Henry John Kaiser was born on May 9, 1882 in Sprout Brook, New York. His father Franz (1842-1929) was a German immigrant who landed in New York but traveled upstate where he was taken in by the Yops family. He later married their daughter Mary (1847-1899) in 1873. The couple settled in Sprout Brook, where Franz (Frank) opened a cobbler’s workshop. After three daughters (Elizabeth, born November 23, 1873; Anna, born October 23, 1876; and Augusta, born September 19, 1878), Mary gave birth to a son Henry.
Kaiser’s family endowed him with an irrepressible drive to achieve. He initially worked at several odd jobs and furthered his business education through a correspondence course. At the age of sixteen he worked in photography studios, studiously learned the craft, and then became a traveling salesman for Eastman Kodak products. By 1901 he owned his own photography studio. He expanded the business to Florida where he owned three photography shops. It was in Florida that Henry met his wife, Bess Fosburgh (1886-1951), the only daughter of a wealthy wood merchant. The couple married on April 8, 1907, in Boston. Kaiser moved west and over the next few years worked as a salesman of construction material, tools, and machines, and learned to manage projects in civil engineering and road construction. In 1914 when his employer went bankrupt and Kaiser continued the construction of a road in Vancouver, British Columbia, at his own risk. A local bank provided him with the necessary working capital and thus made possible the founding of Henry J. Kaiser Company, Ltd.
During the first seven years, Kaiser’s crews built roads with a total value of about $2.8 million (or $34.1 million in 2010 dollars). Soon the company began winning contracts for million-dollar projects and the focal point of its operations shifted permanently to Oakland, California. The family grew, and now included two sons, Edgar Fosburgh (born July 29th, 1908, died December 11th, 1981) and Henry John, Jr. (born February 18th, 1917, died May 3rd, 1961). Kaiser expanded the scope of his company by taking over the supply side of his paving company and began operating his own gravel and sand pits. He also built concrete mixing plants, supplying them with his own raw materials. He also launched his first joint ventures with Warren Brothers of Massachusetts, a firm that had been supporting Kaiser with capital contributions and know-how since 1914. This association would be important when later bidding on the Hoover Dam contract. In California, an equally friendly relationship soon developed with Warren A. Bechtel, a descendant of German immigrants who by this time had laid the foundation for the largest construction company in the United States.
This ability to work in concert with other companies was an asset, since projects often required a variety of specialized skills that no single company could offer. A major benefit of this ability came in the spring of 1927, when the Warren brothers invited Kaiser into a consortium to build 750 miles of highways and 400 bridges in Cuba over the following three years. For Kaiser, the $20-million project was an opportunity to prove himself once and for all within the circle of the established competition. It was not long before these allies invited him into a new consortium that was planning to bid on the construction of the Boulder Dam (renamed Hoover Dam in 1947).
Although the task of overseeing the operations of the construction site was not in Kaiser’s hands, he did go along with the decisions of his partners, and even beyond the prestigious project on the Colorado, Kaiser did not stand out with any special commitment to social policies until the middle of the 1930s. He met the minimum legal requirements of the respective states, but when it came to health insurance, for example, he did only what was absolutely necessary. But with the creation of Social Security, the passage of the Wagner Act in the summer of 1935, and Roosevelt’s anti-business reelection campaign the following year, it must have become very clear to Kaiser that the conditions of successfully running a business were fundamentally changing—at least for companies entirely dependent on government contracts, as he was. It was therefore no doubt largely due to the changing political climate that Kaiser was eager henceforth to have harmonious relations with the unions and soon agreed to sign closed-shop agreements.
