Kiplinger commissioned Kalish to create fifty portrait statuettes of prominent figures in World War II era politics, arts and sciences.
Kiplinger donated the statuettes to the Smithsonian Institution in 1944.Kalish was the author of Labor Sculpture, largely a collection of photographs of his statues of workers.
Most of the works in the book are in a Social realism style.
Critic Emily Genauer wrote in 1938, "It is the workmen who dominate the American scene, and who have become as surely symbolic of their time as the pioneers in covered wagons, and the robber barons and the great merchant princes were in there respective eras." This was what Kalish portrayed in his art.In 1939, Kalish lived in New York City and summered in Cleveland.