July 6th
1892
Homestead, Pennsylvania
Just before dawn, thousands of striking workers surround the homestead steelworks. They have their families with them. Someone shouts.
They turn. Two barges loaded with 300 men of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency float toward the riverbank.
They've been hired by the chairman of the Carnegie Steel company to disperse the striking workers,
allowing the factory to reopen with non-union labor. The workers, know exactly what to expect from the Pinkertons:
they violently protected Western railroads from cult heroes like Jesse James, Butch Cassidy, and the Sundance Kid; they provided the damning but
controversial evidence, that sent non-union members to the gallows after the Haymarket affair; and in Pennsylvania,
Pinkertons had already been used as strike-breakers during the great railroad strike of 1877
and snuffed out the secret society of Irish coal miners known as the Molly Maguires.
These were the mercenaries of the oligarchy, the knights of capitalism, and they're carrying
Winchester rifles.
Real quick up top. Please welcome our fantastic guest writer for today's episode: Dr.
Bob Whittaker, a professor who studies the history of law enforcement.
He's also the creator of the awesome video and podcast series History Respond, which invites historians to comment on historical games.
So you should definitely check that out,
if you want to hear what actual historians think of everything from Assassin's Creed to The Return of Obra Dinn. Thanks Bob.
In America's Gilded Age,
there was no greater friend to the robber baron and no worse enemy to the working man, than the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.
Yet the reputation of the Pinkertons stands in stark contrast to the history and politics of the agency's founder, Allan Pinkerton.
The story of how a progressive working class activist from Scotland founded an organization synonymous with ruthless capitalism represents one of the greatest
paradoxes of American history. Born in Glasgow in 1819,
Allan Pinkerton was part of a large family living in desperate poverty and spent most of his teenage years as a homeless illiterate Cooper.
Like many underemployed British men, Pinkerton was soon caught up in the major political movement of the age:
Chartism. Named after the people's charter of 1838, Chartism was a working-class movement that pushed for
universal male suffrage in Britain and the primary goal of Chartism, beyond suffrage, was to alleviate
working-class suffering related to unemployment and low wages. No goal made more sense to an impoverished Cooper living in the rough.
So Pinkerton joined the Glasgow Universal Suffrage Association and soon he became one of the group's most vocal advocates of violence to achieve
working-class goals. And he backed up his words with action, in
1839, when he traveled hundreds of miles to participate in a march on Newport.
There, 10,000 Chartists descended on the West Gate Hotel,
which was being used as a temporary jail for local Chartist leaders.
Armed with homemade weapons, the Chartists engaged in a skirmish with British troops, leaving dozens dead and wounded.
British authorities captured the leaders and transported them to penal colonies, while the remainder,
including Pinkerton, escaped with arrest warrants dogging their steps. While on the run, Pinkerton reevaluated his situation.
With Chartism reeling, there seemed no hope for him in Britain
and so in 1842, with his new bride Joan,
Pinkerton boarded a passenger ship to start a new life in North America. And with help from Chartist friends,
Pinkerton was soon able to set up a barrel making business in Illinois.
Having escaped poverty and arrest warrants back home in Scotland,
the Pinkertons settled down to family life. Yet on his way to historical obscurity, something funny happened to Allan Pinkerton.
In 1847, Pinkerton was searching an island in the Fox River for wood for his barrels, when he happened upon a
counterfeiters camp. Like all new territories and states in the Midwest, Illinois suffered from gangs of counterfeiters,
which managed to flourish because federal currency laws did not get extend to the new territories. And
counterfeit currency was especially a problem for immigrants, like Pinkerton, whose unfamiliarity with the new money often led to getting swindled.
So after discovering the camp, Pinkerton returned with the local sheriff and a band of deputized citizens. The posse descended on the camp,
arrested the counterfeiters and destroyed their equipment. Following this episode, Pinkerton became a permanent sheriff's deputy.
Yeah, that's right. The wanted Chartist from Glasgow was now a lawman in the West.
Counterfeiting pointed to a common issue faced by American law enforcement at this time,
namely how to ward off criminal activity in a country that was growing both in geography and population
beyond the means of the states. Because what recourse did a county sheriff have, when criminals could just escape justice by simply leaving that sheriff's
jurisdiction?
And this issue was most evident on the railroads, which cut through multiple municipal and state
jurisdictions, and through areas with no legal structure at all.
