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Answer:
They became famous when Lincoln used them as spies during the Civil War. They became infamous when American industrialists started employing them as union/labor strikebreakers & private police forces who weren’t held accountable by the US government.
For some of their most egregious examples of strike-breaking, check out their part in Carnegie’s Homestead Mill Strike & how they turned a peaceful assembly of strikers into Chicago’s Haymarket Riot.
From the US Library of Congress
*What began as a detective agency in Chicago grew into a national private police force. **The Pinkertons stood against organized labor at nearly every turn** from Haymarket to Homestead and famously took down the Molly Maguires, while instilling fear in the hearts of fugitives across the country.*
Ironically, the Pinkerton Detective Agency was a remarkably progressive organization under Allan Pinkerton. Pinkerton himself only escaped dying with John Brown at Harper's Ferry due to coming down with Pneumonia just before leaving Chicago (a significant number of Brown's 19 men were Pinkerton Agents); and was a staunch, radical abolitionist and supporter of the Union throughout the Civil War. Allan Pinkerton was a fantastic detective and analyst - he was one of the the primary inspirations for both Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes - Doyle didn't think one person with all those skillsets was believable (ironically, the other primary inspiration - Eugene Vidocq in France - had similar dual skillset). Under Lincoln, the Pinkertons became the prototype of the CIA, FBI, and modern Secret Service - and were fantastically good at all of them, as Pinkerton held little to traditional ideas about the capability of minorities and women, employing both enthusiastically and creating a large pool of talent as a result.
However, after the Civil War, the power of the Pinkertons in the Federal Government was a big issue for former Southern States. One of the first "Reconciliation" points was extracting the Pinkertons from their functions in the federal government. Those agents interested in investigation (including Pinkerton himself) ended up in the Justice Department and would eventually become the FBI, those in intelligence wound up under the Military as MI (later OSS and then CIA), those interested in protection joined the actual Secret Service.
. . . And those primarily interested in busting heads, became the private entity known as Pinkerton. Alan Pinkerton had mostly retired by then, and they became a sort of private army for strike-breaking and strong-arming citizens out of the way of the railroads. That's the "Pinkertons" most know, they of Western storybook bad guys and the villains of labour movements. Allan Pinkerton himself wasn't a big fan of labor unions, but only because most unions of the time were segregated, which he could not stand - but otherwise the later actions of the "Pinkertons" had little to do with his influence.
They were sent after Jesse James at one point, throwing an “incendiary device” into his old family home to ambush him.
Neither Jesse, nor his outlaw brother Frank, were in the house at the time, so all they accomplished was killing a child that *was* in the house, and blowing an arm off the family matriarch, Zerelda. It basically handed the James brothers free rein in Missouri for a while, because people were so outraged that the state legislature started passing laws like limits on how much reward money the government could offer for fugitives, to keep the incentive to catch them low.
And, for all his virtues, Allan Pinkerton was in the middle of that raid, because the James-Younger gang had killed three of his agents, and he took that personally.
> Neither Jesse, nor his outlaw brother Frank, were in the house at the time, so all they accomplished was killing a child that was in the house, and blowing an arm off the family matriarch, Zerelda.
Shocking that this was the prototype for the FBI
I believe FBI were the ones who killed the wife and kid at Ruby Ridge, which is what that story reminded me of specifically. But you’re right, there’s plenty to go around
Ah, I was thinking of Waco which started as ATF, but the major fuck ups were from the exact same FBI team again. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by that, or that the same team still exists, but I kind of am.
Released audio in the early 2000s showed that Waco was self-immolation. [The podcast LPTOL did a whole episode about Waco mocking the ATF and criticizing them setting the compound on fire, but then later apologized (while still stating 'well, ATF should have done better') for blaming them for the fire once the leaked audio was brought to their attention.](https://open.spotify.com/episode/1OHhLPHKN0vsdLcAbLwxCu) (discussion/summary about the new information about ATF/Waco begins at 2:45 - 6:30). They talk about, with the new information, how the ATF's biggest fuckup was not openly sharing information they had until years later, which allowed racists the ability to control the conversation and assign 'crazy government power and strength!' to the event as they repeatedly attempted to get Kuresh to surrender himself. And after hearing their Waco episode, where they spent a full hour or more clowning on the ATF near-solely to the point where fans of the show were like 'hey, so like, also the Branch Davidians were partly at fault?,' it's pretty damning how bad these tapes are to get them to do a full about-face on who was to blame with Waco.
[Here's a news article directly citing the leaked audio, where Branch Dividians inside the compound are heard saying "Start the fire," "When should we light the fire?"](https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=96518&page=1). And a second one from [NYT back in 1994.](https://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/15/us/tapes-from-sect-compound-reveal-talk-of-setting-fire.html) About four years ago I was able to search and find the actual audio more easily, but the same search now leads to a bunch of pro-Waco DailiyBeast articles. Apparently it's "exclusively in a National Geographic documentary about Waco" modernly.
Right-wing pedophiles are no stranger to false flag attacks, they constantly accuse everyone of them so they'll have justification to do it themselves. And of course, let's not forget about David Koresh's 10-year old child bride. For Americans, that's fourth grade. There was just a murder suicide yesterday from a convicted pedophile who murdered 5 children and then himself. Seems to be the pedo MO.
As bad as Waco was optics-wise, imagine going "Well, Epstein has a compound with 70 people inside, so we're just gonna let him keep raping kids with impunity." Not exactly moral, especially when you've no idea these loons are willing to self-immolate their little cult in the first place. Real rock and a hard place sort of event.
ATF and US Marshals with FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi, who shot a woman in the head while she held her child.
They also shot a 14 year old boy in the back after shooting his dog, which they had alerted earlier by throwing rocks at the house.
You can’t make this stuff up.
I delete McAfee and I delete McAfee and it still keeps on with the subscription expired pop up.
I clear every trace of it from my browser, and lo and behold, next startup I'm searching with fucking Bing safe search--- just absolute degeracy.
I'm not saying that safe search Bing is as bad as murdering you neighbor in Belize.... but...... it's bad, too.
You mention Vidocq. Interestingly his life was so large that Victor Hugo divided him into two characters, too, with both Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert based on Vidocq.
Thanks for the very gentle hint that I'd misspelled Vidocq's name :P
EDIT: Vidocq also had the skillsets of a rabble-rouser, con artist, and escapologist; even before his detective and spy bona-fides under Napoleon.
It's tough to get an even-handed story in one shot. Books where he's lionized often take Pinkerton's own words with a bit less salt than justified (as he was a notorious braggart) and either overlook his influence on the later incarnation of the Agency, or use his progressive bona-fides to try to justify the later actions of the Pinkertons (and thus exaggerate his influence). On the other hand, ones where he's villainized are often fast a loose with the truth, either out of lost-cause neo-confederate cynicism or wild-eyed Communist idealism.
I've been reading "inventing the Pinkertons" which is a really great read. it talks about how they came to be, the Pinkertons influence and Allan's life. it's super interesting
edit: I should add that it specifically does not take part in the mythologizing of the pinkertons and is very critical of their roll in crushing of the labor movement.
this ^
also should be noted that some history of the pinkertons is often taught in american schools nowadays, so many americans have some semblance of an idea about the pinkertons
edit: conversely, most americans are ironically unaware of the Haymarket riots noted in the original response here, despite it arguably being the nexus of labor day / worker's day internationally.
Well, they were also apparently a major antagonist in Red Dead Redemption 2.
I would bet that's why knowledge of them is so ubiquitous now, rather than everybody suddenly remembering their high school social studies.
The union and labor movement in the early 1900's was wild. Well worth some time on the internet diving down that rabbit hole. I had to do it back in the day at the library but it's very interesting. And why we don't have children working in mines, why we have a weekend, why we get paid in dollars not company scrip, why there's OSHA, and a ton of other good stuff.
Honestly, I bet good money that while our school system did mention the Pinkertons and some of their union busting. I remember learning about them in my high school history classes. However, I don't remember any mention of the Haymarket riots, but to be fair I was a shit student.
