Editors’ Note: Andrew Fisher shines light on a lesser-known philanthropic titan of the turn of the last century, Nathan Straus. This post is adapted from the prologue of Fisher’s recently published book, Nathan Straus: From Macy’s Magnate to International Humanitarian (Rutgers University Press, 2026). It is reprinted with the publisher’s kind permission.

I came to Nathan Straus after retiring from a 35-year career with Manhattan-based charitable grantmaking foundations, over half as the executive director of a new foundation called the Lavelle Fund for the Blind. In its home area of New York City, Lavelle supports programs advancing the adaptive school, career, and independent-living success of people who are blind; in the developing world, it underwrites efforts to prevent or reverse blindness. An interesting career destination for someone who started out teaching writing enroute to an English Lit Ph.D.!  

In retirement, I found myself looking for a project that would engage both my avid interest in philanthropy and my desire to write. I asked myself: might there be a great American philanthropist whose story was not fully told?  

One possibility was Nathan Straus, the North Atlantic world’s most influential champion of the life-saving technology of milk pasteurization. I had come across his name in the annotated “Philanthropy Hall of Fame” list appearing in the Philanthropy Roundtable’s Almanac of American Philanthropy. Straus, who lived from 1848 to 1931, had been something of a Renaissance man – a nonstop dynamo who achieved in many realms. His philanthropy alone had won glowing praise from four U.S. presidents and world leaders like Albert Einstein. His funeral had attracted some 8,000 mourners. New York City had named a square, school, library, and community center in his honor; and, in Israel, a coastal town and Jerusalem street bore his name. Yet Straus had never been the subject of a book-length biography. Might he and his example deserve to be better remembered?   

The question launched a rather obsessive, five-year research project, which culminated in the Rutgers University Press’s publication, in April 2026, of Nathan Straus: From Macy’s Magnate to International Humanitarian. Two of its findings merit particular emphasis for HistPhil readers in this moment. First, unlike many philanthropists of his or our time, Straus chose to give away a large majority of his wealth during his lifetime and to apply his own management skills fully to his giving. He brought more than money to his four great philanthropic initiatives, efforts that centered, respectively, on providing relief to jobless New Yorkers in the 1890s depression; bringing affordable, pasteurized milk to infants in America and Europe; protecting NYC tenement children from TB; and supporting Hadassah’s public-health building in Palestine. Straus also often oversaw, documented, publicized, and advocated for these initiatives. Being a self-made NYC retailing magnate with substantial rather than titanic wealth, he judged that he’d have a better chance of achieving ambitious philanthropic aims through such “all-in” lifetime commitment than, say, by establishing an endowed grantmaking foundation. This insight no doubt powered greater social impact in Straus’s time – but also militated against bequeathing large charitable endowments that might have fueled enduring renown.

Second, much of the success of his public-health initiatives was driven by his insistence on grounding them in medical science. He was honoring a common-sense social-benefit formula: demonstrate the efficacy of science-based solutions – in his case, protection against infectious disease – and then mobilize the public and policymakers behind scaling the solutions.

Today, this shared public-private foundation for science-based public health is cracking. America’s federal government is softening or displacing evidence-based recommendations on vaccine use, declining to review or delaying major vaccine applications, and scaling back or ending some investments in vaccine access, disease monitoring, and public preparedness for epidemics. The gap between our scientific capacities in public health and our political will to apply them is growing, leaving us more exposed to preventable crises.

Yet, the experience of Progressive-Era “childsavers” like Straus suggests that such trends are reversible, especially with help from private initiative. With allies ranging from medical researchers and municipal health officers to mothers’ groups, Straus and his science-based public health effectively addressed some free-market excesses and policy lapses that had been festering since the Gilded Age. And Straus found his way forward despite his volatile temperament, high school education, finite wealth, and sometimes formidable opponents. Sometimes, philanthropy really can be a tool not just for relief or amelioration but for lasting social reform.

