Comrade Marcy’s insightful, empathic intelligence, and compelling, combative personality are on early and full display in this, her inaugural ‘Letter of a Pork Packer’s Stenographer.’ The letters would bring her to the attention of the Socialist movement she would help to define the following decade and a half. In 1902 Mary E. Marcy, then recently married and in her mid-20s, moved from Chicago to work as an assistant to the treasurer of the Armour meat-packing company in Kansas City. While there she began writing letters back home to her friend Katherine. Mary’s career was muckraking career exposing that industry’s dirty secrets was born as Charles H. Kerr printed Marcy’s letters over the following year. Gaining her national notoriety, the exposure, and her public testimony against her bosses at a Chicago grand jury, cost Mary her job in 1905. However, less than five years later Mary would be the editor International Socialist Review. The collected letters are a treasure. An archive page with all of the letters here.

‘Letters of a Pork Packer’s Stenographer, No. I.’ by Mary E. Marcy from the International Socialist Review. Vol. 5 No. 2. August, 1904.

‘Chicago, Ill., April 18, 1904,

My Dear Kate:

‘You will see from the above address that I am back in dear, dirty old Chicago again-glued to my Remington—as of yore. I returned home just a month ago yesterday, much stronger and a great deal poorer than I went away. So poor, in fact, that the day after my arrival, I donned my most business-like frock, and bought all the morning papers to see what was doing in the stenographic line. There were the usual half-dozen ads. for “Neat and attractive experience unnecessary; ten dollar a week” girls, that experience has taught us to shun, and an enormous demand for the girl who could serve in every capacity from correspondent to sweep, for $6 a week; but there was only one position that looked like my sort of a place, and as I knew it was one of the kind you have to get up early in the morning to secure, I took the first car out there; met the man who employs the stenographers; was chosen from fifty applicants, and in less than five minutes was taking dictation from my new “boss”, who was reading it off at the rate of about fifty knots an hour.

‘But the news that will most surprise you, and delights me, is, that I am in the employ of the Pork Packer who wrote these famous “Letters to His Son”! As I was engaged to be stenographer-in-chief to the General Manager of the Branch House Department, and have consequently been able to get a pretty good inside line on the way things are run here, I want to put you onto a few points from our side of the questions he wrote about. But none of the things I write, ought to be sufficiently selfish or vulgar to surprise you, after reading his pages that reeked so strongly of the sty.

‘You know I have maintained for a long time that men are largely products of their environment, and so I am trying to remember that it would be difficult for a Pork Packer to deal in hogs for forty years without acquiring some of the characteristics for which they are noted.

‘I leave at 6:30 in the morning, and generally reach home at the same hour in the evening, in time for dinner. Twelve hours at the office and en route don’t leave me much strength, nor desire to study the “higher” things, in the little time I have left for myself. In fact, I am usually so tired that I prefer my bed to a favorite symphony at a Thomas concert.

‘We have thirty minutes at noon for lunch, when all the cattle on the plant and in the office feed. Those in the pens get the best, because the best pays, and we get the cheapest-flap-jacks at 5 cts. apiece, and cold storage No. 3 eggs at 10 cts, each, through the benevolence of the Packing Company, although No. Is are re- tailing at 25 cts. per dozen. And they tell us the Graham restaurant is run purely for the convenience of the employes!

‘Every morning when I come to work, I see a crowd of ragged Austrian, German, Italian, negro, Polish and American workmen in groups before the gates, who, I am told, are always waiting about the plant in the hope of getting a job when an accident occurs, or there is a call for extra men, and as I learn there are often as many as thirty men hurt here in a single day, I suppose the poor fellows do not always have to wait in vain.

‘The buildings are large, and would be airy, were there any air in this part of the city. They cover many acres, and throng with thousands of working men, and women, and little children every day. We are, in fact, a city in ourselves.

‘The first day I came down here, I noticed a golden pig that dances airily from a gilded weather vane on the top of the main office, and I am beginning to think it is more significant perhaps, than the historical calf, as an emblem of the spirit of the powers that rule over, and the methods pursued in Packingtown.

‘I wish you could hear Mr. King (Manager of the Branch House Department) dictate to me. He comes like a whirlwind; begins when he is about ten feet away, and talks like one possessed. He snorts and stews and gives it to the Branch House Managers good and plenty. He never writes unless something has gone wrong, and so his life is one long never-ending complaint; but he glories in it. I wonder every day of my life why the men don’t resign. None of their reports are ever so good but that Mr. King growls because they are not better. They always seem to find it necessary to pay higher wages than he wants them to pay, and to sell their goods for a little less than he thinks they ought to get for them; for you know:

“The robin is joyous with one little nest;

The squirrel with enough is contented to rest

And would deem any more but a jest on a jest

But WE–We are only a TRUST!”

‘But to continue with my dictation. There are telegrams galore, and cables to the uttermost parts of the earth, and every few minutes Mr. King goes so fast that his tongue gets twisted, and he runs into a snag. Then he backs up, side tracks, and tears on again regardless of any and every thing, and finally starts away, dictating as he goes. Then I take a long breath and wonder what parts of the mess to transpose.