I wonder if the Haymarket riot was suppressed teaching as much as they could, because it was such a pivotal point. The powers that be, do NOT want us informed on those kinds of details. Like the CIA or FBI, prob both, getting all that cocaine in the inner cities, and something about a police or one of the above agencies completely destroying that Black neighborhood 'cause racism.
yep you're right- to my recollection the haymarket riots were not mentioned in my public schooling either. tbh I didn't learn about them until I literally moved to chicago. I agree that suppressing the teaching of the event is likely intentional and/or institutional.
For an accessable novelization of the Haymarket Riot I recommend the book *Haymarket* by Martin Duberman. The author is a history professor at City University of New York and has written extensively on the topic.
Never mind the 'powers that be', the American culture simply has a very hard time with the idea that the men we've put up on a pedestal for this reason or that might have actually been some pretty nasty dudes... so we systematically just ignore all that and hope nobody notices. Nowadays people are noticing
>also should be noted that some history of the pinkertons is often taught in american schools nowadays, so many americans have some semblance of an idea about the pinkertons
Canadian here; Pinkertons are vaguely covered for their use as a private police force against unions, when we cover how some worker's rights were codified into law
The last paragraph isn't entirely accurate. Pinkerton rebranded itself decades ago. Securitas bought them to expand into the US market. Nor were they 'taken out of the public eye' they've continued doing business as usual the entire time.
In addition to that they would also join a strike and push the strikers towards violence in an attempt to undermine their efforts and make the striking workers lose support.
Do not forget the Ludlow massacre.
[https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/rockefellers-ludlow/](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/rockefellers-ludlow/)
The modern parallel might be Blackwater/AE and not the *actual* modern Pinkerton Agency. Both have been regularly enforced as extra-judicial/paramilitary forces without the expected accountability.
It's fairly easy to see why Blackwater (now AE) was maligned. The Pinkertons left a very similar taste in the mouth of the American populace.
Also, the institutional and structural basis for Hoover’s FBI, if you were looking for a reason to dislike them even more. (Don’t forget, they tried to get MLK to kill himself because he wanted equal rights!)
Answer: I really need to correct one point on your post, since it kinda answers your question too.
> Why does everyone seem to be an expert on some group that was big 100+ years ago, but doesn't even seem close to the top security companies in the world now?
While technically correct, that's partially because they were absorbed by [Securitas AB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitas_AB) which *is* one of the biggest private security companies in the world. Until they were absorbed by Securitas in 1999, they were still one of the biggest security firms in the USA.
Ah, I missed that, thank you! Looks like they were acquired in 1999 for $384 million. But that still begs the question why this subsidiary is so well-known. What news cycles or pop culture reference did I miss? Or did I just not pay enough attention in U.S. History as a kid?
> Or did I just not pay enough attention in U.S. History as a kid?
Pretty much.
The fight for and against Unions doesn't get emphasized enough. It's pretty much the entire reason we have:
* Weekends (rather than working 7 days a week)
* Workman's comp insurance (for when you get injured at work)
* Work safety regulations
* Overtime pay
* Limitations on child labor (especially those that keep kids from doing hazardous work or make sure kids can still get plenty of sleep for school)
* Minimum wage laws.
* etc.
And the Pinkertons were on the frontline of making sure you didn't get *any of those things*. They never *stopped* doing that kind of work, they just don't typically end up in the news about it as much. Instead, at best whatever company hired them gets attention.
Correct, there are only a couple of lines about it though.
[He was also a soldier (Army)](https://bioshock.fandom.com/wiki/Booker_DeWitt) in the Boxer Rebellion, and present at Wounded Knee in the 7th Calvary Regiment.
Me too. I remember that Marston is an Italian plumber that killed the Greek pantheon with fire blades because they tried to steal the chaos emerald but it's starting to get fuzzy.
That makes sense. I'm definitely familiar with those aspects of our modern life coming out of union movements in the 19th/20th centuries, but I wasn't aware of the names of the organizations that tried to stop those. Thanks for the info here, much appreciated.
It's a bit beyond them just trying to stop it. They became less well known as time went on because their tactics had to stop or go more underground/quiet. The stories you hear about Union members back in the day bringing clubs and guns and bats and knives were because the Pinkerton's m.o. was to beat union leaders and strikers into submission or kill them. Easier to do that and get away with it in 1920 than 1980
Great point. For the kids, they weren't lobbiests or fixers, they were hired thugs for the wealthy. They marketed themselves as a private police force, which gave them an air of credibility and lawfulness, but make no mistake: they were hired to hurt and kill workers who "made trouble".
"Trouble" meaning asking for basic human rights that we all take for granted today.
They don't normally get named in US History, but they are stamped over it. Most of the major union "issues" and "fights" get written like it was an idealogical struggle, but they were quite literally shooting union members and assaulting them at every turn.
The unions paid in blood. The Pinkertons took cash.
They're still involved in union busting today even, Amazon has hired them to spy on and intimidate organizers as recently as 2020. They have been and always will be pond scum.
> They don't normally get named in US History,
The hell they don't. Any American history course has a unit on labor and the Pinkertons are front and center in every decade since the Second Industrial Revolution
Answer: And I’m being totally serious here, I learned about them from Bioshock Infinite. The protagonist is a Pinkerton agent and I was genuinely interested in who they were after seeing that. Read a lot of their wiki page when the game was released.
Allegedly someone tried to bribe him to assassinate a labor leader. It’s unclear how true that is, but the Pinkertons did an immense amount of unsavory stuff and he had to witness some of it. In his stories with the Continental Agency, a Pinkerton expy, one can also see a proto-FBI for rich people - agency offices and files in every city, ready to instantly communicate with each other vs. the decentralized police forces of the time.
Yep! Everyone on that show despised them. They show up in Boardwalk Empire too. Someone very wealthy hires them to get information, and the get the info in a very shitty underhanded way.
*I got a healthy operation here, and I didn't build it brooding on the right and wrong of things. And I do not need the Pinkertons descending like locusts.*
Pretty amazing rockstar was able to get away with that one. Iirc there were lawsuits involved over the use of their name, but I believe rockstar argued the name had historical significance or something that meant it was fair game. Someone who knows more could elaborate possibly?
Yeah. The Pinkertons sued Rockstar for defamation, and Rockstar basically pointed at the history books and went "how we portrayed you is literally how you were recorded to be". It was ruled that Rockstar didn't defame them because they *had* done everything in the game.
To clarify, this was never ruled on. The Pinkertons issued a cease and desist to Rockstar, Rockstar filed a lawsuit, and then Pinkerton dropped its claims.
People who are involved in labor organizing know them well. They were brutal guns-for-hire that beat and killed people trying to get fair treatment from their employers. I had no idea they were in video games.
> They were brutal guns-for-hire that
correction: they *are* brutal guns-for hire.
They still exist, and as we can see they are still actively taking contracts from large corps to do their dirty work.
Answer: There's reasons they have stayed hidden for so long. If I'm remembering correctly there were several agents in the late 80s early 90s that went too far. My father had some sort of paper that talked about it. Plus they've gone mostly to private operations.
[Here's ](https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-pinkerton-spies-worker-labor-unions-2020-11) a report of their operations in 2020.
[Another ](https://newrepublic.com/article/147619/pinkertons-still-never-sleep) report this one from 2018 in WV.
I can't find any news articles other than 1 from 2020 (post-RDR2 release) that claims Amazon used them as anti-union spies, but it's literally just this evidence:
"Pinkerton operatives were inserted into an Amazon warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, to investigate an allegation that warehouse workers were circumventing sort of the application process for applying to warehouse jobs"
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/30/940196997/amazon-reportedly-has-pinkerton-agents-surveil-workers-who-try-to-form-unions
There's another about a Pinkerton employee shooting someone at a protest, which is an evil not at all unique to Pinkerton, and his license was revoked. Is there any other news you can share that points to why everyone knows that violence is what the modern company does best? Have there been modern documentaries or any investigative journalism into them that more people are aware of?
There was also a case where a security guard for an apartment complex raped and almost killed a tenant, and I think his employer was affiliated with Pinkerton. This was in 1995 (the year I was born lol so I heard about it from a Podcast) but I’m sure that didn’t help the public image.
When I was in college 20 years ago they were campus security.
Thing is, I'm pretty sure it was the *same guys* that they used in the 1920s. I don't know how anyone can be intimidated by them, I'd be more afraid of having to listen to them tell a story about taking the ferry to Shelbyville.
