Pinkerton (detective agency)

In the 1850s, Allan Pinkerton, a Scottish immigrant, met Chicago attorney Edward Rucker in a local Masonic Hall. The two men formed the North-Western Police Agency, later known as the Pinkerton Agency.[13][14][15] Pinkerton used his skills in espionage to attract clients and begin growing the agency. Historian Frank Morn writes: "By the mid-1850s a few businessmen saw the need for greater control over their employees; their solution was to sponsor a private detective system. In February 1855, Allan Pinkerton, after consulting with six midwestern railroads, created such an agency in Chicago."[16] The Pinkerton Agency hired women and minorities from its founding because they were useful as spies, a practice uncommon at the time.[17]

"We Never Sleep" logo

Among the business's early operations was to safely deliver the newly elected President of the United States Abraham Lincoln to Washington, D.C., in light of an assassination threat. Pinkerton detective Kate Warne was assigned and successfully delivered Lincoln to the U.S. capital city through a series of disguises and related tactics that required her to stay awake throughout the entire long journey. As a result of the public notoriety of this success, the business adopted an open eye as its logo and the slogan, "We never sleep."[18] Allan Pinkerton around this time also served in the "Secret Service" intelligence division of what was then known as the U.S. War Department.

These actions preceded and laid the groundwork for the establishment of the United States Secret Service, which is tasked with the serving and former U.S. Presidents' security to this day. The official Secret Service was founded on July 5, 1865,[19] less than three months after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Pinkerton guards escort strikebreakers in Buchtel, Ohio, 1884

In 1871, Congress appropriated $50,000 (about equivalent to $1,221,000 in 2022) to the new Department of Justice to form a sub-organization devoted to "the detection and prosecution of those guilty of violating federal law." The amount was insufficient to fashion an internal investigating unit, so they contracted out the services to the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.[20]

However, as news leaked about the Pinkerton's involvement in strikebreaking, lawmakers began pushing against the government contracts with the Pinkertons.[21] The Pinkertons reached their zenith in the 1870s and 80s which saw them frequently engage in violent crackdowns against striking workers. The most notable example of this was the involvement of the Pinkertons in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. However, it was the confrontation in Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892 that led to a national outcry against the Pinkerton Detective Agency.[22] Following the strike, Congress took swift action against the Pinkertons and passed the Anti-Pinkerton Act in 1893, which severely curtailed the relationship between the federal government and the agency. The act states that, "individual employed by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, or similar organization, may not be employed by the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia."[23]

In the 1870s, Franklin B. Gowen, then president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, hired the agency to "investigate" the labor unions in the company's mines. A Pinkerton agent, James McParland, using the alias "James McKenna", infiltrated the Molly Maguires, a 19th-century secret society of mainly Irish-American coal miners, leading to the downfall of the labor organization.

The incident inspired Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novel The Valley of Fear (1914–1915). A Pinkerton agent also appears in a small role in "The Adventure of the Red Circle", a 1911 Holmes story. A 1970 film, The Molly Maguires, was loosely based upon the incident.

Pinkerton men leaving a barge after their surrender during the Homestead Strike

Frick's letter describing the plans and munitions that will be on the barges when the Pinkertons arrive to confront the strikers in Homestead

On July 6, 1892, during the Homestead Strike, 300 Pinkerton agents from New York and Chicago were called in by Carnegie Steel's Henry Clay Frick to protect the Pittsburgh-area mill and as strikebreakers. This resulted in a firefight and siege in which 16 men were killed, and 23 others were wounded. Following the confrontation, the Governor of Pennsylvania, Robert E. Pattinson, mobilized state law enforcement and the National Guard. Private and government forces broke the strike and workers returned to the steel mill.[24]

The strike, dubbed "The Battle of Homestead" by local media ignited a firestorm around the United States.[25] Americans were outraged at the conduct of the Pinkertons and how strikers were treated. The Homestead Strike of 1892 is regarded as a turning point in American labor history and prompted Congress to begin a crackdown on the Pinkertons.[26] As a legacy of the Pinkertons' involvement, a bridge connecting the nearby Pittsburgh suburbs of Munhall and Rankin was named Pinkerton's Landing Bridge.

Harry Orchard was arrested by the Idaho police and confessed to Pinkerton agent James McParland that he assassinated former Governor Frank Steunenberg of Idaho in 1905. Orchard testified (unsuccessfully), under threat of hanging,[27] against Western Federation of Miners president Big Bill Haywood, naming him as having hired the hit. With a stirring defense by Clarence Darrow, Haywood and the other defendants of the WFM were acquitted in a nationally publicized trial. Orchard received a death sentence, but it was commuted.[28]

Pinkerton agents were hired to track western outlaws Jesse James, the Reno Gang, and the Wild Bunch (including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). On March 17, 1874, two Pinkerton Detectives and a deputy sheriff, Edwin P. Daniels,[29] encountered the Younger brothers (associates of the James–Younger Gang); Daniels, John Younger, and one Pinkerton agent were killed. In Union, Missouri, a bank was robbed by George Collins, aka Fred Lewis, and Bill Randolph; Pinkerton Detective Chas Schumacher trailed them and was killed. Collins was hanged on March 26, 1904, and Randolph was hanged on May 8, 1905, in Union. Pinkertons were also hired for transporting money and other high-quality merchandise between cities and towns, which made them vulnerable to outlaws. Pinkerton agents were usually well paid and well armed.

