New Yorkers are Humanitarians - With Andy Fisher

0:00Hi, this is Alex Kantrowicz. I'm the host of Big Technology Podcast, a longtime reporter and an on-air contributor to CNBC. And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing the business world and our lives. So each week on Big Technology, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech and outsiders trying to influence it, asking where this is all going. They come from places like NVIDIA, Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty more. So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, in meetings with your colleagues and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

0:35Hello, everyone, and welcome to The New Yorkers, a podcast by New York City Cop. I'm your host, Kelly Copp, published photographer, New York City tour business owner, content creator, podcaster, and above all else, a New Yorker. Ladies and gentlemen, the next Brooklyn Bell, Trace is now high. Stand clear of the closing doors, please.

1:10This is Times Square.

1:29With me today, everyone, I have author Andrew Fisher. He is the retired founding executive director of the Lavelle Fund for the Blind. He has 35 years of experience in New York City charitable foundations, and is a winner of the Helen Keller International's Humanitarian Award. And he has written his first book, Nathan Strauss, from Macy's Magnet to International Humanitarian. But above all else, he is a New Yorker. Hey, Andrew, welcome to the show today. How are you doing? Oh, I'm doing just fine, Kelly. And thank you so much for your kind words. Well, we're very grateful and honored that you took an important time out of your day to sit with us and talk.

2:14So Andrew, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you're from, and what you do? Oh, thank you, Kelly. Happy to do that. I was born and was brought up in the greater Boston area, and I had worked in teaching as a high school and college teacher and done a number of years of graduate work, but I decided that my greatest passion was philanthropy, and I thought I would have perhaps more opportunity to affect the world, if I may be a little grand, if I had some influence over significant resources that were spent in the nonprofit sector. And that's what foundation work gives you. So I ended up in a 35-year career in New York City charitable grant-making foundations.

3:21I worked at the old Chase Manhattan Foundation, at the Wallace Foundation, Charles Hayden, and then I was very fortunate to be named the first executive director of the Lavelle Fund for the Blind. Wow. The fund is a moderate-sized international foundation whose mission is to support the adaptive education, work, and independent living of mostly New York area people who are blind. But also, a second mission is to support sight-saving surgeries and the prevention of blindness in the developing world. Wow. And where is this located? It's located in Manhattan? Yes, yes. It's located on West 38th Street.

4:24Oh, nice. Oh, I know exactly where it is. Yes, yes. Yes. I've walked by it many times. Wow, it's very impressive, my friend. Thank you. Thank you so much. So that was my career. I loved it. It was kind of a combination of somewhat wonky paper-based analysis and planning together with working with wonderful people who were actually delivering services in the field. and that that was a great privilege it was inspiring and of course I also worked with the board I worked with the staff and uh when I retired uh uh it's now six years ago I thought my probably my my my deepest interest beyond my family is in philanthropy and probably my greatest skill is in expository writing because I'm a very practiced writer.

5:27I mentioned I have a PhD in English and I taught college English at one point. So I thought, hmm, I wonder if there is a great American philanthropist who's undersung and whose life story would not only be exemplary in a sense of being inspiring, but also sort of educated that we could learn from this person's life and work. And I came upon a philanthropy hall of fame list that stated that Nathan Strauss, who lived from 1848 to 1931, had been the single most influential private citizen in persuading municipal and state governments of the North Atlantic world about the importance of milk pasteurization in saving infants' lives.

6:40Which is fascinating. Thank you. And I thought, wow, this is important. This is, you know, because milk is just one example of what we call public health. Right. And public health is about protecting the health of everyone. Correct. It's a big part of history of New York City, correct? Oh, indeed. Indeed. Indeed. I mean, in 19th century New York, you had a situation where what had been a country of scattered villages and small family farms was being transformed, especially in the last decades of the 19th century, into a country of great industrial cities and capitalists of vast world. wealth and companies sometimes of near monopoly power.

7:43Right. And the country wasn't used to, and the Western world wasn't used to, how to keep a city of many, many millions crowded together safe, how to keep them healthy. Right. In terms of water, in terms of sewer, street sanitation, you name it. And milk, which is one of nature's most perfect foods, was at that time the choice of about roughly 20 % of all families, many of whom had mothers who worked outside the home. That was another feature that in a more industrialized country with more people, both men and women, working in shops and factories outside of the home, breastfeeding wasn't automatically something that was practical.

