Pinkertons: Guards or Blackguards?

I recently was talking to my friend Joyce in Pittsburgh when the topic turned to the Pinkertons.  Joyce's cousin had just finished Darkness Visible, and she had found a jarring contrast between the images of Pinkertons in their family stories and those of the Pinkerton characters in the book.
      The cousin's husband's grandfather had been beaten and dragged through the streets of Braddock and arrested during a strike in the early 1900s, all because he was a worker supporting unionization.  Joyce's grandmother had told the story of an incident during labor unrest in Homestead during the same period: Joyce's grandfather and his friend were walking along the the tracks by the Works when they encountered some Pinkertons.  The friend made a smartass remark to the Pinks; to the horror of Joyce's grandfather, one of them promptly shot the friend dead. (Predictably, the guard was not held accountable for the killing.)

     The history of the Pinkerton Detective Agency is a checkered one, with some very ugly parts. Founded in 1852 by Scottish immigrant Allan Pinkerton, the agency specialized in guarding trains. The agency was hired during the Civil War to protect President Lincoln.  In 1861 the Pinkertons famously foiled an assassination attempt on Lincoln in Baltimore, while he was on his way to his inauguration. (The agency was not successful in preventing John Wilkes Booth from killing Lincoln four years later, after the war.)

Left-right: Allan Pinkerton, Abraham Lincoln, Maj.Gen. John A. McClellan, 1862.

      After the war, the agency became known as the private militia for companies and the goverment to call in to crush uppity workers. Before the 1892 Homestead Strike, Pinkerton guards were employed in putting down coal, iron, and lumber disputes in Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania, as well as during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.   A subsidiary group, the Coal and Iron Police, were used by Henry Clay Frick and other robber barons to stop union organizing in these industries.  Companies hired the Pinkerton Agency to provide agents to infiltrate unions, to supply guards to keep strikers and union organizers out of factories, and to recruit goon squads to intimidate workers. In the 1870s the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroad hired Pinkerton spies led by agent James McParland to investigate union activities in the company's mines by the Molly Maguires. The agents were successful in facilitating the arrest and eventual execution of organizers for the group.

Pinkerton detectives show off as a trophy the corpse of a Union soldier they had shot as a deserter (1862).

     The most famous (or infamous) of the numerous violent clashes between the Pinks (their derogatory nickname) and workers is the '92 Homestead Strike.  It is the only time that workers, during a daylong gun battle, defeated the Pinkertons. But of course, it was a Pyrrhic victory for the strikers, who were trumped by Frick's convincing the Pennsylvania governor to call in the State Militia to "restore order." However, after the Homestead battle, the Pinkertons were banned from employment by the government. The controversy swirling around the role of the militia in the violence spurred the passage in 1893 of the federal Anti-Pinkerton Act, which states that an "individual employed by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, or similar organization, may not be employed by the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia."
     From this time and into the 20th century, the Pinkertons frequently appear wherever and whenever a dispute arises between workers and companies.  For many, the name "Pinkerton" became synonymous with union busting, not only in the overt use of guards, but through the use of infiltrators and goon squads.  Joyce's relatives apparently experienced the Pinkertons in these roles.  How many other people can tell similar stories of  guards literally getting away with murder?
     In 1912, the dark side of the agency came to public view in Charlie Siringo's book titled  A cowboy detective: a true story of twenty-two years with a world-famous detective agency; giving the inside facts of the bloody Cœur d'Alene labor riots, and the many ups and downs of the author throughout the United States, Alaska, British Columbia and Old Mexico, also exciting scenes among the moonshiners of Kentucky and Virginia (available as a Google e-book). The long title suggests the skullduggery involved in the agency work of union busting. In the book Siringo, who had worked for more than twenty years under James McParland in the Pinkerton's western division based in Denver, claims that the agency was guilty of  "jury tampering, fabricated confessions, false witnesses, bribery, intimidation, and hiring killers for its clients," assertions confirmed over time by documents and testimony.
     Another incident in the summer of 1917 suggests Pinkerton involvement. A man named Frank Little was helping organize workers in the metal mines of Montana, including leading a strike of miners working for the Anaconda Company, which had hired the agency to protect its interests. In the early hours of August first, six masked men broke into Little's hotel room in Butte. He was beaten up, tied by a rope to a car, and dragged out of town, where he was lynched. A note, "First and last warning," was pinned to his chest. No serious attempt was made by the police to catch Little's murderers. It's not clear if he was killed for his anti-war views or his union activities; either way, the result was the same.

Cartoon in Solidarity magazine, August 1917--'Copper Trust to Press: "It's all right, pal; just tell them he was a traitor."'

