Stories about Pinkertons -- anyone have any?

[AP]

Does anyone know any interesting stories about Pinkertons? I know a little about Homestead, PA, and the Molly McGuires, and a few other small things, but there must be some nuggets, some outrages that threaten to recede in people's memories, unless they get told in forums like this one.

[Julien Sorel]

1. Once, a Pinkerton

chased me and my brothers from a construction site where we were hiding among the lumber piles and shooting rubber band guns at each other. The bastard caught us and took our guns, some of which we'd spent hours making. I'm still mad about that; I think that was the best rubber band gun I ever made.

[AP]

2. Ahh, a connection to history. Could you picture that guy

cracking the heads of stiking coal miners 80 years earlier, had he been a Pinkerton at the time?

[Holly]

3. UAW

Trying to remember the details, maybe someone can help me out. Wasn't Pinkerton's involved (as in beating people) in the first strike at the GM plant in Flint that formed the UAW.

[TreasonousBastard]

5. Do some googling...

concentrating on labor riots and early organizing. Pinkerton was hired by mines, railroads, and whoknowswhoallelse to break strikes and demonstrations. They were for hire to do pretty much anything back then.

http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Square/5784/unit6.htmPinkertons:

"They were a group in Allan Pinkerton’s organization, the National Detective Agency. They often spied on the unions for the companies. In 1877, when a railroad strike broke out, they were called in as strikebreakers. In the Homestead Strike, the Pinkertons fired on the strikers, killing many of them."


They caught the Younger brothers after first severely screwing it up. There's a play about it, and Mark Twain memorialized them in a story about a bunch of detectives who couldn't find a "stolen" elephant in a tent until it died and stunk up the place.

Can't remember the name of the story offhand, but PM me if you want it (I may never see this thread again). It was hilarious. One of Twain's better ones.

[stewert]

4. Pinkerton Security.........

We had a barney fife pinkerton security guy when I worked at International Paper. He was
hired to watch the parking lot because a couple cars got broken into.

The guy was about 60 years old and clearly out of shape. His job was to watch the parking
lot, yet he spent most of the night in the canteen inside the building at least 100 yards from the
parking lot. The machine I ran was in sight of the front canteen, I swear the guy spent 7.5
hours out of an 8 hour shift in there. You can not even see the parking lot from that canteen.

Once or twice a night he would walk out to the end of the sidewalk and look at the parking lot.

During his shift one night another car got broken into, so the company fired him and put big
street lights in the parking lot. The guy was worthless, whatever they paid him he was overpaid.

No security would be better than this guy.

[Scairp]

6. Did you know

That Pinkerton's is no more? They were bought by a Swedish security company. They kept the Pinkerton name for a few years but just this year they stopped using it. If you really want to know, I can get lots of information about Pinkertons, not tonight of course, because the person I can ask is asleep, but tomorrow I'm sure he can give me info about the company.

[AP]

7. Yeah. I'd love that.

I think with all the privatizing of everything with Iraq, and with prisons, and considering that Rove wants to be Mark Hannah reincarnated, it's important to tell these stories right now.

[Michael Harrington]

8. The Union busting outfit...

...around here was Baldwin-Felts, as depicted in John Sayles' classic Matewan.

Allen Pinkerton was a useless member of George McClellan's useless staff during the Civil War. He died after the war when he tripped while walking, bit his tongue and developed Gangrene.

Funniest death story, ever.

Dashiell Hammett was a Pinkerton early in his life. Ironic, considering his later politics.

[TexasMexican]

9. is that the same...

guy who was supposed to be Lincoln's body guard, but Lincoln told him that he didnt need one, so Pinkerton went out drinking or something instead?

[AP]

10. The people who were Pinkertons weren't very different from people whose

heads they were busting.

They were people without many options. Often immigrants themselves.

Employers, whether industrial or Pinkerton would pick groups of the same ethnicity, and encouraged ethnic rivalries, and wanted people to not know English so they wouldn't know their rights. They did this within the factory, as well as between Pinkertons and factory workers. So you might have the Irish Pinkertons, and then one shift of all-Italians doing one kind of job, and then a group of Hungarians doing another kind of job.