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[[File:Pinkertons.jpg|thumbnail|300px|left|<i>Inventing the Pinkertons</i> by S. Paul O'Hara]]

Here is out interview with Professor O'Hara.

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.

<b>What were the Pinkertons? What was their primary function?</b>

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.

<b>The Pinkertons had a fearsome reputation and were seen as extremely competent in the 19th Century. Was that an accurate description of the company?</b>

Reputation was tremendously important to Allan Pinkerton and his agency, but the firm’s reputation was also complex and contradictory. The meaning of the agency was layered in myth and counter-myth, narrative and counter-narrative. Allan Pinkerton crafted his agency’s reputation upon new ideals of professional and moral detectives capable of delving into the depths of the criminal underworld. For certain audiences, then, the Pinkerton’s did have a well-deserved reputation as highly competent and professional lawmen. However fans of Jesse James or defenders of the Molly Maguires countered with infamous tales of hired mercenaries doing the railroad or mining companies’ dirty work. This reputation was less about competency than ruthlessness, recklessness, and fearsomeness. Even amongst businessmen, some saw the Pinkertons as the armed men holding back the tides of anarchy, while others saw reckless thugs who exacerbated conflicts and spurred public outrage. Still others, especially the publishers of dime novel fantasies, portrayed the Pinkertons as incompetent fools, the almost comedic foils for the novel’s heroes. As for accuracy, each of these versions could, depending upon the location, the perspective and the teller of the tale, be an accurate description of the agency.

<b>As you were researching this book, what surprised you the most?</b>

I fully expected the agency to show up as the armed muscle of industrial capitalism, and that was certainly the case. Whether it was hunting train robbers, harassing cattle rustlers, breaking strikes, “infiltrating” secret societies, etc., the Pinkertons were almost always present to function essentially as capital’s private army. But two things surprised me the deeper I dug into the agency’s history. The first was the really complicated role between the state and the agency. From the 1850s through the early 1890s, Pinkerton detectives were often vested with a quasi-official authority; they worked in an unclear space between official and private. They were capital’s private army while also functioning as an arm of state power. This ‘official’ authority included work with the Treasury and the Post Office, spy work during the Civil War and the Spanish-American War, deputization by local sheriffs, and coordination with urban police. It was this blurry line that gave rise (and name) to accusations of ‘pinkertonism’ or the control of the legal system by corporations and plutocrats.

It is relatively short, fairly accessible, and full of self-invented and self-aggrandizing characters such as Allan Pinkerton, Jesse James, Charlie Siringo, Tom Horn, Butch Cassidy, James McParlan, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack Kehoe, Albert Parsons, Big Bill Haywood, Clarence Darrow, Kate Warne, and others. I think that if someone were looking to cover the Gilded Age for a US survey, this book, because of the scope of the Pinkerton agency, covers a lot of different areas. Otherwise, I think classes that want to analyze the cultures of capitalism and labor, the constructed tales of the west, the making of folklore and narrative, the evolution of crime and criminality, or the language of immigration and order will find something useful and interesting within these pages.