Wonkette has a history article about The Goddamn Pinkertons, in their role as anti-union thugs. Of course I do know about this history, but this is a good synopsis and timeline. It confirms that Allan Pinkerton is a fucking hypocrite who started out as a Chartist in Scotland before immigrating to America and betraying all his former working-class principles to work for corporations and robber barons. (I read a fictional novel about Pinkerton once that blamed Allan's sons, not Allan himself, for the anti-union cases they took.) Loomis even casts doubts on whether Pinkerton's spies even really helped the Union much in the Civil War.
About the only good part of Pinkerton's agency history is Kate Warne and the department of women detectives she ran. What case histories I have read her participating in were mostly murders and robberies, rather than this violent anti-union stuff. But she died young, and I read conflicting reports about when Pinkerton's sons disbanded the department. In any case, they continued their father's penchant for strikebreaking long into the 20th century.
In 1915, Arthur Conan Doyle based part of Valley of Fear on the history of Pinkertons investigating the Molly Maguires. He viewed the Pinkertons as good guys fighting criminals, and John Douglas aka Birdy Edwards is based on James McParland.
In my own unfinished novel, I'm trying to have a young Sherlock go to America to be a Pinkerton operative for a year before quitting and returning to England to become a consulting detective. He realizes that the Pinkertons aren't really "investigating" and "solving" cases so much as standing around spying for weeks and months, hoping to get criminals to confess their crimes. That's what turns him off and makes him create his own career. (Of course, ironically, Holmes will do an undercover spying investigation in His Last Bow to protect England from Germany.)
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