8:51And it turned out that a shocking percentage of infants at that time were dying. Actually, 14 % of children under age five were dying each year. So bringing children into the world was a dangerous business. Yeah. I mean, before modern medicine in itself is a challenge to keep, you know, adults and children healthy. But with that on top of it, correct? And also, it's easy to not bear in mind that Louis Pasteur's great discoveries about, in his case, it was about not about milk, but two other organic beverages, a beer and wine. that it was only the 1860s that he did that it was only in the 1880s that the german scientists uh potch uh isolated the the tuberculosis bacteria and so the the so-called bacterial revolution was new in the late 19th century and historically it's taken a generation or so for the medical profession to understand, accept, and then act on a new paradigm in medicine.

10:35It's hard to change the fundamental way that you practice your profession. Right. And you need to have confidence. You need to have years of evidence and validation. and the reassurance of a kind of critical mass of my fellow professionals are doing this. Right. So in addition, Andy, too, this is the time that the world is learning about germs when you mentioned bacteria, you know, in the medical field, correct? Exactly, exactly. It's really the... uh, uh, pastor and Koch and Lister, they all lived and practiced in, uh, the 1860s through, uh, 1900 ish. Um, and, and so, and those were the discoverers, the, the, that then comes the translation, you know, the translation to, to, from laboratory to, right.

11:37You know, it's just fascinating not to get off subject, so to speak, to go back further. History of, you know, mankind didn't know anything about germs just until within the last hundred years. To me, that's fascinating. It's crazy, too. It's astonishing. It's really astonishing. And we sometimes forget that how incredibly lucky we are to live when we live. Completely agree. I agree. You know, I've had these conversations too with friends, you know, I wouldn't have made it this far. I mean, I've had things when I was a childhood that would have taken me out. You know, a lot of us would just most, a lot of us because of just penicillin wasn't available or known about and things like that.

12:21So it's really crazy to think about like, you know, just this last hundred more, you know, a little bit over a hundred years that we know about this. Well, you know, I'm excited. You know, we have you on the show today, Andrew, or Andy, I should say, because you've written a new book. And what we've just talked about is in the book as well. And it's about the former owner also of Macy's, which we, you know, we all know and love Macy's. And but what inspired you to write a biography about him, about Strauss? So I thought of the, and I read about scores and scores of American philanthropists looking for, you know, and some of the household name ones, whether it be Johnny Rockefeller Sr., Andrew Carnegie, Julius Rosenwald, Jacob Schiff, they've all had books written about them.

13:18most of them many books written about them and i thought could there be someone who did not have titanic wealth but had substantial wealth and did did something that affected all of society uh who who has not really been recognized fully and and to some extent it's been lost to history And when I came upon Strauss, I realized it was special and different from most wealthy people of his time in that from middle age, he prioritized philanthropy and gave aggressively starting in his 40s and continuing until he died at age 82. and he uh strauss um not only funded but designed oversaw documented and then publicized his program and he picked program he picked areas that were uh where something was extremely important of life and death importance on the one hand and that affected everyone right or at least a big swath of society, problems that were under attended to, that were somewhat neglected, and problems that were tractable with a philanthropic intervention, particularly if the philanthropic intervention had the goal of showing success that would persuade government to act.

14:59And that was Strauss' modus operandi. That's what he wanted. So I thought, yikes, this is the guy that I want to write about. How long did the research take on Strauss to write the book? So there were a couple of phases, Kelly. the research and writing of a draft that I thought was acceptable to submit to publishers, that took just over three years. And I was fortunate to, within a not long time, I was fortunate that Rutgers University Press expressed interest in the manuscript. And I was then drawn into their, to me, fascinating and new, unfamiliar system, which involved, in their case, they They appointed three experts in feels relevant to my book to review the manuscript, and they all had some excellent substantive suggestions, but they all also recommended the book be published.

16:24And then if I could just include— Yeah, of course. And then from there was about another two years of backing and forthing. And at one point I thought, I've gone as far as I can with the manuscript. And I recruited a scholar named Professor Abigail Green of Oxford University. She is a specialist in European history, but she has a subspecialty in Jewish history and Jewish philanthropy. And so she and also another British scholar, Jacqueline Granick, they both gave me some superb pointers that I then, you know, it became a whole nother. Right. So it was finally about five years. It was about five years in total.

