Marshall Field III was an American investment banker, publisher, racehorse owner/breeder, philanthropist, heir to the Marshall Field department store fortune and a leading financial supporter and founding board member of Saul Alinsky's community organizing network Industrial Areas Foundation.
Background
He was born in Chicago, Ill. , the son of Marshall Field II and Albertine Huck; he was the grandson of Marshall Field, the eminent nineteenth-century merchant. In 1906, following the deaths of his father and grandfather, the family moved to England.
Education
Field was educated by private tutors and at the Colter School in Chicago.
He attended Eton College from 1907 to 1912, when he matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Career
While he was in the United States in the summer of 1914, preparing to assume the inheritance (one of the world's great fortunes) and responsibility that would be his on his twenty-first birthday, World War I broke out.
When the United States entered the war, Field joined the First Illinois Cavalry as a private. Shipped overseas in March 1918, he saw combat as a lieutenant in the artillery at St. Mihiel and Verdun, and was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry under fire.
Discharged in February 1919 with the rank of captain, Field settled in Chicago, explored investment banking, and devoted his efforts to the family trust established by his grandfather.
He joined the banking firm of Glore, Ward and Company, which became Marshall Field, Glore, Ward and Company in 1921. That year the Fields moved to Caumsett, their newly completed estate on Long Island. (The estate is now, at the family's wish, a state park. )
Field grew increasingly unhappy with the failure of his class-the stewards of American wealth--to foresee or cope with the Great Depression.
Between 1932 and 1937 Field resigned twenty-three directorships, five finance committee memberships, and two trusteeships.
In 1935 Field became active in child welfare, serving as president of the Child Welfare League of America.
As a publisher, Field launched the New York tabloid newspaper PM on June 18, 1940; in October he formed a new corporation and bought out the other seventeen original backers. Unashamedly liberal, PM was greeted with cheers, insults, picket lines, and criminal restraint by other publishers.
The newspaper accepted no advertising and hence was dependent solely on circulation for its revenue; but it never attracted a sufficiently large readership to survive without Field's financial backing.
It did, however, earn him a serious reproof still remembered: as its publisher he was called "a traitor to his class" and was regularly attacked by conservatives. The experience taught Field much about newspaper publishing and politics.
In 1941 he decided to found a liberal but more conventional morning newspaper in Chicago, which had been virtually monopolized for decades by the isolationist and reactionary Tribune.
On December 4, 1941, the first issue of the Chicago Sun appeared. Philanthrophy, Field believed, was one thing; but if a commercial enterprise could not earn money it was not properly responsive to the public's needs.
PM had shown no profit by June 1948, when it became briefly the New York Star; it ceased publication in January 1949.
In September 1947 Field had bought the Chicago Daily News, an afternoon tabloid; in 1948 the Chicago Sun merged with the Chicago Times, and the morning Sun-Times has remained a major influence.
In 1944 he consolidated his communications and publishing ventures as Field Enterprises, comprising Simon and Schuster, Pocket Books, World Book Encyclopedia, the weekly pictorial supplement Parade, and two radio stations.
He supported the work of such reformers as Aubrey Williams and Saul Alinsky, remained a force in child welfare, helped to found Roosevelt University in Chicago, and stoutly resisted the political hysteria of the 1950's, vigorously defending dissidents.
He died in New York City.
Achievements
Views
In 1945 he published Freedom Is More Than a Word, in which he expounded his views on the press, society, liberalism, and freedom.
Membership
From 1942 to 1945 Field fought the refusal of the Associated Press to admit the Sun to membership, finally winning a landmark case in the United States Supreme Court.
He was a member of the Industrial Areas Foundation.
Personality
Character, intelligence, and deep human sympathy led Field to assume the obligations of privilege. He gave greatly of himself to homeless children, sharecroppers, migrant workers, and blacks.
Connections
On February 8, 1915, he married Evelyn Marshall; they had three children.
In 1930 he divorced his wife and on August 18 married Audrey James Coats. By 1934, when his second marriage ended in divorce, he was openly questioning the values of his peers; and although he had backed Herbert Hoover in 1932, by 1936 he had become a serious liberal and New Dealer.
On January 15, 1936, he married Ruth Pruyn Phipps, of an old New York family prominent in public service; they had two children.