      In 1937, forty years after the Little incident, the agency dropped out of labor spying following revelations publicized by the LaFollette Committee hearings. The agency's criminal detection work also was diminished by the police modernization movement, which saw the rise of the F.B.I. and the bolstering of detective branches and resources of public police forces.
      In July of 2003, the agency was acquired by Securitas AB to create Securitas Security Services USA, Inc., one of the largest security companies in the world. (Ironically, Securitas employees are currently trying to form a union through the Services Employees International Union).
      In Darkness Visible my goal was to show the events of 1892 from multiple viewpoints.  As I read eyewitness accounts of the experiences of the guards,  I could not help feeling sympathy for the new recruits who were brought into the battle unprepared, victims of the company's phony enticements as much as of the workers' fury.
     But the Pinkerton rank-and-file and their leaders knew exactly what they were getting into. The words of A.F. Heinde to Hugh O'Donnell at the landing before the Pinkertons' first attempt to disembark were blatantly inflammatory. However, it must have come as a great surprise to Heinde to have the strikers defy him and the company by holding their ground and firing back.
     I can't help wondering, what was Heinde thinking?  Didn't he see the couple of thousand armed and angry workers blocking their way? It suggests arrogance and unwarranted confidence in acheiving the usual outcome for the agency, that is, crushing the workers. In any case, after the initial barrage of gunfire, in which Heinde was shot in the leg, he and company superintendent Potter high-tailed it to safety on the tug, leaving the rest of the Pinkertons to their fate, trapped on the barges.
     So, were the Pinkertons just guards or blackguards? Both, it appears. At my Munhall High School class reunion last summer, I talked to several classmates about the Strike and Battle.  They all held the same view, namely that the Pinkertons deserved what they got after the battle. Maybe so, maybe not. Whatever your views, it's a fact that the Pinkertons' arrival on the river bank changed not only Homestead, but the course of the American history.

A Hollywood view of the Pinkertons from the 2001 film, "American Outlaws." In the movie Timothy Dalton (no relative of the outlaw Daltons), center, plays Allan Pinkerton, who is called in to stop the James gang.  In the words of one reviewer, "What ensues is a stultifyingly bland, bloodless and clichéd bunch of nonsense." Again, the myth of the Old West triumphs over Clio, the muse of history.

    

Real Characters

First edition cover

When Sinclair Lewis published his immensely popular novel Main Street in 1920, it was no secret that the setting of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, and the characters that populated it were derived from his hometown of Sauk Centre.  The people upon which Lewis based his characters were understandably none too pleased with Lewis's rendering of them: blowhards, boosters, back-stabbers, hypocrites, and culture-vultures.
     However, only five years after the book came out, Sauk Centre High School's teams changed their name to "Mainstreeters," a name they still use today.  I suppose you can't argue with success.
     Because Darkness Visible is an historical novel, I had no choice but to use characters based on real people--Hugh O'Donnell, for example.  My portrait of him was derived from reading contemporary accounts of his role in the Strike and the trial afterward for murder (in which he was acquitted).  He seems one of the more tragic figures in a story that has many tragedies.  He was stuck in a damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don't situation that offered no happy ending.  He tried valiantly to stop the battle before it started, and he was the one who negotiated the release of the Pinkertons from the barges.  But the strikers thought he was too soft in his dealings with the company, and the company vilified him as the leader of the strikers. In the end he was blacklisted and ostracized, wandering about trying to pick up work as a journalist.  That's history.

Hugh O'Donnell, c. 1892

     Another kind of history is family folklore, stories handed down from generation to generation.  I knew my Grandfather Busch, but as an old man, a retiree who loved listening to the Pirates' game on the big old radio console. After my grandmother died, he came to our house on James Street for dinner each day.  I can't recall him ever appearing not wearing a white shirt and tie.  For my father I relied on the stories of his father as a youth, the eldest of 11 sons and 2 daughters. Apparently the boys were hellions, rampaging through the neighborhood, knocking over outhouses on Halloween. I also knew his sister Kate as an old woman in a nursing home, a huge stone Romanesque edifice in Braddock, straight out of the Addams Family series.  She seemed to me kind, yet tough, a woman who had survived the literal knocks from her beer-swilling, tuba-playing husband. I  imagined that her mother, whom she resembled, had a similar personality.

Kate Busch Wieland (2nd from left) and Susanna Busch (3rd from right), early 1900s.

