This Day in Labor History: January 18, 1887--The Pinkertons killed a 14 year old boy in coal wharves strike in Jersey City. Let's talk about the Pinkertons and the role of private police thugs in American labor history.
Allan Pinkerton immigrated from Scotland to the United States in 1841. Ironically, given his future, he left in part because of British repression of the Chartists, which Pinkerton was involved in.
However, his concern for workers dissipated as he established himself in the United States, although he remained a strong abolitionist who directly assisted John Brown with $500 when Brown freed 11 slaves in Missouri in 1858 and needed to get them to Canada.
Pinkerton began his detective career somewhat by chance, stumbling across a group of counterfeiters in 1847. With the police not paying much attention to this, local merchants paid him to start patrolling for counterfeiters. A career began.
Pinkerton rose to fame by protecting Lincoln from assassination on his journey from Illinois to DC after his election. He then became McClellan's chief of intelligence, where he produced absurd, overheated reports about the gigantic size of Confederate forces
Most importantly for labor history, Pinkerton started a firm that supplemented Chicago’s meager police force, with Pinkerton himself given the power to arrest.
The Pinkertons started working as thugs for companies against strikers in 1866, during a miner’s strike in Braidwood, Illinois. A more serious action took place in the same town in 1874, when miners walked out over wage cuts. Pinkerton and 20 armed guards came to Braidwood.
But the locals violently resisted the Pinkertons. A group of women attacked Pinkerton himself and forced him to flee. After this, he stayed out of labor strikes.
It was only after Allan died and his sons took over the firm that the Pinkertons became THE PINKERTONS, the symbol of violent evil against workers.
The Pinkertons soon became the agency of choice by employers to use violence against strikes. They weren't even that effective at it. They became so notorious that their arrival into town would lead to militant resistance.
Local authorities not infrequently arrested Pinkerton agents upon arrival, such as in New Braidsville, Ohio, where 25 Pinkertons were arrested for carrying concealed weapons. Of course, corporations had a lot of power in the Gilded Age and the Pinkertons were quickly freed.
In 1885, workers at a McCormick’s Harvester Company plant went on strike. The Pinkertons arrived. Fights happened daily.
At one point, strikers stopped a busload of Pinkerton men and beat them severely, stealing all their weapons. When the Pinkertons finally shot an old man, McCormick had to give in entirely to the strikers and they won the strike.
Pinkerton agents themselves were just thugs. Undisciplined, they included a lot of heavy drinkers and men looking for violence. The lack of any sort of police discipline made bad situations worse.
In the Jersey City strike where Pinkertons killed a 14 year old boy, after they murdered him, local resentment was so strong that the entire agency fled the city.
The most notorious Pinkerton action was at Homestead in 1892, when Henry Clay Frick hired them to destroy the union at Carnegie's legendary plant. Strikers met Pinkertons with guns and in the shoot-out that followed, the Pinkertons surrendered.
After Homestead, the Populists adopted an anti-Pinkerton plank in their platform. The House and Senate created committees to investigate. 26 states banned the Pinkertons by 1900.
This largely ended the Pinkertons dominance in anti-labor action. But there were plenty of other anti-labor thug agencies ready to step in the breach, most notoriously the Baldwin-Felts agency that would play a huge role in West Virginia's coal wars.
Pinkerton agents also took on new strategies. They would infiltrate strikes as spies for instance, which was a huge issue in the 1892 Coeur d'Alene strike that included miners blowing up a mill (you can visit the remnants of it today)
Ultimately, the importance of the Pinkertons comes down to what they represent--that employers will do anything to keep their workplaces union-free, including hiring private thugs to kill their own workers. And not much has changed.
As we descend into the New Gilded Age, recreating the inequality, racial violence, and desperation of the late 19th century, don't be at all surprised if employers more openly revert to private guards and violence to keep organizers out of their workplace.
Defeating agencies such as the Pinkertons doesn't mean that struggle is over. Workers have to continue fighting for the sheer right to organize and form a union. Employers will do anything to stop you from doing that.
I will be back on Saturday with another labor history thread--this time on one of the great strikes you've never heard of, the Hawaii sugar strike of 1920.
