Historical Study: The Pinkerton Detective Agency

Continuing with my Old West phase, I want to turn my attention away from the outlaws and towards those who hunted them. Aside from the local lawman and county officials, perhaps the biggest enemy of the western outlaw was the Pinkterton Detective Agency. I have often heard of the Pinkerton Agency as the enemies of the labor unions during the early 1900s. They were basically the bought-out police force of big business interest. However their role goes further back than that and the agency really got started during the Civil War hunting gangs and train robbers. 

This organization was founded by Allan Pinkerton in 1850 established as a private police force. They provided security, espionage, counterintelligence, and investigative services. This agency was the pre-cursor to the FBI, and during the 1870s-1890s were under contract with the government. In this post I want to give a brief summary of their rise to existence and some of their most notable cases. I should also note that the Pinkerton detective agency is still in operation to this day as a private detective corporation. 

Allan Pinkerton

The famous detective organization was founded in Chicago by a Scottish immigrant named Allan Pinkerton. Pinkerton immigrated from Scotland to Illinois in 1842 and quickly took on a career in crime-fighting. His big break came when he exposed a group of counterfeiters to the local Chicago authorities. By 1849 Pinkerton became the first police detective of Chicago and worked with some attorneys to establish an agency within the police force. Within a year this agency grew to become a national operation known as the Pinkerton Detective agency. They were solving crimes all across the midwestern region, most of which were train robberies. 

By the mid 1850s Pinkerton had partnered with many major railroad businesses to protect their services. He was working with prominent businessmen and politicians such as George McClellan and Abraham Lincoln. Allan Pinkerton was also a firm abolitionist and sided against the south during the rising tension over slavery. He even supported John Brown's infamous raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, however did not publicly get involved with the failed uprising. 

Union Intelligence Service during Civil War

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Pinkerton was appointed as head of the Union Intelligence Service. This organization secretly sought out information just like with Washington's Culver Ring spy-network during the American Revolution. Perhaps Pinkerton's biggest contribution during the war was uncovering an assassination plot on recently elected President Lincoln. It what was known as the Baltimore Plot of 1861 in which Pinkerton provided security and safe passage for the president thru Baltimore. From that point on the president was always protected by Pinkerton guards in what could be considered the predecessor to the Secret Service that was founded in 1865.

Aside from their role in protecting the president, the Pinkerton agency also provided espionage services by infiltrating the Confederate ranks. Allan Pinkerton himself partook in various undercover operations in the Deep South and was discovered and nearly killed in Memphis 1861. His agency also provided counterintelligence as a tactic to protect against infiltration from Confederate spies. Pinkerton later relinquished his post during the war to Lafayette Baker. Meanwhile however he continued to focus on his crime solving and after the Civil war. At this point they took on the identity of the eyeball that "never sleeps". The Pinkerton detective agency really rose to prominence in stomping out Confederate insurgents.

Hunting Outlaws in the West

Perhaps the pinnacle of the Pinkertons' fame came in hunting the infamous outlaws of the west. Following the Civil War and the boom of the west, lawlessness became the norm which gave way to the rise of gangs. Since many of these gangs were often migrating and changing their location it required a federal force to hunt them. As a proud northern abolitionist, Allan Pinkerton took the rise of these outlaws personally and considered them Confederate terrorists. Throughout the 1870s-1880s the Pinkerton agency was hired by businessmen and government officials alike to hunt and track well-known gangs. This included the Jesse-James/Younger gang, the Reno gang, and the Wild Bunch of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid. The Pinkertons were successful in most of their endeavors however also lost many of their detectives in gunfights against the outlaws.

The Pinkerton agency was essentially an organization of bounty hunters during this period. However aside from their contracts paid out by banks and railroad companies they were also funded by the government. In 1871 the newly formed Department of Justice acquired the Pinkerton agency as their  secret police force until it was defunded under the anti-Pinkerton act in 1893. During this period the Pinkerton agency operated as the predecessor to what would become the Bureau of Investigation in 1908 and later J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1933.  

Fight Against Labor Unions

I'd say my first understanding of the Pinkertons was as the hired police force that squashed labor union assemblies. Following the Industrial Age a new movement of labor rights swept the world, influenced by political theorists such as Karl Marx. By the 1870s labor unions had become common-place in most major American manufacturing companies. These organized work-forces demanded better pay and benefits which severely put them at odds with their employers. So naturally there were many disputes and strikes that occurred especially during the Gilded Age of the 1880s-1900s. The Pinkerton agency was quite often hired by big business owners to help squash these labor strikes. 

One of the Pinkerton's earliest involvements against labor unions came against the Molly Maguires in the 1870s. This was an organization of Irish-American coal-miners working for the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad Company. One of the Pinkerton agents infiltrated the organization and played a vital part in dismantling the group. Perhaps the most infamous of Pinkerton-labor union standoffs came at the Homestead Strike of 1892. This strike occurred at Carnegie Steel's facility in Pittsburg under the management of Henry Clay Frick, where 16 people died in a gunfight. Throughout the 1870s-1890s the Pinkerton agency was involved in over 70 other labor disputes (such as the Pullman Strike of 1894). It's also worth noting that Allen Pinkerton died in 1884 and as a Scottish immigrant may not have supported this union-busting approach his company had taken. 

Other Misc Cases

With the onset of the Anti-Pinkerton Act in 1893 the government could no longer hire private detective agencies and this certainly took away some of the organizations power. Nonetheless the Pinkerton agency continued it's work into the new century as the top private-eye organization. They were also very much involved in union-busting especially during the First Red Scare against communism and anarchism. However much of their espionage and investigative business was swallowed up at this point by the newly developed FBI. 

Aside from their involvement in the Civil War, hunting of western outlaws, and busting labor unions the Pinkerton agency partook in many other legendary cases. Some worth mentioning here is their discovery of Marm Mandelbaum's underworld crime empire in New York City 1884. In 1890 they did investigation work at Indiana University to help unveil an underground student newspaper using profane language against faculty. They also worked with the police to help expose the serial killer H. H. Holmes in 1894. In 1905 Pinkerton agent James McParland's investigated the assassination of Governor Steunenberg of Idaho in 1905. He was able to discover that the assassination was coordinated by the Western Federation of Miners. 

By around the 1930s the Pinkerton Agency had lost much of it's national business and were mostly handling private security contracts. The agency was eventually bought out by the Swedish security company Securitas AB in 1999. The company has sense relocated it's headquarters from Chicago to Ann Arbor, Michigan as a division of Securitas AB. Around this time the agency removed "Detective" from their company title and today are known simply as Pinkerton. Most of their private cases today pertain to threat intelligence, risk management, executive protection, and shooter response. So while the company still exists it no longer is at the driving seat of history as it once was during the Gilded Age.