Changes

<b>What were the Pinkertons? What was their primary function?</b>

Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency was a private firm established by Allan Pinkerton in 1850 to provide detective services and police protection to banks and railroads. City police forces, which were just being created, tended to focus on riot prevention and social order, so private police or ‘special’ police often provided extra services to paying clients. Quickly, Pinkerton’s developed two distinct divisions: a detective branch where undercover agents could uncover embezzlement, counterfeit, or other crimes and a ‘protective patrol’ which could provide armed guards. Because of its close association with railroad businessmen such as George McClellan, the detective branch morphed into an espionage and counter-espionage service during the Civil War. In the years following the war, railroads and banks hired the firm to protect its interests from bandits such as Jesse James, striking miners in Pennsylvania, and rustlers and squatters in the west. By the 1870s, undercover agents would also be hired to expose criminal immigrant conspiracies, anarchist societies, and potential labor organizations. They became labor spies. Meanwhile the protective patrol began to take on an ever larger role in patrolling mill towns, breaking strikes, and busting heads during labor conflicts. By the time Henry Frick brought 300 Pinkerton guards to Homestead, Pennsylvania, the firm was already notorious as capital’s private army.

<b>As you were researching this book, what surprised you the most?</b>

I fully expected the agency to show up as the armed muscle of industrial capitalism, and that was certainly the case. Whether it was hunting train robbers, harassing cattle rustlers, breaking strikes, “infiltrating” secret societies, etc., the Pinkertons were almost always present to function essentially as capital’s private army. But two things surprised me the deeper I dug into the agency’s history. The first was the really complicated role between the state and the agency. From the 1850s through the early 1890s, Pinkerton detectives were often vested with a quasi-official authority; they worked in an unclear space between official and private. They were capital’s private army while also functioning as an arm of state power. This ‘official’ authority included work with the Treasury and the Post Office, spy work during the Civil War and the Spanish-American War, deputization by local sheriffs, and coordination with urban police. It was this blurry line that gave rise (and name) to accusations of ‘pinkertonism’ or the control of the legal system by corporations and plutocrats.