The Bloodhounds of Heaven

THE PINKERTONS: THE DETECTIVE DYNASTY THAT MADE HISTORY by James D. Horan. 564 pages. Crown. $7.95.

From Cotton Mather to J. Edgar Hoover, America's best vice fighters have displayed an unappeasable fervor for coming to grips with evil that might be described as a Moby Dick complex. Allan Pinkerton and his sons William and Robert--founder and scions of a family whose name is synonymous with sleuthing--are no exceptions. Toward the criminals they pursued for twelve decades, from Jesse James to Willie ("The Actor") Sutton, the Pinkertons seemed to direct the same obsessive passions Melville imputed to Captain Ahab, who was a first-class tracker by any detective's standards: "He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down." Adopting a godlike motto ("We Never Sleep") the Pinkertons did not so much solve cases as play Puritan avenging angels in private duels with the devil.

From Gamblers to Greenhorns. Biographer James D. Horan, a prolific ex-journalist with an omniverous curiosity about crime (The D.A.'s Man) is not quite up to turning the Pinkertons into either a study in American character or a social history of violence. But he does mount nice rogues' gallery snapshots of such Pinkerton-defying sinners as Confederate Spy Rose O'Neal Greenhow (whose charms earned her a peek at the blueprints of various forts around Washington) and "Old Bill" Miner, who held up his first stagecoach in 1866 and his last train in 1911. He also manages a rough-edged portrait of Founder Allan Pinkerton, No. 1 bloodhound of heaven.

An itinerant cooper from the Glasgow slums, young Allan came to Chicago in 1842 as a fugitive, escaping the consequences of his past as a radical agitator. The time and the place could not have been more propitious for a man with an extravagant taste for self-righteousness and the sort of brawn developed by swinging a ten-pound cooper's hammer. Mid-19th century Chicago was beginning America's painful, often bloody transition from frontier to urban society. Law enforcement was faltering between mere inefficiency and dedicated corruption. Into the power vacuum stepped the indefatigable, incorruptible Pinkerton, self-made gangbuster. In 1849 he became Chicago's first and only police detective. After resigning from the force, in his own words, "because of political interference," he started the Pinkerton agency a year or two later to perform the services he had found most public law-enforcement agencies of the day only promised.

Pinkerton recruited former clerks, farmers, watchmakers and one widow, Kate Warne ("not what could be called handsome" but "decidedly of an intellectual cast"). Kate, it was hoped, would "worm out secrets in many places to which it was impossible for male detectives to gain access," and worm she did. So did her fellow infiltrators, who were first given a rigorous training course in pre-Method acting until they were able to disguise themselves as anybody and everybody from shifty gamblers to greenhorns "just off the boat."

Pinkerton detectives, known as "operatives," initiated the practice of keeping suspect files ("has scar on left hand," and lives with "a Hooker named Frisco Ann"). As for doctrine, operatives subscribed to the "General Principles," including one that read, "The ends justify the means." The agency was the self-expression of a man who got up at 4:30 a.m., was in bed by 8:30 p.m., and whose idea of an acting disguise (for himself) was as a "jovial, friendly" social drinker. "I must get my way in all things," he once confessed firmly, showing a taste for the fanatic in himself and others (symptomatically, he regarded Abolitionist John Brown as "greater than Napoleon and just as great as George Washington"). Trying his hand as an espionage agent for the North in the Civil War, Pinkerton overestimated the Confederate enemy almost to the point of paranoia.

College Grads and Clam Beds. By the 1870s--chasing a new breed of bank robbers, mostly ex-soldiers like the Younger Brothers of Missouri, and pouncing on cheating streetcar conductors in the East--Pinkerton agents were operating out of offices in New York and Philadelphia. The revolutionary slum boy from Glasgow was able to build himself a Scottish estate in Onarga, Ill., complete with 85,000 imported trees, where he entertained the likes of General Grant and Commodore Vanderbilt. Yet as America progressed beyond the crude improvisations of frontier justice, Pinkerton gradually fitted less and less serviceably into his society. An outspoken admirer of vigilante tactics, he became a willing, over-brutal tool of mine owners and steel bosses in the terrorism that marked the early attempts to pioneer workers' rights.

It was the Homestead steel strike in 1892 (eight years after Allan's death) that finally turned the word Pinkerton into a hated synonym for union-breaking muscle; for during that strike, Winchester-toting agents were imported as "watchmen." As late as the 1930s, Pinkertons were finding congenial work playing labor spies on behalf of management. For today's Pinkerton heirs, however, the intoxicating old self-righteousness is gone. Robert II, the fourth generation of detective Pinkertons, who would have preferred to remain a Wall Street broker, is now chairman of the board. Seventy branch offices are tamely staffed with 13,000 full-time employees--and college degrees are "preferred." Pinkertons patrol race tracks with miniature cameras and walkie-talkies, and protect the clam-and oyster-seed beds of Long Island with a radar-equipped Pinkerton navy. Passion has given way to technology. For the enduring challenge of any personal crusade against the forces of darkness requires simplicity of means, and the possibility of confrontation with evil personified. Given the choice, Ahab might well have accepted radar and sonar aboard the Pequod but the Great Whale's looming, symbolic presence would soon have been reduced to a series of blips and bongs.

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