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Pinkerton's National Detective Agency

When the desperate bankers of the border states hired Allan Pinkerton to pit his army of sleuths against the James gang in 1871, they figured their troubles with holdups were over. In the detective business, Pinkerton had no peer. He once wrote to an aide, "I do not know the meaning of the word `fail.' Nothing in hell or heaven can influence me when I know that I am right."

Pinkerton had honed his skills for this epic manhunt in a variety of secretive pursuits. In his native Scotland he had been a revolutionary agitator for workingmen's reforms, escaping arrest only by emigrating in 1843. Settling in Illinois, he turned ardent abolitionist and smuggled many a runaway slave to safety in Canada. His relish for undercover work next prompted him to join the Chicago police force as its first detective; after cracking a counterfeit ring and scoring other successes, he formed his own detective force in 1850.

The agency quickly won fame for daring new methods, including a form of psychological warfare against its quarry. In one case, the murder of a bank teller in 1856, Pinkerton assigned a detective who startlingly resembled the dead man to shadow a suspect named Drysdale. Hounded day and night by this specter, Drysdale broke down, confessed and committed suicide. Such tactics caused criminals everywhere to fear Pinkerton. They dubbed him "The Eye," a name suggested by the agency's symbol - and that later gave rise to the term "private eye."

Another innovation - supplying the Illinois Central Railroad with a guard force - led to a dream assignment for the agency chief. Pinkerton's contacts with the railroad included an ambitious executive and a backwoods lawyer, later better known, respectively, as General George McClellan and President Abraham Lincoln. Through their offices, a Major E.J. Allen - one of Pinkerton's many aliases - was appointed in 1861 to set up a secret service for the Union Army. He deployed his spies skillfully and, when they sniffed out a plot to assassinate Lincoln on a train from Baltimore to Washington, Pinkerton personally thwarted the attempt by putting the President on an earlier train.

America's Sherlock Holmes A 1911 New York Times article described William J. Burns as "perhaps the only really great detective, the only detective of genius, whom this country has produced." Arthur Conan Doyle simply called him "America's Sherlock Holmes". Born in 1861 to Irish immigrants, Burns spent his teenage years in Columbus, Ohio, trying to decide on a career. As a compromise between his interest in acting and his father's insistence on the law, Burns became a bookkeeper in the family tailor shop. While Burns' father served a term as police commissioner, Burns would frequently visit the police station, where the department's detectives passed on their experiences. The bookkeeper decided to become a detective. In 1885, the newly elected county prosecutor asked the amateur detective to investigate fraud in the local election. Married and with two sons, Burns accepted the part-time job. He identified the perpetrators, including a forger and safecracker whom the former prosecutor had recruited from the state penitentiary. Burns worked briefly as a freelance detective, and then searched for more stable employment to support his growing family. In 1889, he joined the US Secret Service. Here, he investigated counterfeiting cases, work that he found monotonous, despite his success in catching a master counterfeiter who had eluded authorities for 25 years. Opportunity for change came in 1903. Secretary of the Interior Ethan A. Hitchcock asked the Secret Service for its best detective to investigate illegal sales of government lands for private profit. On loan from the agency, Burns exposed corruption in the US General Land Office and the involvement of city, state and federal officials, including a US senator and a congressman. After Burns completed his land fraud investigation in the summer of 1906, President Roosevelt arranged the detective's leave of absence from the Secret Service for a special assignment. Rather than resuming his routine counterfeiting cases, Burns would lead a team to investigate corruption in the San Francisco city government. The reconstruction of the earthquake- devastated city had provided abundant opportunities for graft. Burns' three-year investigation uncovered sufficient evidence to convict Mayor Eugene Schmitz and political boss Abe Ruef, and to force the resignation of 18 city officials. Newspapers and popular magazines flaunted the investigations of "Never Fail" Burns. In 1909, Burns capitalized on his fame by creating the Burns National Detective Agency in Chicago, the home base of Pinkerton's National Detective Agency. An enduring rivalry developed between the two firms, especially after Burns stole a major source of Pinkerton income: the protection of the American Bankers Association's 11,000 member banks. One of the Burns agency's major cases began in the early morning of 1 October 1910, when 16 sticks of dynamite exploded in the Los Angeles Times building. The blast and resultant inferno claimed more than 20 lives. Hired by the mayor of Los Angeles, Burns analyzed fragments of the explosive device and concluded that the bomb had been similar to others used by members of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers. His investigation led to confessions by two Union members, despite their representation by the famed lawyer Clarence Darrow. In his book about the LA Times case, The Masked War (1913), Burns promised that he resided wherever "a law-abiding citizen may find need of men who know how to go quietly about throwing out of ambush a hidden assassin or drawing from cover criminals who prey upon those who walk straight." At times, Burns had been accused of failing to walk straight, using questionable and even illegal methods to obtain results. At least some of these criticisms can be explained by the public's growing distrust of private detectives, a development that coincided with an increased efficiency of police departments. In 1921, Burns reentered public service, becoming head of the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner of the FBI. To modernize the agency, he called for a central fingerprint registry of criminals, which would replace the awkward and inaccurate Bertillon system of identification. Rather than directing his energy to other reforms, Burns focused on exposing members of radical organizations. In a few years, he found himself tainted by the widespread corruption that marked President Harding's administration. At the request of the Attorney General, Burns resigned in 1924, stepping aside for his second in command, J. Edgar Hoover. Burns retired to Florida, where he lectured and wrote mystery stories. Although he died in 1932, his firm endured and became a leading security provider in the United States, second only to Pinkerton's. In 2000, the Sweden-based Securitas Group acquired the Burns International Detective Agency, ending the rivalry with Pinkerton's; Securitas had acquired Allan Pinkerton's firm the previous year.

