<i>As you were researching this book, what surprised you the most?</i>
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.
The second thing that really surprised me was the importance of reputation, storyline, mythology and brand. Allan Pinkerton’s success really came less in the competency of his agents than his ability to craft and control the way his agents were discussed in the broader popular culture including not only the press but the emerging genres of detective fiction and dime novels. In many ways the agency is really a fascinating case study in brand management. But therein lay the problem. While the Pinkerton family might have wanted to control the storyline about their agency and agents, they could not. Instead counter narratives of Pinkerton agents as thugs, mercenaries, bad men, etc. became just as much a part of the fabric of American popular culture as the image of the dashing and bold detective and spy.
<i>How would you recommend using Inventing the Pinkertons in the classroom?</i>
It is relatively short, fairly accessible, and full of self-invented and self-aggrandizing characters such as Allan Pinkerton, Jesse James, Charlie Siringo, Tom Horn, Butch Cassidy, James McParlan, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack Kehoe, Albert Parsons, Big Bill Haywood, Clarence Darrow, Kate Warne, and others. I think that if someone were looking to cover the Gilded Age for a US survey, this book, because of the scope of the Pinkerton agency, covers a lot of different areas. Otherwise, I think classes that want to analyze the cultures of capitalism and labor, the constructed tales of the west, the making of folklore and narrative, the evolution of crime and criminality, or the language of immigration and order will find something useful and interesting within these pages.
