PINKERTON, ALLAN (police)

 

In February 1855, Allan Pinkerton established the Northwest Police Agency in Chicago, Illinois. It was to be a regional police system for the fledgling railroad industry, extending over an area consisting of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Shortly it would grow to cover the entire nation, and eventually it became the present-day Pinkerton, Inc., the world’s largest private security and detective firm. Since federal detection was scant and city police were inefficient or corrupt, Pinkerton became the nation’s preeminent detective force in the nineteenth century. In many respects Allan Pinkerton was to his century what J. Edgar Hoover was to the twentieth.

Pinkerton was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on August 25, 1819. Although his father had been a police officer, Allan apprenticed as a cooper. Young Pinkerton soon became involved with the Chartists, a workers’ movement in Great Britain that was increasingly interpreted by officials as radical. Local political and police pressure compelled Allan Pinkerton and his new bride to flee Scotland in 1842. After a short stay in Canada and in Chicago, he settled in a small Scottish settlement called Dundee, forty miles northeast of Chicago. He opened a cooperage and employed eight apprentices.

Throughout the 1840s, numerous counterfeiters passed spurious money and made business haphazard in much of the rural Midwest. Out on an expedition hunting wood to be used as barrel staves in 1847, Pinkerton stumbled upon a camp of counterfeiters. He returned with the local sheriff to make the arrest and was heralded as a hero. Itinerant rogues nevertheless continued to travel the area selling bundles of fake money to those rustics wanting to turn a fast profit. Constables seemed powerless and a delegation of Dundee merchants pressured Pinkerton into watching for counterfeiters as a part-time deputy sheriff. A number of arrests followed, and Pinkerton began to be weaned away from barrel making.

By 1850, Pinkerton had given up his Dundee business and moved to Chicago. He was an avid abolitionist, but most Dundee residents were conservative on slavery. In his only bid for elective office in Dundee, Pinkerton had come in last in a field of nine candidates. He was convinced that his poor showing was due to his abolitionism. Chicago had a sizable abolitionist population, and he felt his views would be more acceptable there.

More important, requests for his services had increased. For example, the national government became interested in the counterfeiting problem in the Midwest. Because the Treasury Department would not have Secret Service agents to combat counterfeiting until after the Civil War, the secretary of the treasury had Pinker-ton investigate the problem in Illinois in 1851 and 1853. In 1852, Cook County sheriff William Church asked Pinkerton to rescue two kidnapped Michigan girls who had been taken westward. By 1854, he was an official deputy to the Cook County sheriff in Chicago. At the same time, the U.S. postmaster appointed him to be a special agent in the Chicago postal system. He was to investigate mail theft. In several spectacular cases he discovered postal employees stealing mail, and local newspapers proclaimed that ”as a detective police officer Mr. Pinkerton has no superiors and we doubt that he has any equals in the country.”

By mid-decade, as an official in the Cook County sheriff’s office, which did much unofficial detecting, Pinkerton hovered between public and private policing. Then in February 1855, Pinkerton opened his agency. He made a commitment to private policing, but in a country with little official law enforcement, his duties took him across geographic and jurisdic-tional boundaries.

There was an explosion of railroad building in the 1850s. Illinois had ninety-eight miles of railroad track in 1851. Five years later that figure jumped to 2,086 miles. The figure would more than double by decade’s end. The railroads faced the dual problems of rapid growth and America’s ”home rule” conception of law enforcement. Much vandalism and crime occurred on railroad property in the rural areas. Buildings and bridges were burned and trains were derailed. In addition, there were problems with railroad employees far from direct supervisory control. Railroad conductors, in their capacity of selling tickets on board the train, could take money and admit passengers but not issue tickets. With no record of a transaction, conductors could pocket the fare.

Opportunities were great. For example, in 1857 Illinois Central conductors sold $147,856 worth of tickets—officially, at least. Railroad management wanted to control the workers who were far away from headquarters. Pinkerton was to provide that control. A spying system—Pinkerton called it a ”testing program”—was devised to watch conductors. Either Pinkerton himself or one of his employees (there were three at first, but the number grew rapidly in the next five years) boarded the trains, posed as a passenger, and watched the conductors.

Immediately, Oscar Caldwell was spotted taking money. An arrest, trial, and conviction followed. Caldwell’s trial aroused considerable interest in Chicago and divided employee and employer. Most railroad workers in 1855 took sides against their bosses and this newly invented spy system. Shortly, Allan Pinkerton devised a symbol for the agency, the all-seeing eye. The eye began to convey double meanings. For railroad workers it meant distrust and deception; for the owner it meant accountability and control. In the next five years Pinkerton’s testing program uncovered numerous cases of conductor dishonesty. In the same period railroad workers began to form unions. It seemed that war between the workers and the capitalists might erupt, but then another war got in the way.

