Nathan Straus

American department store owner

• Born: January 31, 1848
• Birthplace: Otterberg, Bavaria (now in Germany)
• Died: January 11, 1931
• Place of death: New York, New York

Straus was the co-owner of two of the largest department stores in New York City—Macy’s and Abraham & Straus. He also was an active philanthropist, advocating milk pasteurization, opening a tuberculosis sanatorium for children, and providing coal, food, housing, and other relief during economic and natural disasters.

Source of wealth: Retailing

Bequeathal of wealth: Charity

Early Life

Nathan Straus (strows) was born in Otterberg, Bavaria, the son of Lazarus and Sara Straus. He was the third of four children. At the age of six, he traveled with his mother, sister Hermine, and brothers Isidor and Oscar to join their father in the southern United States. After the Civil War, the family moved from the state of Georgia to were chosen.

His father founded L. Straus & Sons, a business that sold crockery and glassware. The three boys learned this trade from their father and eventually took over the business. On April 28, 1875, at age twenty-seven, Straus married twenty-one-year-old Lina Gutherz. The couple had six children.

First Ventures

L. Straus & Sons began selling crockery to R. H. Macy & Company department store. In 1888, the Straus business and Macy’s became partners, and less than a decade later the Straus family co-owned the store. In 1893, Nathan and Isidor bought a Brooklyn dry goods store, Abraham and Wechsler, from its owner Joseph Wechsler. The brothers renamed the store Abraham & Straus.

During this time, Straus noticed the struggles of the city’s poor. Especially cold winters in 1892 and 1893 caused economic distress, so Straus set up shelters and created a chain of centers to distribute food and coal to the needy. The Straus family’s dry goods business also offered coal, bread, sugar, flour, and other staples at a minimum cost. The personal cost for helping those in need was estimated at $100,000, nearly ten times what local charities were contributing, yet Straus’s philanthropic efforts were criticized for encouraging pauperism.

Shortly before the hardship of these terrible winters, Straus took an interest in public service. From 1889 to 1893 he served as the park commissioner for New York City. He declined the Democratic Party’s nomination for mayor of the city in 1894. However, the plight of the city’s poor and homeless continued to concern him. The high death rate of infants and children led him to explore health issues among the poor.

Mature Wealth

Straus was intrigued with the discoveries of scientist Louis Pasteur, and after the death of two of his three small children Straus became convinced that raw milk was “white poison.” The sudden death of a family cow revealed that it had died of tuberculosis, and Straus suspected the cow had passed on the disease to his children. Straus and his wife created and financed the Nathan Straus Pasteurized Milk Laboratory. Here milk was pasteurized, or heated, to kill bacteria and was then bottled to help combat infant mortality from tuberculosis, typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and other diseases. Eighteen milk depots were established throughout the city to sell sterilized milk for a few cents or to provide it for free to those unable to afford it for their children. Straus and his wife also opened and financed the Tuberculosis Preventorium for Children in Lakewood, New Jersey. In 1898, Straus served as president of the New York City Board of Health.

After their efforts to pasteurize milk, Straus and his wife Lina planned a trip to Israel. The couple and Straus’s brother, Isidor, and Isidor’s wife traveled to Palestine in 1912. Straus was taken by the area but grew concerned about the health and housing problems he saw in Palestine. Although he and Lina remained abroad, Isidor and his wife returned to New York aboard the RMS Titanic. They perished, and Straus took the deaths very hard. He believed divine intervention had spared him and his wife and committed himself to helping those in Palestine.

Legacy

The last decade of Straus’s life was devoted to assisting the Jewish community in America and helping underwrite Zionist activities in the Holy Land. Straus and Lina devoted two-thirds of their fortune to these efforts. They funded pasteurization plants, nursing missions, and hospitals in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and worked to improve living conditions for both Arabs and Jews in Palestine. In 1920, Straus turned the New York City milk depots over to public agencies and donated his pasteurized milk laboratory to the state of New York, since by that time milk pasteurization was required by most cities and states.

Bibliography

Medoff, Rafael. “The Day Nathan Straus Went to Church.” In Zionism and the Arabs: An American Jewish Dilemma, 1898-1948. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997.

Sarna, Jonathon D. The Jews of Boston. Boston: Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, 1995.

Seymour, Brody. “Nathan Straus.” In Jewish Heroes and Heroines of America: 150 True Stories of American Jewish Heroism. New York: Lifetime Books, 2005.

Straus, Lina Gutherz. Disease in Milk—the Remedy Pasteurization: The Life Work of Nathan Straus. 2d ed. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957.

Straus, Nathan. The Seven Myths of Housing. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1974.