It Could Happen Here - Wizards of the Coast Deploys the Pinkertons

Episode Date: April 28, 2023

Mia discusses the history of the Pinkertons and the arc of corporate military force that led them from mass murdering strike breakers to the enforcers of Magic the Gathering embargoes.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We are once again talking about Wizards of the Coast. Now, this time is not about Dungeons and Dragons. It is about their other property, Magic the Gathering, which, if you don't know, is Wizards of the Coast's trading card game that's at the forefront of some truly wild stuff right now. Now, you could ask, Mia, why are we even talking about this, about Magic the Gathering on this show? And, you know, there's multiple answers. One of them is that as industrial profit rates have been decreasing in the last half a century, capital is increasingly turned towards entertainment as a way to make money.

Magic is now a billion-dollar brand, partnering with everything from Fortnite to The Walking Dead to, and this is not a joke, being in the process of releasing an entire set of Lord of the Rings cards. As capital is flooded into the entertainment industry, and Magic in particular, our silly little hobbies are suddenly the front lines of class struggle. Workers at TCG Player this year, given the job of sorting through literally tens of thousands of cards that TCG Player processes, finally won their second attempt to form a union after two devastating union busting campaigns. And this is where things get very, very weird. Now, bear with me here, dear listeners. We have to talk about a little bit of

magic minutiaia to understand what has happened in this incident, and then we will get back to what the show is usually about, which is corporations killing enormous numbers of people. So a few days ago, Dan Cannon, a man who runs a very small magic YouTube channel called Old School MTG, bought what he thought were cards from the latest Magic the Gathering set called March of the Machine. Now, Magic releases new cards periodically in what are called sets. These sets have plots and characters. They have written stories.

They are enormous sort of lore events. They have enormous hype behind them. And March of the Machine, story-wise, is basically the version of an Avengers movie. Giant apocalyptic threats, all the heroes crossing over, people hopping through multiverses, etc, etc, etc. Now, okay, this has happened before Wizards does big sets. It wasn't that weird. But Wizards decided to do something very, very weird, which is they printed, for the first time ever, a mini set called March of the Machines,

March of the Machine Aftermath. Now the regular March of the Machines set has 387 cards in it. Aftermath has 50. Now I don't know why they decided to do this. They've never done anything like this. They've never printed just a tiny set they release a bit after the regular set before. And you know, the names are very, very confusing very confusing right one is called march of the machine the other one is marching the machine aftermath uh how how is a regular person supposed to keep track of this the mind boggles etc etc either way so dan cannon tries to buy cards from the regular march of the machine set what he gets in sent instead are by accident march of the Machine set. What he gets sent instead are, by accident, March of the Machine Aftermath cards.

Now, these cards are still secret. They have not been revealed yet. No one knows what they are. No one's supposed to know what they are. Before every set, there's an incredibly elaborate process where Wizards gives cards to influencers to reveal them to the public, and at a certain date everyone

reveals the people you know your influencer reveals what their card is and there's this whole hype cycle on reddit and everyone argues about how good the cards are and how cool the art is and what it means for the story it's sort of it's sort of similar to the the the the sort of hype cycles that would happen around trailers from marvel movies where people would be analyzing every detail of it etc etc and these are these spoiler seasons as they're called are a huge deal for wizards they wizards tries to heavily control the entire process but sometimes cards leak out now dan cannon suddenly has been handed a bunch of cards no one has ever seen before so he does what you know every person who just suddenly has magic cards that haven't been revealed yet do and have been doing for years and years and years.

He makes a video showing off the cards. Now, importantly, this is not illegal. I need to stress this because of what's going to happen, what is going to happen next. You know, it's very, very easy to look at the sort of severity of what's going to happen to this guy and assume that he broke a law. But no, he did not. He did not break a law. Nothing he has done is illegal. Literally, what he's done is he bought some magic cards from someone who screwed up and accidentally broke the street date for selling cards because he confused March of the Machine with March of the Machine Aftermath. Wow, how could anyone make that mistake, right? The genius of Wizards of the Coast marketing is unmatched. Everything they do

is incredibly clear, et cetera, et cetera. Now, in the process, because of how many cards he bought and how small the set is, he reveals most of the cards that are in the set. And then the Pinkertons show up to his house, forced away through his door, make his wife cry, threaten to arrest him and threaten to put him in prison for 10 years with $200,000 fines for copyright infringement on the grounds of him having stolen material. The Pinkertons also harass his elderly neighbors. Literally just today, as I'm recording this, a story broke on Gizmodo that revealed that Wizards of the Coast have used the Pinkertons before to go after stolen goods.