17:19Yeah. That's fascinating. Just writing a book in general, how do you know what to leave out? How do you know at what point, oh, this is perfect, it's finished? Just to write a book, I think, spending five years and all this amazing information you have, how do you know what to leave out? You know, David McCullough had a saying that be kind to the reader. And that sort of rhymes with a saying that Alfred Hitchcock had about movies, which was, what will the audience think? And so I tried, I hope this doesn't sound immodest, but I tried really hard to think, what would be of importance and interest to my audience?

18:16I think that's, yeah. Yeah, and what would be relatively compelling and not sort of like the kind of secondary detail that really doesn't advance the narrative. Right. When you were researching Strauss, did you expect to admire him as much as you did, as much as you do? uh i expected to admire him for sure but there was a special feature that grew in my feeling about him over time and that was that here was someone who was not necessarily destined to live the kind of life he did. He was born with a volatile, passionate temperament. He, uh, you know, he, he, uh, migrated with his family at age six from Bavaria to first to rural Georgia.

19:17And then after the civil war to New York, but he, he, he had no more than a high school education. Oh, interesting. Yeah, and when he undertook his philanthropic work, he sometimes met some pretty formidable opposition. For example, the dairy industry had been used to selling milk in large quantities as a commodity. And the dairy industry didn't think that people would pay for pasteurization. That was not the mindset of the consumer. They didn't even know what pasteurization was. And so they didn't want an extra cost built into a commodity. And so they pushed back a lot. And some medical associations and medical professors who hadn't embraced the bacteriological revolution and the full implications in terms of things like pasteurization, they also pushed back.

20:38And so he had, at different times, to deal with public criticism, this person who was emotional and sensitive and who especially didn't like public criticism. but that that someone with that wiring had the courage and tenacity to even though you know he he actually i mean he had he in late middle age he for reasons we can talk about he had three three different nervous breakdowns uh but he he he got up when he was knocked down he got up and And I found that, I find it remarkable and in some ways heroic. I do too. You know, he's what, in my opinion, from your amazing biography of Strauss is he was basically his mission was for the betterment of humanity.

21:46Yeah, he thought that from childhood, actually. And I know that one should be a little skeptical about how much weight to put on this or that anecdote from childhood. But he was entranced by his father's saying taken from the Hebrew Bible that—actually from the Talmud—to save one human life is to save the world. and he as an adult he became convinced that it was his duty as as a believing jew and as as a member of society to lessen human suffering particularly of those who are not in a position to protect themselves. And he was always certain that prevention was far better than relief. What people want is work.

22:58They don't want to be rescued once they're homeless. They want work. Or they want health so that they're not sidelined from gainful activity. And so that's one of the reasons he focused so strongly for decades, especially on public health. Interesting. Historian Jonathan D. Sarno once wrote something interesting about your biography, which I absolutely love. He said, at last, a full-length biography of one of the greatest Jewish philanthropists that history forgot. Nathan Strauss's contribution to public health, especially by championing pasteurized milk for children, saved countless lives in the United States and Palestine, and demonstrated how strategic philanthropy can improve the world.

23:47I thought that was just an incredible review of your book, and I nailed it. It was so powerful, I feel. I was so grateful for Professor Sarna's generous words. I do in fact think that there are lessons for our time, especially now when we see in federal government policymaking, we see the intrusion of politics and personal opinion. whereas Strauss always, always sought out, he may have only had a high school education, but he was brilliant. And he, he always sought out the very best scientific, uh, uh, expertise and applied it. Um, and so that that's inspiring and it's, it's we we've done it before and we can certainly do it again.

24:51well I just love to review I think it's wonderful I think it just nailed your autobiography I'm sorry nailed your biography you know what's interesting I was reading as well about Strauss and he he traveled here from Europe to the United States via a ship a steamship correct which to me is to think in the mid 1800s and here he is crossing the Atlantic Ocean as just what a trek that must have been in itself. And so then he moves to the United States and in Georgia, then up to New York. And then how did Macy's come into play? Well, so when the bulk of the family's small fortune from running two stores in Georgia was wiped out with the Union Army's occupation of their town, Columbus, Georgia.