So seizing on an opportunity, Pinkerton began to develop a private police force that could protect westbound cargo, and thus,
Pinkerton's National Detective Agency was born. Now, there was a bit of bravado involved in calling a Chicago-based company
national, but the word was critically important to Allan Pinkerton's clients.
They needed a police force that wasn't beholden to local or state boundaries, and perhaps more importantly,
wasn't subject to the corruption that afflicted police departments and sheriff's offices throughout the country.
They also needed a force that could provide security without relying on patches or uniforms. In other words,
plainclothes detectives that could blend in with suspected criminal groups, to gain intelligence.
By 1860, Pinkerton's Detective Agency had lucrative retainers with six Midwestern railway companies based in Chicago.
Most of their work with the railroad companies focused on
'testing' railway employees. In this testing, a Pinkerton agent would pose as a criminal and offer
conductors and station agents bribes in exchange for free rides or access to cargo. With the success of the Pinkerton agency,
Allen began enjoying a level of social prestige and financial security
he had only dreamed of back in Scotland. And with this newfound money, Allen began to pursue another transportation
project: the Underground Railroad. The Pinkerton family were ardent
abolitionists and their Chicago home became a way-station for escaped slaves venturing north to Canada.
In fact, Allen even hosted and raised money for the wanted
abolitionist John Brown in the run-up to Brown's famous raid on Harpers Ferry. And when the Civil War came in 1861,
Pinkerton helped to foil an assassination attempt on his Illinois acquaintance,
president-elect,
Abraham Lincoln in Baltimore. And also worked closely with General George McClellan - an old railway buddy, to scout confederate troops movements.
Bolstered by this association with wartime leaders, Pinkerton was able to expand his business in the post-war period.
Yet for all of Allan Pinkerton's fame as a defender of Chicago area immigrants,
as a stationmaster on the Underground Railroad, as the protector of
Abraham Lincoln and as the bane to vicious criminals like Jesse James, his agency was also
inextricably linked to the defense of property and capital. As a private police force,
the Pinkertons were not beholden to the will of the people, but instead the will of the highest bidder, and
although much of their anti-union work happened after Allan Pinkerton's death, the anti-labor
perspective of the agency was present at the very beginning of the organization with the aforementioned testing of employees at train stations.
So given that anti-labor work was a feature of the agency,
what did Allan Pinkerton, the former Chartist and poor immigrant laborer, make of this situation?
Writing in 1878, Pinkerton argued that America's working class were negatively influenced by foreign political
ideologies: namely Anarchism and Socialism, and through the strikes of these workers,
Pinkerton contended the true working spirit of the honest laborer was being destroyed. For Pinkerton,
the American worker didn't go about his betterment the right way. As though, Alan himself wasn't motivated by similar
ideologies when he stormed West Gate Hotel in 1839. And though Pinkerton himself, may have become
conveniently forgetful in his old age,
the workers surrounding the homestead steelworks
were all too aware of who the Pinkertons were as they began to land. As the agents neared the factory shots rang out.
The strikers responded with everything they had: bullets, stones,
burning oil, burning rail cars, and even shells from a cannon. And in the Battle of Homestead the Pinkertons reaped the consequences of
decades of labor abuse, false accusations,
surveillance and testing. They were overrun. And when the Pinkertons attempted to surrender, the strikers
shot down their white flag.
Eventually, Union leaders accepted the Pinkertons surrender, with several dead on both sides. And as the Pinkertons laid down their arms and
disembarked, they walked through a gauntlet of angry strikers who beat and berated them as they moved from the river.
Of the 300 Pinkertons who embarked that morning, three were dead and the remaining
297 were injured, either from the battle or the gauntlet that followed. Although the homestead strike ended in another labor defeat, it also
tarnished the reputation of the Pinkerton agency.
In 1893, the US Congress passed the anti-Pinkerton Act, limiting the government's ability to hire private
Investigators or mercenaries. Although this law didn't apply to private corporations,
it did give the federal government increased oversight over the activities of the Pinkertons and similar organizations.
The agency was never the same.
The story of Allan Pinkerton and his agency is a story that touches on so many important topics in 19th century America:
capitalism, immigration,
industrialization, labor unrest, slavery, and
ideology. And it's a tale that has echoes today in its warnings about the dangers of private policing, but it's also a story about a
complicated man, who went on an incredible journey: one that a poor boy living in Glasgow might find too incredible to be true.
Special thanks to our educational tier patrons Ahmad Ziad Turk, Joseph Blaim, and Dominic Valenciana.