Now, some of you may be asking, who are the Pinkertons? And I think some of you probably know in very broad outlines who the Pinkertons are, but in order to really get at the core of what this organization is and why they look the way they do today as compared to how they've looked in the past, we need to ask another question, which is how has the balance of military power between the state and corporations changed over time? And this seems like a very weird question, And this seems like a very weird question, but the Pinkertons emerge in a very weird period of time in this balance. They are what fills in the gap between corporations directly having armies that could conquer nations and modern corporations who, instead of having their own personal armies, have vast intelligence agencies, but also rely on the police and the government as the people who do violence for them. So let's go back and tell the story from the beginning by taking a look, a brief look at the most infamous corporate army of them all, the army of the East India Trading Company. The East India Trading Company was formed in 1600, and it was given a vast state monopoly

over trade in what they called East India, which is an area we would broadly call Southeast Asia in the South Pacific today. And at the start, these guys are – optimistically, they are half trading group, half pirate. The level of piracy is really high, especially in the early days. They trade for spices. They steal a lot of other people's spices from places like Java, and they bring them back to England. They make a lot of money. Now, over the course of their actions, and again, it's worth noting,

these people are kind of the descendants of the British privateers, people like Thomas Drake, who'd been, you know, just pirates, who had been hired by the government to only go after like Spanish ships instead of English ships. So they are, you know, from the beginning, the East India Company has this sort of DNA of army in it. And over the course of about two centuries, they are going to conquer with their own army, most of what is now India and Pakistan. And that territory is either going to indirectly or their own army most of what is now India and Pakistan, and that territory is either going to indirectly or directly come under the rule of the East India Company. And the East India Company is fighting wars everywhere. Again, they seize India and Pakistan

by force. They are fighting wars in Afghanistan. They kill unfathomable numbers of people. The worst of these events is the Great Bengal F Famine. There's a Behind the Bastards episode about this that you can listen to if you want a really sort of long thing about the East India Company and the famine. But I want to talk about the famine a little bit because so the Great Bengal Famine of 1770 kills 10 million people. And I knew this intellectually, right? I studied a bit in college, but what I had never actually looked up somehow, what I'd never seen was the percentage

of the population that this famine kills. And this famine is directly the fault of the East India Company. This is something that all historians who have looked at this agree, is that this is directly the fault of the East India Company and the combination of their agricultural policies their tax extraction

to sort of put into perspective how bad this gets the highest serious estimates for the number of people who die in the great leap forward stands at about 30 million dead this is an unfathomable atrocity it is a scale of death at which the human mind breaks down and loses the ability to process. Some of my family lived through it. It is horrific in ways that are difficult to even begin to describe. The Great Leap Forward killed about 5% of China's population.

The Great Bengal Famine killed 30% of the population of India that the East India Trading Company controlled. 30%. That's not just sort of small of the population of India that the East India Trading Company controlled. 30%! That's not just sort of small population statistics either, right? It's not like they killed 30% of a country with 30 people in it, right? They killed 10 million people.

This is an unbelievable force of human evil. They are capable of killing people in numbers that defy comprehension. They're able to do this because they have an army that is the size of a great power nation state. The East India Trading Company's army in 1800 had 200,000 soldiers. That is a massive army today. That is like the size of the active Ukrainian army in 2022. It is more than twice the size of the active Ukrainian army in 2022.

It is more than twice the size of the British army in 1800. And in 1800, it's not like the British aren't fighting wars, right? In 1800, the British are fighting the war of the Second Coalition. So they are fighting Napoleon, right? So this isn't a sort of completely half-assed peacetime British british army this is a you know this is a serious military force and even even once they like fully build up their army at the peak of the napoleonic wars 13 years later the entire size of the british army is about 250 000 troops and that's not much larger than the east india company's army at the same time and at the height of the east india trading company their army swells to again 250 000 which is again the size of the regular british army at in in the most desperate war that the british had

fought to that point the east india trading company is a full-on military great power, right? But, and this is something that is going to shape an enormous amount of the sort of arc of the relationship between corporate and military power. It is unbelievably expensive to maintain an army like this. The British East India Company, even though they are looting entire nations, right? There are entire states where they're fully taking over the tax services. They're just walking into temples and taking stuff.

