LABOR: 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.