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Pinkerton detectives, known as "operatives," initiated the practice of keeping suspect files ("has scar on left hand," and lives with "a Hooker named Frisco Ann"). As for doctrine, operatives subscribed to the "General Principles," including one that read, "The ends justify the means." The agency was the self-expression of a man who got up at 4:30 a.m., was in bed by 8:30 p.m., and whose idea of an acting disguise (for himself) was as a "jovial, friendly" social drinker. "I must get my way in all things," he once confessed firmly, showing a taste for the fanatic in himself and others (symptomatically, he regarded Abolitionist John Brown as "greater than Napoleon and just as great as George Washington"). Trying his hand as an espionage agent for the North in the Civil War, Pinkerton overestimated the Confederate enemy almost to the point of paranoia.
College Grads and Clam Beds. By the 1870s—chasing a new breed of bank robbers, mostly ex-soldiers like the Younger Brothers of Missouri, and pouncing on cheating streetcar conductors in the East—Pinkerton agents were operating out of offices in New York and Philadelphia. The revolutionary slum boy from Glasgow was able to build himself a Scottish estate in Onarga, Ill., complete with 85,000 imported trees, where he entertained the likes of General Grant and Commodore Vanderbilt. Yet as America progressed beyond the crude improvisations of frontier justice, Pinkerton gradually fitted less and less serviceably into his society. An outspoken admirer of vigilante tactics, he became a willing, over-brutal tool of mine owners and steel bosses in the terrorism that marked the early attempts to pioneer workers' rights.
It was the Homestead steel strike in 1892 (eight years after Allan's death) that finally turned the word Pinkerton into a hated synonym for union-breaking muscle; for during that strike, Winchester-toting agents were imported as "watchmen." As late as the 1930s, Pinkertons were finding congenial work playing labor spies on behalf of management. For today's Pinkerton heirs, however, the intoxicating old self-righteousness is gone. Robert II, the fourth generation of detective Pinkertons, who would have preferred to remain a Wall Street broker, is now chairman of the board. Seventy branch offices are tamely staffed with 13,000 full-time employees—and college degrees are "preferred." Pinkertons patrol race tracks with miniature cameras and walkie-talkies, and protect the clam-and oyster-seed beds of Long Island with a radar-equipped Pinkerton navy. Passion has given way to technology. For the enduring challenge of any personal crusade against the forces of darkness requires simplicity of means, and the possibility of confrontation with evil personified. Given the choice, Ahab might well have accepted radar and sonar aboard the Pequod but the Great Whale's looming, symbolic presence would soon have been reduced to a series of blips and bongs.