Felix Frankfurter - Early Life

Early Life

Frankfurter was born into a Jewish family on November 15, 1882, in Vienna, Austria, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was the third of six children of Leopold and Emma (Winter) Frankfurter. His forebears had been rabbis for generations. In 1894, when he was twelve, his family immigrated to New York City's Lower East Side. Frankfurter attended P.S. 25, where he excelled at his studies and enjoyed chess and crap shooting on the street. He spent many hours reading at The Cooper Union and attending political lectures, usually on subjects such as trade unionism, socialism and communism.

After graduating in 1902 from City College of New York, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, Frankfurter worked for the Tenement House Department of New York City to raise money for law school. He applied successfully to Harvard Law School, where he excelled academically and socially. He became lifelong friends with Walter Lippmann and Horace Kallen, became an editor of the Harvard Law Review, and graduated with one of the best academic records since Louis Brandeis.