George Thiel, a former Pinkerton employee, established the Thiel Detective Service Company in St. Louis, Missouri, a competitor to the Pinkerton agency. Thiel's agency operated in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

Due to its conflicts with labor unions, the word Pinkerton continues to be associated by labor organizers and union members with strikebreaking.[30] Pinkertons diversified from labor spying following revelations publicized by the La Follette Committee hearings in 1937,[31] and the firm's criminal detection work also suffered from the police modernization movement, which saw the rise of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the bolstering of detective branches and resources of the public police. With less of the labor and criminal investigation work on which Pinkertons thrived for decades, the company became increasingly involved in protection services, and in the 1960s, even the word "detective" disappeared from the agency's letterhead.[32] The company now focuses on threat intelligence, risk management, executive protection, and active shooter response.

In 1999, the company was bought by Securitas AB, a Swedish security company, for $384 million,[33] followed by the acquisition of the William J. Burns Detective Agency (founded in 1910), longtime Pinkerton rival, to create (as a division of the parent) Securitas Security Services USA. Today, the company's headquarters are located in Ann Arbor, Michigan.[34]

In December 2018, Securitas AB issued a cease and desist notice to video game company Take-Two Interactive over the use of the Pinkerton name and badge imagery in Red Dead Redemption 2. They demanded royalties for each copy of the game sold or they would take legal action. Take-Two maintained that the Pinkerton name was strongly associated with the Wild West, and its use of the term did not infringe on the Pinkerton trademark.[35] By April 2019, Securitas AB had withdrawn its claim.[36]

In 2020, they were hired by Amazon to spy on warehouse workers for signs of union activity.[5] It was revealed in 2022 that Starbucks had hired a former Pinkerton employee as part of their union busting efforts.[37]

In 2020, Matthew Dolloff, an unlicensed security guard contracted through Pinkerton, shot and killed Lee Keltner, a conservative protestor in Denver, Colorado. Dolloff had been contracted by Pinkerton to guard a camera-crew working for 9News. They had been assigned to cover rival right- and left-wing protests in Denver. Keltner had told a camera-man to stop filming him; Dolloff then approached Keltner. Keltner slapped Dolloff before spraying him with bear spray just as Dolloff shot Keltner. Dolloff was arrested, investigated for a first-degree murder, and charged with a second-degree murder. The charge was later dropped.[38][39][40]

In 2023, Wizards of the Coast hired Pinkerton to seize products from the March of the Machine: The Aftermath card set for the trading card game Magic: The Gathering from YouTuber Dan Cannon of oldschoolmtg who had received them in an order from a local game store.[41] Cannon published a video showing his contents on YouTube ahead of the release. Pinkerton used intimidation and threats of detention, arrest, fines and jail to force compliance.[41] According to Wizards of the Coast, this was done after several attempts had been made to contact the individual in private, with no response.[42]

• Anti-union organizations in the United States
• Anti-union violence
• Anti-Pinkerton Act of 1893
• Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency
• Battle of Blair Mountain
• Coal and Iron Police, a Pinkerton-supervised former private police force in Pennsylvania
• Colorado Labor Wars
• Dashiell Hammett, author and former Pinkerton operative
• Frank Little, American labor leader; lynched in 1917, allegedly by Pinkerton agents
• George Samuel Dougherty, a leading private detective for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency from 1888 to 1911
• Industrial Workers of the World
• Labor spying in the United States
• List of worker deaths in United States labor disputes
• Morris Friedman, author of Pinkerton Labor Spy
• Timothy Webster, Pinkerton agent who served as a Union spy in the American Civil War

Notes

Further reading

• Friedman, Morris (1907). The Pinkerton's Labor Spy. New York: Wilshire Book Co. Retrieved July 8, 2009.
• Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri (2003). Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-10159-7.
• Obert, Jonathan (2018) "Pinkertons and Police in Antebellum Chicago" in The Six-Shooter State: Public and Private Violence in American Politics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
• O'Hara, S. Paul (2016) Inventing the Pinkertons; or, Spies, Sleuths, Mercenaries, and Thugs Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Siringo, Charles A. (1912). A Cowboy Detective: A True Story of Twenty-Two Years with a World-Famous Detective Agency. Chicago: W. B. Conkey Company. Retrieved July 8, 2009.

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