ABSTRACT
Racial and ethnic prejudice in America took an extreme form in anti-Semitism, which thrived in the 1920s when H. L. Mencken's Smart Set became the bible of the educated classes; Mencken's sneering values are revealed in the following paragraph in his Prejudices: Fourth Series. Many Proper Protestants were more anti-Irish Catholic than anti-Semitic. It was in this climate of opinion that Frank Shields was born in 1910 on Manhattan's Irish Catholic Lower East Side. Frankie did a little more studying at Roxbury than he had at Columbia Grammar, but never made it to Yale. Always a perfect gentleman when sober, he was an ugly and often dangerous drunk when off on one of his ever-increasing binges. Although nobody will ever know for sure whether anti-Semitism influenced Shields or Kramer in their overlooking Savitt, it must be said that the mores of the upper-class world in which Shields lived took blanket anti-Semitism for granted.
