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New International, March 1948

 

Abe Victor

Books in Review

Millionaire “Free Press”

 

From New International, Vol. XIV No. 3, March 1948, p. 95.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

The Marshall Fields
by John Tebbel
E.P. Dutton, New York, 320 pages, $3.75.

John Tebbel’s biography of the Marshall Field family was apparently intended as an apology, as an “understanding” book about one of America’s leading bourgeois families. It does, in reality, reveal some interesting but not flattering truths about the creators and inheritors of one of America’s fabulous empires of wealth.

Included are most of the relevant facts about its subject, the more unpleasant ones being explained away from a point of view which is liberal enough and personal enough to be that of the Marshall Field who now owns PM and the Chicago Sun. There is the rags-to-riches story of the first Marshall Field, an industrious clerk who borrowed $100,000 from his boss in order to buy a junior partnership in the firm, repaying the money from his salary and profits, a feat highly improbable if not impossible in these days of intrenched capitalism. Here also is the story of the suicide of the second Marshall Field, a version different from the one given in America’s Sixty Families; this version, however, in no way alters the basic conclusions drawn by Lundberg about the sons and daughters of the millionaire families. And, of course, the biography includes the episode of Marshall Field III’s psychoanalysis by Dr. Gregory Zilboorg and his conversion from playboy to publisher. A middle section which is neither valuable nor important deals with the Marshall Field store and its policies. The facts about the history of PM and the Chicago Sun will prove more interesting to most readers.

Marshall Field the first and his Chicago are as colorful a vision as the background of Theodore Dreiser’s The Titan and The Financier. But the second generation of Fields were the Americans abroad – not those of Mark Twain but those of Henry James: sensitive, complex, burdened individuals unable to cope spiritually with a heritage of wealth and property which they had little interest in expanding, perhaps some shame about its source and which had no purposive connection with their lives. Yet they could not dissolve this structure of property because the social system and the tradition which they inherited was too strong for them, and they would not dissolve it because without it they could not have their life abroad, their speedboats, their hunting preserves and their stables of polo ponies. Like some of the Henry James characters, Marshall Field the second was unable to act decisively at most points in his life; but he eventually desired and brought about his own death.

In the Marshall Field of PM and the Chicago Sun there is a combination of the driving initiative of the first generation merged with the sensitivity of the second. The outcome, however, is not so much a synthesis as it is a potent chemical weakened by dilution. The dabbler in liberal journalism reflects much of the dilettantism of the young Guggenheims, Vanderbilts and Morgans who study music, paint a little bit, write some occasional poetry, or become the camp-followers of other musicians, artists and writers. Perhaps the most interesting outcome of the book, in fact, is its unintended portrait of the effect of capitalism upon the fibre of its own rulers.

 
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