On the night of April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg and began its terrible descent into the North Atlantic. Among the more than 1,500 people who would not survive were Isidor and Ida Straus, a married couple of 41 years, parents of seven, grandparents of thirteen, and owners of the largest department store in the world. They were last seen seated together on deck chairs, arm in arm, while lifeboats departed without them. Their devotion became legend.
But the full story of the family behind Macy’s is far more complicated than the romantic image suggests, and it begins not in New York, but in the cotton fields of the antebellum South. Lazarus Strauss was born in 1809 in Otterberg, in the Rhenish Palatinate of Bavaria. He was a landowner and grain merchant, educated and progressive, devoted to the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment. His grandfather had been selected by Napoleon to serve on the Sanhedrin, the council of Jewish notables convened to advise on Jewish emancipation, and the family had adopted the name Strauss under Napoleon’s 1808 decree.
This tradition of civic emancipation shaped Lazarus’s entire worldview. When the 1848 revolution failed, and with it his hopes for a liberal Germany, he made a fateful decision. In 1852, at the age of forty-three, he left his wife Sarah and their four children behind and sailed alone to America. He settled in Talbotton, Georgia, a town at the heart of the cotton plantation economy, where more than half the population was enslaved.
There he opened a general store and built a thriving business handling cotton on commission for plantation owners. The cotton was cultivated by enslaved people, and the family derived its profits from the system of human bondage. In 1854, Sarah and the children, including nine-year-old Isidor, joined him. The family that would one day own Macy’s arrived in America already embedded in the slave economy.
They were the only Jewish household in Talbotton, yet they assimilated deeply into the Confederate culture around them. When the Civil War erupted in 1861, sixteen-year-old Isidor tried to enlist in the Confederate Army but was turned away for lack of weapons and his youth. In 1863, the family moved to Columbus, Georgia, not because they opposed the Confederacy, but because a local grand jury had publicly blamed Jewish merchants for rising prices. They moved closer to the Confederate cause, to the South’s second most important supply depot.
There, seventeen-year-old Isidor was appointed secretary to an agent tasked with selling Confederate bonds in England and funding ships to run the Union blockade. He boarded a ship in Charleston with $1,200 in gold sewn into his undershirt by his mother. In London, he engaged in complex bond-selling and deal-making with astonishing success. He shipped $130,000 worth of packages back to Georgia in a single week in 1864, sold Confederate bonds on European exchanges, and returned home with $12,000 from an initial investment of $1,200.
When false news of a Confederate victory at Gettysburg reached London, Isidor celebrated fervently. He believed deeply in the world he had grown up in, a world built on human bondage. When the war ended, Isidor returned to a decimated family business. He insisted on paying all his debts despite the worthlessness of Confederate currency, then arrived in New York with $12,000 in gold.
He made the decisive choice to establish the family there, purchasing a house on West 49th Street. In 1866, Lazarus and Isidor opened a crockery business called L. Straus and Son, supplying basic chinaware to small stores, particularly in the South. The transformative moment came around 1873 or 1874, when Nathan Straus proposed installing a china and glassware department in the basement of R.
H. Macy’s department store at 14th Street and 6th Avenue. R. H.
Macy himself was a former whaling captain from Nantucket, a tattooed Quaker who had failed at four dry goods stores before finally succeeding in 1858. On his first day of business, sales totaled $11. 08. By the time the Strauses approached him, his operation was booming.
The basement department proved immediately profitable, and by 1888, when the brothers were invited to become formal partners, it accounted for roughly thirteen percent of Macy’s total sales. They paid $235,000 in cash plus notes for a forty-five percent stake, becoming the first outsiders in company history to hold a financial interest. By 1896, they were sole owners of R. H.
Macy and Company. The brothers complemented each other perfectly. Isidor was the meticulous financier, analytical and reserved, who became a leading voice against high protective tariffs and served a single term in Congress. Nathan was the vibrant showman, energetic and inventive, who constantly launched new departments and conceived innovative schemes.
Together they upheld Macy’s founding principles: cash-only sales with no credit, fixed prices honestly marked, low prices maintained through high volume, and manufacturing goods under Macy’s own brands. The cash-only policy was ironclad, lasting until 1939. They refused discounts to servants, ministers, and dressmakers, a radical rejection of the hierarchical commerce of the era. Their boldest decision was relocating Macy’s to Herald Square in 1902, a location widely considered too far north of the established shopping district.
The new store required an investment of $4. 5 million and opened as the largest department store in the world. It featured the first modern escalators, crafted from solid oak and ash, several of which still operate today as the oldest escalators in the world. They also acquired Abraham and Straus in Brooklyn, building an ecosystem of retail.
As employers, they were progressive for their time, establishing a mutual aid society with medical care, providing picnics and sleigh rides, and distributing Thanksgiving turkeys. Yet the warmth of their paternalism existed in tension with the low wages paid to female clerks. The brothers operated at a complex intersection of commerce, politics, and Jewish identity. Isidor became a political ally of President Grover Cleveland and was offered the post of Postmaster General, which he declined.