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On a fair day in 1895, anyone passing the East Third Street pier, near Manhattan’s Lower East Side tenements, might have come upon a curious scene: a long row of shaded benches filled with simply dressed mothers and older sisters feeding babies bottled milk. Coming closer, a passerby would have discovered that a nearby infant milk depot sold pasteurized milk daily at wholesale prices, with the neediest customers paying nothing. If the time were late afternoon, the stroller might also have puzzled over the presence of a slight, stylishly suited businessman whose middle-aged face radiated a mix of pensiveness and energy. What could he want in chatting up depot staff and customers, and why was he taking boyish delight in handing out infant milk bottles himself?

The man would likely have been Nathan Straus, and the milk depot would have been one of the seventeen in Manhattan that Straus designed and funded. His mission was to demonstrate to the city’s health officials that milk pasteurization could save the lives of infants and young children from a host of deadly infectious diseases—and do so affordably. He rightly intuited that such evidence, when driven home by science and grassroots advocacy, would eventually motivate the city to mandate the pasteurization of its entire milk supply.

Little could have been more important to young New York families at a time when 25 percent of babies were dying before their first birthday—and the two largest causes (diarrheal diseases and cholera infantum) were commonly linked to infected raw cow’s milk.[i] This was turning nature’s life cycle on its head. Even Americans aged eighty to eighty-five faced lower annual mortality rates.[ii] Straus was haunted by such needless suffering. He knew it well. A few years before, he and his wife Lina had lost their toddler Sara to milk likely to have been infected.

Over the next decades, Straus was to bring his milk initiative to much of America, the British Isles, and the German-speaking lands. He would surmount fierce dairy industry opposition and navigate a mix of resistance and support from pediatricians and elected officials. In the end, he would substantially prevail, exerting unsurpassed influence in convincing the North Atlantic world of pasteurization’s unique life-saving power.

The milk work was part of just one Straus life: one life among many. Others included an American dream tale—his rise, as a German Jewish immigrant, from his family’s ruin in Civil War Georgia to become co-owner of the Macy’s and Abraham & Straus department stores; his life as a Jewish political leader—helping build America’s Zionist movement and cofounding the American Jewish Congress; and his New York City public service career, bounded by his rejection of the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor in 1894. All were, in their ways, animated by Jewish values that had shaped his moral compass from youth. His parents Lazarus and Sarah had modeled these in their religious study and observance and, even more, in their integrity in the family’s businesses, generosity toward needy neighbors, and loving-kindness toward their own children.

Over the last half of Nathan’s crowded eighty-two years (1848–1931), one constant—philanthropy—was to win the thanks of millions. Some of his giving was part of the American Jewish community’s collective charity work, most notably his giving and raising major sums to aid Eastern European Jews displaced in the Great War. But he gave far more in four other philanthropic initiatives of his own. Of these, the first provided relief that was traditional in kind but unusual in means and scale: he sold food, fuel, and housing at deeply discounted prices to tens of thousands of jobless New Yorkers during the depression of the mid-1890s, America’s greatest economic crisis to that time. Straus saw this businesslike (or “social venture”) program structure as a means of both stretching philanthropic dollars and affirming beneficiaries’ dignity as customers with agency.

The other three Straus initiatives focused on what we now call public health: that is, protecting the health of whole populations. The earliest was the campaign for milk pasteurization. Another was his founding of America’s first residential program to prevent vulnerable tenement children from contracting tuberculosis, then one of the nation’s top three causes of death. This program became a model for the more than forty-five tuberculosis preventoria later opened in and beyond the United States. Straus’s final public health campaign—and the main focus of his last twenty years—sought to apply his U.S. experience in building public health infrastructure in Mandate Palestine. Later accounts would credit him and his organizational partner, Hadassah, with laying foundations for the state health system of modern Israel.