     For impressions of John Paul, I had to rely on secondhand stories told by my father.  Because my father's editing so blurred the lines on his portrait of his grandfather, I had to come up with an imaginative rendering of this ancestor who eschewed the war-torn land of his fathers to come to America.  I can only guess how desperate he must have been to come to Homestead to take that fateful job starting furnaces for Carnegie Steel.
     Only one of the fictional characters is based on someone I knew. Virgil of the open hearth resembles a classmate at William and Mary, a Tidewater Virginian.  Although my friend had a more patrician background than Virgil (from a farm in the Shenandoah Valley), his personality is much like the character's.

Kip races ahead with the ball as Nant looks on at the dog park.

    The only fictional figure that is based on family members contemporary to me is the doctor's dog Cerberus.  He is a composite of my two border collies, Kip and Nant.  He has Nant's face (blue and brown eyes) and intense sheepdog "eye", but Kip's easygoing personality and large frame. Kip would always stay by my side and come when called. We traveled thousands of miles together, even crossing the border into Canada several times. I imagine Cerberus having the same loyalty to the the doctor, the family member he could always rely on.  Kip and Nant are gone now, she in November 2010, he in April 2012, but both live on in the book as Cerberus, the gatekeeper of Homestead.

Kip drinks from Lake Superior, while Nant takes her usual "polar bear" dip.

Places in the Novel Today

The Homestead Works of Carnegie Steel (cum United States Steel) is gone, replaced by the large Waterfront shopping and entertainment complex.  And most of the buildings on Eighth Avenue were erected in the 20th century.  Nevertheless, a visitor can get some idea of what the town was like.  Here are some photos of the sites in Homestead today.

The intersection of 8th Avenue and Ann Street.  The buildings on either side of Ann were there in 1892.

The 300 block of E. Eighth Avenue, location of the doctor's office.

The 200 block, location of the saloon Emlyn visited with Gwyn.  The larger buildings were built in the 1910s.

The view west from the Amity Street crossing, with the depot at right. In 1892 a different depot stood in the same place. The locomotive approaching the station is hauling a 100-car freight train, headed eastward to Horseshoe Curve.

The railroad depot in Homestead today, now used as offices for the Allegheny County District Attorney. The depot, built 1906, is on the National Register. It was used as a passenger depot until the 1960s.

The view east from the crossing.  In 1892 hotels and other commercial buildings stood  in the current green area between these and  the tracks (not visible) off to the left.

The site of the mill's General Office Building, now a bank.  The office structure was destroyed by fire in 1942.

The view from the front of the Carnegie Library.  In 1892 the General Office Building would have stood just below where St. Michael's Church stands today. The mill complex was where the buildings can be seen in the distance.

Looking down the front steps of the Carnegie Library.  The current library is sited on the hill where people watched the Battle of Homestead unfold at the river, and where the troops of the Pennsylvania Militia were camped later.

The brick house on Tenth Avenue that served as the model for the exterior appearance and location of the Oesterlings' house.

The house on Eleventh Avenue where the author's Aunt Helen McGeever and her family lived in the 1940s. It served as the model for the interior of the Oesterling's house.

The Bost Building, headquarters for the Amalgamated during the lockout and strike.  Reporters watched the town and mill  from the roof of this building before and during the battle.  Today it is the home of Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area.

The mill Pump House, the only remaining structure from the 1892 battle site.  Today it is used by Rivers of Steel .   Emlyn, Gwyn and the others were on the roof of the Pump House during the battle.

A boat pushing barges of coal up the Monongahela River at the battle site.  In 1892 the barges holding the Pinkerton guards were at the mill landing, out of view on the river below.  The stone pylons of the Pemikey Railroad bridge of 1892 are visible on the newer bridge in the background.

The concrete overlook at the battle site today.  (l-r) Ceridwen Christensen, Jay-Louise Weldon, Trilby Busch

Anne Ashley Memorial Methodist Church, built 1887. It is still a thriving congregation. Sarah and Emlyn ride their horses past it, and Montague was thrown from Figaro near here.

The view today from where Emlyn sat on Easter Sunday. Only the gravesites on top of the hill in the distance would have been there in 1892.

The Jones-Phillips house stood here, somewhere in the parking lot of a Target store.  In 1937, the entire First Ward, where this house would have been located, was razed for the expansion of the Homestead Works.

Launch Successful

The register listing the strikers arrested after the Battle of Homestead, on display at the Bost Building.

     The launch for Darkness Visible: A Novel of the 1892 Homestead Strike went off as planned on St. Patrick's Day at the Bost Building in Homestead, headquarters for the union during the Strike, currently part of Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area.

The author giving a slide presentation.

      

Reading from the novel.

