The Company Town (31 page)

In the early 1940s, Richmond, California, was a pretty quiet place. Just north of Oakland on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay, the town was “a drab little industrial city,” in the words of
Fortune
magazine, marshland backed by a few hills that were peppered with Standard Oil storage tanks. The fragrance from that company's refinery was an almost palpable presence. Along with the Standard facility, Richmond contained perhaps a dozen other industrial operations, including since the early 1930s a Ford Motor assembly plant.

Things were about to change—radically. Ford had been drawn to the area by its deepwater port, and local businessmen felt that other companies should be attracted as well. So in 1939, officials from the local chamber of commerce suggested to the U.S. Maritime Commission that the site was a natural for shipbuilding. War was already a reality in Europe, and where there is war, there is money to be made. Before long, the Maritime Commission and the Richmond officials were in contact with other parties, including a vigorous construction magnate named Henry J. Kaiser and his sometime colleague, W. A. Bechtel.

Kaiser and Bechtel had been the major figures behind such profoundly transformative projects of the 1930s as the Boulder and Bonneville dams. They didn't know much about shipbuilding—but such gaps in experience never stopped Kaiser. A baldheaded, 260-pound dynamo in a double-breasted suit, Kaiser would become nationally celebrated—and resented—as a can-do guy who seemed always to deliver on his ambitious, even outrageous, promises. And it didn't take Kaiser long to become very interested in Richmond.

In late 1940, a British commission arrived in New York looking to assign the building of sixty cargo ships. The Kaiser-Bechtel consortium, known as Six Companies, bid on the project and, against all odds, won it. Almost immediately, Kaiser dispatched a young executive from his company, Clay Bedford, who was working on a construction project in Texas, to Richmond to put together a shipyard. Solidifying the shoreline
marshes with 300,000 cubic feet of rock, Bedford had a workable shipyard in place within six months.
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That was only the beginning.

Pearl Harbor made Kaiser's shipyards into a major contractor for the U.S. government. The assignment: producing the freighters that would be known as Liberty Ships and Victory Ships. Kaiser and the War Manpower Commission proceeded to recruit workers from across the country and abroad—targeting such surplus-labor pools as Minneapolis, Little Rock, Memphis, and St. Louis. They tapped idle mining and agricultural areas in California and called out to urban workers in Los Angeles. The result: Richmond's population jumped by 400 percent. By the end of 1943, the four Kaiser shipyards employed 100,000 workers.

Richmond became a boomtown, with experiences not unlike those of the Texas oil-gusher communities. The promise of high wages, averaging $1 per hour, drew workers, but expenses, especially rent, ate up much of that. And as in Texas, they were extremely fortunate if they could find any place to stay: Early arrivals in Richmond snatched up the available spare rooms. More than seventy trailer camps sprouted on the outskirts of town, and soon they were jammed, too. Families slept in cars, pitched tents along outlying creeks, and rented shelter in boats harbored near the shipyards. In one case, twenty-eight people cohabited in a converted storefront. Others found lodging in chicken shacks that a federal housing agent called “so horrible that the only possible solution would be to remove their occupants immediately and burn the shacks.” In another oft-described case, a single male worker volunteered for the graveyard shift at the Richmond yard, slept in the park by day, then shaved at a gas-station washroom and spent the evening in a bar before going off to work.

Schools operated in quadruple shifts, as juvenile delinquency soared. Other crimes, including prostitution, rose as well, and during one month police made 4,000 arrests. (The resulting fines ran to $34,000 and, no doubt, were welcomed by the fiscally strapped city government.) Although neither gambling houses nor brothels operated openly, plenty of both existed surreptitiously. Restaurants and movie houses ran full-out, round-the-clock. And as in Gary, a tough saloon district appeared, especially along the main drag known as McDonald Avenue. “It takes a fairly
hardy customer to walk into the Nutt Club, the Denver Club, or the Red Robin,” reflected the
Fortune
writer.
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Kaiser's shipyard was like a city unto itself. Photos from the time show a vast industrial area dominated by towering cranes. In his collection of short stories,
Swing Shift
, Joseph Fabry describes a character's arrival at the facility after passing beneath a huge REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR sign. “The yard was arranged city-like,” Fabry explains:

In
Swing Shift
, workers from a variety of backgrounds are thrown together, eagerly learn new skills, rapidly overcome initial stereotypes about gender and race, find romance, and finally triumph in the speed-record-breaking completion of a Liberty ship. A Viennese refugee from Nazism, Fabry saw American life and comradeship in a rosy hue. William Martin Camp's novel
Skip to My Lou
is much less Pollyannaish. Following a family of Arkansas migrants to Richmond, Camp offers images of brutish living conditions, furtive prostitution amid partially built ships, and racial friction that threatens to burst forth in street fighting. In one scene, the author describes the sweaty, miserable drudgery belowdecks:

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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.