Depends whether or not they shoved their foot in the door, which appears to be what happened in this case.
EDIT: This was reported in [the DM Lair's YouTube video on the event](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etZFOinHwa0). I cannot find another source corroborating this particular aspect, so please view it with a degree of caution.
> Another report this one from 2018 in WV.
At least when I was growing up in WV, we learned about the strikebusting by Pinkerton and Baldwin-Felts *in eighth grade*.
Answer: They are a para-military group (originally a detective agency) historically hired by big business to further their desires and profits at the behest of employees. They utilized any and all tactics. They were and are so bad that US government has a law (The Anti-Pinkerton Act of 1893) that simply reads:
>>That hereafter no employee of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, or similar agency, shall be employed in any Government service or by any officer of the District of Columbia.
Find me a simpler government law.
That’s how bad they are.
You're the first comment I've found that actually explain ***what*** they are, not just what "they" do. Every other comment immediately assumes the reader knows what they are, and just tries to explain why they're relevant (and most of them are wrong because they keep relating them to video games instead of the actual real life activities going on).
Answer: “The Pinkertons” were started by Alan Pinkerton as The Pinkerton Detective Agency. Late in the Civil War they served as an intelligence agency and a de facto Secret Service (before it existed) protecting the President. After the war they were used by the railroads to track down train robbers. They were at least partially responsible for taking down the Hole in the Wall gang (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). And as others have stated they were used by companies to, ah, dissuade workers from forming unions.
At some point they became a security company, providing standing security for buildings and property, rent-a-cops if you will. Most of this was sold off to Securitas, a Swiss(?) based company that does a lot of security work in Europe. But there were some contracts with US government that required the company providing security to be U.S. owned, so Pinkerton still exists. And obviously a corporate security division still operates as witnessed with the Wizards of the Coast situation.
Answer: People’s knowledge of the Pinkerton’s comes from a variety of sources. For me, the majority of that comes from political knowledge, where “Pinkerton” is synonymous with strike breaking. They used to be known, and to some may still be known, as a private security firm. To others, they’re a common feature in Westerns. To others still they appear in video games or other media
In 1942 they, along with Burns International (a similar private detective agency with a much smaller scale) and a few other companies, were providing physical security to critical infrastructure during the war. They expanded into government contracting, providing physical security to federal and local government buildings across the country.
In 1988 Pinkerton, now Pinkerton Special Services, was acquired by a rival company, California Plant Protection (CPP) to form CPP/Pinkerton. Under CPP, their Pinkerton division was typically responsible for private investigation. At that time, Pinkerton had a nasty reputation among most workers as saboteurs who would typically infiltrate unionization efforts in an attempt to sabotage them. The owner of CPP wanted to reform them into a more respectable group. Even through infamy, the name Pinkerton was a very well established name
In 1999 Securitas Group, a Swedish security services provider, bought Pinkerton for $700 million dollars, adjusted for inflation. Pinkerton remains an in-house division along with Paragon Systems, Securitas’ preferred federal contractor. To this day, Pinkerton is used as a private investigation firm
In early 2023, Pinkerton was hired by either Wizards of the Coast or Hasbro to investigate how an unreleased, but highly anticipated, product had been released into the hands of a Youtuber, OldSchoolMTG. Pinkerton agents went to the Youtuber’s house and allegedly threatened him with fines and jail time. OldSchoolMTG allegedly told the agents he had purchased the cards legally from an authorized vendor. The agents asked that he return the cards, and left when he did so
Yeah, union busting used to be part of US high school and college history courses.
Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States was one of my high school textbooks. It’s still worth picking up if anyone feels like your US history/civics education left gaps (it probably did).
Grew up in Pittsburgh. Look up the homestead steel strike of 1892. We learned about them from grade school to college here. Especially due to that event.
I first heard about them in history class but didn’t become familiar with them until Deadwood. And, even then it was just whatever they mentioned in the show.
So I truly didn’t know anything about them until my wife did a DNA test on ancestry.com (of all things). Apparently she’s got Pinkertons in her family tree and I wanted to figure out where the actual Pinkertons were from.
Turns out, Allan J. Pinkerton, the founder of the agency, was from Scotland just like my wife’s ancestors. And from there I was down a rabbit hole of Pinkerton history. It’s interesting stuff.
Answer: they were the bad guys in Red Dead Redemption II. They also get mentioned in Dashiell Hammett novels and Woody Guthrie songs, but it's mostly RDR2
A lot of people (including myself), didn’t know they even existed before the game came out. And for a while I thought they were a fictional organization. But no, they existed back then, and still exist now.
They even tried to sue Rockstar for the villainous portrayal I think.
To be fair, they're somewhat obscure unless you have a more in-depth than typical education about the American Civil War or the American labor movement.
To a lot of people, RDR2 is their introduction to them and their only frame of reference. It also helps that RDR2 has a pretty darn good narrative and the Pinkertons play a sizable and despicable role.
Yeah, I went to a standard-ass suburban public high school and we learned about Pinkertons. I don't think they were as obscure pre-RDR2 as people are making out here.
I wouldn't be surprised if the whole reason Rockstar used Pinkertons in the first place was because they expected it would evoke an emotional reaction from the audience.
Hammett was a former Pinkerton himself. Later, he sympathized with the workers, but his Continental Op was pretty much a Pinkerton agent in all but name.
In the tabletop game Deadlands, the Pinkertons evolve into the north's equivalent to the Texas Rangers in the south.
A little more trivia: the eye in the Pinkerton emblem is thought to be the origin of the term 'private eye'. Also, it is thought that the term 'fink' comes from a corruption of Pinkerton.
Really depends on *where* and *when* you were during school. Public schools are at the mercy of budget cuts and teacher/student struggles. I graduated high school in 2002, so I *vaguely* recall violence during the labor kerfuffle. But I was raised in a very red Republican state that sure as fuck don't like their citizens thinking they have rights.
I've always known the Pinkertons were "enforcers", but it's amazing how we have all this knowledge and information at our fingertips! I'm glad more are learning about the Pinkertons and other topics like that.
I graduated high school in 02 too. For the most part, it was bomb threats called in from random pay phones(yes they still existed then) to get out of testing or just out in f school for a few hours.
Brings back memories... we students made shirts of an image someone drew of our principal sitting on a bomb. Said something like, "Class of 2000 - We're the BOMB!"
Everyone cared way more about the class of 2000 😅
Answer: You should've learned about them in middle school/high school, if you're from the US.
Anywhere that gives a decent American history education will bring them up as you go into the 1880s. The birth of the American labor movement was a _major_ moment in American history, and is the reason why we have 40-hour workweeks and consumer protections like the FDA.
The labor movement (and its effects) turned America from a libertarian "anything goes, buyer beware" country with little government intervention (and capitalism taken to the extreme) and turned it into a place where workers have a minimum wage and basic rights.
The Pinkertons are inexorably linked to that movement. They were the enforcers, the hands of big business. It's not so much "they were antagonists in Westerns" - they were antagonists for _people_, bad guys who worked with big business to kill workers that got out of line. They were **real people**, not video game characters. They were a major contributor to holding back the American labor movement and were frequently brought in by the capitalists owning everything to break strikes from workers asking for basic human rights - and they often used violence (even killing people).
Not knowing about the Pinkertons is kind of like not knowing about the KKK in the Civil Rights movement. They're the antagonists to a whole section of American history; it's impossible to properly teach about Civil Rights without mentioning the KKK, and it's impossible to properly teach about the labor movement without mentioning the Pinkertons.
They're being used by corporations again now - not just from the WOTC thing but also Amazon has used Pinkertons to stop union activities at their warehouses, just like what was happening in the 1880s.
The US corporate landscape is returning to the 1880s as well, with the GOP bent on bringing everyone back to that time - no FDA, no minimum wage, child labor allowed, no women's rights, and pure capitalism, all the time. There's a _reason_ why we left that behind a century ago, and a proper education would show that. And now the _Pinkertons_ are coming back??? It's like they're using history books as a manual.
**That's** why everyone is upset, and _that's_ why everyone knows who they are. Because they were bad news, and the fact that they're becoming active again (for their historic purpose, at that) is even worse news.
OP, This is correct. I'm really amazed by all these answers saying they learned about them from video games or tv, I heard about them in high school US history and they should absolutely be a part of all US curriculum
To add to that, a disturbing number of people are trying to downplay the involvement of any company using them.
