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Private Detective Agencies and Labour Discipline in the United States, 1855–1946*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Robert P. Weiss
Affiliation:
State University of New York: Plattsburgh

Extract

As a professional and bureaucratically organized institution of social control, the police in the United States originated less than 150 years ago. Traditionally, this development has been explained as an inevitable response to a dramatic rise in felonious crime. According to this type of account, a criminal reaction was a natural by-product of such factors as urbanization, immigration, and industrialization. Other investigators have disputed this interpretation, arguing that there is little evidence to support the occurrence of a crime wave. Rather, the municipal police in America originated as part of a larger class control apparatus designed to regulate working class social and political activities, including ‘subversive’ speeches, strikes, riots, and daily breaches of the ‘public order’. Those who argue that the ‘new police’ developed as a crime fighter typically neglect to discuss one of the oldest forms of professional policing in die nation, the private detective agency.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

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82 As an example of how effective Bugas' new offensive tactics were, and how far the grounds of dispute had shifted, union bargainers countered Ford with an offer to bring unauthorised strikers up before a union trial board. ‘The union was kept so busy answering the company demands that it was not until a few days ago that it was able to inject its own call for 30 per cent in the discussion at all’, observed Business Week, 8 December 1945.

83 ‘Two-way bargaining demand’, Business Week, 24 November 1945; ‘Clerical revolt’, Business Week, 15 September 1945; ‘White collared’, Business Week, 22 September 1945. White-collar workers were becoming increasingly discontent, and willing to show it in organizational activity. The September 1945 strike at Westinghouse dramatized the ‘revolt of the white-collar worker’. The close integration of plant and office idled 30,000 non-striking production workers, with the prospect of soon idling 60,000 more. This, one of the biggest strikes of white-collar workers, revealed the power that office employees possessed to stop manufacturing operations cold. Undermining unionization of the ‘new working class’ would provide a new area of ‘labour relations’ work for private detective agencies. See Huberman, , The labor spy racket (New York, 1966, rev. edn)Google Scholar.

84 To ‘keep alive their old bonds, the ex-stalwarts of the FBI have created their own association’, the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, Inc., whose president at the time was a personnel executive of American Airlines, observed a 20 July 1946 Business Week article. The Society is a formal institutionalization of the ‘old boy network’ begun under Mr Burns. This fraternity serves as a recruitment and placement service for graduates, and Business Week continued, ‘relations with the old chief are cordial, almost reverent’. See also, ‘Post to FBI ex-agent’, Mew York Times, 25 September 1947, p. 44.