‘He treats everybody (except the Grahams) as his natural enemy, though they tell me he says I am one of the only two good stenographers he has had in his thirty-two years experience with the company. If he knew I had heard of it, however, he would fire me tomorrow. I really do try to please him. First, because I need the position; second, because I would rather work for a man who goes like the wind and keeps things moving, than for one whose dictation puts me to sleep; and third, because, better would a millstone be tied about my neck, and I be thrown into the lake, than to displease Mr. King. When anything goes wrong, he screams at the top of his voice, and everybody in that end of the office lingers around to be at the killing, and see the fun. In toto he treats us all like dogs. He has driven half the boys to drink, and the girls into nervous prostration. I wondered when the man who engages the stenographers asked if I had “strong nerves” what his object could be; but it did not take me more than ten minutes to find out, after I had met Mr. King. I suppose my turn must come next, and I want you to ask my friends to put me in a private sanitarium.

‘They tell me Mr. King never talks anything but packing-house, even at social entertainments. His shop is his whole house. He talks it on the cars, at lunch, and doubtless, also, he talks it in his sleep. He reminds me of those serfs who died so willingly for their lords in the feudal times, because, while he has worked faithfully for the company so many years, is poor, and old, yet he is prouder than John Graham, himself, because as I have heard him boast, “The sun never sets on the Graham hams and bacon.” He is out of the city a large part of the time, when I am to substitute in other departments. This, I hope, will give me a breathing spell, as well as to acquaint me with other sides of the business.

‘I was here several days before I saw Mr. John Graham (the Pork Packer) himself. The papers said he had been up to Battle Creek two months, for his stomach’s sake. When I opened my desk at 7:25 the morning of his return, he was already going over Branch House Reports, ferreting out shrinkages, unnecessary expenses, and questioning any rise in salaries. In less than five minutes he had “fired” one of our Branch House Managers, by wire, for not disposing of some spoiled sweet pickled meats before the health officers got after him, and had dispatched another man to take his place—also by wire. He is indeed a wonderful man in his way. From the time each hog goes into the pen, until it is disposed of to the consumer or dealer, he is able to account for every hair of its hide, and every ounce of flesh and bone (for nothing is wasted here, you know).

‘He is a rather short, stout, bald, red-faced man, with keen gray eyes that take in discrepancies and shortages at a glance. He knows just how many pounds of 1 cent tallow will add a given number of pounds to 15 ct. “springs”; how to turn tough old canners at $1.50 per hundred into that canned “Delicatessen Lunch Tongue,” at 25 cts., of which you used to be so fond; how to use any old carcass to make “Spring Beauty Toilet Soap”; in short, how to make one dollar in labor produce five dollars in market value. And I would say that John Graham’s relation to the production of those four dollars of profit, was just about the same as the relation our “Golden Churn” Butterine bears to the churn!

‘Things have changed a good deal, of course, since he wrote those letters to his son Pierpont. They have progressed, as in the past, to the advantage of the Packing Company. Pierpont’s college education seems to have paid Old John very well, for they say around here, that in the five years Pierpont has been in the business, the profits of the company have been greater than his father made during all the thirty-five years previous.

‘Pierpont is now in London looking after that “Foreign Trade,” and they tell me that the Graham Hams and Bacon are sold cheaper to those Britons than they are to us.

‘Tariff is a mighty profitable thing to the Packing Company when it comes to selling goods, for it keeps up the price the workingman has to pay for them, although foreign workmen can come over to compete with him on the wages he is to receive for making them.

‘Anyone who reads the Eastern newspapers, would naturally suppose that John Graham was a Republican, and he IS a Republican in the East. And when he claims our goods at Southern points are only held on consignment, in order to avoid the Wholesale Tax, he is a staunch Democrat, and lends his support to the friendly, prospective candidate; but first, last and always—he is a Pork Packer.

‘Well, I will have to wait until my next letter to tell you a dozen other things I had wanted to say today, because the Fertilizer Department has just telephoned for me to come down to take a few letters. So no more until Saturday. Address me at Michigan Avenue, and write soon to

Your loving Mary.’

The International Socialist Review (ISR) was published monthly in Chicago from 1900 until 1918 by Charles H. Kerr and critically loyal to the Socialist Party of America. It is one of the essential publications in U.S. left history. During the editorship of A.M. Simons it was largely theoretical and moderate. In 1908, Charles H. Kerr took over as editor with strong influence from Mary E Marcy. The magazine became the foremost proponent of the SP’s left wing growing to tens of thousands of subscribers. It remained revolutionary in outlook and anti-militarist during World War One. It liberally used photographs and images, with news, theory, arts and organizing in its pages. It articles, reports and essays are an invaluable record of the U.S. class struggle and the development of Marxism in the decades before the Soviet experience. It was closed down in government repression in 1918.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/isr/v05n02-aug-1904-ISR-gog.pdf