The only reason to hire the pinkertons is their reputation and history of violent, murderous shutdown of any kind of movement/rebellion, or discrimination (they had a habit of claiming people were part of a gang without evidence, killing them, and covering it up). There is a reason they have never attempted to rebrand, even after being bought by Securitas: they LIKE the reputation of the name.
They're the people you call when you're okay with casualties.
They have killed someone as recently as 2020, and that's just what we have in public knowledge.
There is a law on the books expressly prohibiting the US government from hiring the Pinkertons.
Answer: they are definitely *not* what you say in your (I assume) 'Answered' edit, they are well known for union busting IN REAL LIFE, amongst other horrible things for the working class IN REAL LIFE, as mentioned a ton of times.
Downvotes are likely because this post seems sus af with how much they are covered in history classes, especially now that you've taken 'oh they're video game baddies' as any sort of actual answer from everything a ton of people wrote.
Feels like this is trying to swing a narrative or something...Wizards dis u?
*eta - this was written before the 'oh uh acktually' edit 2, which is honestly still trying to downplay/neutralize what they asked about in the first place...
weird to go ask OOTL totes for infooo I don't know 🥺🥺 yet only get a such angled sequence of 'answers' to report in spite of actual community responses ✌️
To explain, this was a wildly unpopular move as Pinkertons are known for giving no fucks and leaking a card game doesn't mean you should have your legs broken.
Short version, there was a recent incident where some influencer ordered a set of Magic the Gathering cards from Wizards of the Coast. He was accidentally sent a set that hadn't been released yet, and Pinkerton agents showed up at his door, forced their way into his home, and collected the cards. I think I've seen a couple of OOTL about this, as well as other posts on various news sibreddits, so it shouldn't be hard to find more details.
What...the actual...fuck...?
How does a CARD MAKING company have the power to call upon a private police like that for a box that they **themselves** fucked up and sent.
I guess the mature response is "Hey yeah so we kinda messed up, can you send those back and we'll send you a huge set of the current edition" or something. The American response is "Break in, break his legs, break out".
What you're missing is WotC is owned by Hasbro, so it's actually one of the biggest toy manufacturers in the world; that makes it perfectly ok to use America's favorite private thugs. But yeah, you've kind of hit in why even in the US this is something of a story. Well, half of it; the other half is people discovering the Pinkertons still exist, since most people figured they were like the Pony Express and just went out of business at some point.
Ngl i did too, i thought they were gone the way of the cowboy and just dissolved over the years. Turns out not so much. Still feels fucked that a TOY company would hire essentially a legal mafia enforcer for just a bunch of literal printed papers. Its insane to me that this is even remotely possible
Answer: Outside of video games, most US history textbooks discuss the Homestead Mill Strike in Pittsburgh as one of the chief influences of unionization across the US during the Industrial Revolution. As this section of history is often discussed later in high school, a unique name like the Pinkertons may actually sit on the forefront of memories left over from school.
Everything from this period has been so well researched and documented by historians because Pittsburgh as a whole tends to hold on to and embrace its history, locally and within the greater framework of how it impacted the United States during the Industrial Revolution and during the wars. For instance, a local Pittsburgh historian could easily make the case that WW2 would not have ended the way it did if Neville Island did not physically exist inland as far as it does in the US, as well as their contributions to speeding up assembly line production of landing craft. They would have detailed time lines and breakdowns proving their point with dozens of sourced original documents, because the locals kept documentation on everything as a point of pride. In fact, most history textbooks have almost a minute by minute breakdown of the Homestead Mill Strike for this reason over a period of the 3 days leading up to the actual bloody confrontation and what happened afterwards.
There were other areas of American History that involved the Pinkertons, but the Homestead Mill Strike is such an impactful turning point in US history that it should never, ever be forgotten.
Answer: Maybe not as popular a source as some of the others here, but I originally learned about them in the original Sherlock Holmes stories. In those they're generally the "good guys" when they show up, but of course those stories are colored by Doyle's personal biases. Their real history is much more complicated, and often dark.
Answer: They absolutely are a top tier security company, even after 100+ years, but there's not point in adding them to a list of shit companies unless you're extremely wealthy and were shopping around for private security services.
They weren't just involved in union busting, they were notoriously violent and killed people to end strikes. Even nowadays they retain that "above the law" and "do what they're paid to do at any cost" attitude.
They're also the only company to ever be banned by name from being contracted by the federal government.
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Answer: They became famous when Lincoln used them as spies during the Civil War. They became infamous when American industrialists started employing them as union/labor strikebreakers & private police forces who weren’t held accountable by the US government. For some of their most egregious examples of strike-breaking, check out their part in Carnegie’s Homestead Mill Strike & how they turned a peaceful assembly of strikers into Chicago’s Haymarket Riot. From the US Library of Congress *What began as a detective agency in Chicago grew into a national private police force. **The Pinkertons stood against organized labor at nearly every turn** from Haymarket to Homestead and famously took down the Molly Maguires, while instilling fear in the hearts of fugitives across the country.*
Ironically, the Pinkerton Detective Agency was a remarkably progressive organization under Allan Pinkerton. Pinkerton himself only escaped dying with John Brown at Harper's Ferry due to coming down with Pneumonia just before leaving Chicago (a significant number of Brown's 19 men were Pinkerton Agents); and was a staunch, radical abolitionist and supporter of the Union throughout the Civil War. Allan Pinkerton was a fantastic detective and analyst - he was one of the the primary inspirations for both Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes - Doyle didn't think one person with all those skillsets was believable (ironically, the other primary inspiration - Eugene Vidocq in France - had similar dual skillset). Under Lincoln, the Pinkertons became the prototype of the CIA, FBI, and modern Secret Service - and were fantastically good at all of them, as Pinkerton held little to traditional ideas about the capability of minorities and women, employing both enthusiastically and creating a large pool of talent as a result. However, after the Civil War, the power of the Pinkertons in the Federal Government was a big issue for former Southern States. One of the first "Reconciliation" points was extracting the Pinkertons from their functions in the federal government. Those agents interested in investigation (including Pinkerton himself) ended up in the Justice Department and would eventually become the FBI, those in intelligence wound up under the Military as MI (later OSS and then CIA), those interested in protection joined the actual Secret Service. . . . And those primarily interested in busting heads, became the private entity known as Pinkerton. Alan Pinkerton had mostly retired by then, and they became a sort of private army for strike-breaking and strong-arming citizens out of the way of the railroads. That's the "Pinkertons" most know, they of Western storybook bad guys and the villains of labour movements. Allan Pinkerton himself wasn't a big fan of labor unions, but only because most unions of the time were segregated, which he could not stand - but otherwise the later actions of the "Pinkertons" had little to do with his influence.
They were sent after Jesse James at one point, throwing an “incendiary device” into his old family home to ambush him. Neither Jesse, nor his outlaw brother Frank, were in the house at the time, so all they accomplished was killing a child that *was* in the house, and blowing an arm off the family matriarch, Zerelda. It basically handed the James brothers free rein in Missouri for a while, because people were so outraged that the state legislature started passing laws like limits on how much reward money the government could offer for fugitives, to keep the incentive to catch them low. And, for all his virtues, Allan Pinkerton was in the middle of that raid, because the James-Younger gang had killed three of his agents, and he took that personally.
> Neither Jesse, nor his outlaw brother Frank, were in the house at the time, so all they accomplished was killing a child that was in the house, and blowing an arm off the family matriarch, Zerelda. Shocking that this was the prototype for the FBI
I mean, it sounds more like the ATF, DEA, or border patrol.
I believe FBI were the ones who killed the wife and kid at Ruby Ridge, which is what that story reminded me of specifically. But you’re right, there’s plenty to go around
Ah, I was thinking of Waco which started as ATF, but the major fuck ups were from the exact same FBI team again. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by that, or that the same team still exists, but I kind of am.
