from Stephen Becker's MARSHALL FIELD III (1964)

About Francis Sill Wickware's profile of Field in Life:

It was a superior example of snide journalism, and it affronted Field greatly. It also hurt him deeply. The misstatements of fact were perhaps to be expected, but the invention of conversations that had never taken place, or the casual quoting of previously invented conversations, was simply shoddy reporting. (236)

... Much of Field's anger at all this was the contained, glacial resentment of a gentleman who has been near-slandered; some of it was the helpless resentment of any honest man derided by cocky and inaccurate journalism; but some of it was the moral dismay of an idealist pouring more and more of his life to responsible publishing. As an honest publisher he must have felt lonely, betrayed, apprehensive: if a major magazine could do no better in something as unimportant (his modesty would have insisted) as a profile of Marshall Field, where could people turn for any sort of reliable interpretation of the people and events that were changing the world? Part of the answer -- and this he had known before -- was that the press as a whole had no interest in changing the world. Its weapons, from editorial polemics to gossip columns by way of slanted news, were at the service of a comfortable status quo (if not ante quo), and anything that happened anywhere was interpreted in the light of the assumption that traditional American prejudices were the highest possible flights of man's spirit. It was discouraging, to say the least, but it confirmed him in a resolve so simple and naive as to be almost embarassing: he would keep his own life, and his own publications, honest. Maybe it was all that a man could do; maybe it was the least a man could do; at any rate, he would do it. (238)