Allan J. Pinkerton and the Pinkerton Detective Agency

 

To say that Allan J. Pinkerton (1819-1884) lead a colorful life is a little bit of an understatement. In his long and varied career he was called a traitor and a patriot, an outlaw and a police officer, a thug and an idealist, a left-leaning political activist fighting for the plight of the workers and a hired goon for bosses, a defender of liberty and a trampler of rights, an immigrant and a drunkard, a rogue, an adventurer and a barrel maker. But most of all, he was a detective.

He founded the detective agency that still bears his name, arguably the most famous private detective agency in the world. He and his operatives foiled assassination attempts on presidents and chased outlaws and desperadoes back and forth across the American West. He was responsible for the apprehension of counterfeiters and kidnappers, train robbers and embezzlers and radicals. He was also a prolific author, one of the first private eye writers of them all. Even the phrase “private eye” can find its roots in the agency’s trademark: a large, unblinking eye with the slogan “We Never Sleep.”

ALLAN J. PINKERTON was born into poverty in the Gorbals, a slum area of Glasgow, in 1819, the son of a policeman who could no longer work, due to injuries sustained on the job. When his father passed away, it was up to the young Allan, still in his teens, to support his family, and he became an apprentice cooper, making and selling barrels. Eventually, an arrest warrant was issed for Pinkerton–he had ran afoul of local authorities over his membership in the Chartist movement, a reformist political organization dedicated to universal suffrage and better working conditions for the poor. One step ahead of the law, a price on his head, Pinkerton and his young bride Joan fled to Canada in 1842. A shipwreck off the coast of Nova Scotia left them virtually penniless, and so Pinkerton eagerly accepted the invitation of a Scottish friend to come work as a cooper for Lill’s Brewery in Chicago. He slipped across the border and worked there for a few years, before relocating to the small, rural settlement of Scottish immigrants in nearby Dundee, with hopes of establishing his own business.

It was there, the story goes, that while wandering the forests near Dundee looking for wood for barrel staves, he stumbled across a band of rural counterfeiters hard at work. Pinkerton notified the local sheriff and returned with him to make the arrest. Impressed with his honesty and courage, two local merchants hired the Scot to watch for more counterfeiters. At first Pinkerton was leery of entering such a “wil-o’-the-wisp” business,” but a few subsequent successes led to his becoming a part-time deputy for the county.

But politics would rear their ugly head once again. The town of Dundee was deeply divided over the abolition issue, and Pinkerton, a staunch and vocal supporter, was known to frequently help fugitive slaves on the Underground Railway to Canada (a few years later, he would assist John Brown in doing the same). Running for local office, Pinkerton came in dead last in a field of nine, when his own minister branded him a drunkard.

Discouraged, and tired of the pettiness of small town politics, Pinkerton moved back to Chicago, where his politics and his growing reputation as a “terror to evil-doers” were more appreciated. He was hired on two different occasions by the local branch of the Treasury Department to pursue counterfeiters and once by the Cook County Sheriff’s department to help rescue two Michigan girls who had been abducted. Pinkerton tracked them down and shot one of the kidnappers. This dramatic incident lead to a more-or-less full-time gig as a Cook County Deputy Sheriff in 1853. I say more or less, because the ever-ambitious Pinkerton continued to take numerous outside freelance detective work, and in 1855, realizing the potential, formed his own private agency, The North-Western Police Agency, soon to become The Pinkerton National Detective Agency.

In the mid-nineteenth century, much of the United States was still the “Wild West.” What few official police forces existed at the time were for the most part confined to the larger cities, and they were often less than organized and often embarrassingly incompetent, leaving large sections of the still mostly rural country with virtually no law enforcement at all. The railroads and the post office, two businesses that were forced to operate in this lawless wilderness, quickly became two of the agency’s most lucrative clients. In contrast to the public police of the time, Pinkerton and his private operatives quickly gained a reputation for toughness, thoroughness and relentless professionalism. They compiled huge files on suspects, and were credited with creating the first rogue’s gallery and being the first to use photographs to identify criminals. Operatives had to keep case journals and documentation. They cracked cases and prevented crime through meticulous and painstaking research, often perilous undercover work and exhaustive surveillance.