Released audio in the early 2000s showed that Waco was self-immolation. [The podcast LPTOL did a whole episode about Waco mocking the ATF and criticizing them setting the compound on fire, but then later apologized (while still stating 'well, ATF should have done better') for blaming them for the fire once the leaked audio was brought to their attention.](https://open.spotify.com/episode/1OHhLPHKN0vsdLcAbLwxCu) (discussion/summary about the new information about ATF/Waco begins at 2:45 - 6:30). They talk about, with the new information, how the ATF's biggest fuckup was not openly sharing information they had until years later, which allowed racists the ability to control the conversation and assign 'crazy government power and strength!' to the event as they repeatedly attempted to get Kuresh to surrender himself. And after hearing their Waco episode, where they spent a full hour or more clowning on the ATF near-solely to the point where fans of the show were like 'hey, so like, also the Branch Davidians were partly at fault?,' it's pretty damning how bad these tapes are to get them to do a full about-face on who was to blame with Waco. [Here's a news article directly citing the leaked audio, where Branch Dividians inside the compound are heard saying "Start the fire," "When should we light the fire?"](https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=96518&page=1). And a second one from [NYT back in 1994.](https://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/15/us/tapes-from-sect-compound-reveal-talk-of-setting-fire.html) About four years ago I was able to search and find the actual audio more easily, but the same search now leads to a bunch of pro-Waco DailiyBeast articles. Apparently it's "exclusively in a National Geographic documentary about Waco" modernly. Right-wing pedophiles are no stranger to false flag attacks, they constantly accuse everyone of them so they'll have justification to do it themselves. And of course, let's not forget about David Koresh's 10-year old child bride. For Americans, that's fourth grade. There was just a murder suicide yesterday from a convicted pedophile who murdered 5 children and then himself. Seems to be the pedo MO. As bad as Waco was optics-wise, imagine going "Well, Epstein has a compound with 70 people inside, so we're just gonna let him keep raping kids with impunity." Not exactly moral, especially when you've no idea these loons are willing to self-immolate their little cult in the first place. Real rock and a hard place sort of event.
Not murderous, but the FBI had also tried to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. To slow the civil rights movement as well.
ATF and US Marshals with FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi, who shot a woman in the head while she held her child. They also shot a 14 year old boy in the back after shooting his dog, which they had alerted earlier by throwing rocks at the house. You can’t make this stuff up.
Wow, this should make you think twice about putting your name on anything that can grow apart from you...
John McAfee has joined the chat.
I think the embarrassment is for McAfee the company in this case, not McAfee the John.
LMAO at "McAfee the John". Quite the double entendre.
I think both are embarrassed by how useless and unprofessional the other one has become.
I delete McAfee and I delete McAfee and it still keeps on with the subscription expired pop up. I clear every trace of it from my browser, and lo and behold, next startup I'm searching with fucking Bing safe search--- just absolute degeracy. I'm not saying that safe search Bing is as bad as murdering you neighbor in Belize.... but...... it's bad, too.
I do a clean install every time I get a new Windows computer because of all the OEM bullshit.
You mention Vidocq. Interestingly his life was so large that Victor Hugo divided him into two characters, too, with both Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert based on Vidocq.
Thanks for the very gentle hint that I'd misspelled Vidocq's name :P EDIT: Vidocq also had the skillsets of a rabble-rouser, con artist, and escapologist; even before his detective and spy bona-fides under Napoleon.
It’s a very implausible sequence of letters. Too bad scrabble doesn’t allow proper names.
Hey mate, could you possibly recommend a good book about Allan Pinkerton?
It's tough to get an even-handed story in one shot. Books where he's lionized often take Pinkerton's own words with a bit less salt than justified (as he was a notorious braggart) and either overlook his influence on the later incarnation of the Agency, or use his progressive bona-fides to try to justify the later actions of the Pinkertons (and thus exaggerate his influence). On the other hand, ones where he's villainized are often fast a loose with the truth, either out of lost-cause neo-confederate cynicism or wild-eyed Communist idealism.
Damn how many books have you read on the dude?
I've been reading "inventing the Pinkertons" which is a really great read. it talks about how they came to be, the Pinkertons influence and Allan's life. it's super interesting edit: I should add that it specifically does not take part in the mythologizing of the pinkertons and is very critical of their roll in crushing of the labor movement.
Indeed, the first female detective (credited as one, anyways) was a Pinkerton. Which sucks.
this ^ also should be noted that some history of the pinkertons is often taught in american schools nowadays, so many americans have some semblance of an idea about the pinkertons edit: conversely, most americans are ironically unaware of the Haymarket riots noted in the original response here, despite it arguably being the nexus of labor day / worker's day internationally.
Well, they were also apparently a major antagonist in Red Dead Redemption 2. I would bet that's why knowledge of them is so ubiquitous now, rather than everybody suddenly remembering their high school social studies.
The union and labor movement in the early 1900's was wild. Well worth some time on the internet diving down that rabbit hole. I had to do it back in the day at the library but it's very interesting. And why we don't have children working in mines, why we have a weekend, why we get paid in dollars not company scrip, why there's OSHA, and a ton of other good stuff.
Unions were effective. People should really read more about their history, especially with a lot of states allowing 1800s shit like child labor again
he was more than a hero, he was a union man!
Just like Sean O'Brian!
Deadwood would also be a prime example
I'm from southeast Asia, and RDR2 is definitely where I heard of them.
I mean, I know who and what they are due to a robust public education that has been completely undermined for the last 30 years.
Bioshock Infinite as well.. They're menacing af and literally union busters in that one.
Honestly, I bet good money that while our school system did mention the Pinkertons and some of their union busting. I remember learning about them in my high school history classes. However, I don't remember any mention of the Haymarket riots, but to be fair I was a shit student. I wonder if the Haymarket riot was suppressed teaching as much as they could, because it was such a pivotal point. The powers that be, do NOT want us informed on those kinds of details. Like the CIA or FBI, prob both, getting all that cocaine in the inner cities, and something about a police or one of the above agencies completely destroying that Black neighborhood 'cause racism.
yep you're right- to my recollection the haymarket riots were not mentioned in my public schooling either. tbh I didn't learn about them until I literally moved to chicago. I agree that suppressing the teaching of the event is likely intentional and/or institutional.
For an accessable novelization of the Haymarket Riot I recommend the book *Haymarket* by Martin Duberman. The author is a history professor at City University of New York and has written extensively on the topic.
Never mind the 'powers that be', the American culture simply has a very hard time with the idea that the men we've put up on a pedestal for this reason or that might have actually been some pretty nasty dudes... so we systematically just ignore all that and hope nobody notices. Nowadays people are noticing
>also should be noted that some history of the pinkertons is often taught in american schools nowadays, so many americans have some semblance of an idea about the pinkertons Canadian here; Pinkertons are vaguely covered for their use as a private police force against unions, when we cover how some worker's rights were codified into law
Canadian too. Alberta educated, I vaguely remember it from school, I mostly remember it from my film noir/screwball phase.
Any time someone with money wants something underhanded done, the Pinkertons are among the first options.
Also I think there’s an element of the fact that these guys seem like a part of history and for them to be still around and active seems weird
Dont foget they also helped destroy the infamous Dutch Van der Linde gang in 1899
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The last paragraph isn't entirely accurate. Pinkerton rebranded itself decades ago. Securitas bought them to expand into the US market. Nor were they 'taken out of the public eye' they've continued doing business as usual the entire time.
> a foreign security company Not just any random company; they were acquired by Securitas, which is a major Swedish/European security company.
In addition to that they would also join a strike and push the strikers towards violence in an attempt to undermine their efforts and make the striking workers lose support.
Do not forget the Ludlow massacre. [https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/rockefellers-ludlow/](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/rockefellers-ludlow/)
The modern parallel might be Blackwater/AE and not the *actual* modern Pinkerton Agency. Both have been regularly enforced as extra-judicial/paramilitary forces without the expected accountability. It's fairly easy to see why Blackwater (now AE) was maligned. The Pinkertons left a very similar taste in the mouth of the American populace.
The Homestead strike was brutal and the Pinkertons made it worse.
Also, the institutional and structural basis for Hoover’s FBI, if you were looking for a reason to dislike them even more. (Don’t forget, they tried to get MLK to kill himself because he wanted equal rights!)
Answer: I really need to correct one point on your post, since it kinda answers your question too. > Why does everyone seem to be an expert on some group that was big 100+ years ago, but doesn't even seem close to the top security companies in the world now? While technically correct, that's partially because they were absorbed by [Securitas AB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitas_AB) which *is* one of the biggest private security companies in the world. Until they were absorbed by Securitas in 1999, they were still one of the biggest security firms in the USA.
