Chicago’s First Progressive Movement

With a focus on Avant Garde writer Mary Field Parton, this class will put today's progressive movement in historical context and draw parallels between it and its predecessor from a century ago.

The life of Avant Garde writer and progressive crusader, Mary Field Parton (1878-1969) serves as a means of understanding the intellectual and political bases of progressivism and the social discontent it fomented in the early 20th century.

Parton embraced pragmatic principles in her life as a settlement house worker in Chicago, mistress of Clarence Darrow, advocate of free love, and supporter of organized labor. Her life can be seen as embodying the intellectual and behavioral inconsistencies that plagued the progressive movement and caused its failure after World War I.

This class will put today's progressive movement in historical context and draw parallels between it and its predecessor from a century ago.

Historian Mark McGarvie, JD PhD, has published four books and numerous essays. He has taught in American colleges and law schools, as a Fulbright Scholar in Croatia, and as a visiting professor at Cambridge University in England. He completed a post-doctoral Golieb Fellowship in legal history at NYU.

MATERIALS LIST

Required:

• Mark Douglas McGarvie, The Pragmatic Ideal: Mary Field Parton and the Pursuit of a Progressive Society. NIU through Cornell University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9781501762666

First Reading:

• No first reading assignment