Entrepreneur, Philanthropist. He is remembered, as a German-born American, being one of the owners of the New York City department store, Macy's, and as a pioneer in public health and child welfare. Born into a Jewish family in Bavaria, he immigrated from Germany to the United States settling in rural Georgia, near Columbus, with his family in 1854. The Strauses moved to Philadelphia, then to New York City after the American Civil War, where he and his older brother Isidore eventually became the sole owners and managing directors of the R. H. Macy department store in 1896. He had joined his family's glass and china import business in 1866 at the age of 18. In 1874 Lazarus Strauss & Son, the company launched by him, his father, and his older brother Isidor, began to operate the china and glassware department at Macy's. The china department soon became the store's most famous department. L. Straus & Sons became partners with Macy in 1888. Within a few years, they had the highest profits of any department and accounted for 18 percent of the total gross at Macy's. By 1898, the Straus family owned both Macy's and the Brooklyn store, Abraham & Straus. During the terrible depression winters of 1892 and 1893, he operated a chain of centers to distribute food and coal to the poor, and he built shelters for the homeless. However, his main concern was the mortality of infants and children, convincing him that the chief cause was their consumption of unsanitary raw milk. With death of two of his children, he was sensitized to child mortality. The greatest philanthropic crusade of his life was providing safe milk for the nation's children. Before the Industrial Revolution, the overwhelming majority of babies were breast-fed, with most Americans living on farms, where fresh cow's milk was readily available. With the population moved increasingly to cities, the milk supply had become a problem. The urban rich could keep a cow in their stables, but the less affluent had to depend on "swill milk," which was produced by cows kept by brewers and distillers; it was of the poorest quality imaginable. Typhoid, diphtheria, and cholera can all be contracted from contaminated milk, although there may be no sign of spoilage. In New York in the 1850s, fewer than half of all children born lived to see their 5th birthday, and bad milk was one of the biggest culprits. He was convinced that the discoveries of Louis Pasteur offered the best hope for a remedy to the milk problem. In 1892 he built the Nathan Straus Pasteurized Milk Laboratory, his own plant to sterilize milk bottles and pasteurize milk to kill bacteria using heat. In 1893 his oldest son Jerome died of pericarditis and double pneumonia just six days before his 16th birthday, making three of his six children dying before adulthood. In 1893, at his own expense he opened the first of 18 milk distribution depots throughout the city, which sold his sterilized milk for only a few cents and made free milk available to those unable to afford even that. Being outspoken, he believed that ensuring safe milk should be a government responsibility. He tirelessly lectured civic groups and bombarded political leaders around the United States with missives describing the menace of raw milk. He was president of the New York City Board of Health in 1898. He carried the campaign abroad by building pasteurization plants in Europe and the Middle East to demonstrate the technique to foreign governments. He and Lina, his wife, travel to Palestine in 1904. In 1909 he opened the Tuberculosis Preventorium for Children in New Jersey. In 1912, he and his wife traveled to Europe to attend the International Tuberculosis Conference in Rome. His brother Isidor and his wife also went on the same trip, but sailed home aboard the Titanic, which hit an iceberg in the north Atlantic, sinking on April 15, 1912. In 1914, deeply affected by the loss of Isidore and his wife, both of whom perished on the Titanic, he retired from business to devote himself full-time to public service and philanthropy. During World War I, he sold his yacht in 1916 to the United States Coast Guard, using his profited funds for orphans in Palestine. Nationally, he established, at his own expense, 297 milk stations in 36 cities. The national death rate for infants fell from 125.1 per thousand in 1891 to 15.8 in 1925. Altogether it is estimated that the efforts of Nathan Straus directly saved the lives of 445,800 children. He died at the age of 82 and had thousands attending his funeral.