Kaiser, Henry J(ohn)

Kaiser, Henry J(ohn) (1882-1967), American industrialist. From 1914 to 1929 he headed a road construction company. In 1931 he directed the construction of Boulder Dam in Colorado, and subsequently the Bonneville Dam in Oregon and the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington. During World War II he managed Pacific Coast shipyards that handled a great deal of the wartime shipbuilding for the United States government and dramatically increased the speed of ship construction. In 1945, in association with the car manufacturer Joseph W. Frazer, Kaiser organized the Kaiser-Frazer Corporation, which was for a period one of the largest car-manufacturing concerns in the United States. He was also the founder of the Kaiser Steel and the Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation.