Nathan Straus
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Nathan Straus (January 31, 1848–January 11, 1931) was an American merchant and philanthropist who owned two of New York City's biggest department stores -- R.H. Macy & Company and Abraham & Straus -- before giving away most of his fortune to the Zionist cause.
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[edit] Life
Nathan Straus was born in Otterberg, Germany, the third child of Lazarus Straus (1809 - 1898) and his wife Sara (1823 - 1876). His siblings were Hermine Straus Kohns (1846 - 1922), Isidor Straus (1845 - 1912) and Oscar Solomon Straus (1850 - 1926). Isidor Straus died on the RMS Titanic.
The family moved to the U.S. state of Georgia in 1854. After the American Civil War the family moved to New York City where his father formed L Straus & Sons, a crockery and glassware firm
On April 28, 1875, he married Lina Gutherz (1854 - 1930) with whom he had six children, among them Sissie Straus who was married to Chief Judge Irving Lehman.
[edit] Macy's and Abraham & Straus
He and his brothers started selling the crockery to R.H. Macy & Company department store. The brothers became partners in Macy's in 1888 and co-owners in 1896.
In 1893, he and Isidor bought out Joseph Wechsler in the Abraham and Wechsler dry goods store in Brooklyn, New York, which they renamed Abraham & Straus.[1]
[edit] Public service
In the late 1880s, Straus began a period of philanthropy and public service in New York City.
He served as New York City Park Commissioner from 1889–1893, president of the New York City Board of Health, 1898, and in 1894 he refused the Democratic nomination for New York Mayor.[2]
In 1892, he and his wife privately funded the Nathan Straus Pasteurized Milk Laboratory to provide pasteurized milk to children to combat infant mortality and tuberculosis. In his battles with the disease he opened the Tuberculosis Preventorium for Children at Lakewood, New Jersey (later it was moved to Farmingdale, New Jersey in 1909. Their book, Disease in Milk: The Remedy Pasteurization : the Life Work of Nathan Straus (by Nathan Straus and Lina Gutherz Straus) records that unclean, unpasteurized milk fed to infants was the chief cause of tuberculosis, typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria and other diseases that were the main cause of, e.g. a 25% infant mortality rate in the US in 1890, 15% in 1903 (but 7% in New York in 1900, where pasteurized milk had already become the norm) (it is now below 1% in the US). Straus is credited as the leading proponent of the pasteurization movement that eliminated the hundreds of thousands of deaths per year then due to disease-bearing milk.
He donated money to the New York Public Library, specifically targeting young people. The Young People's Collection at the Donnell Library Center is named for him.
If simply giving away money were all he did, it probably would have been enough to secure him a small place in history. But his humanitarian achievements were enormous. Nathan Straus saved babies' lives. Not just a few, or even a few hundred. Hundreds of thousands of them. By that time, Nathan Straus was also the city's parks commissioner. And it was during this period that he began the crusade for which New York became exceedingly grateful.
It began with two events. The first was the death on a trip to Europe of one of Straus' six children, an infant named Sara. Her demise was attributed to bad milk, a common fact of life in those days before refrigeration and sanitary health regulations. Some time later, Straus, whose Manhattan home was at 27 W. 72nd St., was raising milk cows for his family's use on property he owned upstate, and one day a seemingly healthy cow suddenly died. It turned out to have had tuberculosis.
Straus was astonished. Although 30 years earlier Louis Pasteur had linked disease to milk, and the heating of milk to high temperatures - the process that came to be known as pasteurization - to the absence of microorganisms, it was only 10 years earlier that Robert Koch found the organism that caused tuberculosis. The connection between pasteurization and preventing illnesses from infected milk was not yet widely understood. Straus, though, decided that his children from then on would drink only milk that had been pasteurized.
Moreover, he resolved, if pasteurization was crucial to the well-being of his children, it should be important for the children of his city as well.
He built a milk pasteurization laboratory and distribution center. Then he established depots around the city where the poor could have access to the healthy milk. The first, opened in 1893, was located on the East River Pier at Third St.
