Isidor Straus - History

Merchant, born in Otterberg, Germany, the brother of Nathan and Oscar S Straus. His mother, Sara, brought the family to join her husband, Lazarus, in Georgia in 1854. Isidor worked as a clerk in his father's Atlanta store, and then travelled to Europe (1863) on commission to purchase supplies for the Confederacy. Stranded in Liverpool, UK, with Southern ports blockaded, he sold cotton shares and Confederate bonds and returned to New York (1865). There, he and his father formed L Straus & Sons, a crockery and glassware firm that in 1874 bought into R H Macy & Co. Isidor and brother Nathan became partners of Macy's (1888) and then sole owners (1896). They also developed Abraham & Straus, another department store. Active in civic affairs, Isidor was an influential friend of President Grover Cleveland, on whom he prevailed to pursuade Congress to adopt a gold standard. He served in the US House of Representatives (Democrat, New York, 1894–5) but declined renomination. His philanthropies included the Montefiore Home and the American Jewish Committee, and he was president of the Educational Alliance (1893–1912), a settlement house on New York City's Lower East Side. He and his wife, Ida Blun, were aboard the SS Titanic, and both drowned when Ida refused to be separated from her husband of 40 years, and he refused a seat on a lifeboat while women remained aboard the ship.

History

Isidor Straus was born on February 6, 1845 in Otterberg, Rhenish Palatinate. After the Civil War, the Straus family moved to New York City, where Isidor and his brother Nathan brought their family crockery and glassware business, selling their merchandise in the Macy's department store.

Travelling from Germany back to the US, Isidor and his wife were passengers of the Titanic when on April 14, 1912, it hit an iceberg. The officer filling up the boat told Isidor that he could get into the boat with his wife, but he refused to get in the boat before other men and instead sent his wife's maid, Ellen Bird, into the boat. Ida refused to board the half-full boat, and Isidor and Ida both died on April 15 when the ship sank. In the 1997 film Titanic, they are briefly depicted comforting each other as their stateroom floods with water, along with a deleted scene showing earlier Isidor attempting to persuade Ida to enter the lifeboat.

Isidor Straus's body was recovered by the Mackay-Bennett and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx. (Ida's body was not recovered.) A memorial for Isidor and Ida Straus is located at the intersection of Broadway and West End Avenue at West 106th Street in Uptown Manhattan.