had considerable popular support, but eventually failed to move forward in Congress due to opposition from the American Legion, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and other immigration restrictionists. At the same time, Strauss joined with Hoover and Bernard Baruch in supporting the establishment of a refugee state in Africa as a safe haven for all persecuted people, not just Jews, and pledged ten percent of his wealth towards it. This effort too failed to materialize. Still another scheme that involved Strauss concerned an international corporation, the Coordinating Foundation, that would be set up to effectively pay Germany an immense ransom in exchange for their allowing Jews to emigrate; that too did not happen. Strauss subsequently wrote: "The years from 1933 to the outbreak of World War II will ever be a nightmare to me, and the puny efforts I made to alleviate the tragedies were utter failures, save in a few individual cases—pitifully few." Strauss was president of Congregation Emanu-El of New York, the largest such in New York City, for a decade, from 1938 to 1948. He was named to the presidency to replace Judge Irving Lehman, after having previously been chair of the temple's finance committee. He had first joined the board of trustees of the temple in 1929, during the time the congregation was absorbing the merger of Temple Beth-El. Strauss succeeded in Washington's social and political world despite it being notoriously anti-Semitic at the time. Indeed, those experiences with anti-Semitism may have contributed to the outsider perspective and fractious personality that became evident during his later career. He was proud of his Southern upbringing as well as his religion, and insisted his name be pronounced in a Virginia fashion as 'Straws' rather than per the usual Germanic form. World War II Despite his medical disqualification for regular military duty, Strauss applied to join the U.S. Navy Reserve in 1925, becoming effective 1926, and he received an officer's commission as a lieutenant intelligence officer. He remained in the reserve as a lieutenant commander. In 1939 and 1940, as World War II began overseas, he volunteered for active duty. He wanted to go into intelligence but was blocked, reportedly because the Director of Naval Intelligence, U.S. Navy was prejudiced against Jews and because Strauss's contributions to B'nai B'rith had aroused suspicion on the part of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and others in the U.S. intelligence community.