Historian S. Paul O'Hara examines the public image of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (PNDA) in its heyday, from the Civil War, when founder Allan Pinkerton broke up an assassination plot against President-elect Abraham Lincoln, to the height of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. In 1936, the fourth-generation family head of the company admitted in testimony to Congress to violating federal law. In the following year, the agency ceased to offer labor investigations to its clients. During that nearly eighty-year span, “the Pinkertons” played a prominent role in national affairs and occupied an omnipresent place in citizens’ imaginations. In that time, agency detectives chased down train and bank robbers and served both government and private industry by investigating, infiltrating, and combating perceived enemies of the state and big business. Pinkerton operatives became notorious for serving as capitalists’ mercenaries to attack unionized workers, resorting to assassination and thuggery to do industry's bidding. Popular opinion of the firm and its workers rose and fell during this period.
After the Civil War, when state and federal law-enforcement efforts were anything but robust, Allan Pinkerton's Chicago-based firm hired out to railroads, banks, steel manufacturers, cattle ranchers, and mining companies to investigate, infiltrate, and then, if requested, violently break up organized robber bands or labor organizations. It found success against the Reno gang of Indiana, but failed spectacularly to defeat Jesse James's Missouri-based robbers. This failure tarnished the firm's carefully constructed image of sure success. In the 1870s a Pinkerton detective successfully infiltrated miner organizations in Pennsylvania, which led to convictions and hangings of leading “Molly Maguires.” Later, after the Haymarket bombing in Chicago killed several police officers, a Pinkerton detective who had spied on secret meetings provided the trial testimony that convicted several anarchists. Also at this time, the agency expanded into “preventive patrol” work: providing guards and security forces to industry in an era of limited state police power. Out west, Pinkerton spies and muscle worked for cattle interests against other land owners and competitors, leaving a trail of blood behind them. Newspaper writers depicted Pinkerton detectives as omniscient, all-seeing, and virtuous watchers over the nation. Yet while the agency had become the private army of capital and the surrogate investigators of disorder for government, it increasingly was seen as culpable for violence and death in many industrial actions.
The PNDA's efforts to mold and control its image as a successful and honest enterprise started early. Beginning in the 1870s, after the James gang failure, and until his death in 1884, Allan Pinkerton penned (or had ghostwritten) numerous novelized accounts of his own or his agents’ exploits. Widely read, these popular works created a mythology of agents’ unswerving skill, bravery, and devotion. Until the 1960s, whenever its image was sullied, agency heads gave chosen writers access to company archives. These authors dutifully produced glowing stories to polish the agency's image in the public eye. Played down or forgotten in all these works, including in Allan Pinkerton's memoirs, was the founder's early radicalism as a Scottish chartist and abolitionist. All depictions of the agency and its operatives highlighted their role as defenders of a conservative social order.
Agency efforts to remove tarnish proved increasingly difficult after the debacle of the Homestead, Pennsylvania, strike of 1892. Hired by steel magnates Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick, the PNDA assembled a mercenary army to attack the strikers. A protracted gunfight killed and wounded many on both sides. The brutal tactics of the Pinkerton hirelings and, by extension, the industrialists who had hired them prompted widespread condemnation and congressional investigations. “Pinkertonism” became a watchword for the blurry line between corporate power and state authority. Editorialists began to equate the PNDA with heavy-handed barbarity for hire. In the aftermath of the Homestead debacle, the governor of Illinois investigated anew the Haymarket bombing, dismissing the previously unimpeachable testimony of the Pinkerton agent and pardoning the remaining prisoners.
The Pinkertons, O'Hara writes, had become a “metonym for corporate power” and “Pinkertonism” a byword for corporate thuggery under a weak state (p. 149). Public opinion concluded that the Homestead conflict represented the failure of a weak government law-enforcement apparatus to protect the people. Congressmen reacted to calls for a more activist state to counter various social ills, passing a law that barred the federal government from hiring Pinkerton (or other firms’) agents as surrogates for law-enforcement officers. States followed suit. At this time, officials began to empower the state in policing disputes and regulating business. The Progressive Era aimed to rein in private armies for hire.
The PNDA's fortunes declined in the early twentieth-century era of reform, when exposés by ex-Pinkerton detectives showed that the agency stood for cynical chaos and violence inflicted in corporate interests. Agents’ testimony in court no longer guaranteed conviction. Starting with the Pullman, Illinois, strike, the state played a more active role, calling in troops instead of Pinkertons to quell disorder. The national government created the Bureau of Investigation (later adding “Federal” to the name) to investigate organized crime, anarchy, and communism. By 1937, the PNDA's long-standing reputation for providing the muscle for corporate interests no longer served the agency. Its retreat from labor investigations and interventions represented the end of an era of unchecked corporate rule during the Gilded Age.
O'Hara's short book is built on a reading of the large Pinkerton propaganda literature along with the “dime novels” of the period in which agency detectives appeared as both heroes and bad guys. His treatment of the memoirs/exposés of cowboy-detective Charlie Siringo and the short stories and novels of former Pinkerton operative Dashiell Hammett is deft. He has read widely in the periodical press of the period and waded through congressional testimony on the PNDA's activities. Anyone seeking a straight history of the Pinkerton agency should resort to Frank Morn's The Eye That Never Sleeps (1982). But students wishing to learn about the image of the Pinkerton detective in American popular culture during the Gilded Age and Progressive era will find O'Hara's well-written work a profitable read.
