The Pinkerton Detective Agency
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What is the Pinkerton Detective Agency?
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and there's Jerry, and this is Stuff You Should Know. And we're keeping an eye on you, sucker. Did I throw you off when I pre-recorded? No. I'm always expecting anything from you.
We do our usual countdown, everyone, so we can sync sound. And you do that. Here's a little how the sausage is made. You do that by counting down and then each of us clapping. So you have a spike in the audio wave file that the engineers and editors can align so we match up.
Right.
And I clapped, but this time I also said, Schlemiel, hoping you would say.
Oh, you set me up, huh? I'm sorry. That's okay. Well, here, let me say it now. Schlemazel.
There you go.
Okay. Are you ready to get on with our sausage party?
Gross.
Yeah, sure. Okay. That was nice of you to kind of give that behind-the-scenes tour to everybody, Chuck.
You know.
That's why everyone likes you more.
Trade secrets.
That's not true.
I've been on Reddit.
Whatever. Everybody likes you, including me, especially me. At any rate, so we're talking today about the Pinkerton Detective Agency. And this one strikes me as odd that we have waited this long, 17 years, to finally talk about them.
Yeah.
And because they're just so legendary, you know, like everybody knows what the Pinkertons are. And if you don't, I'm not taking that back because everyone else knows what the Pinkertons are.
Yeah, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency technically was the name of it, but they were generally called the Pinkertons, led by Alan Pinkerton. And they're, you know, what they're known for is being one of the first or perhaps the first detectives And I say private detective agency, but not like we think of PIs. Not Sam Spade stuff. No, no, no. Just a detective agency that's privatized, like police kind of detective work.
Right.
And, you know, they did a lot of stuff, including, as we'll see, busting up bank robbers and then later busting up unions.
Yeah, it took a dark turn for sure.
Yeah, but they got their start doing, you know, God's work by working in the abolitionist movement, by helping to free enslaved people.
Yeah, yeah, that's one thing. So there's a lot of stuff you'll find when you dig into the history of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. It depends on who you're reading. Either they were pretty great and did some really great work, or they were evil from the start. And then apparently also one of the things that complicates it is Alan Pinkerton was known to kind of hype his own company, hype his own exploits. And some people interpret that as like personal myth-making. And whether that's correct or not, a lot of historians have delved into. And I think the answer generally is it's a case-by-case thing, whether it's actually true, whether it actually happened quite that way. But for the most part, from what I saw from researching this is – Generally, most of the stuff can be accepted at surface level, for the most part. It's not like if you buy into the story that we're about to tell you, that you're just being totally misled.
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
5 identified
Josh 26 min
Chuck 20 min
Unknown Speaker 5 min
Narrator
Unknown