Omen for Mr. Kaiser

Fabulous Henry J. Kaiser, his family and his companies made headlines all over the U.S. last week:

> In Cleveland OPA jumped hard on Kaiser Co., Inc., accused it of buying steel from a warehouse at “profiteer prices.” OPA got a restraining writ against both firms while a purple-talking Government lawyer flung charges that Kaiser Co., Inc. was a conniver, had impeded the war effort, was a “scofflaw participant in illegal transactions.” OPA’s chief charge: in mid-July Kaiser’s firm paid $25 a ton over ceiling prices for about 230 tons of steel. Snorted Kaiser: “We have not at any time paid prices in excess of those approved by Leon Henderson. . . . I defy anyone to try and prove the contrary. . . .”

> Henry Kaiser dashed to Santa Monica, Calif., arrived late for a hush-hush huddle with aviation bigwigs Donald Douglas, Glenn Martin, Jack Northrop and Grover Loening. Purpose of the meeting: to debate Kaiser’s grandiose scheme to build hundreds of huge cargo planes. No one talked publicly afterwards but the atmosphere was tense as a shotgun wedding. So aircraft-wise West Coast newsmen figured that the aircraft men felt that Kaiser’s plans called for too much skilled labor, engineering talent and equipment.

> Kaiser rushed to his younger son’s booming shipyard in San Francisco Bay, impatiently waited as scurrying Kaiser-men prepared to launch the 10,000-ton Liberty Ship John Fitch just 24 days after keel-laying—another world’s record for Kaiser. Ship sponsor was Kaiser’s wife, who married him only after Kaiser proved to his late father-in-law that he could earn $125 a month. As the whistles blew and the band played, orchid-bedecked Mrs. Kaiser swung the champagne bottle, but the ship slid out of reach. Son Henry Jr. grabbed the bottle, hurled it against the fast-retreating prow. The crowd gasped: in over 100 Kaiser launchings nobody had ever misfired. But now Kaiser’s own wife had missed.

These were fresh items in the saga of Henry Kaiser, around whom news and fables now collect as about a Paul Bunyan. The public still didn’t know whether he could build planes—no one did, really —but the public, sick of objections and objectors, was fiercely impatient with them. Columnist Ray Clapper well expressed the public sentiment:

“Now Old Man Kaiser turns up in the clutches of the courts.

“Yes, they’ve got the old fellow. He was trying to build ships and was doing mighty damned well at it. . . . He had to use a lot of steel. The Government could give him the contracts, but it couldn’t insure him steel. Didn’t the Government shut down Higgins because they couldn’t get him the steel to go with the order?

“So Old Man Kaiser’s people—if the Government’s charge is correct—got to buying steel on the black market. . . . The OPA attorney triumphantly declared that Old Man Kaiser’s outfit was now branded as a scofflaw. A scofflaw! That’s just about it. Old Man Kaiser is just about as much of a criminal as all of us who used to be scofflaws drinking out of a bottle of bootleg hooch. . . .

“If you have to be a scofflaw to get steel out of the arsenal of bureaucracy, then that’s okay with me. . . . If that’s the way Old Man Kaiser has to get his steel to build ships to carry American forces to the fighting fronts, then I hope the old fellow breaks every law on the books. Winning the war is more important than any regulation of any Washington bureaucracy. . . .

“Give us a dozen such scofflaws around this town and it might shorten this war and save thousands of lives. One thing is certain, they won’t win this war with court cases that put our industrial Kaisers in strait jackets.”