Allan Pinkerton - Legacy

Legacy

After his death, the agency continued to operate and soon became a major force against the labor movement developing in the United States and Canada. This effort changed the image of the Pinkertons for years. They were involved in numerous activities against labor during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including:

• The Homestead Strike (1891), the direct impetus for the federal Anti-Pinkerton Act of 1893, prohibiting the federal government from hiring its detectives
• The Pullman Strike (1894)
• The Wild Bunch Gang (1896)
• The Ludlow Massacre (1914)
• The La Follette Committee (1933–1937)

Many labor sympathizers accused the Pinkertons of inciting riots in order to discredit unions and justify police crackdowns. The Pinkertons' reputation was harmed by their protection of replacement workers ("scabs") and the business property of the major industrialists, including Andrew Carnegie.

Despite his agency's later reputation for anti-labor activities, Pinkerton himself was heavily involved in pro-labor politics as a young man. Though Pinkerton considered himself pro-labor, he opposed strikes and distrusted labor unions.

Pinkerton was so famous that for decades after his death, his surname was a slang term for a private eye. Due to the Pinkerton Agency's conflicts with labor unions, the word Pinkerton remains in the vocabulary of labor organizers and union members as a derogatory reference to authority figures who side with management.

Pinkerton's exploits were in part the inspiration of the 1961 NBC western television series, Whispering Smith, starring Audie Murphy and Guy Mitchell.

Pinkerton's role in foiling the assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln was dramatized in the 2012 film Saving Lincoln, which tells President Lincoln's story through the eyes of Ward Hill Lamon, a former law partner of Lincoln who also served as his primary bodyguard during the Civil War. Pinkerton is played by Marcus J. Freed in that movie.