It was characteristic of Kaiser that he accepted such circumstances and not only accommodated himself to them, but soon realized the advantages of the new course. Already during the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam he began to set up a corporate health insurance. His oldest son Edgar was able to enlist a doctor named Sidney R. Garfield to provide medical care for the workers and their families in remote Grand Coulee. Garfield had previously developed a business model at two similar construction projects in the wilderness, and it proved a worthwhile expense at Grand Coulee: while the employer assumed the majority of the costs for establishing a small hospital, the workers paid a fixed monthly fee in advance. Workers now went to the doctor more often and especially at an earlier stage of an illness, since they no longer had to worry about possible additional expenses. This accorded with the interest of the doctors in keeping control of treatment costs. As much as possible, they wanted to prevent serious illnesses that entailed especially expensive treatments. These financial incentives also led Garfield to commit himself to better job safety at the construction sites and to training workers in accident prevention. As the Kaiser company expanded—a development inextricably linked with World War II—Kaiser developed the prepaid health care plan into the nucleus of a separate business. After the war, and still under the leadership of Garfield, the sector then grew even larger thanks to cooperation with the unions, whose members streamed into the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program. By 1955, only five percent of the program’s clients were Kaiser employees. By then Kaiser was so convinced of the merit of “his” health program that he recommended it to progressive politicians as a model. Especially because of its financial incentives, he argued that it was preferable to proposals for government-sponsored health insurance.
Until 1940, Kaiser was active chiefly as a builder who was also involved in the sale of ready-mix concrete and the production of raw materials such as sand, gravel, or cement. The United States’ slow turn away from isolationism, however, and above all its support for its European allies, created opportunities for business expansion even before the launch of wartime production as such. The Kaiser company’s first military projects were in shipbuilding, but it soon became involved in machine building and extracting magnesium as a lightweight alloy. The company's engineers built blast furnaces, steel works, and rolling mills on the West Coast. Kaiser factories made airplane parts, bombs, and munitions. This surging growth reflects the general economic development in the United States: in the first half of 1942 alone, state and military agencies awarded contracts totaling 100 billion dollars (or $1,340 billion in 2010 dollars), and it was only the military spending that put an end to the Great Depression. Against this background, Kaiser has very aptly been called a “government entrepreneur,” since the methods of his success reveal a good deal about the relationship between the state and the private sector during the New Deal and World War II.
Three strategies for success explain the course of his expansion. First, Kaiser was superbly prepared for the opportunities of a state-managed economy, because throughout his entire career he was active in a political and bureaucratic marketplace. The second strategy of success: speed. While the size of the contracts grew over time, Kaiser operated on the same model he had used in his first road projects. The art lay in drawing up realistic plans, submitting more favorable bids than the competition, and eventually building the project more quickly and efficiently than originally planned. The third strategy of success: that of the outsider. Kaiser had experienced the effectiveness of this strategy for the first time when he suffered an unexpected setback in the wake of many successful bids. The Six Companies narrowly lost out on building the Shasta Dam on the Sacramento River. But since the delivery of sand, gravel, and concrete was put out to bid separately, Kaiser applied to supply these—although the cement plant he intended to build was still in the late stages of planning; the Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, also signaled his political backing. Kaiser knew that public clients had been suffering for years from price fixing in the cement industry, and his bid was several million dollars below the price that the cement factories in Northern California had colluded to charge—even though their capacities were utilized at only sixty percent. Kaiser was awarded the contract, but this meant that he had to set up a cement plant at the Permanente Creek near Palo Alto posthaste, a plant whose long-term market prospects were uncertain. For five years it had a secure market for its output thanks to the dam’s construction, and additional contracts soon materialized as naval infrastructure expanded. Kaiser also managed to circumvent opposition from his competitors: when the Southern Pacific Railroad, under influence from the cement cartel, suddenly refused to transport sand and gravel to the remote construction site and also blocked a private feeder track, Kaiser simply had a 10 mile long conveyor belt built.
During the World War II, Kaiser’s shipyards built 1,490 ships with a contract volume of more than five billion dollars. Not only was this business financially profitable, it also catapulted the entrepreneur into the center of public attention. While the construction of the first “Liberty Ship” had taken 244 days, the average construction time soon dropped to forty days thanks to new welding techniques and a modular building method.F
For a brief time he worked with Howard Hughes on the "spruce Goose" project. This was an attempt to manufacture a transport plane that could fly men and materiel overseas and thus avoid the deaded German U-Boats which were taking a heavy toll on allied shipping. When the erratic Hughes failed to meet production demands, Kaiser bailed out of the project.
After the war, Kaiser quickly transformed his war plants into products geared for the civilian market. When the war ended he made no efforts to purchase the shipyards from the government which owned the plants. In the same way he exited as the operator of the magnesium facilities and left them to their uncertain fate. However, he kept the steel works in Fontana. In the future, the steel and health care sectors would be joined by two others: aluminum and cars. In the 1950s, Kaiser also created Engineer Consulting, since his organization had gathered important experiences during the war, which it henceforth marketed as engineering services.