Among the attendees were several descendants of George Washington Busch, and three Katilius cousins.  Members of the Pittsburgh St. David's (Welsh) Society were in attendance, including President Ian Samways and Munhall H.S. alum Mark Thomas.  At least eight attendees were former students of G. Edward Busch at Munhall H.S.  Trilby's college friend Jay-Louise Weldon and her husband drove in from New Jersey for the event.

Setting up for the launch in the exhibit area.

Treats from the Blue Bonnet Bakery

Trilby signing a copy for her Busch cousin, Grace Jack Krepps.  Grace and her husband  Phil were very helpful in researching the background for the book.

Book Launch in Pittsburgh

The launch for Darkness Visible: A Novel of the 1892 Homestead Strike will take place at 3 p.m. in the Bost Building, strike headquarters for the union, at 623 E. Eighth Avenue in Homestead.

The launch will kick off the release of the novel. The event will begin with a slide show of photos of people (and one dog) on which characters are based, followed by a reading and signing.  Refreshments will be served.


Click on link to Rivers of Steel's website for details:
http://www.riversofsteel.com/things-to-do/event/darkness-visible/

The author talks about Welsh connections in the book  to the Minnesota  St. David's  Society.

On Saint David's Day

A 19th-century image of St. David in an Oxford chapel.

     Today is Saint David's Day, the feast day of the patron saint of Wales. Dewi Sant, as the Welsh call him, was born in Pembrokeshire circa 500 A.D., and died, according to tradition, on March 1, 589.  He was of the royal house of Ceridigion, but gave up the posh (for the 500s) life to take up a  monastic one.   He eventually became a famous ascetic, teacher and bishop, establishing a Celtic monastic community at Glyn Rhosyn (the Vale of Roses) on the western headland of Pembrokeshire (Sir Benfro).  A cathedral consecrated in 1131 stands on the site today.
      In the 6th century, the Celts were not broken in distinct groups.  In fact, Saint Patrick was likely born in Wales, hence the joke that a Welshman is an Irishman who can't swim.
     In my lifetime, the Welsh diaspora have been the ones to celebrate their heritage on March 1st.  But in recent years the Welsh themselves, perhaps looking for an excuse to take a day off and party, have been celebrating their national day with marches, concerts, and food festivals.   The ubiquitous spread of McWorld, the homogenizing culture of multinational corporations, is apparently spurring the Welsh to stand up for their national identity.
     Today I'm thinking about Wales and my connections to it. Nearly forty years ago, I embarked on a search for my relatives in Wales.  Despite my best efforts, I did not find them. (You can probably guess how many people named Ann Jones and John Edwards lived in Wales in the mid-1800s.)  But that doesn't matter now.  Instead of locating blood relatives in my search, I found a new "family" of Cymry:  teachers, ministers,  professors, students, people from all walks of life.

Vivan Jones bemusedly points to his house number, which Emyr and I missed.

     Several of these have been key to my research for Darkness Visible: the Rev. Mr.Vivian Jones (a Congregational minister who served for a time in Minneapolis), Dr. Bill Jones (a history professor who sent me documents about the Park Slip mining disaster), and Emyr Wyn Morris, whom I met through, of all places a chat room, #cymru, in the mid-1990s.
      In 2005 Emyr took me around South Wales to the sites I planned to use in the novel:  Treorchy, the Rhondda Valley, the Park Slip mine site outside Bridgend. We both took quite a few photos of the area, photos I had planned to use in my presentation "Wales and the Welsh in Darkness Visible."  However, earlier this week I could not open the bunch of '05 pics, so I asked Emyr if he could send me some of his.  He could not find his either, so he drove to Ton du and took pics of the old iron foundry and Park Slip memorial. (Yesterday, with much messing about, I finally opened mine.) Here are two Emyr took this week:

The old Tondu ironworks, founded 1836.

A coal car commemorating the Park Slip mining disaster, August 1892.

  Emyr isn't the only Morris who helped with the book. His mother, Ann, of Maenclochog (not too far from St. David's), a retired teacher in a Welsh-language school, did the translations for the Welsh dialog.

Workers' houses near Ton du

    The photos of Wales became a sort of virtual reality through which I envisioned life in Valley towns in the 1890s.With the publication of Darkness Visible, I feel I've acquired a new set of Welsh "relatives," the Phillips and Jones families, of Treorchy and Ton du, respectively.
    To mark St. David's Day, here's the Treorchy Male Voice Choir singing my dad's favorite Welsh song, "Myfanwy", with images of the town and its people as the setting.  I can't think of a more fitting tribute to my Welsh heritage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FFaxOv3nnU

A hand-painted sign welcoming people to the Valleys of South Wales.

Cymru am byth! Wales forever!

