He served as United States Secretary of Commerce and Labor under President Theodore Roosevelt from 1906 to 1909.

[1] 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.

"[6] President McKinley sent a personal letter of thanks to Straus and said that its accomplishment had saved the United States at least twenty thousand troops in the field.

On January 14, 1902, he was named a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague to fill the place left vacant by the death of former President Benjamin Harrison.

[13] In December 1906, Straus became the United States Secretary of Commerce and Labor under President Theodore Roosevelt.

During his tenure, Straus ordered immigration inspectors to work closely with local police and the United States Secret Service to find, arrest, and deport immigrants with anarchist political beliefs under the terms of the Anarchist Exclusion Act.

During the Taft administration, an American strategy was to become involved in business transactions, rather than military confrontations, a policy known as Dollar Diplomacy.