Amy Kittelstrom on Mark Douglas McGarvie’s *The Pragmatic Ideal: Mary Field Parton and the Pursuit of a Progressive Society*

In this concise, accessible intellectual biography of a relatively unknown figure, Mary Field Parton (1878-1969), the historian Mark Douglas McGarvie uses the remarkable lifespan of this interesting historical actor to reflect on the role of liberal ideas and progressive reformers in the modern United States. McGarvie argues that while Parton enthusiastically supported the labor movement in the 1920s and beyond and should be considered part of the overall progressive push for government action on behalf of workers, she developed a paternalistic politics, and a taste for luxury, that belied her liberal ideas in telling ways.

Mary Field grew up the second of five surviving children in a gracious Detroit house, comfort made possible by their father’s work in sales during a critical surge of economic growth for Anglo-Americans in particular. George Field’s Calvinist strictness made corporal punishment a matter of course, while Mary’s youthful fascination with fashion was deemed sinful by her mother. Mary Field rebelled by finding a patron—her mother’s best friend, a wealthy Bostonian—to pay for her college tuition at the University of Michigan, packing her bags secretly and escaping by train. In Ann Arbor, she encountered the labor leader Eugene V. Debs, who taught her about migrant workers’ desperate circumstances, and the pragmatism of William James, which McGarvie describes as giving “young people a compelling call to action, rooted in an acceptance of people’s ability to empathize with their fellows and create social progress from a moral need to do so.”[1]

Field became so inspired by hearing Debs speak a second time that she wrote to Jane Addams, whose Hull House was the opposite of what McGarvie describes as the “elitist form of paternalism” exhibited by Field and her fellow liberals.[2] Addams, a true egalitarian who believed in the reciprocity of settlement work, who came to Chicago to learn from the people themselves what they needed, does not fit McGarvie’s argument, nor his description of the “new women” Field is said to represent.[3] At this point—1905—Addams had recently published Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) and was arguably the most connected American, certainly the most connected Chicagoan, in the overlapping world of social change, labor action, social science, liberal religion, and municipal politics.[4] Hull House was full, Addams responded to Mary Field, but Graham Taylor had room at the Chicago Commons. Taylor would later have Addams write the introduction to his Religion in Social Action (1913), a book unmentioned here, which Taylor hoped would help “to realise the democracy of religion and the religion of democracy.”[5] McGarvie never gets very particular about Field’s religious exposures, even while a vague Christianity lurks in the narrative, but religion is undoubtedly an important aspect of Field’s conditioning.

The next few years of work in Chicago were exciting for the young activist and provide the basis for McGarvie’s depiction of her as a progressive pragmatist. “Progressivism” is treated as a unitary noun here, the absence of Daniel T. Rodgers’s 1982 essay on the four types of progressive reform found in the so-called progressive era striking.[6] McGarvie similarly shuns Rodgers’s monumental Atlantic Crossings (1998), ignoring the European connection without which understanding American social change in this era is impossible.[7] Even though he relies on James T. Kloppenberg’s transatlantic Uncertain Victory (1986) for some of his material on progressive ideas and pragmatism, he looks away from Europe.[8] Instead, McGarvie describes his approach as a “microhistory” that finds “emotion and inductive reasoning” were more important than reasoned argumentation, which is how Field, after becoming Parton with her marriage, succumbs to “condescension and luxury.”[9] This liberal lapse, since symbolized in phrases like “champagne liberal,” is a fair critique of Parton, but perhaps not of progressive reform overall.

McGarvie’s major preoccupation in the book is the very long relationship that began when the young Mary Field met the powerful, brilliant, older, married Clarence Darrow, who appears to have been quite a sexual predator. Indeed, a better title for the book would have been Darrow’s Mistress. However long their sexual relationship lasted, and whether she was entirely faithful to her husband after marrying herself, she orbited around Darrow’s star rather than pursuing her own intellectual or reformist objectives, really. He introduced her to Theodore Dreiser and got her assignments, the most telling in the book being when he gave her money to take Mother Jones shopping for clothes. Although Field wrote some journalism, she also jumped at Darrow’s every suggestion, while loathing his wife and tolerating his contempt for women overall, writing in her diary that “[a]gainst the collective women he rages as he would like against the little piss ant wife whose pettiness and jealousies have galled him for years.”[10] McGarvie acknowledges that Darrow might be read as misogynistic, overlooking Parton’s own internalized patriarchal values. She believed that “a woman’s ‘purpose is Man,’” as she wrote to her sister after meeting the man she would marry. “‘In him—always to all women some man is Man–…[she] moves and breathes and has her being,” she piously attested.[11] That this was true neither for Jane Addams nor for Charlotte Perkins Gilman—the other key contemporary women in the book—escapes McGarvie’s notice.

In his acknowledgments, McGarvie credits his wife of many years as the source of whatever understanding of women he has, which is nice, but there is a lot of scholarship on the topic as well, which he ought to have consulted. The way McGarvie treats gender and sexuality is jarring. “She knew she was pretty,” McGarvie tells the reader of the young Field, twice.[12] How does he know she knew, and why is this important, historically? Darrow’s wife “seethed in private” over his serial philandering, but no evidence for this seething is offered.[13] When a friend of Parton’s left her husband for another woman’s husband, she was “only too eager to dine on the fine sex and high lifestyle” on offer, again without any source for this alleged sexual quality, nor reason for making the reader think about this.[14] By the time Parton is uncomfortably aging, having slapped her daughter and made racist remarks about a Japanese-American servant, the reader is shocked neither by her vanity nor by her jealousy of younger women but also not sure what historical sense to make of these characteristics. Regardless, McGarvie gives today’s reader an important takeaway in a remark of Parton’s he emphasizes, that “the nation remained safe from revolution when the leftist radicals were drinking wine and beer under the arbors.”[15]

[1] Mark Douglas McGarvie, The Pragmatic Ideal: Mary Field Parton and the Pursuit of a Progressive Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022), p. 35.

[2] Ibid., p. 8.

[3] Ibid., p. 4.

[4] Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics ed. Charlene Haddock Seigfried (Champagne and Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022).

[5] Graham Taylor, Religion in Social Action (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1913), p. viii.

[6] Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (1982): 113-32.

[7] Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press).

[8] James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in Europe and the United States, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

[9] McGarvie, Pragmatic Ideal, pp. 8-9.

[10] Ibid., p. 120.

[11] Ibid., p. 86. It appears McGarvie may have gotten his bracketed pronoun wrong, there.

[12] Ibid., pp. 38, 41.

[13] Ibid., p. 57.

[14] Ibid., p. 83.

[15] Ibid., p. 165.