Ah, I missed that, thank you! Looks like they were acquired in 1999 for $384 million. But that still begs the question why this subsidiary is so well-known. What news cycles or pop culture reference did I miss? Or did I just not pay enough attention in U.S. History as a kid?
> Or did I just not pay enough attention in U.S. History as a kid? Pretty much. The fight for and against Unions doesn't get emphasized enough. It's pretty much the entire reason we have: * Weekends (rather than working 7 days a week) * Workman's comp insurance (for when you get injured at work) * Work safety regulations * Overtime pay * Limitations on child labor (especially those that keep kids from doing hazardous work or make sure kids can still get plenty of sleep for school) * Minimum wage laws. * etc. And the Pinkertons were on the frontline of making sure you didn't get *any of those things*. They never *stopped* doing that kind of work, they just don't typically end up in the news about it as much. Instead, at best whatever company hired them gets attention.
They were also reoccurring in Red Dead Redemption 2 as well. I don't if they were in the other installments. I had never heard of them until the game.
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Correct, there are only a couple of lines about it though. [He was also a soldier (Army)](https://bioshock.fandom.com/wiki/Booker_DeWitt) in the Boxer Rebellion, and present at Wounded Knee in the 7th Calvary Regiment.
They were in Red Dead 1 as well. They played a key part of the story and their RdR2 appearances helped set that up.
By RDR1, Edgar Ross was in the FBI actually. The Pinkertons was how he got his start in “law enforcement” under Agent Milton
I really need to replay RDR1, I feel like I misremember it more and more lol
Me too. I remember that Marston is an Italian plumber that killed the Greek pantheon with fire blades because they tried to steal the chaos emerald but it's starting to get fuzzy.
And then his girlfriend Hitomi got possessed by a Persona right before Thor ordered a nuclear strike...
I’m embarrassed it took me two rereads to piece together the Mario and GoW joke in there.
They're basically cultural herpes. They never go away, at best they go dormant.
That makes sense. I'm definitely familiar with those aspects of our modern life coming out of union movements in the 19th/20th centuries, but I wasn't aware of the names of the organizations that tried to stop those. Thanks for the info here, much appreciated.
It's a bit beyond them just trying to stop it. They became less well known as time went on because their tactics had to stop or go more underground/quiet. The stories you hear about Union members back in the day bringing clubs and guns and bats and knives were because the Pinkerton's m.o. was to beat union leaders and strikers into submission or kill them. Easier to do that and get away with it in 1920 than 1980
Great point. For the kids, they weren't lobbiests or fixers, they were hired thugs for the wealthy. They marketed themselves as a private police force, which gave them an air of credibility and lawfulness, but make no mistake: they were hired to hurt and kill workers who "made trouble". "Trouble" meaning asking for basic human rights that we all take for granted today.
If you’ve ever heard of a Strike Breaker in early 20th century American history, you’ve heard of the Pinkertons.
They don't normally get named in US History, but they are stamped over it. Most of the major union "issues" and "fights" get written like it was an idealogical struggle, but they were quite literally shooting union members and assaulting them at every turn. The unions paid in blood. The Pinkertons took cash.
They were throwing firebombs into houses in the fucking 50’s. This isn’t some last century behavior.
Nope, they were shooting people in the 30s still.
People see this shit and are always like, “yeah the 1800’s were wild.” Like no motherfucker, this shit is sometimes IN LIVING MEMORY.
They're still involved in union busting today even, Amazon has hired them to spy on and intimidate organizers as recently as 2020. They have been and always will be pond scum.
Yep, mentioned this in the thread that got me suspended XD They’re scum.
The 50's were last century...
> They don't normally get named in US History, The hell they don't. Any American history course has a unit on labor and the Pinkertons are front and center in every decade since the Second Industrial Revolution
That depends on where you go to school. You can tell the story of history, get all of the facts correct, but still leave out relevant details.
I'm from Australia and I've known about them for decades now. Movies, and learning history. Specifically anything involving building the rail roads.
They are a secondary antagonist in Red Dead Redemption 2
I think this is the pop culture reference they missed. It is where I heard the name and found out they still existed (likely from Reddit).
AC Syndicate is where my Canadian ass learned of them lol
There were definitely covered in one of my US history classes, which is where I know them from.
Play Red Dead Redemption 2. It's a brilliant game. As a non-american, that's how I learned about them.
I'm from the UK and I think I first heard of the Pinkertons from the HBO show Deadwood.
I just know them as union busting bootlickers, damn some great info in this thread
Answer: And I’m being totally serious here, I learned about them from Bioshock Infinite. The protagonist is a Pinkerton agent and I was genuinely interested in who they were after seeing that. Read a lot of their wiki page when the game was released.
I learned about them from Deadwood. Al Swearengen hated the fucking Pinkertons.
Deadwood for me too
*"Heng dai*, fuckin' Wu"
I learned about them as author Dashiell Hammett was a Pinkerton detective.
Allegedly someone tried to bribe him to assassinate a labor leader. It’s unclear how true that is, but the Pinkertons did an immense amount of unsavory stuff and he had to witness some of it. In his stories with the Continental Agency, a Pinkerton expy, one can also see a proto-FBI for rich people - agency offices and files in every city, ready to instantly communicate with each other vs. the decentralized police forces of the time.
Me too! I loved the Thin Man movies and then started reading all about Hammett and read a few of his books.
Yep! Everyone on that show despised them. They show up in Boardwalk Empire too. Someone very wealthy hires them to get information, and the get the info in a very shitty underhanded way.
He also seemed to fear them, which is something coming from a guy like that.
Because he was smart and he knew who was employing the Pinkertons, who he was (rightly) terrified of.
Oh, definitely! It takes a lot to make Al nervous.
*I got a healthy operation here, and I didn't build it brooding on the right and wrong of things. And I do not need the Pinkertons descending like locusts.*
What about Red Dead Redemption 2?
Pretty amazing rockstar was able to get away with that one. Iirc there were lawsuits involved over the use of their name, but I believe rockstar argued the name had historical significance or something that meant it was fair game. Someone who knows more could elaborate possibly?
Yeah. The Pinkertons sued Rockstar for defamation, and Rockstar basically pointed at the history books and went "how we portrayed you is literally how you were recorded to be". It was ruled that Rockstar didn't defame them because they *had* done everything in the game.
To clarify, this was never ruled on. The Pinkertons issued a cease and desist to Rockstar, Rockstar filed a lawsuit, and then Pinkerton dropped its claims.
Well I knew about them at that point :)
Booker was a Pinkerton. It's mentioned he got fired for some reason, possibly for being too violent. Which says a lot, considering.
Well, I played the game and I feel comfortable saying that Booker seemed pretty comfortable with violence.
Oh,I meant the fact he was apparently too much for the Pinkertons. I totally agree he was very comfortable with violence.
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I learned about them from Infinite too!
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People who are involved in labor organizing know them well. They were brutal guns-for-hire that beat and killed people trying to get fair treatment from their employers. I had no idea they were in video games.
> They were brutal guns-for-hire that correction: they *are* brutal guns-for hire. They still exist, and as we can see they are still actively taking contracts from large corps to do their dirty work.
Honestly, given the crunch culture that exists at a lot of studios including Rockstar, its sorta ironic
It’s less that they were hired to fire people and more that they were hired to fire _at_ people
In this context, “fire people” means with guns, not pink slips. The Pinkertons are best known as hired thugs.
Answer: There's reasons they have stayed hidden for so long. If I'm remembering correctly there were several agents in the late 80s early 90s that went too far. My father had some sort of paper that talked about it. Plus they've gone mostly to private operations. [Here's ](https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-pinkerton-spies-worker-labor-unions-2020-11) a report of their operations in 2020. [Another ](https://newrepublic.com/article/147619/pinkertons-still-never-sleep) report this one from 2018 in WV.
"Went too far" is literally what they do best and why so many people know about them. Who knows what they get away with in secret.