George, Eddie, Ceridwen, and Me

     My daughter Ceridwen. with apologies, sent me a link to an article by Irish writer Colm Tóibín titled, "How I killed my mother," which begins with a quote from an essay on the writer Seán O'Faoláin by Conor Cruise O'Brien:
     "There is for all of us a twilight zone of time, stretching back for a generation or two before we were born, which never quite belongs to the rest of history. Our elders have talked their memories into our memories until we come to possess some sense of a continuity exceeding and traversing our own individual being … Children of small and vocal communities are likely to possess it to a high degree and, if they are imaginative, have the power of incorporating into their own lives a significant span of time before their individual births."
     (My apologies for this quote-within-a-quote business, but it's important to give due credit.) Because all of the writers Tóibín mentions are male, and they reconstructed their own childhoods in their writings, I can't say that my experience as a writer is analogous.

     But that initial quote really resonated with me.  O'Brien is suggesting that the stories told by our elders about their Lives Before Us, and the stories told them by their elders, create a continuity with previous generations: an alternate reality, so to speak.  It this sense of connection with past generations that compelled me to write their/my story of the Homestead Strike of 1892.  

Eddie and George W. at the Machine Shop, 1910

     My father told and retold the story of his grandfather's death in the Homestead Works in September of 1892; however, his story was focused on the horrors of the experience.  Dad--an actor, drama coach, and playwright--loved drama.  The story consisted of two parts: a description of the explosion that resulted in the death of his grandfather and three other men, and the scene at the bedside of the dying patriarch, with his eleven children at his bedside.  

Dad and me, c. 1946

The first part was sometimes augmented by stories of terrible accidents at the Works. One I recall in particular described the killing of a worker by molten steel spilling into the casting pit.  I can't remember if Dad actually witnessed this, but he told it as if he had.  The second part he sometimes told without the first. Dad would dramatize the scene, adding specific dialog, sometimes of a serio-comic sort.  "Germany stinks," John Paul would say from his deathbed. "Despite all, I'm glad to have come to America and glad to be an American."  He would then admonish his children to "stand by America"--a phrase that sounds suspiciously like an exact quote from his father, George W.

     I can't help wondering what the story my grandfather Busch told Dad was like. I'm sure it was quite different.  Grandpap and Dad had such different temperaments.  My father Edward inherited more than his mother's surname, Edwards, from her Welsh ancestors.  Eddie was a born teacher and actor, loving to perform for any size audience.  His retirement project was to write and publish his memoirs, Full of Sound and Fury, which he passed out to friends, family, and former students.

Unhappy bat boy, front; George W. fourth from left rear, 1919 

     My grandfather, on the other hand, supervised hundreds of workers in the Homestead machine shop. He worked under tremendous pressure much of the time, but always stayed cool and focused.  His son was an introvert, emotional and high-strung. One of Dad's stories was how disappointed Grandpap had been when young Eddie had been downright miserable being made to serve as bat boy or water carrier for the many athletic teams the former was involved in.  Dad showed me a photo of himself with the  Homestead Steel Mechanics' baseball team, 1919 AA champions. Dad pointed out how unhappy he looked and felt when the picture was taken. (Ironically, this photo somehow made its way onto the menus of at least two local restaurants as an image of Good Old Times in  Homestead.)

Ceridwen & Dad, front, at reunion, c. 1979

    It's significant that Ceridwen is the one who sent me the Tóibín article, for it is she who has taken up the torch passed down from Eddie through me.  A Goodreads librarian and top reviewer, Ceridwen's reviews are always, as she puts in, "hopelessly personal."  She sometimes recounts my stories, other family stories, and stories about her children in her reviews. In her review of Darkness Visible, Ceridwen poignantly expresses the connections she feels with generations past in Homestead. (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/258461711)  She recalls the stories and experiences that make up the cluster of emotions she feels about the family legacy--from the singing of Welsh hymns in her childhood to the spreading of my parents' ashes on the banks of the Monongahela River at the Battle site.  I can't get through the piece without blubbering--but then again, this is "our" story. 

Ceridwen and me with James Joyce, 1996

     Apparently, it was not for naught that we named Ceridwen after the Welsh goddess of poetic inspiration. (Both she and I like to tell the story of shape-shifting Ceridwen chasing around her shape-shifting offspring, Taliesin, the bard.)  After all, she comes from a line of storytellers named, consecutively, after the first U.S. President, a family of hymn-singing Welsh drunkards, and the title character in an 1896 English Gothic novel.

      Tóibín might have "killed" his mother in his writings, but Ed, Ceridwen, and I have made our forefathers--and in her case, mother--live.