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The Legendary Detective
The Private Eye in Fact and Fiction
By John Walton University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-30843-2
CHAPTER 1
Enter the Detective
The First Detectives
François-Eugène Vidocq (1775–1857) was the first detective and founder of the first private detective agency. He was also a notorious criminal, a thief and jailbird from adolescence until he joined the Paris police force in 1811 as an informer with invaluable knowledge of the underworld. Indeed, his criminal activity persisted and facilitated his fifteen-year career as a sûreté bureau chief. Police work at the time consisted largely of apprehending thieves and recovering stolen property. Purloined goods conveniently reappeared after the detective-negotiator brokered an exchange for a customary fee. The prudent thief could also purchase police protection. Vidocq was at the center of this world, retiring a wealthy man to found his own detective agency, the Bureau des Renseignements, in 1827. The agency prospered, with offices in one of Paris's exclusive glass- covered arcades, a staff of forty agents, and a business model that spawned a number of rival agencies. Vidocq and his imitators had discovered a lucrative niche in the growing urban economy, notably in the areas of theft recovery and debt collection.
Vidocq personified the forces shaping Paris in the early nineteenth century. He was an urban immigrant who joined a legion of petty criminals. The city's population increased fourfold in the period, reaching two million by 1860. The French historian Louis Chevalier describes a condition of "social deterioration" as new "ethnic" (i.e., regional) minorities overtaxed the city's infrastructure, creating slums, congestion, and disease such as the cholera epidemic of 1832. Poverty was pervasive, reflected in an underclass of prostitutes, peddlers, beggars, and street urchins, the gamin. The old craft guilds suffered the challenge of new working classes. In the midst of this perceived disorder, police relied on informers: "In any urban community there would always be a certain degree of complicity between the police and those the police considered potentially dangerous." Vidocq was a natural for the role that combined criminal knowledge and associations with insouciance and entrepreneurial skill. Yet the detective's niche derived from a peculiar conjunction of the state and economy — compromised police and explosive growth.
An important part of Vidocq's success was the publication of his ghostwritten Mémoires de Vidocq in 1828. Already a Parisian celebrity, Vidocq now was becoming legend as the sensational memoir was translated into English as Vidocq! The French Police Spy and inspired a London play of the same name. The picaresque detective was a friend of Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo and informed their portrayals of the Parisian underclass. Reflecting this social world, Eugène Sue's Les mystères de Paris created a new literary genre soon imitated in other cities. Vidocq's place in history was forever assured in 1841 when Edgar Allan Poe published the first detective story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," featuring the shrewd patrician C. Auguste Dupin, who was modeled after Vidocq. Chevalier observes, "The legend of Vidocq, combining in one person as he did order and disorder, police and crime, dirty work and high politics, was an important element in popular thinking. The massive silhouette, now reassuring and now terrifying, not only loomed in the background of the major contemporary works, but also dominated the people's fears and beliefs."
Private policing in Britain followed a different path, partly in reaction to contemporary France. From the late eighteenth century onward, the movement for parliamentary reform and the right of workers to form associations was harried and repressed by the state. Government spies infiltrated the network of nascent corresponding societies and worker groups suspected of violating the Combination Acts that outlawed unions. National scandal was provoked by Oliver the Spy when he publicly promoted militancy as a friend of reform while secretly naming rebels to the authorities, who arrested, tried, and, in a few instances, executed the leaders. E. P. Thompson claims, "The employment of informers had become virtually a routine practice on the part of magistrates in the larger industrial centers. ... But the practice was regarded by a very wide section of public opinion as being wholly alien to English law [and] the clamor grew throughout to country against the 'continental spy system.'"
In preference to the continental pattern, policing of British cities was delegated to the magistrate's courts, which received criminal complaints and apprehended accused persons for trial. London's Magistrate's Court employed six agents called "thief takers" or "Bow Street Runners," owing to the court's location in Bow Street near Covent Garden. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, London had become the largest city in the world, doubling its population in seventy years (1750–1820), with all the potential for disorder deriving from immigration, burgeoning slums, working class agitation, and crime — or at least the fear of crime. Dickensian London required a metropolitan police force, one that could claim respectability by clearly refusing the services of spies and criminal informers. In 1829, Parliament passed the Metropolitan Police Act, which provided full-time day and night patrol of city streets. Preventative policing emphasized the presence of authority, identified by military style uniforms, height-enhancing helmets, and a professional demeanor that spoke order. Often called "bobbies" or "peelers," after parliamentary exponent Robert Peel, these officers did not come by respectability immediately. Half the original recruits were dismissed for drunkenness and police spies plagued the labor movement. Yet the metropolitan force worked deliberately to eliminate such unprofessional behavior and establish a reputation for providing public order.