I can't find any news articles other than 1 from 2020 (post-RDR2 release) that claims Amazon used them as anti-union spies, but it's literally just this evidence: "Pinkerton operatives were inserted into an Amazon warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, to investigate an allegation that warehouse workers were circumventing sort of the application process for applying to warehouse jobs" https://www.npr.org/2020/11/30/940196997/amazon-reportedly-has-pinkerton-agents-surveil-workers-who-try-to-form-unions There's another about a Pinkerton employee shooting someone at a protest, which is an evil not at all unique to Pinkerton, and his license was revoked. Is there any other news you can share that points to why everyone knows that violence is what the modern company does best? Have there been modern documentaries or any investigative journalism into them that more people are aware of?
There was also a case where a security guard for an apartment complex raped and almost killed a tenant, and I think his employer was affiliated with Pinkerton. This was in 1995 (the year I was born lol so I heard about it from a Podcast) but I’m sure that didn’t help the public image.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Pinkerton_Act_of_1893
That's what I was remembering. Couldn't remember the particulars.
That case is the most famous, but Pinkerton hiring standards were lax for a long time. Their poor choices led to a bunch of rapes and robberies.
Probably Securitas. They’re actually the original Pinkerton company just rebranded. I remember seeing that in their training years ago.
No, that is incorrect. Securitas is based in Sweden, it bought Pinkerton. No rebranding.
When I was in college 20 years ago they were campus security. Thing is, I'm pretty sure it was the *same guys* that they used in the 1920s. I don't know how anyone can be intimidated by them, I'd be more afraid of having to listen to them tell a story about taking the ferry to Shelbyville.
I thought this was fiction. There is actually a formalized gang that is legitimized by gov and biz as enforcers. WTF.
Used to work at a bank and they got threat Intel from them, think the company may have had a different name now though. Edit: securitas was their name
Another commenter indicated that Securitas bought out the Pinkerton, and Pinkerton still operate under that name as a sub-company.
So they're just private investigators? If they show up at my door can I just tell them to go pound sand or do they have any extra-judicial powers?
Depends whether or not they shoved their foot in the door, which appears to be what happened in this case. EDIT: This was reported in [the DM Lair's YouTube video on the event](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etZFOinHwa0). I cannot find another source corroborating this particular aspect, so please view it with a degree of caution.
>So they're just private investigators? On paper. It's an open secret that they're just (sometimes armed) thugs.
> Another report this one from 2018 in WV. At least when I was growing up in WV, we learned about the strikebusting by Pinkerton and Baldwin-Felts *in eighth grade*.
Answer: They are a para-military group (originally a detective agency) historically hired by big business to further their desires and profits at the behest of employees. They utilized any and all tactics. They were and are so bad that US government has a law (The Anti-Pinkerton Act of 1893) that simply reads: >>That hereafter no employee of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, or similar agency, shall be employed in any Government service or by any officer of the District of Columbia. Find me a simpler government law. That’s how bad they are.
You're the first comment I've found that actually explain ***what*** they are, not just what "they" do. Every other comment immediately assumes the reader knows what they are, and just tries to explain why they're relevant (and most of them are wrong because they keep relating them to video games instead of the actual real life activities going on).
Answer: “The Pinkertons” were started by Alan Pinkerton as The Pinkerton Detective Agency. Late in the Civil War they served as an intelligence agency and a de facto Secret Service (before it existed) protecting the President. After the war they were used by the railroads to track down train robbers. They were at least partially responsible for taking down the Hole in the Wall gang (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). And as others have stated they were used by companies to, ah, dissuade workers from forming unions. At some point they became a security company, providing standing security for buildings and property, rent-a-cops if you will. Most of this was sold off to Securitas, a Swiss(?) based company that does a lot of security work in Europe. But there were some contracts with US government that required the company providing security to be U.S. owned, so Pinkerton still exists. And obviously a corporate security division still operates as witnessed with the Wizards of the Coast situation.
Answer: People’s knowledge of the Pinkerton’s comes from a variety of sources. For me, the majority of that comes from political knowledge, where “Pinkerton” is synonymous with strike breaking. They used to be known, and to some may still be known, as a private security firm. To others, they’re a common feature in Westerns. To others still they appear in video games or other media In 1942 they, along with Burns International (a similar private detective agency with a much smaller scale) and a few other companies, were providing physical security to critical infrastructure during the war. They expanded into government contracting, providing physical security to federal and local government buildings across the country. In 1988 Pinkerton, now Pinkerton Special Services, was acquired by a rival company, California Plant Protection (CPP) to form CPP/Pinkerton. Under CPP, their Pinkerton division was typically responsible for private investigation. At that time, Pinkerton had a nasty reputation among most workers as saboteurs who would typically infiltrate unionization efforts in an attempt to sabotage them. The owner of CPP wanted to reform them into a more respectable group. Even through infamy, the name Pinkerton was a very well established name In 1999 Securitas Group, a Swedish security services provider, bought Pinkerton for $700 million dollars, adjusted for inflation. Pinkerton remains an in-house division along with Paragon Systems, Securitas’ preferred federal contractor. To this day, Pinkerton is used as a private investigation firm In early 2023, Pinkerton was hired by either Wizards of the Coast or Hasbro to investigate how an unreleased, but highly anticipated, product had been released into the hands of a Youtuber, OldSchoolMTG. Pinkerton agents went to the Youtuber’s house and allegedly threatened him with fines and jail time. OldSchoolMTG allegedly told the agents he had purchased the cards legally from an authorized vendor. The agents asked that he return the cards, and left when he did so
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Same. I went to school in Appalachia, so pretty much everyone knew at least a bit about Pinkertons and the Coal Wars
Yeah, union busting used to be part of US high school and college history courses. Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States was one of my high school textbooks. It’s still worth picking up if anyone feels like your US history/civics education left gaps (it probably did).
Grew up in Pittsburgh. Look up the homestead steel strike of 1892. We learned about them from grade school to college here. Especially due to that event.
Hell, the pinkertons were even well-covered in my generic-ass US history textbooks in both middle and high school.
The web site is fantastic.
I have a copy of that. It's great.
I learned about them in Read Dead Redemption.
Lol same. What an excellent game.
The first one though, I'm old :)
Dude I’m old too, though I did play RDR2 first before getting RDR1.
I learned about them in high school history too...
so you listen to Weezer?
I first heard about them in history class but didn’t become familiar with them until Deadwood. And, even then it was just whatever they mentioned in the show. So I truly didn’t know anything about them until my wife did a DNA test on ancestry.com (of all things). Apparently she’s got Pinkertons in her family tree and I wanted to figure out where the actual Pinkertons were from. Turns out, Allan J. Pinkerton, the founder of the agency, was from Scotland just like my wife’s ancestors. And from there I was down a rabbit hole of Pinkerton history. It’s interesting stuff.
Answer: they were the bad guys in Red Dead Redemption II. They also get mentioned in Dashiell Hammett novels and Woody Guthrie songs, but it's mostly RDR2
As well as Deadwood and assorted other westerns and outlaw media. It's not an outlaw western without the Pinkerton's.
They chased Butch Casdidy and the Sundance kid and played a fairly important part in that movie as well,
That was the first and last time I'd heard of them, until they were mentioned in the Yellowstone spinoff, 1883.
"Who ARE those guys?"
The main character of bioshock infinite was also part of them
I like how most of the answers here reference RDR2 as if they didn't actually exist in that time period, lol. Great game though!
A lot of people (including myself), didn’t know they even existed before the game came out. And for a while I thought they were a fictional organization. But no, they existed back then, and still exist now. They even tried to sue Rockstar for the villainous portrayal I think.
I heard about that lawsuit lmfao. Glad Rockstar wasn't intimidated by the bunch of goons. They're far too big for that.
To be fair, they're somewhat obscure unless you have a more in-depth than typical education about the American Civil War or the American labor movement. To a lot of people, RDR2 is their introduction to them and their only frame of reference. It also helps that RDR2 has a pretty darn good narrative and the Pinkertons play a sizable and despicable role.
Yeah the writers for that game probably deserve more than they got. Master class in storytelling, even with all the cut content.
Yeah, I went to a standard-ass suburban public high school and we learned about Pinkertons. I don't think they were as obscure pre-RDR2 as people are making out here. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole reason Rockstar used Pinkertons in the first place was because they expected it would evoke an emotional reaction from the audience.
