New York: Knopf, 2025
226 pp., $31

It’s clear from The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding that Joseph Ellis is bothered by the scorn recently heaped upon the American founding fathers by writers such as those affiliated with The New York Times’s “1619 Project.” The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian opens his new book with a conde…

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Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner was that rarest of political creatures: a deeply principled man who nevertheless rose to the highest levels of government power. Best remembered today as one of slavery’s most vocal enemies, he was also a leading scholar of international law whose achievements included overseeing the annexation of Alaska.

Despite his …

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Independently published
369 pp, $28

The twentieth century’s most destructive ideology is now the least understood. Across Europe, America, and parts of the Global South, support for socialism and communism is making a comeback. A striking number of young people in the West now view these systems favorably, often attributing their past failures to poor imp…

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In most 18th-century European countries, if you were born a commoner, you’d quickly realize how limited your freedom was. Russian Empress Catherine II made this explicit in her framing for her law-code committee in 1767, writing, “What is the true End of Monarchy? Not to deprive People of their natural Liberty; but to correct their Actions, in order to …

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On June 4, 1942, the Japanese and American navies met in fierce combat near Midway Atoll. The fighting lasted for five days, and it ended with a resounding American victory. In total, approximately three thousand Japanese sailors and airmen were killed. The U.S. pilots were able to destroy four Japanese aircraft carriers, obliterating the bulk of the fearsome Japanese navy and turning the tide of the war in the Pacific theater.¹ For the next three years, Japan desperately tried to reassemble its once-vast navy. During that time, the Japanese produced six new aircraft carriers. In the same time frame, the United States produced seventeen.2

In fact, American mills, plants, and factories had been pumping out much-needed military materiel and equipment at an unprecedented rate. Over the course of the war, U.S. corporations produced 650,000 jeeps, 297,000 aircraft, 86,000 tanks, and 27 aircraft carriers.3

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America’s wartime industrialization was rapid. The country’s efficient, coordinated production of military equipment during WWII was driven by a conscious effort by policy makers in Washington, prominent industrialists, and men and women from all over the country who flocked to work in factories to contribute to the war effort. Children’s toy companies began to produce compasses, nail companies made rifle cartridge clips, and automobile companies transitioned into airplane production.4

One prominent industrialist at the time was Henry J. Kaiser, now known as “the father of modern shipbuilding.”5 Kaiser—along with many others—helped turn the United States into a formidable power that would ultimately defeat its enemies and restore peace in many parts of the world.

The Life of Henry J. Kaiser

Heinrich Kaiser was born in Sprout Brook, New York, on May 9, 1882. His father, Frank Kaiser, had been a shoemaker in Germany before immigrating to the United States in 1872. Once in America, Frank was taken in by the Yops family, German immigrants, and he soon fell in love with Mary Yops. The couple married in 1873. Nine years later, Mary gave birth to her fourth child (and her first son), Heinrich Kaiser. Many years later, he would change his first name add a middle name, and become Henry John Kaiser.6

Kaiser’s parents instilled the values of hard work and perseverance early on. His father worked as a tradesman, and the family struggled to stay afloat financially. In 1889, the Kaisers moved from Sprout Brook to Whitesboro, a more prosperous New York town. Despite the family’s increased economic opportunities, Kaiser had to leave school at age thirteen to help support his family. His first job was in a dry-goods store; he later left to work in photography studios. Kaiser rose through the ranks, quickly becoming a traveling camera salesman. Eventually, he was able to purchase his own photography store. His business expanded; within four years, he owned five stores.7

Kaiser gave up his photography business when his future father-in-law demanded that Kaiser increase his income before getting married. He moved westward from city to city and job to job, building his commercial skills and developing expertise in trade and business. Kaiser worked mainly in construction-related industries; after moving to Spokane, Washington, he worked as a salesman at a hardware store before becoming a civil engineering project manager.8 His specialties were sales, construction, and large-scale engineering projects. Kaiser was known for working harder than any of his coworkers and for staying in the office for extremely long hours; reportedly, he regularly worked twelve to fifteen hours a day. Later in his career, he worked as many as twenty.9

In 1914, the company Kaiser was working for went bankrupt in the middle of a road construction project. Kaiser took over the project himself, and the Henry J. Kaiser Company was born.10

As a result of Kaiser’s clever business strategies and excellent risk management, his new company grew quickly. Most of its contracts were with government clients, and Kaiser knew that he would have to establish a good reputation to win more commissions. Government contracts involved a fixed-price agreement, so whether Kaiser earned a profit or lost money was largely dependent on his company’s ability to complete projects quickly, affordably, and effectively.11

