Mapping Undercover Investigation: Pinkertons, Policing and the 1930s War on Crime

Stephen Robertson, George Mason University

For seven decades beginning in the 1870s private detectives conducted investigations that reached into American workplaces, leisure activities, and homes. They operated as a de facto national police force, filling a gap in policing services at the state and federal level to meet the challenges of maintaining order and determining identity in the industrializing United States. Yet details of this activity, particularly the personal undercover surveillance that was a central technique of private investigators, are largely missing from accounts of the emergence of a modern surveillance society in the United States. This paper brings the nature and scope of undercover surveillance into focus by mapping investigations from the records of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Digital mapping as a method is both spatial and granular so reveals both the reach and scope of investigative work. Daily written reports that detailed how operatives spent their time are used to visualize the locations of investigative activity and the methods used. These investigation maps provide pictures of the reach of surveillance that reveal the roles of undercover and open practices and the failures and limits of personal surveillance. This paper focuses on examples from the 1930s when according to the current narrative Pinkertons should no longer have been involved in policing as state surveillance had expanded to take on the roles performed by private investigators. However, Daniel Richman and Sarah Seo have recently highlighted that the federalism that developed in this period was collaborative in its operation: the FBI facilitated interstate investigations and extraditions in return for the local knowledge and assistance of police. The continued reliance of police on private detectives represents an unrecognized feature of that localism that requires FDR’s War on Crime be understood as partly constituted by the expansive, invasive undercover activities revealed by mapping Pinkerton investigations

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 197. Mapping Perceptions of Space