Pinkertons Pinked

Greatest name in U. S. private detecting is Pinkerton. The founder of the name, Allan Pinkerton, was a Scottish cooper who became Chicago's first city detective in 1850, soon started a private agency.

In 1861 his Baltimore operatives reported a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln on the way to his inauguration. Sleuth Pinkerton rushed the President-elect to Washington by night, was rewarded by a White House invitation to create the U. S. Secret Service. After the Civil War, Pinkerton resumed his private work, grew rich and famed in the service of pioneering railroads beset by train robbers. But while boyish hearts thumped to the exploits of intrepid Pinkerton men in dime novels, Labor grew to hate the name more & more. For Pinkerton's was also making money by supplying armed guards to employers with labor troubles. In 1892 hard-boiled Henry Clay Frick imported 300 "Pinks" to fight a bloody, all-day battle with his steelworkers at Homestead, Pa. Ten were killed, 30 wounded and the public loudly protested. Congress passed a curious law forbidding the Government or any District of Columbia official ever again to employ a Pinkerton operative.

Last week it was the embarrassing task of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency's fourth-generation head to discuss that law in Washington before the Senate committee investigating labor spying and coercion (TIME, Feb. 8). From the agency's instruction book, Committee Chairman La Follette read an item order-ing operatives to submit their bills to Government officials on "plain paper."

"That," snapped the inquisitor, "clearly was intended to indicate a method of evading the law, wasn't it, Mr. Pinkerton?"

"Yes," said unhappy Robert Allan Pinkerton, 33, a slender Harvardman who quit his New York Stock Exchange seat to take over the family business only year and a half ago.

Senator La Follette drew Pinkerton blood again when he produced evidence that the agency had planted unregistered labor spies in Wisconsin for General Motors and other clients. A Wisconsin law requires all industrial detectives to be registered.

In a previous appearance before the La Follette committee last summer, Pinkerton officials admitted that U. S. employers had paid the agency $1,750,000 for labor spy and strikebreaking services since 1933. Last week the committee produced figures to show that General Motors, biggest Pinkerton customer, had paid at least $419,850. Pinkerton services to G. M. had ended suddenly only the previous fortnight. Most of the G. M. jobs were the routine stuff of planting agents in labor unions to betray them. But one shocker revealed a new angle of U. S. labor espionage, cast a shadow not only on Pinkerton ethics but on Pinkerton competence.

In the witness chair sat one William H. Martin, a slick-haired young onetime Pinkerton operative, now unemployed. In 1935, he said, he was sent to Toledo to work on the Chevrolet strike then in progress. He was assigned, he recalled, to shadow "a man named McGrady, a Government mediator."

"Do you mean the Assistant Secretary of Labor?" cried Chairman La Follette's scholarly colleague, Senator Elbert Thomas of Utah.

"That's the man," said the ex-sleuth. His description of his attempts to spy on Mr. McGrady was disillusioning to laymen reared on dime novels and the movie detective school of dictaphones and "Follow that cab!" Once, said ex-sleuth Martin, he simply could not find a cab in which to follow his man. He got a room next to the Assistant Secretary's at the Secor Hotel, sat for hours with his ear plastered to the wall. But he did not hear a thing. "It was all a mumble," he declared.

No joke was the revelation that a U. S. employer would hire a detective to spy on a Government mediator. President Pinkerton and his subordinates defended the action feebly, though a Pinkerton superintendent went so far as to declare that he would spy on the White House if a client wanted him to. "I think it's a terrible thing," barked Assistant Secretary McGrady. "But we expect it. We know or suspect that we are being watched."

Commenting on the terms of the General Motors settlement (see below) by which union members may now wear their union buttons to work, Labor's John Lewis slyly pointed up the wastefulness of G. M.'s spy expenditures, simultaneously seemed to admit that they might have been justified before now. Said he: "It will no longer be necessary for the Corporation to spend hundreds of thousands each year on labor spies because obviously they will now know who the union men are, and the union will come out from a more or less underground position to that of a legalized and respectable organization."

Whether or not against the rumored advice of Governor Murphy, Senator La Follette began examining General Motors executives this week. First damaging admission, by G. M.'s Labor Relations Director, was that G. M. files on labor organization and espionage were "stripped" when the La Follette committee was set up.

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