The English language word "detective" derives from the Latin verb detegere, meaning to expose or reveal, a practice with odious connotations in Britain. It would be 1842 before a separate investigative branch was added to the prevention-oriented force and the first detectives began working to gain acceptance. Private detectives were still barely known in England. Charles Frederick Field retired from the Metropolitan Police in the mid-1850s to establish himself in private practice, although he got into trouble for continuing to represent himself as a public official. Ignatius Paul Pollaky founded Pollaky's Private Inquiry Office in 1862, certainly among the first of its kind, advertising discreet inquiries in election, divorce, and libel cases. Better known as "inquiry agents," these investigators dealt mainly with matrimonial matters. One student of the period writes, "But for the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, which was responsible for the divorce court as we know it, we would never have had the many hundreds of private detectives and agencies that now make a profession out of matrimonial investigation. ... The very terms, 'private detective' and 'private investigator' would never have come into use."
American Exceptionalism
The detective agency achieved its greatest success in the United States beginning in the mid-nineteenth century when Allan Pinkerton established the North-Western Police Agency in Chicago. Early detectives were creatures of the railroads, which dated from the 1830s in southern and midwestern regional lines. The midwestern railroads expanded in the 1850s, and after the Civil War, massive federally subsidized construction extending from the Missouri River to Sacramento, California, resulted in the first "transcontinental" connection of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads in 1869. These early railroads created new opportunities for business and crime. Brazen train robberies multiplied, as did pilfered freight shipments and passenger thieves. Railroad employees and express agents sometimes succumbed to temptation. Security posed special problems. Trains that crossed political jurisdictions had no consistent police protection. Special railroad police were created, but they could not match the geographic mobility and guile of the outlaws.
Pinkerton devised a new business service for the local railways, a private police force that would employ investigative methods not only to apprehend thieves and recover their booty but also to prevent theft. Pinkerton hired former police and experienced investigators who surveilled trains and railroad stations alert to the commission of crimes and observed the haunts of railroad predators — saloons or boarding houses where the thieves would gather information about potential targets. Pinkerton adapted the method of the spy to undercover police work then marketed the new service. Initially, Pinkerton contracted protective services to a consortium of six railway companies headed by the Illinois Central Rail Road. The contract dated February 1, 1855, called for agents in three different salary (and presumably skill) categories who would protect against any threat to the tracks, to the mail, or from the "depredations of any gang" which affected two or more of the companies. Although Pinkerton agents famously pursued train robbers like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, their principal task was surveillance, particularly of railroad employees. In contract language, Pinkerton operatives would "at all times communicate any information they may have concerning the habits or associations of the employees of said [railroad] companies."
In 1858, the young agency was renamed Pinkerton's Protective Police Patrol, first in a field of similar enterprises growing in tandem with commerce and industry. The business model spread. Train robbers were gradually arrested or killed off, along with a few detectives, thanks to the agencies. The Pinkertons, or simply "Pinks," became a familiar American institution owing to successful marketing and public relations symbolized by the trademark "private eye." Pinkerton appropriated the classical "eye of Providence" or "all-seeing eye of God," an ancient symbol found in Hebrew and Egyptian religions, which had been adopted for a variety of purposes before the Pinkerton use, including as a symbol of Freemasonry and as part of the designs of the Great Seal of the United States and the one-dollar bill. Below the eye on the original Pinkerton logo, the agency motto promised "We Never Sleep."
Equally important, Allan Pinkerton initiated a series of popular books celebrating his adventures and his agency, including The Expressman and the Detective; Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives; and The Model Town and the Detectives. Ghostwriters produced most of the sixteen volumes, published in the 1870s and 1880s, which cast detective work in melodrama. Playwright and novelist Cleveland Moffett continued the tradition with a series of "True Stories from the Pinkerton Archives" that appeared in McClure's Magazine and were subsequently collected in a book. Moffett and the Pinkerton ghostwriters invented dialogue among train robbers and attributed intrepid action to detectives in stories that spawned the true crime genre.
Allan Pinkerton's business flourished, moving beyond the railroad contracts. He joined the Civil War effort, protecting trains, investigating war profiteers, spying on Confederate plans, and directing the Secret Service. He admitted making a good deal of money working for the government. But public attention was a mixed blessing. In 1861, the Chicago Tribune gave Pinkerton credit for foiling an assassination plot allegedly planned for Lincoln's inauguration, although it is unclear how the newspaper got the story of a secret operation or whether it was planted by agency publicists. The existence of a plot was denied by southern newspapers and the Chicago Democrat denounced the story: "How much longer will the people of this country be the dupe of these private detectives. ... How are they to have cases unless they get them up? There was no conspiracy at all, save in the brain of the Chicago Detective." Public suspicions about the practices of private detectives that originated in Europe reappeared in the United States, an intrinsic feature of the business.
