Lucius Nathan Littauer was an American manufacturer, philanthropist, and politician. He was a member of the U. S. House of Representatives from 1897 to 1907.
Background
Lucius Nathan Littauer was born on January 20, 1859 in Gloversville, New York, United States, the eldest son and the second of five children of Jewish parents, Nathan and Harriet (Sporborg) Littauer. His mother was from an old, established Albany family; his father had come to the United States as a boy of sixteen from Breslau, Prussia, to which Littauer's great-grandfather had migrated from Littau, Lithuania. After peddling dry goods and opening a store in Gloversville, Nathan Littauer entered the glove business, prospered, and in 1865 moved to New York, where he established the city's first glove shop. He brought up his children in a happy home that valued work, learning, and the arts.
Education
Lucius Littauer attended Wells Seminary in Gloversville, the Charlier Institute in New York, and Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1878.
Career
Littauer entered his father's Gloversville business, which on January 1, 1883, was reorganized as Littauer Brothers, with the twenty-three-year-old Lucius at its head. He also served as president of the Glove Manufacturers' Association. In 1896 to Littauer was elected to Congress as a Republican, though two years earlier he had failed to win the nomination. During his five terms in Congress (1897 - 1907), Littauer served on the Appropriations Committee. He became a friend of Speaker Joseph G. Cannon , who aided Littauer's successful effort to include a high rate on gloves in the 1909 Payne-Aldrich Tariff. Despite his closeness to Cannon, however, Littauer was a progressive in New York politics and a friend and adviser of both President Theodore Roosevelt and Gov. Benjamin B. Odell. Publication in 1903 of the "gauntlet scandal" marred his public service. This was the revelation that during the Spanish-American War Littauer's company had made gloves for a government contractor, despite the law barring Congressmen from being even indirectly party to a federal contract. The statute of limitations made prosecution impossible, but Littauer's enemies, including Thomas C. Platt, used the scandal in an attempt to unseat him. Littauer fought their charges and was reelected in 1904, but declined to run two years later.
For a time, he remained a strong Republican leader. Littauer's political career came to an end in 1914 when he and his brother William were indicted for smuggling into the country, as a present for William's wife, a diamond and pearl tiara allegedly worn by the Empress Josephine. Pleading guilty, they were each fined $1, 000, but to prove that politically powerful rich men were not given preferred treatment, the court also meted out unprecedented six-month suspended prison sentences. The fact that obedience to the tariff by others had helped build his fortune compounded Littauer's humiliation.
After recovering from what he described as "a general nervous collapse", Littauer immersed himself in business activities. Around 1924 he began to concentrate on philanthropy. He gave $300, 000 for an annex to the Littauer Hospital to be known as the Flora Littauer Memorial, as well as other benefactions for the Gloversville area. He also gave money to hospitals in Breslau, Paris, and New York; to medical schools in New York and Albany; and for research on pneumonia, cancer, diabetes, psychiatry, and speech disorders. Proud of his heritage, he endowed in 1925 the Nathan Littauer Professorship of Jewish Literature and Philosophy at Harvard and later gave Harvard nearly 15, 000 volumes of Hebrew literature. To promote "better understanding among all mankind, " he established the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, endowing it over the years with securities worth $3, 800, 000 and giving its directors wide latitude in disbursing funds. An excellent speaker and an impressive figure, Littauer in his later years was stout and bald with a walrus moustache. Having suffered for two years from a heart ailment, he collapsed and died at the age of eighty-five at his country estate near New Rochelle, New York. He was buried in Salem Fields Cemetery, Brooklyn.
Achievements
Politics
Littauer, like his father, was a Republican, he voted for Grover Cleveland in the presidential elections of 1884 and 1888. During his time in Senate he favored government frugality, supported ship subsidies and the metric system, and facilitated migration to the United States of religious and political refugees. In the national convention of 1912 he supported Roosevelt for the presidential nomination, but did not follow him into the Progressive party.
Connections
Littauer married on July 12, 1913 Flora Mathilda Crawford. She died in 1924 of pneumonia. Littauer was childless.