In the wake of these activities, the Pinkerton agency came to be widely regarded as a minion of Northern big business and an unofficial branch of the federal government. The Pinkerton men were especially loathed by poor and unreconstructed Confederates of the border states, who balked the hunt of the James gang at every turn - and, for once, Allan Pinkerton learned the meaning of failure.

Despite the agency's inability to break up the James gang, its list of successes lengthened steadily, even after the founder's death in 1884. His sons William and Robert, whom he had trained to continue the detective dynasty,enjoyed a particularly satisfying triumph in 1896, when Pinkerton men bested the infamous Wild Bunch in a shoot-out; later, the leaders of the gang, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, would have to flee to South America. And the organization William and Robert left to their own sons in time was to serve as a model for a new federal agency - the F.B.I.

Charles Angelo Siringo

Considered by many, including outlaw Butch Cassidy, as the finest of the Pinkerton detectives, Charles Angelo Siringo was born in Texas and worked as a cowhand from the time he was thirteen. At twenty-two he went out to join the search for 17-year-old killer Billy the Kid but was forced to give up after he lost all his money gambling. Siringo later worked as a grocer in Kansas for two years. On a visit to Chicago, he went to a blind phrenologist, who "read" the shape of his skull and told him he should be a detective. Siringo joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency and began a twenty-year career, building an enviable record of getting his man.

Trailing fugitives through deserts and blizzards, Siringo lived with moonshiners and disguised himself as a wanted criminal to convince Efie Landusky, a member of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, to tell him where infamous outlaw Harvey Logan hid out. The detective later barely escaped being killed when he infiltrated a union which was at the center of the Couer d'Alene labor riots of the 1890s. After twenty years with the agency Siringo retired to write about his adventures. One of his pamphlets was called Two Evil Isms: Pinkertonism and Anarchism. He published several books but died a poor man in Los Angeles in 1928, solitary to the end.

FBI

The FBI originated from a force of Special Agents created in 1908 by Attorney General Charles Bonaparte during the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. The two men first met when they both spoke at a meeting of the Baltimore Civil Service Reform Association. Roosevelt, then Civil Service Commissioner, boasted of his reforms in federal law enforcement. It was 1892, a time when law enforcement was often political rather than professional. Roosevelt spoke with pride of his insistence that Border Patrol applicants pass marksmanship tests, with the most accurate getting the jobs. Following Roosevelt on the program, Bonaparte countered, tongue in cheek, that target shooting was not the way to get the best men. "Roosevelt should have had the men shoot at each other, and given the jobs to the survivors."

Roosevelt and Bonaparte both were "Progressives." They shared the conviction that efficiency and expertise, not political connections, should determine who could best serve in government. Theodore Roosevelt became President of the United States in 1901; four years later, he appointed Bonaparte to be Attorney General. In 1908, Bonaparte applied that Progressive philosophy to the Department of Justice by creating a corps of Special Agents. It had neither a name nor an officially designated leader other than the Attorney General. Yet, these former detectives and Secret Service men were the forerunners of the FBI.

Today, most Americans take for granted that our country needs a federal investigative service, but in 1908, the establishment of this kind of agency at a national level was highly controversial. The U.S. Constitution is based on "federalism:" a national government with jurisdiction over matters that crossed boundaries, like interstate commerce and foreign affairs, with all other powers reserved to the states. Through the 1800s, Americans usually looked to cities, counties, and states to fulfill most government responsibilities. However, by the 20th century, easier transportation and communications had created a climate of opinion favorable to the federal government establishing a strong investigative tradition.

The impulse among the American people toward a responsive federal government, coupled with an idealistic, reformist spirit, characterized what is known as the Progressive Era, from approximately 1900 to 1918. The Progressive generation believed that government intervention was necessary to produce justice in an industrial society. Moreover, it looked to "experts" in all phases of industry and government to produce that just society.

President Roosevelt personified Progressivism at the national level. A federal investigative force consisting of well-disciplined experts and designed to fight corruption and crime fit Roosevelt's Progressive scheme of government. Attorney General Bonaparte shared his President's Progressive philosophy. However, the Department of Justice under Bonaparte had no investigators of its own except for a few Special Agents who carried out specific assignments for the Attorney General, and a force of Examiners (trained as accountants) who reviewed the financial transactions of the federal courts. Since its beginning in 1870, the Department of Justice used funds appropriated to investigate federal crimes to hire private detectives first, and later investigators from other federal agencies. (Federal crimes are those that were considered interstate or occurred on federal government reservations.)

By 1907, the Department of Justice most frequently called upon Secret Service "operatives" to conduct investigations. These men were well-trained, dedicated -- and expensive. Moreover, they reported not to the Attorney General, but to the Chief of the Secret Service. This situation frustrated Bonaparte, who wanted complete control of investigations under his jurisdiction. Congress provided the impetus for Bonaparte to acquire his own force. On May 27, 1908, it enacted a law preventing the Department of Justice from engaging Secret Service operatives.

The following month, Attorney General Bonaparte appointed a force of Special Agents within the Department of Justice. Accordingly, ten former Secret Service employees and a number of Department of Justice peonage (i.e., compulsory servitude) investigators became Special Agents of the Department of Justice. On July 26, 1908, Bonaparte ordered them to report to Chief Examiner Stanley W. Finch. This action is celebrated as the beginning of the FBI.

Both Attorney General Bonaparte and President Theodore Roosevelt, who completed their terms in March 1909, recommended that the force of 34 Agents become a permanent part of the Department of Justice. Attorney General George Wickersham, Bonaparte's successor, named the force the Bureau of Investigation (pictured left) on March 16, 1909. At that time, the title of Chief Examiner was changed to Chief of the Bureau of Investigation.

Phill Jones. William J. Burns. . February/March 2006.

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