulee, Kaiser had Edgar and Clay Bedford’s sections divided into two competitive teams, to see who could complete the work faster and more under budget. Late in life Bedford would claim they first tried out this technique in Cuba. Either way, it would become a hallmark of the Kaiser way of doing things. Bedford and Edgar would use it to raise production to stunning heights in America’s dark days after Pearl Harbor.
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Kaiser also learned that taking care of business meant taking care of employees. Higher pay and good working conditions, including housing, kept not only the unions but federal government inspectors at bay. At Grand Coulee, Kaiser added one more element. It came at the suggestion of Dr. Sidney Garfield, the on-site physician Kaiser hired to oversee the health of his workers. Garfield suggested setting aside part of the employees’ paychecks to provide health insurance in case of injury or illness, which would also extend to their families. Kaiser enthusiastically agreed, and the result was the creation of the Kaiser Health Plan—the biggest and most successful private health insurance plan ever established by a private business, which is still up and running today.

“If you spent as much time on your labor as your sales,” he once advised an audience at a business meeting in Washington, “you wouldn’t have any problems”—not just with getting the best workers and raising productivity, he might have added, but also in cultivating a good public image. The man who had started developing photographs knew the importance of public image, especially in dealing with the federal government.
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As for Kaiser himself, Boulder made him more than just a regional titan, the symbol of a growing California and Pacific West. He was now a national figure, and a committed Roosevelt Democrat. While other
businessmen turned their backs on the New Deal, hoping it would go away, Kaiser guessed that Roosevelt and his colleagues were going to be in charge for a very long time. He saw no reason why his opportunities should suffer—indeed, why they should not prosper working with a Washington that wanted a key role in the American economy.

He already had his key contacts and players in place. One was Secretary Ickes. Another was Roosevelt himself, who liked Kaiser’s drive and energy and, in Frank Friedel’s phrase, “dearly loved a semblance of insubordination.”
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Meanwhile, MacDonald and Kahn’s top lawyer, Charles “Chad” Calhoun, had become Kaiser’s point man in the capital, as letters, memos, and invitations flowed out from his Washington law office in all directions. Nor did it hurt when Utah Construction’s former president and bean counter Marriner Eccles moved to Washington to take a job at Treasury, and rose to become chairman of the Federal Reserve.

That was in 1934. Three years later Kaiser was finishing Bonneville Dam and moving on to Grand Coulee. Yet he was already thinking about what would be his next big adventure.

He could not guess that it would be the biggest in the history of the world.

Futurama.
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CORBIS

ON APRIL 30,
1939, the World’s Fair opened in New York. The General Motors pavilion would be its centerpiece and house its most talked-about exhibit.