July 1945 Kaiser went in with Joseph W. Frazer to form the Kaiser-Frazer Corporation. Frazer had decades of experience in Detroit and had helped the Jeep manufacturer Willys-Overland to succeed during the war. The partners each took half a stake in the new joint enterprise and leased from the RFC the shuttered Ford factory at Willow Run, in Michigan, where B-24 bombers had been produced on the assembly line during the war. Initially the partners covered their need for capital with Kaiser’s first public offering, and the production of the first cars began in 1946.
Kaiser also entered the aluminum industry by following the same pattern. At the beginning of 1946, the RFC solicited bids for operating production sites that Alcoa, as the previous lessee, did not believe had any chance as civilian plants. Although Alcoa was known for the rigid methods with which it defended its de facto monopoly, Kaiser initially received open support from the company because the Justice Ministry pushed Alcoa to do so by pointing to the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. Nevertheless, Kaiser’s production of aluminum initially remained dependent on Alcoa. Only the new armaments boom connected with the Korean War brought the turnaround: the sector expanded massively and moved closer to its customers through a new plant in Louisiana. Kaiser-Frazer, however, very quickly had to struggle with structural problems. The rapid start of production had created problems with quality, and the company lacked a qualified network of dealers and repair shops. With sales declining, the capacity of Willow Run could not be fully utilized, with the result that a renewed conversion to armament production at least ensured some financial relief there. In 1953, Kaiser took over the Jeep manufacturer Willys-Overland, sold Willow Run to General Motors, and moved its automobile production to a new location in Toledo, Ohio.
In 1948, Kaiser established the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a U.S.-based, nonprofit, private operating foundation focusing on the major health care issues facing the nation. The Foundation, not associated with Kaiser Permanente or Kaiser Industries, is an independent voice and source of facts and analysis for policymakers, the media, the health care community, and the general public. Kaiser Permanente Federal Credit Union was founded in 1952 and served employees of Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, the Permanente Medical Group, Inc. and Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. In September 2008, The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) selected Alliant Credit Union, based in Chicago, to purchase the assets of Kaiperm Federal Credit Union of Oakland, California. The purchase and assumption was completed on September 26, 2008. Kaiser Federal Bank was originally founded in 1953 as a credit union to serve the employees of the Kaiser Foundation Hospitals in Los Angeles, California, and converted to a federal mutual savings bank in 1999. Kaiser Federal Financial Group, Inc., is a Maryland corporation that owns all of the outstanding common stock of Kaiser Federal Bank. The stock of Kaiser Federal Financial Group, Inc. is traded on the NASDAQ under the trading symbol "KFFG".
In the mid-1950s, Kaiser asked William Besler to convert his 1953 Kaiser Manhattan car to steam. Besler completed this in either 1957 or 1958. Kaiser did not like the remodeled car and left it with Besler. In the early 1950s Henry Kaiser built an elaborate estate on the west side of Lafayette, California, 10 miles from his Kaiser Industries world headquarters in Oakland. After his wife died, Kaiser married the nurse who had cared for her (reportedly with his wife's blessing) and adopted her son. In 1955 he moved his family to Hawaii.
Kaiser spent much of his later years in Honolulu and developed an obsession with perfecting its urban landscape. He founded the Kaiser Hawaiian Village Hotel, today known as the Hilton Hawaiian Hotel. Kaiser constructed one of the first commercially practical geodesic domes in the United States at this resort. In the mid-1950s Kaiser recognized that television could make Kaiser brand products known to the public. He worked with Warner Brothers Studios to develop their first television series, Cheyenne , sponsored by household products including Kaiser aluminum foil and Kaiser cars. To promote his Hawaii ventures, Kaiser induced Warner Brothers to copy the formula of its popular series 77 Sunset Strip as new TV series Hawaiian Eye. Though actually filmed at WB studios in Burbank California, the show featured private detectives based at Kaiser's Hawaiian Village. Kaiser eventually bought and built a chain of radio and television stations which became known as Kaiser Broadcasting.
