“The fountain, designed by German-American architect Adolph Alexander Weinman and constructed in 1947, was authorized by Congress in 1927 as a memorial to another German-American, Oscar S. Straus. He was born in 1850 in the town of Otterberg, Rhenish Bavaria, now in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. In 1854, Oscar S. Straus, then a small child, came with his mother, sister, and brothers to the United States, joining their father, Lazarus, who had emigrated in 1852. He grew up in Talbotton and Columbus, Georgia, and became one of the United States’s first career diplomats, serving for many years as Ambassador to Turkey and at the International Court of Arbitration at The Hague. Later, Straus was named Secretary of Commerce and Labor under President Theodore Roosevelt. Straus was also a staunch proponent of American entry into the League of Nations and worked on behalf of Jewish refugees after World War I. He died in New York in 1926. Among his many writings, Oscar S. Straus was author of a book of memoirs published in 1922 entitled Under Four Administrations, from Cleveland to Taft.”
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