Inventing The Pinkertons Or Spies Sleuths Mercenaries And Thugs Being A Story Of The Nations Most Famous And Infamous Detective Agency Ohara by O'hara, S Paul 9781421420561, 9781421420578, 1421420562, 1421420570 instant download after payment.

Between 1865 and 1937, Pinkerton's National Detective Agency was at the
center of countless conflicts between capital and labor, bandits and
railroads, and strikers and state power. Some believed that the
detectives were protecting society from dangerous criminal conspiracies;
others thought that armed Pinkertons were capital's tool to crush
worker dissent. Yet the image of the Pinkerton detective also inspired
romantic and sensationalist novels, reflected shifting ideals of
Victorian manhood, and embodied a particular kind of rough frontier
justice.
Inventing the Pinkertons examines the evolution of the
agency as a pivotal institution in the cultural history of American
monopoly capitalism. Historian S. Paul O'Hara intertwines political,
social, and cultural history to reveal how Scottish-born founder Allan
Pinkerton insinuated his way to power and influence as a purveyor of
valuable (and often wildly wrong) intelligence in the Union cause.
During Reconstruction, Pinkerton turned his agents into icons of law and
order in the Wild West. Finally, he transformed his firm into a
for-rent private army in the war of industry against labor. Having begun
life as peddlers of information and guardians of mail bags, the
Pinkertons became armed mercenaries, protecting scabs and corporate
property from angry strikers.
O'Hara argues that American
capitalists used the Pinkertons to enforce new structures of economic
and political order. Yet the infamy of the Pinkerton agent also gave
critics and working communities a villain against which to frame their
resistance to the new industrial order. Ultimately,Inventing the
Pinkertonsis a gripping look at how the histories of American
capitalism, industrial folklore, and the nation-state converged.