Nathan Straus: The Man Who Saved Half a Million American Children with Milk (7 photos)

Nathan Straus is remembered as one of the most prominent merchants in American history. As a co-owner of Macy’s and Abraham & Straus, and one of the most successful businessmen of his era, he poured virtually his entire fortune into helping New York’s impoverished communities. He gave thousands of children a fighting chance at life through pasteurized milk. At the turn of the 20th century, infant mortality in New York was soaring, driven largely by tainted milk.





At the time, pasteurization was not only widely dismissed, but often criticized as ruinous to the product and a sheer waste of money. Straus faced fierce opposition at every turn, yet by the end of his life, his philanthropy had funded 297 milk pasteurization depots across 36 American cities.



Nathan Straus, circa 1920s.

Straus’s crusade began with a personal tragedy: while traveling in Europe, he and his wife, Lina Gutherz, lost their infant daughter to contaminated milk. Sometime later, an apparently healthy cow on the Straus family farm died suddenly; an autopsy revealed it had tuberculosis. Shaken by the revelation, the couple began tapping into their personal wealth to fund scientific research and set up milk pasteurization laboratories.





One of Straus’s milk depots in New York City. Milk was bottled in sterilized glass jars and sold at a nominal price. Families who couldn’t afford even that received vouchers free of charge.



A milk pasteurization laboratory in Washington, D.C.

Straus realized that children were dying after contracting diseases from infected dairy cows. He understood that the technique developed in the 1860s by Louis Pasteur—heating milk and then rapidly cooling it—would kill lethal pathogens and make milk safe for consumption.



The opening of Straus’s first milk station, summer 1893.

The Strauses began opening milk stations across New York’s poorest neighborhoods, campaigning tirelessly to make pasteurization standard practice for all commercial milk. In 1891, nearly 24% of infants born in New York died before their first birthday. Yet among 20,111 babies nourished with Nathan Straus’s pasteurized milk, only six died.

In 1898, Straus was appointed president of the New York City Board of Health and immediately donated pasteurization equipment to the city’s orphanage. Over the years, 297 milk depots were established across 36 cities nationwide. The country’s infant mortality rate plunged from 125 per thousand in 1891 to just 15 by 1925. In total, historians estimate that Straus saved the lives of roughly 445,800 children.



A milk station, 1910.

During the Panic of 1893, Straus repurposed his milk depots to distribute coal at rock-bottom prices. Anyone who couldn't pay received it for free.

He also established lodging houses that accommodated 64,000 people, where a warm breakfast cost just five cents, and funded 50,000 one-cent meals for the hungry. After discovering that two of his employees at Abraham & Straus were starving themselves to save money for their families, he introduced the nation's first subsidized, company-funded cafeteria.

In 1911, Straus was chosen to represent the United States at the International Congress for the Protection of Infants in Berlin, and served as a delegate to the Congress on Tuberculosis in Rome.



Nathan Straus died in 1931 at the age of 82, having devoted the vast majority of his fortune to the relief of the poor.