Jacob Javits Is Born on the Lower East Side

Jacob Javits was born on May 18, 1904, in a Lower East Side tenement to immigrant parents, Morris and Ida Javits. As a boy he helped his mother sell dry goods from a pushcart in the street and picked up parliamentary procedure at the University Settlement Society of New York, the kind of neighborhood institution that doubled as both daycare and civics class for tenement kids. He climbed from that childhood to become New York's attorney general in 1955, the only Republican to win statewide office that year, then spent 24 years representing New York in the U.S. Senate. He is remembered today less for any single bill than for what he was: a Republican who backed civil rights, labor, and the arts, and who kept getting reelected doing it.