Oscar, the youngest brother, served as Minister to the Ottoman Empire three times and in 1906 became the first Jewish person ever to hold a United States cabinet position. Nathan became a renowned philanthropist, launching a crusade against infant mortality. After discovering that a cow on his farm had died of tuberculosis, he became convinced that children were endangered by infected milk. He established milk depots throughout New York distributing pasteurized milk to impoverished families.
Of the 20,000 children in his program, only six were lost. His efforts ultimately made pasteurization mandatory in New York City. He also established lodging houses and served one-cent meals during hard winters. Isidor and Ida had married in 1871, a genuine partnership rooted in affection.
They shared a birthday, both born on February 6th. In the spring of 1912, they boarded the Titanic at Southampton in first class, occupying cabin C-55. On the final night, after the ship struck the iceberg, Ida was escorted to lifeboat eight. She instructed her maid Ellen Bird to enter the boat, assuring her she would follow.
Then she changed her mind and returned to her husband, first removing her valuable fur coat and giving it to Ellen, who survived and kept the coat for the rest of her life. Isidor refused a special dispensation to enter a lifeboat with Ida because other men, younger men, were still waiting. Ida declared she would not be separated from her husband. They were last seen seated together on deck chairs, arm in arm.
The Titanic sank at 2:20 a. m. on April 15, 1912. Isidor’s body was recovered and identified by a pocket watch, an 18-karat gold Jules Jurgensen engraved with his initials, a gift from Ida on his forty-third birthday.
The watch had stopped at exactly 2:20 a. m. , the moment the ship slipped beneath the waves. Ida’s body was never found.
The family gathered water from the site of the sinking and placed it in an urn as her final resting place. A cenotaph was inscribed with a line from the Song of Solomon: many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it. More than 40,000 people attended a memorial service at the Educational Alliance on the Lower East Side, and a Yiddish folk song commemorating the couple circulated widely through the immigrant community. In 1915, the city dedicated the Straus Memorial at Broadway and 106th Street, funded entirely by public subscription.
Nathan Straus had been supposed to sail on the Titanic with his brother, but broke his leg during a trip to Palestine and missed the doomed voyage. Convinced he had been spared by divine intervention, he retired from Macy’s and devoted two-thirds of his fortune to humanitarian work, establishing health clinics, soup kitchens, and a Pasteur Institute in Palestine that served Christians, Muslims, and Jews equally. The city of Netanya was later founded and named in his honor. The Straus family’s reach extended even into the darkest chapter of the twentieth century.
In 1908, Nathan’s son Charles had befriended a German student named Otto Frank at Heidelberg and arranged for him to intern at Macy’s. In 1941, trapped in Nazi-occupied Holland, Otto Frank wrote to his old friend pleading for help securing US visas. The family mobilized their influential network, but wartime bureaucracy and strict immigration quotas proved insurmountable. Otto and his family were forced into hiding in the secret annex.
When the war ended, Otto emerged as the sole survivor. Nathan Jr. sent $500 to help his grieving friend. When Otto sought to publish Anne’s diary in America, Nathan Jr.
helped connect him to Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote the foreword to the first American edition. The family could not save Anne Frank, but their support helped ensure her voice survived. The Straus family’s operational control of Macy’s came to an end in the late twentieth century. A $3.
6 billion leveraged buyout in 1986 left the retail giant crushed by debt. In 1992, the store that had survived the Titanic and the Great Depression filed for bankruptcy. Federated Department Stores acquired it in December 1994, ending a century of Straus stewardship. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, first organized by immigrant employees in 1924, continued under new ownership.
It stands as an enduring gift from an immigrant family to American national identity. The Straus story acquired a final, haunting dimension in June 2023, when the OceanGate submersible Titan vanished while diving to the wreck of the Titanic. Among those lost was Stockton Rush, the company’s founder and CEO. His wife Wendy was revealed to be the great-great-granddaughter of Isidor and Ida Straus, a lineage traced through their daughter Minnie.
She had herself participated in three previous expeditions to the wreck site. The Titan suffered a catastrophic implosion approximately 3,800 meters below the surface on June 18, 2023, in the same waters where Ida Straus’s body has rested unrecovered for more than a century. The Atlantic that claimed the great-great-grandparents had, with a cruel twist of fate, taken the husband of their descendant above the same ghostly wreck. The Straus family legacy is deeply contradictory.
They fled a world that denied them full humanity based on religion, yet built an empire in a world that denied full humanity to others based on race. They were the first Jewish family to hold cabinet positions and owners of enslaved people in Georgia. The slaveholder’s profit funded the philanthropist’s milk. The Confederate bond salesman became a defender of democratic values.
The romantic legend of their final moments is beautiful, but it is also the story of two wealthy individuals in first class on a ship where survival was determined by the cost of a ticket. Their true memorial encompasses the cotton fields of Georgia, the bond offices of London, the crockery department at Macy’s, the milk stations of the Lower East Side, the joyous parade, and the deep Atlantic where Ida has rested, undivided from the ocean, since April 15, 1912.