25:51So they lost—a lot of their wealth was in cotton stores, and much of them were either burned or looted. And it was he and his brother, am I mistaken, or that was later? No, well, see, at this point, in 1865, Strauss was 17, And it was his dad who had come over first and who had first done door-to-door peddling. And then he had set up in a small village called Talbotton and run a store there. and after an anti-Semitic incident had moved out of Talbotin to Columbus, which for one thing, it had an established Jewish community, whereas in Talbotin, the Strausses were the only Jewish family. Interesting.

26:51But to your question, so when the Strausses moved to New York City, um lazarus bought uh a a crockery business um at a good price and he set up as a uh crockery wholesaler and that that business prospered to the point where if you fast forward to um this would now be 25 years to the early 1890s they were selling the strassels were at that point selling through this L. Strauss and Sons family business, the international wholesaling firm. They were selling cut glass and fine china to the likes of the Waldorf Astoria and the Russian royal family. Wow, that's incredible. Yeah. And they were the largest crockery and fine china wholesaler in the United States at that point.

28:01But it was that business that gave them the entree with Macy's. And on St. Patrick's Day in 1874, Nathan made a pitch to R.H. Macy's, the founder of Macy's. He said, take, please give, lease to us a floor of your store. And, you know, we will place there this inventory, the crockery and cut glass in China. We'll place the inventory. We'll do it on a confinement basis. We'll continue to own it. And you'll handle the selling tasks. and Macy's accepted the deal and it turned out to be very profitable to him and to the Strausses and it was with and then over the next 15 years or so the Strausses won.

29:04Macy died in the late 1870s and his heirs who are all yankee protestants they came to like and trust this german jewish immigrant family and they in in the uh 1880s uh one of those descendants offered the stress as a minority ownership position in Macy's. And then when he retired in 1896, he sold the entire store to Nathan and Isidore. Wow, what a life he's had, you know, up to this point already. You know, I mean, he's traveled from Europe, he lived in Georgia, and he was, you know, alive during the Civil War. And what's interesting, too, I mean, I was just thinking, when you said 1865 is when you noted 1865 a minute ago.

30:04And that reminds me, that's when it makes me think about New York City history as well about St. Patrick's Cathedral. Because that's when it was built, right around 1865. So in my mind, I'm picturing New York and all these things. And that's what I love about your biography and your story you're telling, too. Because in my mind, I can picture these areas of New York as you're speaking. Yeah, and of course, that was It was just the very beginning of what would emerge as the Gilded Age and the absolute explosion of industry, commerce, trade, and with New York City as the business capital of the country.

30:45So for any wholesaler or retailer, that constituted a marvelous tailwind. True. And capital of the world, maybe, at that point, too. We've become that around the world around that same time, would you say? I think supposedly sometime in the late 19th century, it might have been the 1880s, 1890s, the United States became the wealthiest country in the world in terms of GDP. Wow. Fascinating. Andy Strauss once said he hoped to give away nearly his entire fortune. Do you think that was just rhetoric or did he come close to doing that? He came close to it, and the reason we know that is that Strauss probably, because he began aggressive giving in his mid-40s and continued for 40 years, he probably never had, by my calculation at any one time, more than$10 million in liquid capital.

31:48capital and at the time of his uh death in 1931 he had spent that down to such that his uh uh his his investments were and and his net worth was about a million dollars so and he didn't i mean he he lived he and his life wife uh lena lived comfortably but they didn't live with any great extravagance. They didn't, they never lived on Fifth Avenue or Park Avenue. And, um, which is such a rarity because a lot of these, because a lot of these millionaires back then that was a status, you know, you know, to show that, Hey, I'm on Fifth Avenue. I have this money. Why wouldn't I live on Fifth Avenue?

32:34You know, but he didn't. No. And then when he sometimes did have luxuries at one point, he had an 80-foot steam yacht. In the Great War, what we now call World War I, he sold that to raise money for the relief of Jewish refugees. Wow. And his wife, similarly, slightly different context, but she gave her jewelry collection worth, in today's dollars, about$300 ,000 to Hadassah, the women Zionist organization for their health and social welfare work in Palestine. Oh, nice. Yes, I was going to ask you what he did overseas again, too, back home in Europe. Well, that's the Middle East, actually, too.

