Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [27]
Following this incident, the Pinkertons suddenly became bad guys in the eyes of the public. In the remnants of the Confederate south, the agency was seen as the heavy-handed enforcer of the northeastern moneymen who ran the railroads and banks. The James gang had captivated the public, since their targets tended to be large corporate concerns, and only rarely individuals. The local papers denounced the Pinkertons’ tactics, and the pulp press churned out homages to the glamorous James boys. The Pinkertons never caught the James gang. Jesse James would be killed by a traitor within his own ranks in 1882. Frank James surrendered to authorities a few months later. He lived into his seventies, and died in 1915.
Allan Pinkerton didn’t outlive Jesse James by long, dying of a tongue infection in 1884. He left the company in the hands of his two sons, Robert and William. The sons had different priorities from their father. He was an immigrant, but they were first-generation Americans. He had been raised in poverty, but they were the sons of a wealthy man. He built a company with his bare hands, and they inherited one. Before long, the company began to depart from the code of conduct established by Allan Pinkerton in the early days, taking on more overtly antiunion work.
The brothers’ first major test came soon enough. In 1892, a labor strike loomed in Homestead, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh. The executive in charge was Henry Clay Frick,* an overseer with the Carnegie, Phillips Steel Company. Instead of going to the local police to handle the trouble, Frick turned to the Pinkertons. More than 300 Pinkerton men traveled to Homestead by barge, taking fire from armed strikers on the riverbank as they attempted to land. The Pinkerton men, pinned down on their barges, fired back, setting off an intense firefight with the strikers. The fighting lasted twelve hours, and three Pinkertons and ten strikers were killed. Exhausted and unable to retreat, the Pinkertons surrendered.
The incident became a flash point in the American labor movement. Workers denounced the Pinkertons as hired killers and called the shootings the “Homestead massacre.” Congress held hearings, weighing whether or not private firms should be allowed to wield police authority without government oversight. Should bands of armed men be allowed to cross state lines? Were the Pinkertons modern-day Hessian mercenaries? Could they be a threat to national sovereignty?
Still, the Pinkertons saw themselves as the victims. In prepared testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in July 1892, Allan’s sons Robert and William Pinkerton said their men had acted legally:
After the surrender all our men, including the wounded and helpless, were brutally beaten and robbed by the strikers, and the leaders made no real or honest effort to protect them. Our men were robbed of watches, money, clothing, in fact, everything, and then mercilessly clubbed and stoned. Conners, unable to move or defend himself, was deliberately shot by one of the strikers and then clubbed. Edwards, also wounded and helpless, was clubbed by another striker with the butt end of a musket. Both died, and subsequently another watchman became insane and committed suicide as a result of the fearful beating after having surrendered. All our men were more or less injured. The acts of the strikers, after our men surrendered, would be a disgrace to savages. Yet, because done in the name of organized American labor, sympathy, if not encouragement, is shown for such deeds by part of the press and by political demagogues.2
These protests didn’t register with the politicians on Capitol Hill. In 1893 Congress passed the federal Anti-Pinkerton Act, which began the company’s long decline in the popular imagination. The Pinkertons were