Pinkerton’s politics and abolitionist sympathies drew the attention of supporters of fiery Illinois lawyer and presidential incumbent Abraham Lincoln, and Pinkerton was hired to act as Lincoln’s bodyguard. Pinkerton and his team (which included Kate Warne, possibly America’s first female private eye) discovered and disrupted a scheme to kill the president on the way to his inauguration, and were subsequently rewarded when Lincoln hired Pinkerton to organize the Secret Service. By the end of the Civil War, the agency’s reputation was well-established, and it was often hired by the government to perform many of the same duties that are now regularly assigned to the Secret Service, the FBI, the CIA and most recently, the Department of Homeland Security.

A handful of high-profile cases helped further lodge the agency in the public’s consciousness. In an often raw and violent era, where preoccupation with crime was rampant, they were soon regarded as heroes, and dime novels sang the agency’s praises. They had gained such a reputation for deadpan professionalism and rather dour doggedness that even Mark Twain couldn’t resist taking a couple of potshots at them in his last, never-finished novel Simon Wheeler, Detective.

But the rapidly expanding agency soon became known for other, less admirable activities, not quite so easily made jest of. Free of any real legal restraints, they often became a law unto themselves, and soon became notorious for some rather shady tactics, from entrapment and intimidation up to kidnapping and murder. Their heavy-handed, ruthless and often reckless pursuit of criminals such as the James brothers (they firebombed their mother’s farmhouse, killing a child) began to turn public sympathy away from the agency.

By then, Pinkerton wasrunning a huge and rapidly expanding business empire, and a good deal of his latter years was spent in public relations. Originally intending to merely counter much of the negative press the agency had received and to dispel a few of the more spurious claims made by jealous rivals and dime novels, Pinkerton became a zealous and blatant self-promoter (long before anyone had ever heard of the internet), pumping out a long string of “true crime” books dramatizing his and the agency’s exploits. Of course, many of the stories were exaggerated or otherwise creatively “colored,” much in the tradition of the great Vidocq a few decades earlier, but even Pinkerton alluded to that possibility in the preface of his first book:

“The Expressman and the Detective, and other works announced by my publishers, are all true stories, transcribed from the records in my offices. If there be any incidental imbellishment, it is so slight that the actors in these scenes would never detect it; and if the incidents seem to the reader at all marvelous or improbable, I can but remind him, in the words of the old adage, that ‘Truth is stranger than fiction.'”

But “imbellished” or not, the numerous books and stories left a tremendous impact on the public at large, and to literature, influencing and inspiring not just Doyle and Twain, but a host of others, including former Pinkerton operatives Charlie Siringo, the “Cowboy Detective,” and Dashiell Hammett, both of whom would pick up the pen and contribute so greatly to what would become the private eye genre.

Pinkerton even offered up this rough, early version of Raymond Chandler’s famous “down these mean streets” rant, in the introduction to another of his books, The Molly Maguires (1877):

“(The detective) should be hardy, tough, and capable of laboring, in season and out of season, to accomplish, unknown to those about him, a single absorbing object…. able to distinguish the real from the ideal moral obligation, and pierce the vail (sic) separating a supposed from an actual state of affairs.”

Pinkerton passed away in 1884, and his agency was taken over by his sons, Robert and William, who continued the agency’s movement from detective work to security and protection, and by the early 20th century the agency was swiftly gaining notoriety as strikebreakers, selling dirty tricks and muscle to rich capitalists, which further cardled any public sympathy they might have enjoyed. To this day, there are many who suspect the agency of conspiracy in the 1917 murder of labor organizer Frank Little in the mining town of Butte, Montana. It’s these type of dark exploits that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would eventually hint at in his final Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear.

Perhaps it’s fortunate Pinkerton was long gone by that time. You have to wonder what Pinkerton, who as a young man was heavily involved in pro-labor politics himself, thought of the agency he had founded becoming a sort of special-interest army for the rich and powerful, intent on crushing the burgeoning American labor movement.

But Pinkerton’s legacy as a detective and as one of the first writers of private detective stories remains, and it casts a giant shadow over all of us who toil in the genre.

Maybe it’s time we nominate Allan J. Pinkerton for the Private Eye Writers of America’s “The Eye.”