33:29So the Palestine story begins with the fact that Strauss and his wife, Lena Guthert Strauss, traveled to Palestine in 1904 and 1912. And they were very struck not only by the holy sites that reminded them of great tales of their childhood from the Hebrew Bible, but also of the entrepreneurial spirit and, in many cases, the idealism of the Jewish settlers there, who after all, you know, at that time, Palestine was a sort of neglected outpost of the Ottoman Empire. It was undeveloped and it did not have good sanitation and it was burdened, had heavy malaria burden, trachoma burden. And so it was not an easy place to live.

34:43but some from the Jewish diaspora had decided to move there partly because they wanted to be in their ancestral homeland. So that inspired Strauss, and he said, this project of creating a secure Jewish homeland where he said the Jewish life could be lived naturally and normally and safely, He said that project is only going to succeed if there's a critical mass of well-educated, skilled Jewish settlers who choose to live there, to settle there, instead of going to, say, Western Europe from Russia or Eastern Europe. They had choices. They could go to Western Europe. They could go to the United States.

35:37It wasn't until the mid-1920s that the U.S., for example, started clamping down a lot on immigration during the Republican 1920s. And so he thought, well, the foundation of life, the foundation of a good economy, the foundation of standard of living is hell. So that got him started with not just political Zionism, where he played several leadership roles, but with, you know, let's tackle the softer side of development. Some other people like Brandeis and Felix Warburg and others were raising money for the physical infrastructure of the country, for the economic development of the country. and Strauss wanted to build the health of the country to reduce the burden of infectious disease, to increase longevity, and to increase quality of life, to make it a compelling, attractive place for the Jewish diaspora to move.

37:01Wow, I was reading about that, and it was just so interesting to learn that I didn't know that part of history, you know, and that you just discussed again with us. And I just think it's fascinating. It makes me, you know, the parallels to history that goes up from, you know, back then to today and everything. It just really makes you think about how the world is and everything. Strauss was different from most millionaires of the, most Jewish millionaires of the 1910s vis-a-vis Zionism. For example, the American Jewish Committee, which had some of the biggest names in Jewish leadership, Jacob Schiff, Louis Marshall, or Felix Warburg were among them.

37:52that they tended to be somewhat skeptical about um the the jewish homeland and palestine idea because they they thought well you know our uh arab palestinians that number of jewish palestinians by 10 to 1 or more and then there's also a non-trivial christian minority there as well So, and how are we going to, and moreover, countries like the United States have fairly liberal immigration policies so that if Jews want to move to a promised land, they have America. Right. They don't necessarily need their own sovereign state. And Nathan Strauss intuited that He didn't necessarily say this in as many words, but he somehow intuited that it would be possible at some point to see a world where Jews couldn't be safe almost anywhere.

39:05and where immigration was tight and where there was kind of murderous persecution hounding Jews. And so he thought, well, it may be hard and it may be counterintuitive, but over time we can make it an acceptable land and we can build a critical mass of people. And of course, the Jewish population of Palestine increased by 10 times between 1918 and the declaring of the State of Israel in 1948. Right. And we know what happened in 1930s and 1940s, Germany and in German-occupied Europe. Correct. well also didn't strauss he was also if i'm not mistaken um helping the palestinians and he came up with programs for them as well or am i no no you're you're you're absolutely right so the the the health programs that had also was had also the uh american jewish women's uh zionist organization which had by the way more members in the 1920s it had something like 36 000 members and that was that was the the biggest single zionist organization in the united states um that had also is this great partner in health and whether it be the um the so-called infant wealth welfare stations, of which there were more than 20 eventually by 1930 across Palestine, or his two major health centers in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, all of those services were open to people of all backgrounds.

41:11Right. Now, it is true that they were Jewish, and their funding, and most of their staff, citing and citing uh physical citing decisions and so on so the majority of people served were were jews but for example with the the um the infant welfare and infant health centers um these small primary care uh centers that were set up to train mothers in caring for their babies. They opened one in the Arab quarter of Jerusalem. And the Jewish physicians and nurses were working alongside Arab physicians and nurses in that facility. Very interesting. In April 1912, when Strauss was returning from a visit to Palestine, that he got word, I guess by telegraph, that his brother Isidore and Isidore's wife Ida had been lost on the Titanic.