Oscar Straus

Born in Otterberg, Kingdom of Bavaria (today in Germany), Oscar Straus immigrated to the United States as a child, his family settling in Talbotton, Georgia. After receiving his legal degree from Columbia University in 1873, he practiced law for several years before becoming a businessman. Straus was appointed as a diplomat to the Ottoman Empire in 1887 under President Grover Cleveland, and from 1892 to 1898, Straus served as the first president of the American Jewish Historical Society. Returning to the foreign service in 1898 under President William McKinley, Straus played an instrumental role in negotiating with Sultan Abdul Hamid II to secure Ottoman support for U.S. intervention in the Philippines. In 1906, Straus was appointed to be Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of Commerce and Labor, becoming the first Jew to hold a cabinet-level position in the U.S. government. From this post, Straus directed enforcement of the 1903 Immigration Act, which included a provision to prohibit the admission of anarchists into the country and to facilitate their deportation. Under President William Howard Taft, Straus became ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1909, and in 1912, he ran an unsuccessful campaign for the governorship of New York.