Strauss arranged the firm's financing for steel companies such as Inland Steel, Republic Steel, and Great Lakes Steel. He became a full partner in 1929, at which point he was making a million dollars a year, and he endured the Wall Street Crash of 1929 without significant financial damage. With the firm he helped bring to market Kodachrome film for Eastman Kodak and the Polaroid camera for Edwin H. Land. On March 5, 1923, Strauss married Alice Hanauer in a ceremony at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York. Born in 1903, she was the daughter of Jerome J. Hanauer, who was one of the Kuhn Loeb partners. She was a New York native who had attended Vassar College and was a skilled equestrian and potter. The couple had two sons, one of whom did not survive early childhood. While in New York, they lived on Central Park West, then on the Upper East Side, and later on Central Park South. Strauss had involvements in the New York City community. In particular, he was on the board of directors of the Metropolitan Opera Company and later the Metropolitan Opera Association and was also on the boards of the American Relief Administration and the American Children's Fund. He was a member of American Bankers Association and New York State Chamber of Commerce. Hoover was a candidate for the Republican Party nomination in the United States presidential election, 1920; Strauss campaigned for him and attended the 1920 Republican National Convention on his behalf, but Hoover failed to gain significant support. Strauss again worked for the this-time-successful campaign of Hoover in the United States presidential election, 1928, and was a member from Virginia that year of the Republican National Committee. Over several years, Strauss engaged in activities designed to strengthen the Republican Party in Virginia and the South overall. He also was committed to protecting the reputation of President Hoover; in 1930, on behalf of the White House, he conspired with two naval intelligence officers to illegally break into the office of a Tammany Hall follower in New York who was thought to hold documents that would be damaging to Hoover. During the 1930s, following Hoover's re-election defeat by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States presidential election, 1932, Strauss was a strong opponent of the New Deal. He shared this antipathy with Hoover, who increasingly adopted an ideologically conservative, anti-New Deal viewpoint in