__NOTOC__
<i>How would you describe yourself as a historian?</i>
I would call myself a cultural historian because I am interested in not only the conventions and forms of American popular culture (in this case, the literature of detective fiction, memoir, exposé, and dime novels) but also the linguistic structures of storytelling. I think that this can be a useful way to understand the social and cultural processes of industrialization in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As Americans grappled with the economic and social changes around them, they created a folklore and language to explain their new culture. I find myself drawn to the cultural metaphors and touchstones that society used to debate and discuss their hopes and fears; the Pinkertons were certainly one of these metaphors.
<i>What were the Pinkertons? What was their primary function?</i>
Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency was a private firm established by Allan Pinkerton in 1850 to provide detective services and police protection to banks and railroads. City police forces, which were just being created, tended to focus on riot prevention and social order, so private police or ‘special’ police often provided extra services to paying clients. Quickly, Pinkerton’s developed two distinct divisions: a detective branch where undercover agents could uncover embezzlement, counterfeit, or other crimes and a ‘protective patrol’ which could provide armed guards. Because of its close association with railroad businessmen such as George McClellan, the detective branch morphed into an espionage and counter-espionage service during the Civil War. In the years following the war, railroads and banks hired the firm to protect its interests from bandits such as Jesse James, striking miners in Pennsylvania, and rustlers and squatters in the west. By the 1870s, undercover agents would also be hired to expose criminal immigrant conspiracies, anarchist societies, and potential labor organizations. They became labor spies. Meanwhile the protective patrol began to take on an ever larger role in patrolling mill towns, breaking strikes, and busting heads during labor conflicts. By the time Henry Frick brought 300 Pinkerton guards to Homestead, Pennsylvania, the firm was already notorious as capital’s private army.
<i>How did you become interested in the Pinkertons? What attracted you to their history?</i>
The origins of this book came out of my experience teaching the US survey to college students. Every January I would get a fresh batch of students and we would pick up the master narrative in 1865, but, with the epic story of the Civil War gone, the first couple of weeks of the class always felt a bit disjointed. We would spend one week talking about Reconstruction and Redemption in the post war south, then the following week we shifted to the post-war west. Then we moved to urban industrialization and immigration, and so on. One of the things that I developed to connect it together was a running narrative of the Pinkertons. Thus our discussion of southern redemption ended with Jesse James as an unrepentant southerner hunted by northern railroads; our discussion of the west started with James the ‘western’ outlaw and ended with Butch Cassidy and the closing of the west. We could then segue into industrialization and immigration with the Molly Maguires and the Homestead Strike. All of these subthemes built toward the Populist party and its call for the abolition of the Pinkertons. It helped the class hang together.
In so doing, it became clear to me just how broadly involved and pivotal the agency was to the Gilded Age. There were so many important events covered in Pinkerton fingerprints. Slowly my thinking about the agency began to shift; they became less a framing device to connect various parts of the narrative and more of a driving force in the rise of monopoly capitalism after 1865. The presence of the same agency confronting counterfeiters, railroad bandits, cattle rustlers, immigrant miners, anarchists, Mexican revolutionaries, steel strikers, and so others, began to show just how interconnected the rise of capitalism was in the Gilded Age and just how transformative the new “rules” of the market (and the armed detectives who enforced these rules) were.
====<i>Why did a private security firm become so prominent?==== </i>
Simply put, the Pinkerton agency became prominent because, for many Americans, there was a fear of disorder and a perceived need for order and the Pinkertons looked like the only people capable of providing that order. In an age of territorial expansion, Pinkertons served as law and order where the state had no other representation. In an age that feared immigrant radicalism, Pinkertons uprooted ‘criminal’ conspiracies. In an age of bloody labor conflict, Pinkertons were the muscle of industry. This desire for order also led city and state officials to create professional police forces, construct urban armories, and mobilize a national guard. However industrialists often found such institutions of order unreliable. Instead they turned to privately hired agents to insure order; for the most part state and federal officials were happy to let this happen.