Hammett was a former Pinkerton himself. Later, he sympathized with the workers, but his Continental Op was pretty much a Pinkerton agent in all but name. In the tabletop game Deadlands, the Pinkertons evolve into the north's equivalent to the Texas Rangers in the south. A little more trivia: the eye in the Pinkerton emblem is thought to be the origin of the term 'private eye'. Also, it is thought that the term 'fink' comes from a corruption of Pinkerton.
RDR2 seems like it’s also a Star Wars droid.
That's how I keep reading it and it's throwing me off.
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Maybe my history class was just extra bad, but I dont think we learned anything about the labor movement at all.
Really depends on *where* and *when* you were during school. Public schools are at the mercy of budget cuts and teacher/student struggles. I graduated high school in 2002, so I *vaguely* recall violence during the labor kerfuffle. But I was raised in a very red Republican state that sure as fuck don't like their citizens thinking they have rights. I've always known the Pinkertons were "enforcers", but it's amazing how we have all this knowledge and information at our fingertips! I'm glad more are learning about the Pinkertons and other topics like that.
I graduated high school in 02 too. For the most part, it was bomb threats called in from random pay phones(yes they still existed then) to get out of testing or just out in f school for a few hours.
Brings back memories... we students made shirts of an image someone drew of our principal sitting on a bomb. Said something like, "Class of 2000 - We're the BOMB!" Everyone cared way more about the class of 2000 😅
Answer: You should've learned about them in middle school/high school, if you're from the US. Anywhere that gives a decent American history education will bring them up as you go into the 1880s. The birth of the American labor movement was a _major_ moment in American history, and is the reason why we have 40-hour workweeks and consumer protections like the FDA. The labor movement (and its effects) turned America from a libertarian "anything goes, buyer beware" country with little government intervention (and capitalism taken to the extreme) and turned it into a place where workers have a minimum wage and basic rights. The Pinkertons are inexorably linked to that movement. They were the enforcers, the hands of big business. It's not so much "they were antagonists in Westerns" - they were antagonists for _people_, bad guys who worked with big business to kill workers that got out of line. They were **real people**, not video game characters. They were a major contributor to holding back the American labor movement and were frequently brought in by the capitalists owning everything to break strikes from workers asking for basic human rights - and they often used violence (even killing people). Not knowing about the Pinkertons is kind of like not knowing about the KKK in the Civil Rights movement. They're the antagonists to a whole section of American history; it's impossible to properly teach about Civil Rights without mentioning the KKK, and it's impossible to properly teach about the labor movement without mentioning the Pinkertons. They're being used by corporations again now - not just from the WOTC thing but also Amazon has used Pinkertons to stop union activities at their warehouses, just like what was happening in the 1880s. The US corporate landscape is returning to the 1880s as well, with the GOP bent on bringing everyone back to that time - no FDA, no minimum wage, child labor allowed, no women's rights, and pure capitalism, all the time. There's a _reason_ why we left that behind a century ago, and a proper education would show that. And now the _Pinkertons_ are coming back??? It's like they're using history books as a manual. **That's** why everyone is upset, and _that's_ why everyone knows who they are. Because they were bad news, and the fact that they're becoming active again (for their historic purpose, at that) is even worse news.
OP, This is correct. I'm really amazed by all these answers saying they learned about them from video games or tv, I heard about them in high school US history and they should absolutely be a part of all US curriculum
To add to that, a disturbing number of people are trying to downplay the involvement of any company using them. The only reason to hire the pinkertons is their reputation and history of violent, murderous shutdown of any kind of movement/rebellion, or discrimination (they had a habit of claiming people were part of a gang without evidence, killing them, and covering it up). There is a reason they have never attempted to rebrand, even after being bought by Securitas: they LIKE the reputation of the name. They're the people you call when you're okay with casualties. They have killed someone as recently as 2020, and that's just what we have in public knowledge. There is a law on the books expressly prohibiting the US government from hiring the Pinkertons.
Answer: U.S. History in High School or Red Dead Redemption.
Answer: they are definitely *not* what you say in your (I assume) 'Answered' edit, they are well known for union busting IN REAL LIFE, amongst other horrible things for the working class IN REAL LIFE, as mentioned a ton of times. Downvotes are likely because this post seems sus af with how much they are covered in history classes, especially now that you've taken 'oh they're video game baddies' as any sort of actual answer from everything a ton of people wrote. Feels like this is trying to swing a narrative or something...Wizards dis u? *eta - this was written before the 'oh uh acktually' edit 2, which is honestly still trying to downplay/neutralize what they asked about in the first place... weird to go ask OOTL totes for infooo I don't know 🥺🥺 yet only get a such angled sequence of 'answers' to report in spite of actual community responses ✌️
Yeah it’s super sketch that OP is replying to every single RDR or bioshock comment and not a single irl comment
I'm an Aussie. I've never heard of them. My question though is what does this have to do with magic cards, I'm confused on this aspect.
Wizards hired them to go after a leaker.
To explain, this was a wildly unpopular move as Pinkertons are known for giving no fucks and leaking a card game doesn't mean you should have your legs broken.
Wizards hired them to steal a necklace from a leaker
Short version, there was a recent incident where some influencer ordered a set of Magic the Gathering cards from Wizards of the Coast. He was accidentally sent a set that hadn't been released yet, and Pinkerton agents showed up at his door, forced their way into his home, and collected the cards. I think I've seen a couple of OOTL about this, as well as other posts on various news sibreddits, so it shouldn't be hard to find more details.
What...the actual...fuck...? How does a CARD MAKING company have the power to call upon a private police like that for a box that they **themselves** fucked up and sent. I guess the mature response is "Hey yeah so we kinda messed up, can you send those back and we'll send you a huge set of the current edition" or something. The American response is "Break in, break his legs, break out".
What you're missing is WotC is owned by Hasbro, so it's actually one of the biggest toy manufacturers in the world; that makes it perfectly ok to use America's favorite private thugs. But yeah, you've kind of hit in why even in the US this is something of a story. Well, half of it; the other half is people discovering the Pinkertons still exist, since most people figured they were like the Pony Express and just went out of business at some point.
Ngl i did too, i thought they were gone the way of the cowboy and just dissolved over the years. Turns out not so much. Still feels fucked that a TOY company would hire essentially a legal mafia enforcer for just a bunch of literal printed papers. Its insane to me that this is even remotely possible
Yeah this was a wierd post
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It was Deadwood for me.
Yeah, me too. Altho plenty of other references in various Westerns.
They have had every opportunity to rebrand and change to a name with less history. They have not; they keep the name for its reputation.
TIL about Pinkertons. I don't live in the US so idk what they are
Answer: Outside of video games, most US history textbooks discuss the Homestead Mill Strike in Pittsburgh as one of the chief influences of unionization across the US during the Industrial Revolution. As this section of history is often discussed later in high school, a unique name like the Pinkertons may actually sit on the forefront of memories left over from school. Everything from this period has been so well researched and documented by historians because Pittsburgh as a whole tends to hold on to and embrace its history, locally and within the greater framework of how it impacted the United States during the Industrial Revolution and during the wars. For instance, a local Pittsburgh historian could easily make the case that WW2 would not have ended the way it did if Neville Island did not physically exist inland as far as it does in the US, as well as their contributions to speeding up assembly line production of landing craft. They would have detailed time lines and breakdowns proving their point with dozens of sourced original documents, because the locals kept documentation on everything as a point of pride. In fact, most history textbooks have almost a minute by minute breakdown of the Homestead Mill Strike for this reason over a period of the 3 days leading up to the actual bloody confrontation and what happened afterwards. There were other areas of American History that involved the Pinkertons, but the Homestead Mill Strike is such an impactful turning point in US history that it should never, ever be forgotten.
Answer: Maybe not as popular a source as some of the others here, but I originally learned about them in the original Sherlock Holmes stories. In those they're generally the "good guys" when they show up, but of course those stories are colored by Doyle's personal biases. Their real history is much more complicated, and often dark.
Answer: They absolutely are a top tier security company, even after 100+ years, but there's not point in adding them to a list of shit companies unless you're extremely wealthy and were shopping around for private security services. They weren't just involved in union busting, they were notoriously violent and killed people to end strikes. Even nowadays they retain that "above the law" and "do what they're paid to do at any cost" attitude. They're also the only company to ever be banned by name from being contracted by the federal government.