Gentleman of the Press

Marshall Field III, a gentleman of leisure for the first 40-odd years of his life, has spent the past ten years trying his best to be ungentlemanly. It comes hard. This week, in his first book (Freedom Is More Than a Word; University of Chicago Press; $2.50), he attempts to tell, in very gentlemanly fashion, what he is up to.

His conversion (from Eton-schooled playboy to the sugar daddy of New Deal journalism) came with the help of Manhattan's famed psychiatrist Dr. Gregory Zilboorg. But Zilboorg and the pre-Zilboorg era of riding to hounds get no mention in this partly autobiographical book. Field's immense fortune (estimated at $168 million) is dismissed quickly as "the chance of inheritance." But he explains why his New Dealing journalistic twins--Manhattan's adless, experimental PM, and Chicago's unexperimental, ad-crammed Sun--turned out so unalike:

Is Restraint a Virtue? Not pretending to give "both sides," PM is its shrill, opinionated self because Manhattan's "truly competitive daily newspaper market [forces] papers to represent different groups in order to continue." In Chicago, he puts out the better-rounded Sun because "where monopolies now exist . . . no publisher has the right to use a newspaper for the expression of his whims, prejudices and ambitions." PM, he makes clear, has his blessing to live alone and like it. "Some people seem to consider it strange that I should have paid out money to meet a paper's deficit without throwing my weight around. ... I do not . . . find it so. ... Occasionally I sit in on editorial conferences, but I do so strictly as an observer. ... I have no editorial control. ... An anti-authoritarian paper had, of necessity, to be dominated by its own staff." Does PM's excitability disturb him? Field says: "Restraint is not always a virtue when crying injustice needs to be met head on. ... A certain lack of gentlemanliness is a requisite of democracy. Gentlemen are comfortable associates, but they are seldom ... constructive socially."

If PM is free because it takes no ads, how can the Sun carry ads and be free? Devout PM readers might not like the obvious Field answer: if you make a good enough newspaper, advertisers will have to come to you on your terms.

A Rich Man's Burden. The Sun is obviously Field's favorite. Some of the price he has paid to buck Colonel Robert ("Bertie") McCormick's Tribune (with no comics to match Bertie's fine ones, and no A.P. franchise) he tells for the first time. Arguing his (and the Government's) antimonopoly case against the A.P., Field reveals that the United Press charged him a whopping $110,000 a year for its wires. Out-of-town news bureaus and special correspondents cost him another $425,000 annually. A.P. service would cost only about $50,000, if Bertie and the A.P. would only let the Sun in. In decrying the A.P.'s "news monopoly," Field, unfortunately for his argument, ends up by proving that it is difficult, but not impossible, to get out a paper without A.P.

Much of Freedom Is More is written in the sloganizing tone of a Johnny-come-lately to social problems; but evident throughout is a convert's sincerity and humility. Field sums up the "groping of one man's mind": "I have sought to function as a participating member of a democratic society, with unusual opportunities to serve because of my financial resources, and not as a man of large property interests actuated by attitudes of self-protection. . . . What private property any of us enjoys represents the acquiescence of society in our private control of it ... and, like every privilege, it carries with it certain obligations. . . . Those who neglect the obligations, I am convinced, speed the day when this privilege will be curtailed or perhaps denied."

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