Full Description
A deeply researched account of the life and legacy of the man who defined the profession of private eye
Allan Pinkerton, the world's most famous private detective, has been an enduring source of fascination since the nineteenth century. But the details of his impact, business empire, and private life have been incomplete.
Drawing on overlooked primary sources, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones provides an authoritative account of the man and the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (PNDA). It is the story of how PNDA's founder and its successive generations of heirs put it at the center of American history for decades. A small sampling of Pinkerton's activities includes providing intelligence in the Civil War, pursuing high-profile outlaws like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and protecting scabs in the Homestead lockout, for which they became notorious. The book continues telling PNDA's history into the twentieth century and analyzes the legacies of Pinkertonism up to the present.
General readers as well as scholars of American history will be fascinated by this rich new portrait of Pinkerton's accomplishments, controversies, and contradictions.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Gorbals Man
2. The Revolutionary
3. Escape to America
4. Pinkerton & Co.
5. The Baltimore Plot to Assassinate Lincoln
6. A Secret Service
7. The Secret Service
8. Labor Violence a New Source of Income
9. McParland Tilts at the Molly Maguires
10. Inventing Anti-Communism
11. Inventing Private Detection
12. Jesse James as Robin Hood
13. The Death of the Founder
14. Odyssey of the Son
15. Pinkertons in the Haymarket Trial
16. The Homestead Lockout and the End of Legitimacy
17. Anti-Pinkerton Legislation
18. Sundance and the Setting of the Western Sun
19. The Trial of the Wobblies
20. The Verdict
21. The BofI: Challenge and Succession
22. Private Rivals
23. Of Harvard and Hammett
24. The LaFollette Inquiry
25. A Corporate Era
26. Who Was the Greatest Detective of Them All?
Conclusion
List of Primary Source Archives and of Abbreviations Used in the Notes
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author