Tensions between the northern and southern states over slavery continued to increase in the late 1850s and peaked with the election of Abraham Lincoln. The threat of secession was ominous, and so was the possibility of presidential assassination. One such attempt had occurred earlier, during Andrew Jackson’s presidency. Rumor reached Pinkerton that Lincoln would be murdered as he traveled from Illinois to Washington, D.C. Pinker-ton intercepted the president-elect in Philadelphia with the news that a murder conspiracy was afoot in Baltimore. Only with great effort did Pinkerton persuade Lincoln to be disguised and secretly escorted through Maryland. It was never proved that a real plot existed, however, and Pinkerton was accused of manufacturing one for his own benefit.

War broke out shortly after Lincoln’s arrival in the nation’s capital, and Pinker-ton returned to Chicago. One of Pinkerton’s close friends, George McClellan, became a general in the Midwest and used the detective to gather enemy intelligence. When McClellan was given command of all the Union forces, Pinkerton headed the spy service. A cause celebre occurred when one of his agents, Timothy Webster, was discovered and executed by the Confederate government. The agency continued to spy on conductors and uncover government corruption in the awarding of wartime contracts. When McClellan was dismissed in 1863, Pinkerton returned to his private practice.

After the war Pinkerton’s agency expanded. Offices opened in New York City (1865) and Philadelphia (1866). Testing the honesty of railroad employees continued, but emphasis shifted to the pursuit of train robbers. Kinship gangs such as the Renos, the Youngers, and the Daltons plagued the railroads. Frank and Jesse James emerged as folk heroes, especially after Pinkerton agents botched an ambush and injured the bandits’ mother. Pinkerton continued to chase the railroad robbers, but as happened with the testing programs, the desperadoes made many think that detectives were merely representatives of the moneyed classes who were against the common people.

Although much of the animosity between Pinkerton agents and organized labor would occur after Allan Pinkerton’s death in 1884, there were harbingers. A secret Irish fraternity named the Molly Maguires terrorized the Pennsylvania coal mines between 1867 and 1877. A Pin-kerton agent infiltrated and exposed the organization, and several miners were tried, convicted, and executed. Coal workers claimed that Pinkerton’s men were agents provocateurs, while mine owners felt terrorism had been dealt a decisive blow.

In the twenty years following the Civil War, the Pinkerton agency grew and became more visible. Agents served as private police who traveled across many boundaries doing very public acts. For many people, especially as Pinkerton and other private detective firms became more established, the entire profession hovered on the border of respectability.

As business grew, so did the number of Pinkerton operatives. By 1870, there were twenty detectives and sixty watchmen. In spite of economic recession and depression, the number would almost double in the next decade. The number of other detective agencies increased rapidly as well. Besides combating criminality and radicalism, Pinkerton set out to forge a profession. First, in a series of in-house publications, he defined business philosophy and employee conduct. This was done to control his own operatives and provide guidelines of behavior for other detective agencies. Like any respectable business, the Pin-kerton agency worked for fees instead of rewards. Pinkerton would not accept disreputable work like so many divorce detectives did. Employees had to subscribe to a puritanical lifestyle. In short, his busi-ness—and by implication all proper private detectives—was to be a carbon copy of other respectable businesses. Contradicting prevailing attitudes that it takes a thief to catch a thief, Pinkerton told his operatives that ”the profession of the detective is a high and honorable calling.”

Second, Pinkerton tapped into a growing popular literature coming out of Edgar Allan Poe’s earlier detective puzzles and the sensationalist, cheap ”yellow topic” publications. Both genres distorted real detectives and detection. To exploit this popularity and correct misperceptions, Pin-kerton published sixteen detective topics between 1874 and 1884. Actually, the literary output was a corporate endeavor: Several different authors, under his editorial supervision, put Pinkerton’s memoirs to paper. Two types of publication resulted. The detective stories were matter-of-fact retellings of past cases. They were marked by a lack of excitement and sensation. The second type were not stories; they were descriptions of various crimes and criminal menaces in America. This allowed Pin-kerton to pose as an expert on crime in

America. Such knowledge was based on his ”rogues’ gallery” and network of agents throughout the country.

When Allan Pinkerton died in 1884, the management of the agency passed to his two sons, William and Robert. Much stormy history remained to be written in the late nineteenth century. But at his funeral Pinkerton was eulogized as a reformer because ”the profession in this country of which, in its true dignity, he was the honored founder, is no mean profession. It is a social protector.” Of course, not everyone shared that view.

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