In 1967, Kaiser died at the age of 85 in Honolulu. He is buried in Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, California.
Schanetzky, Tim. "Henry J. Kaiser." In Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present, vol. 4, edited by Jeffrey Fear. German Historical Institute. Last modified February 06, 2014. http://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entry.php?rec=59
Kaiser’s family endowed him with an irrepressible drive to achieve. He initially worked at several odd jobs and furthered his business education through a correspondence course. At the age of sixteen he worked in photography studios, studiously learned the craft, and then became a traveling salesman for Eastman Kodak products. By 1901 he owned his own photography studio. He expanded the business to Florida where he owned three photography shops. It was in Florida that Henry met his wife, Bess Fosburgh (1886-1951), the only daughter of a wealthy wood merchant. The couple married on April 8, 1907, in Boston. Kaiser moved west and over the next few years worked as a salesman of construction material, tools, and machines, and learned to manage projects in civil engineering and road construction. In 1914 when his employer went bankrupt and Kaiser continued the construction of a road in Vancouver, British Columbia, at his own risk. A local bank provided him with the necessary working capital and thus made possible the founding of Henry J. Kaiser Company, Ltd.
During the first seven years, Kaiser’s crews built roads with a total value of about $2.8 million (or $34.1 million in 2010 dollars). Soon the company began winning contracts for million-dollar projects and the focal point of its operations shifted permanently to Oakland, California. The family grew, and now included two sons, Edgar Fosburgh (born July 29th, 1908, died December 11th, 1981) and Henry John, Jr. (born February 18th, 1917, died May 3rd, 1961). Kaiser expanded the scope of his company by taking over the supply side of his paving company and began operating his own gravel and sand pits. He also built concrete mixing plants, supplying them with his own raw materials. He also launched his first joint ventures with Warren Brothers of Massachusetts, a firm that had been supporting Kaiser with capital contributions and know-how since 1914. This association would be important when later bidding on the Hoover Dam contract. In California, an equally friendly relationship soon developed with Warren A. Bechtel, a descendant of German immigrants who by this time had laid the foundation for the largest construction company in the United States.
This ability to work in concert with other companies was an asset, since projects often required a variety of specialized skills that no single company could offer. A major benefit of this ability came in the spring of 1927, when the Warren brothers invited Kaiser into a consortium to build 750 miles of highways and 400 bridges in Cuba over the following three years. For Kaiser, the $20-million project was an opportunity to prove himself once and for all within the circle of the established competition. It was not long before these allies invited him into a new consortium that was planning to bid on the construction of the Boulder Dam (renamed Hoover Dam in 1947).
Although the task of overseeing the operations of the construction site was not in Kaiser’s hands, he did go along with the decisions of his partners, and even beyond the prestigious project on the Colorado, Kaiser did not stand out with any special commitment to social policies until the middle of the 1930s. He met the minimum legal requirements of the respective states, but when it came to health insurance, for example, he did only what was absolutely necessary. But with the creation of Social Security, the passage of the Wagner Act in the summer of 1935, and Roosevelt’s anti-business reelection campaign the following year, it must have become very clear to Kaiser that the conditions of successfully running a business were fundamentally changing—at least for companies entirely dependent on government contracts, as he was. It was therefore no doubt largely due to the changing political climate that Kaiser was eager henceforth to have harmonious relations with the unions and soon agreed to sign closed-shop agreements.
It was characteristic of Kaiser that he accepted such circumstances and not only accommodated himself to them, but soon realized the advantages of the new course. Already during the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam he began to set up a corporate health insurance. His oldest son Edgar was able to enlist a doctor named Sidney R. Garfield to provide medical care for the workers and their families in remote Grand Coulee. Garfield had previously developed a business model at two similar construction projects in the wilderness, and it proved a worthwhile expense at Grand Coulee: while the employer assumed the majority of the costs for establishing a small hospital, the workers paid a fixed monthly fee in advance. Workers now went to the doctor more often and especially at an earlier stage of an illness, since they no longer had to worry about possible additional expenses. This accorded with the interest of the doctors in keeping control of treatment costs. As much as possible, they wanted to prevent serious illnesses that entailed especially expensive treatments. These financial incentives also led Garfield to commit himself to better job safety at the construction sites and to training workers in accident prevention. As the Kaiser company expanded—a development inextricably linked with World War II—Kaiser developed the prepaid health care plan into the nucleus of a separate business. After the war, and still under the leadership of Garfield, the sector then grew even larger thanks to cooperation with the unions, whose members streamed into the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program. By 1955, only five percent of the program’s clients were Kaiser employees. By then Kaiser was so convinced of the merit of “his” health program that he recommended it to progressive politicians as a model. Especially because of its financial incentives, he argued that it was preferable to proposals for government-sponsored health insurance.