Kaiser also had a knack for finding able, productive men to join his companies. Because his business ventures were covering an increasingly wide expanse of the continent, he needed many people he could trust to do their jobs properly. He built a “team of construction foremen and engineers who would be part of his closest circle of leadership for decades”; and over time, he and his team developed an outstanding reputation.12

After years of building infrastructure all over the Pacific Northwest, Kaiser eventually decided to settle his company’s headquarters in Oakland, California. In 1931, the Henry J. Kaiser Company, as a part of a six-company consortium, won the bid to build what is now known as the Hoover Dam. The project was a Herculean undertaking, but the dam was finished two years ahead of schedule. By then, Kaiser had established himself as one of America’s leading industrialists.13

Kaiser’s business acumen extended to multiple realms. For example, he established a corporate health-care system (which still exists under the name Kaiser Permanente). Kaiser had noticed that his employees were missing work due to inadequate health care, and he realized that it would be in his interest to offer better medical care to his workers. With the aid of physician Dr. Sidney Garfield, Kaiser created a private hospital network for his employees, who paid a fixed monthly rate for any health care they required.14 Through this system, Kaiser was able to align his business incentives with the needs of his workers to create a safer workplace.

In the early 1940s, Kaiser turned his attention to helping America prepare for its impending entry into the war. According to the Naval History and Heritage Command, Kaiser was “considered by many to be the most influential civilian to help America win the war.”15 His extensive business ventures before and during the conflict—ranging from electricity that his dams generated to the concrete that his mills manufactured—helped produce the physical materials needed to achieve victory. His most significant contribution to the war effort, however, was the massive number of “Liberty ships” his company built at breakneck speed.

The Liberty ship was a “standard design cargo ship” that could transport thousands of jeeps or hundreds of tanks. In 1941, the U.S. Maritime Commission allocated significant resources to building ships to expand naval capabilities. The first Liberty ships were produced just a few months before the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, which would spur the official U.S. entry into the war. These first ships took almost two hundred days to build. Kaiser was later able to shorten the production time to just fourteen days.16

One method that Kaiser’s shipyard factories employed to maximize efficiency was building sections of a ship separately and then piecing them together at the end of the process. These ship sections, instead of being riveted together, were welded, which took far less time and expertise.17 Now, because each ship section was built separately, each worker only had to learn how to build his section rather than the entire building process.18 This system took advantage of the principle of division of labor, which increases economic output by enabling each worker to focus on perfecting a specialized task. In total, Kaiser’s shipyards produced more than 1,490 ships, amounting to “27 percent of all ships ordered by the U.S. Maritime Commission” during the war.19

Kaiser’s industrial efficiency was characterized by speed and an eagerness to mobilize. It was no easy task to convert America’s peacetime economy into an efficient wartime machine, but Kaiser was able to integrate his supply chain systems to optimize production of various military equipment and supplies. For example, when his shipyards began to use steel faster than they could get it, Kaiser set up a new steel mill.20 He was also incredibly creative. Noticing that it took a lot of time to train new workers to “tightrope” walk along narrow steel beams, Kaiser hired ballet dancers to do the job instead.21

Kaiser’s efforts during WWII did not go unrecognized. The nation adored him, and the American public even christened him the “miracle man.”22 Newspapers and magazines all over the country published articles about him, and President Roosevelt even considered naming Kaiser as his running mate in the 1944 presidential election.23

Kaiser’s Legacy

Kaiser’s early entrepreneurship and his subsequent contributions to the war effort are a testament to his commitment to productivity. He deserves to be remembered as a hero who came to America’s—and the free world’s—rescue in a time of great need. His enterprising spirit, knowledge of business, and ability to overcome tremendous challenges helped save countless lives.

Of course, many other men and women of ability greatly helped the American cause during WWII, such as William “Big Bill” Knudsen, the head of President Roosevelt’s National Defense Advisory Commission; and Charles E. Wilson, the president of General Motors and executive vice chairman of the War Production Board.24

Thanks to men such as Kaiser and their extraordinary industrial capabilities, the United States was able to outproduce its enemies so effectively. Kaiser’s legacy is a lasting testament to the power of ingenuity, determination, and industry. WWII was won not only on battlefields and oceans across the globe but also in the factories, shipyards, and assembly lines across America and other Allied countries. By harnessing the full potential of industry, men such as Kaiser demonstrated that rationality, productiveness, and inventiveness shape the course of history.

