Oscar Straus (politician)
American politician and diplomat (1850-1926)
Oscar Solomon Straus (December 23, 1850 – May 3, 1926) was an American politician and diplomat. He served as United States Secretary of Commerce and Labor under President Theodore Roosevelt from 1906 to 1909. He was the first Jewish United States Cabinet Secretary.
Straus also served in four presidential administrations as America's representative to the Ottoman Empire and ran for Governor of New York in 1912 as the candidate of then-former president Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive "Bull Moose" Party, in tandem with Roosevelt's own unsuccessful run for a nonconsecutive third term as president that same year.
Early life and education
Oscar Straus was born to a German Jewish family in Otterberg in the former Palatinate, then ruled by the Kingdom of Bavaria (now part of present-day Germany), the third child of Lazarus Straus (1809–1898) and his second wife, Sara (1823–1876). His siblings were Hermine Straus Kohns (1846–1922), Isidor Straus (1845–1912), and Nathan Straus (1848–1931). The family moved to the U.S. state of Georgia in 1854. The Straus family owned slaves and conducted business with other slave owners, taking several formerly enslaved people to the North with the family following the defeat of the Confederacy.
At the close of the Civil War he moved to New York City where he graduated from Columbia College in 1871 and Columbia Law School in 1873. He practiced law until 1881, and then became a merchant, retaining his interest in literature.
“Oscar Straus (politician)” enters the record as american politician and diplomat (1850-1926). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Oscar, Straus and politician can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q554988. VIAF identifies the subject as 14899200. The Library of Congress control number is n88002640. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1850, 1926, 1906 and 1909.
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This entry incorporates text from “Oscar Straus (politician)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.