Until 1940, Kaiser was active chiefly as a builder who was also involved in the sale of ready-mix concrete and the production of raw materials such as sand, gravel, or cement. The United States’ slow turn away from isolationism, however, and above all its support for its European allies, created opportunities for business expansion even before the launch of wartime production as such. The Kaiser company’s first military projects were in shipbuilding, but it soon became involved in machine building and extracting magnesium as a lightweight alloy. The company's engineers built blast furnaces, steel works, and rolling mills on the West Coast. Kaiser factories made airplane parts, bombs, and munitions. This surging growth reflects the general economic development in the United States: in the first half of 1942 alone, state and military agencies awarded contracts totaling 100 billion dollars (or $1,340 billion in 2010 dollars), and it was only the military spending that put an end to the Great Depression. Against this background, Kaiser has very aptly been called a “government entrepreneur,” since the methods of his success reveal a good deal about the relationship between the state and the private sector during the New Deal and World War II.
Three strategies for success explain the course of his expansion. First, Kaiser was superbly prepared for the opportunities of a state-managed economy, because throughout his entire career he was active in a political and bureaucratic marketplace. The second strategy of success: speed. While the size of the contracts grew over time, Kaiser operated on the same model he had used in his first road projects. The art lay in drawing up realistic plans, submitting more favorable bids than the competition, and eventually building the project more quickly and efficiently than originally planned. The third strategy of success: that of the outsider. Kaiser had experienced the effectiveness of this strategy for the first time when he suffered an unexpected setback in the wake of many successful bids. The Six Companies narrowly lost out on building the Shasta Dam on the Sacramento River. But since the delivery of sand, gravel, and concrete was put out to bid separately, Kaiser applied to supply these—although the cement plant he intended to build was still in the late stages of planning; the Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, also signaled his political backing. Kaiser knew that public clients had been suffering for years from price fixing in the cement industry, and his bid was several million dollars below the price that the cement factories in Northern California had colluded to charge—even though their capacities were utilized at only sixty percent. Kaiser was awarded the contract, but this meant that he had to set up a cement plant at the Permanente Creek near Palo Alto posthaste, a plant whose long-term market prospects were uncertain. For five years it had a secure market for its output thanks to the dam’s construction, and additional contracts soon materialized as naval infrastructure expanded. Kaiser also managed to circumvent opposition from his competitors: when the Southern Pacific Railroad, under influence from the cement cartel, suddenly refused to transport sand and gravel to the remote construction site and also blocked a private feeder track, Kaiser simply had a 10 mile long conveyor belt built.
During the World War II, Kaiser’s shipyards built 1,490 ships with a contract volume of more than five billion dollars. Not only was this business financially profitable, it also catapulted the entrepreneur into the center of public attention. While the construction of the first “Liberty Ship” had taken 244 days, the average construction time soon dropped to forty days thanks to new welding techniques and a modular building method.F
For a brief time he worked with Howard Hughes on the "spruce Goose" project. This was an attempt to manufacture a transport plane that could fly men and materiel overseas and thus avoid the deaded German U-Boats which were taking a heavy toll on allied shipping. When the erratic Hughes failed to meet production demands, Kaiser bailed out of the project.
After the war, Kaiser quickly transformed his war plants into products geared for the civilian market. When the war ended he made no efforts to purchase the shipyards from the government which owned the plants. In the same way he exited as the operator of the magnesium facilities and left them to their uncertain fate. However, he kept the steel works in Fontana. In the future, the steel and health care sectors would be joined by two others: aluminum and cars. In the 1950s, Kaiser also created Engineer Consulting, since his organization had gathered important experiences during the war, which it henceforth marketed as engineering services.