Straus thought it would be demeaning to give the milk away as charity, so he charged 5 cents for a day's supply. For those who did need charity, milk coupons were distributed throughout the city by doctors, the Board of Health, the Salvation Army and other agencies.
Not everyone was thrilled with Straus' campaign. Farmers in particular were unhappy that their unpasteurized product was being maligned as unsafe. In 1895, their political supporters managed to get Straus indicted on a charge of adulterating milk. He was convicted but given a suspended sentence, and he continued to establish milk stations at his own expense around the city.
Before he was finished nearly 30 years later - New York passed a law in 1914 requiring milk to be pasteurized, but laws were being enacted around the country for years after that - he established 297 milk stations in 36 cities, paying for them himself. Some 24,009,498 glasses and bottles of safe milk were dispensed in the quarter-century of his project.
The result of this incredible philanthropy is priceless. But here is how it is measured in human lives: In 1891, 24% of babies born in New York City - nearly one in four - died before age 1. But of the 20,111 children fed pasteurized milk supplied by Straus over four years, only six died. Nationally, as pasteurization became widespread, the death rate for children fell from 125.1 per 1,000 in 1891 to 15.8 in 1925. One historian determined that Nathan Straus directly saved the lives of 445,800 children.
In 1923, when the city celebrated the first 25 years of consolidation, a jubilee vote was held to honor the person who had done the most to benefit the public. The winner: Nathan Straus.
To match his fortune, Straus had enough energy for a dozen men, and his philanthropy extended far beyond his pasteurization campaign. During the financial panic of 1893, he reached deep into his pockets to help his fellow New Yorkers. He used his milk stations to sell coal at the ridiculously low price of 5 cents for 25 pounds to those who could pay. Those who could not received coal for free. He opened lodging houses for 64,000 persons, who had a bed and breakfast for 5 cents, and separately funded 50,000 meals for a cent each.
He did not wait for emergencies to institute ideas that would benefit his fellow citizens. Anonymously, he gave away thousands of turkeys. He built a recreational pier, the first of many that dotted the city's waterfront.
At Abraham & Straus, he noticed that two of his employees were starving themselves to save their wages to feed their families, so he established what may have been the first subsidized company cafeteria.
In 1916, as American entry into World War I loomed, he sold his yacht Sisilina to the Coast Guard and used the proceeds to feed war orphans. Later, he fed returning American servicemen at Battery Park.
[edit] Israel
In 1912, a trip to then Palestine was to shape the rest of his life. On the trip he became fascinated with the area. His brother Isidor and Isidor's wife headed back to New York aboard the Titanic and perished when it sank.
Feeling he had been spared by divine intervention he then devoted two-thirds of his fortune to Palestine.
He established a domestic science school for girls in 1912, a health bureau to fight malaria and trachoma, and a free public kitchen. He opened a Pasteur Institute, child-health welfare stations, and then funded the Nathan and Lina Straus Health Centers in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
The modern Israeli city of Netanya, founded in 1927, was named in his honor.
The Jerusalem street, Rehov Straus (Chancellor Avenue during the British Mandate), was also named for Nathan Straus.
Nathan Straus died on January 11, 1931, in New York City. Twenty years before, at a dinner in his honor, he had given what could have been his own eulogy.
"I often think of the old saying, 'The world is my country, to do good is my religion,'" Straus had said. "This has often been an inspiration to me. I might say, 'Humanity is my kin, to save babies is my religion.' It is a religion I hope will have thousands of followers."
[edit] Anne Frank connection
Nathan's son (Nathan Jr., 1889 - 1961) attended Princeton University and arrived in Heidelberg University in 1908 where he met a young art history scholar named Otto Frank. Otto accepted a job in Macy's with Nathan Straus, Jr, where he fell in love with New York and its brashness. But in 1909, Otto's father died and he returned to Germany where he fought for Germany in World War I and lived to see the time when he and his family would have to leave Germany because of anti-Semitism. One of Otto's daughters was Anne Frank.