Hell, the PWA wouldn’t even be calling its lifetime achievement award “The Eye” if it wasn’t for him.

BOOKS

• The Expressman and the Detective (1874)
• The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (1877)
• The Spiritualists and the Detectives (1877)
• Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives (1878)
• The Gypsies and the Detectives (1879)
• Bucholz and the Detectives (1880)
• Professional Thieves and the Detective (1881)
• The Rail-Road Forger and the Detectives (1881)
• Bank-Robbers and the Detectives (1883)
• The Burglar’s Fate and the Detectives (1883)
• Spy of the Rebellion (1883)
• A Double Life and the Detective (1884)
• Thirty Years a Detective (1884) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
  Pinkerton wrote countless books tooting his own horn but in this reprint, the most famous dick of his day tones down the BSP and simply tells readers how to protect themselves from criminals.

COLLECTIONS

• Claude Melnotte As a Detective, and Other Stories (1875)
• Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches (1879)
• The Detective and the Somnambulist (1875; aka “The Somnambulist and the Detective”)
• The Model Town and the Detectives (1876)
• Mississippi Outlaws and the Detectives (1879)

SHORT STORIES

• “The Detective and the Somnambulist” (1875, The Detective and the Somnambulist)
• “The Murderer and the Fortune Teller” (1875, The Detective and the Somnambulist)
• “Claude Melnotte as a Detective” (1875, Claude Melnotte As a Detective, and Other Stories)
• “The Frenchman and the Bills of Exchange” (1875, Claude Melnotte As a Detective, and Other Stories)
• “L’Envoi: A Sequel” (1875, Claude Melnotte As a Detective, and Other Stories)
• “The Two Sisters; or, The Avenger” (1875, Claude Melnotte As a Detective, and Other Stories)
• “Byron As a Detective (1876, The Model Town and the Detectives)
• “The Hard Life of the Detective” (1876, The Model Town and the Detectives)
• “The Model Town and the Detectives” (1876, The Model Town and the Detectives)
• “Don Pedro and the Detectives” (1879, Mississippi Outlaws and the Detectives)
• “Mississippi Outlaws and the Detectives) (1879, Mississippi Outlaws and the Detectives)
• “Poisoner and the Detectives” (1879, Mississippi Outlaws and the Detectives)
• “A Bit of Detective Office Romance” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)
• “A Bogus Baronet and His Victims” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)
• “Bogus Detectives and Would-Be-Detectives” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)
• “A Brilliant Confidence Swindle in High Life” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)
• “Burglar’s Tricks Upon Burglars” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)
• “The Cost of Business Arrogance” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)
• “A Curious Case of Circumstantial Evidence” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)
• “Canada Bill” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)
• “Extraordinary Self-Robbery” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)
• “The Ghost of the Old Catholic Cemetery” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)
• “A Gigantic Conspiracy Defeated” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)
• “How I Became a Detective” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)
• “An Insurance Conspiracy Foiled” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)
• “Jack Canter” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)
• “Max Shinburn” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)
• “Mr. Bluffer and the Monte Men” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)
• “Piper, the Forger” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)
• “A Private Assurance Company and a Public Insurance Company” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)
• “Quick Work” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)
• “Remarkable Prison Escapes” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)
• “Sheridan, the Forger” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)
• “Trapping a Detective” (1879, Criminal Reminiscences and Detective Sketches)

REFERENCES

• Horan, James D., and Howard Swiggett
  The Pinkerton Story
  1951
• Horan, James D.,
  Desperate Men: The James Gang and the Wild Bunch
  Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962
  Revised and expanded from original 1949 book.
• Horan, James D.,
  The Pinkertons: The Detective Dynasty That Made History
  New York: Crown Publishers, 1967.
• Morn, Frank,
  The Eye That Never Sleeps: A History of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency
  Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982.
• Collins, Max Allan,
  “Mysterious Beginnings” (20001,The History of Mystery)
• Soodalter, Ron,
  “Allan Pinkerton: “They Must Die” (August 2015, Wild West)

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

• The Fictionalized Pinkerton
  Looks like Pinkerton isn’t the only one who occasionally fictionalized his life.

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Photograph of Allan Pinkerton is from the personal collection of Corey Recko. Used with permission.

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