Straus was different from many American millionaires of his day. Especially beyond the Jewish community, others generally made few large gifts until their later years, gave relatively little thought to charitable aims and strategies, and did not apply their business skills to their giving. By contrast, Straus contributed the great bulk of his fortune to philanthropic causes during his lifetime, beginning major giving midlife, when he and his older brother still needed cash for business expansion. He also researched, designed, oversaw, and documented his philanthropies’ work, even while co-leading large businesses. Possessing substantial rather than titanic wealth, he consciously chose to expend the bulk of his fortune “giving while living”— and to personally direct his largest funded projects—rather than to create an endowed charitable foundation. Straus was “all in” in a way matched only by a small number of philanthropic greats, including Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller Sr., and Sears Roebuck CEO Julius Rosenwald (though all three, of course, established foundations that bore their names and warehoused their wealth).

His aims, too, were unusual. They included strengthening not only individual beneficiaries or institutions but also the government policies and service systems that affect whole societies—especially, infants, children, and mothers. Most of the American philanthropists of Straus’s generation mainly supported individual organizations, often universities, hospitals, and cultural institutions. Only a few other Progressive Era philanthropists concentrated on changing the complex, interlocking systems charged with protecting whole populations. And astonishingly, with an order of magnitude less wealth than the richest givers, Straus helped improve public health systems in America and Palestine and seed similar reforms in Western Europe.

Despite this stellar record, Straus is little thought of today beyond some specialized circles, such as the Straus Historical Society and the Center for Jewish History. The few substantial, published writings about his life as a whole date mostly from his own time and extend only to essay length. The only book-length chronicle of his philanthropy is a painstaking but protectively loyal tribute written by his wife and philanthropic partner, Lina Gutherz Straus.

Some scholars of Progressive Era philanthropy and social reform may find less reason to single out the story of a Jewish philanthropist in a landscape of predominantly Christian-inspired reform. Jewish political historians may find less reason to highlight someone less active in politics than renowned contemporaries like Jacob Schiff, Louis Brandeis, and Felix Warburg.[iii]And there is of course also the fact that Straus left no endowed foundation to track and study.  Whatever the case, we can posit something else: that the very nature of public health has sometimes affected the field’s visibility. Public health achievements often materialize undramatically, focusing as they do mostly on prevention instead of immediate cure, whole populations instead of individuals, and gradual systems change instead of overnight solutions.  Also, the very fact that public health pioneers like Straus ultimately had so much success in controlling infectious disease means that few people today remember the struggles it took to get there. Hardly anyone now alive can recall a time when TB was a top American killer, when even developed nations suffered astronomical infant mortality rates. It has also been generations since cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa suffered from infected water, milk, and food, and homes infested with disease-bearing mosquitos.

The biography, Nathan Straus: From Macy’s Magnate to International Humanitarian, aims to fill this gap by telling the story of Straus’s many lives: as an immigrant boy in antebellum and Civil War Georgia; as a star salesman, marketing innovator, and co-CEO at Macy’s and the family’s international wholesaling firm; as a sometime New York public official and Democratic Party activist; as a generous and outspoken defender of Jewish life and unifying force in American Zionism; as a high-strung, emotional man of changing moods, a bon vivant, and an avid horseman; and as a family man, by turns devoted and distant. Above all, it relates how Straus’s many lives converged into a commitment to philanthropy that was the supreme expression of his Jewish values, business savvy, and personal longing to prevent and relieve human suffering.

-Andrew Fisher

Andrew Fisher, Ph.D., is the retired executive director of the Lavelle Fund for the Blind, a NYC charitable grantmaking foundation. He has served on many nonprofit and foundation boards and is the winner of Helen Keller International’s Humanitarian Award.

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[i] U.S. Census Bureau, Vital Statistics of New York City and Brooklyn, Six Years Ending May 31, 1890 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1894), 12.

[ii] 2. ​Nathan Straus, “How the New York Death Rate was Reduced,” first appearing in The Forum (November 1894), in Lina Gutherz Straus, Disease in Milk—the Remedy Pasteurization: The Life Work of Nathan Straus, 2nd edition (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1917), 179.

[iii] The author thanks Oxford professor Abigail Green for having raised these historiographical questions.