Mary Marcy (1877–1922)

Mary Marcy, née Tobias, was born in Belleville, Illinois, and orphaned in childhood, Her younger siblings were sent to live with relatives, while Mary attended high school and worked to support herself. Later she was able to bring her sister and brother into her household and support all of them, having taught herself shorthand from a textbook. In 1896, at age 19, Mary was fired by her employer for wearing a button supporting William Jennings Bryan on the job; after Clarence Darrow heard the story of her dismissal, he helped get her a job as a secretary for William R. Harper, the president of the University of Chicago. The position included free college tuition, and Mary took advantage of the opportunity, studying psychology under John Dewey and taking advanced courses in literature and philosophy. In 1901, she married Leslie A. Marcy, a socialist and journalist, and moved with him to Kansas City, Missouri. There she got a job as a secretary in a large meatpacking company, which provided the inspiration for a series of muckraking magazine articles entitled "Letters of a Pork Packer's Stenographer" that exposed the dangerous working conditions and inadequate wages in the packing industry. She went on to testify against her employers before a grand jury. Mary also published a series of articles about poverty, based on her work with the Associated Charities of Kansas City, called "Out of the Dump." She took a job as an assistant editor to Charles H. Kerr, publisher of the International Socialist Review. In 1909, Mary became managing editor of the Review; under her leadership, it gained circulation and influence and became one of the leading magazines of the American left, often featuring the activities of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). In 1910-1911, Mary published a series of articles in the Review called "Beginners' Course in Socialism and the Economics of Karl Marx," republished in book form as Shop Talks on Economics (1911). The book appeared in numerous foreign languages and eventually sold more than two million copies.
Mary also wrote a novel, a play, two children's books, and various short stories and poems.

When the USA entered World War I in 1917, the anti-war Review was the subject of government repression, including U.S. Postal Service surveillance and denial from the mails. Unable to reach its subscribers, the Review failed in 1918; although Kerr & Co. tried to launch a successor publication, edited by Mary, called The Labor Scrapbook, it was also unsuccessful. The Marcys lost their home in Illinois after mortgaging it to provide bail bond money for William D. "Big Bill" Haywood, who fled to the Soviet Union. Mary was demoralized by the splintering of the American leftist movement in the years after the war and suffered from depression. She died by suicide from poison at age 45 in 1922.

In 1984, more than six decades after her death, You Have No Country, a new collection of Mary Marcy's anti-militarist writings, appeared in print.