July 1945 Kaiser went in with Joseph W. Frazer to form the Kaiser-Frazer Corporation. Frazer had decades of experience in Detroit and had helped the Jeep manufacturer Willys-Overland to succeed during the war. The partners each took half a stake in the new joint enterprise and leased from the RFC the shuttered Ford factory at Willow Run, in Michigan, where B-24 bombers had been produced on the assembly line during the war. Initially the partners covered their need for capital with Kaiser’s first public offering, and the production of the first cars began in 1946.
Kaiser also entered the aluminum industry by following the same pattern. At the beginning of 1946, the RFC solicited bids for operating production sites that Alcoa, as the previous lessee, did not believe had any chance as civilian plants. Although Alcoa was known for the rigid methods with which it defended its de facto monopoly, Kaiser initially received open support from the company because the Justice Ministry pushed Alcoa to do so by pointing to the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. Nevertheless, Kaiser’s production of aluminum initially remained dependent on Alcoa. Only the new armaments boom connected with the Korean War brought the turnaround: the sector expanded massively and moved closer to its customers through a new plant in Louisiana. Kaiser-Frazer, however, very quickly had to struggle with structural problems. The rapid start of production had created problems with quality, and the company lacked a qualified network of dealers and repair shops. With sales declining, the capacity of Willow Run could not be fully utilized, with the result that a renewed conversion to armament production at least ensured some financial relief there. In 1953, Kaiser took over the Jeep manufacturer Willys-Overland, sold Willow Run to General Motors, and moved its automobile production to a new location in Toledo, Ohio.
In 1948, Kaiser established the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a U.S.-based, nonprofit, private operating foundation focusing on the major health care issues facing the nation. The Foundation, not associated with Kaiser Permanente or Kaiser Industries, is an independent voice and source of facts and analysis for policymakers, the media, the health care community, and the general public. Kaiser Permanente Federal Credit Union was founded in 1952 and served employees of Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, the Permanente Medical Group, Inc. and Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. In September 2008, The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) selected Alliant Credit Union, based in Chicago, to purchase the assets of Kaiperm Federal Credit Union of Oakland, California. The purchase and assumption was completed on September 26, 2008. Kaiser Federal Bank was originally founded in 1953 as a credit union to serve the employees of the Kaiser Foundation Hospitals in Los Angeles, California, and converted to a federal mutual savings bank in 1999. Kaiser Federal Financial Group, Inc., is a Maryland corporation that owns all of the outstanding common stock of Kaiser Federal Bank. The stock of Kaiser Federal Financial Group, Inc. is traded on the NASDAQ under the trading symbol "KFFG".
In the mid-1950s, Kaiser asked William Besler to convert his 1953 Kaiser Manhattan car to steam. Besler completed this in either 1957 or 1958. Kaiser did not like the remodeled car and left it with Besler. In the early 1950s Henry Kaiser built an elaborate estate on the west side of Lafayette, California, 10 miles from his Kaiser Industries world headquarters in Oakland. After his wife died, Kaiser married the nurse who had cared for her (reportedly with his wife's blessing) and adopted her son. In 1955 he moved his family to Hawaii.
Kaiser spent much of his later years in Honolulu and developed an obsession with perfecting its urban landscape. He founded the Kaiser Hawaiian Village Hotel, today known as the Hilton Hawaiian Hotel. Kaiser constructed one of the first commercially practical geodesic domes in the United States at this resort. In the mid-1950s Kaiser recognized that television could make Kaiser brand products known to the public. He worked with Warner Brothers Studios to develop their first television series, Cheyenne , sponsored by household products including Kaiser aluminum foil and Kaiser cars. To promote his Hawaii ventures, Kaiser induced Warner Brothers to copy the formula of its popular series 77 Sunset Strip as new TV series Hawaiian Eye. Though actually filmed at WB studios in Burbank California, the show featured private detectives based at Kaiser's Hawaiian Village. Kaiser eventually bought and built a chain of radio and television stations which became known as Kaiser Broadcasting.
In 1967, Kaiser died at the age of 85 in Honolulu. He is buried in Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, California.
Schanetzky, Tim. "Henry J. Kaiser." In Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present, vol. 4, edited by Jeffrey Fear. German Historical Institute. Last modified February 06, 2014. http://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entry.php?rec=59