After the war, detective agencies adjusted to a growing national economy, especially the rise of heavy industry. Chicago steel mills made rails and Pullman cars that ran on them. Detectives extended their services. Agency experience in undercover work and surveillance, aimed originally at employee theft, transferred well to investigations of worker efforts to organize unions. Industrial espionage and the labor spy emerged and grew to a principal income source. Protective services developed for trains and tracks were easily adapted to industrial plants.
America's Gilded Age (1878–99) derives its name from a set of social and economic changes, including economic growth; industrial concentration; and wealth creation, excess, and inequality, which resulted in a pervasive rearrangement of social classes and geography. Urbanization took charge. From 1870 to 1920 the number of people living in cities doubled from 25 to 50 percent of the population. The urban population of the Northeast reached 75 percent in 1920. Remarkably, in 1900, 60 percent of city dwellers nationwide were immigrants or the children of immigrants. Coast to coast, the great US cities were predominantly first- or second-generation immigrants as early as 1880, with Chicago at 87 percent, New York at 80 percent, and San Francisco at 78 percent. The nation's cities and rural hinterlands were connected in a transcontinental railway network: from 1860–1880 the miles of railroad track tripled, and tripled again by 1920. Apropos of the age, the transcontinental railways were ill-advised schemes financed by government in a maze of corruption and destined for bankruptcy. This was the age of monopoly, of the great trusts like John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, J. P. Morgan's U.S. Steel, and many more, from farm machine manufacturing to sugar refining to meat packing. The expanding infrastructure and the plentiful labor force supported unprecedented economic growth that favored all sectors, albeit in unequal measure.
Economic boom and bust punctuated the Gilded Age. Major depressions visited the 1870s and 1890s, which brought dislocations in the form of unemployment and wage reductions. Labor's plight motivated the early unionization movement. A series of protests over wage and job cuts by the railroads occurred in scattered locations and culminated in the General Strike of 1873–74. Although the strike failed, it signaled a new reality in American society. "The significance of the strikes lay not in their success or failure but rather in the readiness of the strikers to express their grievances in a dramatic, direct, and frequently telling manner." Precipitated by depression, the railroad strikes of 1877 pitted a better organized labor movement against the National Guard in violent conflicts. Social unrest increasingly occupied public attention.
Railroad strikes provided the backdrop for the sensational struggle of the Irish immigrant "Molly Maguire" miners in Pennsylvania's anthracite coal fields. The conflict cast the miners against the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, which had come to dominate the operation of the mines. The miners' battle for fair wages and unionization in the face of aggressive management ended in violence and the hanging of ten alleged conspirators from the Irish communities. In fact, the original Molly Maguires, a secret society of peasants in Ireland who fought against oppressive landlords, was not coincident with the fraternal and union organizations that waged the miners' fight in Pennsylvania. The erroneous connection stemmed from mine owners' antipathy for unions and sensational popular literature that portrayed the movement simplistically as a product of alien terrorism. In the second of the series of books devoted to his agency's exploits, Pinkerton published The Molly Maguires and the Detectives, a biased intrigue that lionized Pinkerton operative James McParland, demonized the Irish, and served mainly as "a sales pitch for his detective agency." Marked improvement in the prose over that of the first book in the series, The Expressman and the Detectives, suggests that the boss had already turned to ghostwriters.
Urban disorder attained its most dramatic expression in Chicago's Haymarket Square in May 1886. In the wake of a general strike for the eight-hour day, labor organizers called for a rally in the city center to protest a bloody clash on the previous day at the McCormick farm equipment factory. As speakers warmed the crowd of three thousand mainly ethnic (especially German) working people and Chicago police moved precipitously to disperse the crowd, a bomb of unknown origin exploded, killing seven police and three civilians and injuring scores. Once again, the press blamed "foreign savages" and a show trial led to the hanging of four accused anarchists. Judicious critics were unconvinced of their guilt or of the innocence of possible agents provocateurs. Charles Siringo, the fabled Pinkerton "cowboy detective," claimed to have been working for the agency during the Chicago rallies along with other operatives who, he said, engaged anarchists in conversation, unsuccessfully attempting to evoke threats of violence and subsequently writing "flashy reports [that] suited the agency" and giving "perjured testimony" alleging planned violence.
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Excerpted from The Legendary Detective by John Walton. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of University of Chicago Press.
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