This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of The Objective Standard.

Before the Industrial Revolution, human life was bleak. Men, women, and children had to do grueling manual labor all day to produce basic necessities. Aside from a privileged few, nobody had the time or energy to indulge in hobbies or produce other values. Most people were essentially confined to their hometowns, and the long-distance trade of goods was…

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New York: Avid Reader Press, 2024
570 pp. $35 (hardcover)

None of the millions of people who witnessed the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986, will ever forget the wave of shock and grief that swept over the United States, and the world, on that day. When the shuttle exploded a little more than a minute into its flight—killing seven ast…

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Virtue to discharge all the duties of life; and Fortitude, to bear whatever destiny awaits me. —John Quincy Adams

The long, eventful life of John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), which began on the eve of the American Revolution and ended on the eve of the Civil War, is a testament to ambition, fortitude, integrity, moral courage, and patriotism. Although he is…

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Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024

295 pp. paperback, $20

John Swanson Jacobs was born into slavery in North Carolina in 1815 or 1817. Exactly when is unclear, because slaves’ birth dates rarely were recorded with precision. But we do know that he was the younger brother of Harriet Jacobs, who in 1861 published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

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London: Picador, 2023

892 pp. $29.77 (paperback)

After Germany’s defeat in May 1945, leaders of the victorious Allies convened a trial in Nuremberg to prosecute Nazi leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity. That trial lasted eleven months, and although prosecutors blundered in some ways—most infamously, bungling Hermann Göring’s cross-examinati…

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Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2022

404 pp. $19.95 (paperback)

In 1943, the world was at war, and the barbaric regimes of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan occupied much of Europe and Asia. America, the “sleeping giant,” had awakened to thrust its industrial might against those regimes. Yet, on American soil, leading thinkers had embraced versions of the…

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I recently spoke with Chelsea Follett, managing editor of HumanProgress.org and policy analyst at Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, about her new book, Centers of Progress: 40 Cities That Changed the World. Here is our discussion, edited for clarity and brevity.

Thomas Walker-Werth: What led you to write a book about cities, and …

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History is replete with famous inventors. Usually, they are known for their most successful inventions—Alexander Graham Bell for the telephone, Johannes Gutenberg for the printing press, and so on. Not so, however, for Robert P. McCulloch, inventor of the handheld chainsaw. An engineer by training, McCulloch dabbled in a wide range of industries through…

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New York: Random House, 2022

676 pages, $40 hardback

When Abraham Lincoln died in a bricklayer’s house across from Ford’s Theater on April 15, 1865, the weeping secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, said . . . something. Nobody knows exactly what. The most common version of the story holds that Stanton said, “Now he belongs to the ages.” But some thought his w…

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Charlottesville, VA: TPC Books, 2022

124 pp. $14.95 (paperback)

Every thinking man who does honest work in his own field is our ally and is helping to move civilization forward (28).

“Who sets the tone of a culture?,” asked Ayn Rand. “A small handful of men: the philosophers.” Philosophers provide answers to fundamental questions about the nature of the wo…

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Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited version of a speech delivered at TOS-Con 2022, which was adapted from Timothy Sandefur’s forthcoming book, Freedom’s Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness (Cato Institute, November). The article contains spoilers of Ayn Rand’s novels The Fountainhead and At…

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Yale University Press, 2022

348 pp. $20 (paperback)

Thomas Jefferson was an insatiable writer, composing tens of thousands of letters, as well as pamphlets and essays, about everything from Plato’s influence on Christianity to the economics of whaling. But he published only one full-length book in his lifetime: Notes on the State of Virginia, which first …

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On September 11, 2001, at 10:03 a.m., United Flight 93 ended in a fiery crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.1 Passengers had just stopped hijackers likely aiming to destroy the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.2

Earlier that day, three other teams of jihadists had flown similar suicide missions. Two planes collapsed the Twin Towers of the World Trad…

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New York: Harper, 2021

428 pp. $35, hardcover

Among the horrific battles of World War II, Operation Pedestal—the 1942 effort to resupply Britain’s besieged colony on the Mediterranean island of Malta—seems relatively minor. It was nothing like the Battles of Stalingrad, which lasted six months and killed two million people; or Okinawa, which involved hund…

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Adventure is always just around the corner, and I can turn that corner mighty fast. —Jacqueline Cochran

When Jackie Cochran died in 1980, she held more speed, altitude, and distance records than any other pilot in aviation history, she had founded a successful cosmetics company that she ran for twenty-eight years before selling it, and she had been award…

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