But even with all of that profit, right? They have the ability to mint their own coins in a lot of these areas, but they still lose money. And they still lose money, again, because they're maintaining this 250,000 strong army. And, you know, so you have this problem, right? Which is that you have this item on your balance sheet that is unfathomably expensive. And then you have a second problem, which is that if you have an army, there's always a danger that the army goes into revolt. And that's what happens in 1857. The British managed to piss off their own army, which is almost all composed of Indian troops,

and they fight an incredibly bloody war known as either Sapoy Mutiny or the Sapoy Uprising. And the British win, and after victory, they strap a bunch of prisoners' bodies to cannons and shoot them so they can't be properly buried. But the consequence of this sort of horrifying war, and particularly the sort of fear it invokes in the minds of the British populace of like, oh my God, these non-white people can actually fight us, is that they directly seize control of India

from the East India Trading Company. And for all you nationalization fans out there, the British assuming direct control of India was actually a nationalization. It's not actually inherently socialist, guys. You have to be a bit smarter than this. But that aside, right, this marks an enormous shift in the sort of political economy of violence.

What is happening here is that states are assuming direct military control over their colonies instead of operating through corporations and this means that what you see is a shift from direct corporate armies to corporations using the state to do violence for them and this doesn't mean that corporations don't use force directly today, and it also doesn't mean that the governments weren't acting as the armies of corporations in the balance of forces away from corporations with armies doing violence towards states doing violence on their behalf and this is one of the things alongside sort of slave catchers in the u.s that leads to the formation of the police um you see this but both both both in britain and in sort of france right You start to get police agencies that are, you know, largely tasked with putting down their own working class.

And this is one of the sort of inexorable marches that happens over the course of the 20th century. And it's also happening in the 19th century too. There is a sort of mass centralization of state and police power. And particularly,

that's an expansion of the bureaucracy, right? The American state in 1840 is barely a functional state by today's standards, right? state and police power and particularly that's an expansion of the bureaucracy right the american state in 1840 is barely a functional state by today's standards right like they they have an incredibly difficult time even figuring out how many people there are in the country their provisioning of services is a joke um nobody has id cards like people people don't even have birth certificates for the most part and and that's something, you know, and that's something that changes, right, over the course of sort of the 1800s and 1900s is that you get a massive bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is built on the model of the police and they get bigger and more powerful. And by the time you're, you know, you're halfway through the 20th century, you get a modern standing army. And that's something that is very, very weird. The founders who, you know, suck ass in enormous numbers of ways are also fundamentally and deeply opposed to standing armies because, you know, they are students of Roman history.

And they know that standing armies have this, you know, this sort of way of seizing power. But we've landed in a situation where, you know, they don't really need to, right? The US army is kept in check by the fact that it has basically a limited budget that increases every year, so you can't even, like, talk about cutting it without getting accused of treason. But it didn't used to be like that. In the 1800s, right, after a war would end, you know, entire parts of the, like, you know, all the U.S. Cavalry, for example, sometimes would just get disbanded, right? There would be these massive reductions in troop size in between wars, know that's that like doesn't happen anymore right but the product of

this was that you know there weren't that many like armed agents of the state running around with guns and that's the thing that is completely and utterly ubiquitous in modern american life i mean modern american life has reached a point where people you can't even imagine what it would be like if there weren't cops literally everywhere and if you didn't have the ability to call the police about anything and that was just the sort of the state of affairs for a lot of the 1800s in the u.s that just you know there really weren't police and you know this kind of midpoint in in in in the the level of sort of bureaucratic development and the level of sort of the bureaucracy of violence that is the police

happens after a bit after this the the civil war where there are not enough police to develop the kind of sort of to to deploy develop the kind of sort of, to deploy against the kind of violence that companies need to stop unions from forming. And, you know, there's a secondary problem, right? Which is, okay, so, you know, there are armed troops in a state, but the armed troops are the militia. And, you know, a lot of the times the militia can be relied upon to shoot striking workers and break them,

but there's always a chance that you order the militia in and the militia aren't people from the towns where I, you know, where the striking workers are from. And this was a real problem with sheriffs too, right? Is that in this period, you get it,

you get a lot of sheriffs who just won't prosecute workers because the entire town and the sheriff are all pro union. And this is where we come to the Pinkertons. But first, and this is something that the Pinkertons would have approved of, some ads. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join

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and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba.

Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. and we're back so who are the pinkertons the pinkertons are founded by a guy named alan pinkerton um alan pinkerton's an interesting guy he's he's kind of a radical when he's young he's

like he's a hardcore abolitionist who like funds john brown right um there's a whole debate about the extent to which he was involved in a sort of british workers reform movement called the charter lists i'd every source i've read disagrees about how much he was involved in it uh it's everyone's disagreements are basically pinned in their ideology i don't know if we're ever going to get a good answer about how involved in it he is but pinkerton briefly and kind of by accident becomes a bounty hunter but he just like walks across it just runs into a camp of people who seem to clearly be counterfeiters and he eventually becomes a detective around michigan and then in chicago and then he becomes

a postal cop and in the process of being a postal cop, he figures out something that is more lucrative. He figured out a more lucrative way to do detective work than just working for the state, which is working for the railways. So by 1850, he has a full detective agency going that he renames the Pinkertons. Now, you know, this is the 1850s, right? You are rapidly approaching the Civil War. During the Civil War, he is hired by George McClellan, just the worst Union general. He runs a spy network in the Confederacy that absolutely sucks. Like, all the spies get caught.

His intelligence being awful is one of the things that leads McClellan to suspect, you know, that there's, like, secretly way more Confederate troops than there actually are, so he just never does anything for the entire world he's like the worst union general until he gets replaced yeah when mcclellan is axed pinkerton's also out um but you know the agency is still around and the detectives are initially known as cider as cinder dicks for complicated railroading reasons i yeah i don't know about that one but it's very funny and what they sort of do right is in in this early phase they have this massive network of sort of informants and spies that they sell to the highest bidder they're not sort of

you know they are detectives right in some sense but they're not detectives in the Sherlock sense, where you have a guy who sees a bunch of evidence and then uses logic and uses investigation to deduce who did the crime. Pinkerton detectives are operatives. They do infiltrations. This is basically their one trick, right, is they send a guy undercover, and then he gets people to talk to him, and then they catch the guy because someone talked. Right. Now, the other thing that the Pinkertons are really, really good at is spinning mythology around them. Pinkerton claims that he saved Lincoln from an assassination plot. And, you know, he successfully convinces Lincoln to flee a building in a disguise.

Right. convinces Lincoln to flee a building in a disguise, right? The problem is that, you know, as early as like the next day after this, like supposed plot happens, assassination plot happens, people were already claiming that there wasn't one. And, you know, I think the evidence for there not being one is bolstered by the fact that no one was ever like, not only was no one ever tried for this, no one was ever even arrested for, again, a plot to assassinate the president of the United States. So I am inclined to suspect that this was fake. Historians disagree about this, but he's able to milk this for incredible PR.

Right. He's you know, he's like, I'm the guy who saved the president. And he does this whole sort of like, if I had been there when I if I if I had only been there when Abe Lincoln was being gunned down by John Wilkes Booth, ah, I would have saved him. And, you know, this makes them very famous. They also start doing, you know, it's sort of worth noting, right, the kind of crime that they're doing. These guys are, they're basically a corporate anti-crime group, right? they're basically a corporate anti-crime group, right? They solve crimes, but the crimes that they solve are people stealing from corporations.

For example, they do a lot of solving bank robberies. They do a lot of security to stop train robbers. They do counterfeiting. These are all kinds of crimes that affect rich people. And so the Pinkertons are slowly starting to gain this reputation as sort of like the hired hands of capital.

Now, they're also sort of doing like frontier outlaw stuff. There's a gang of people who, there's a gang of sort of bandits who they very successfully break up. But they also go after Jesse James. And, okay, we need to tell the story of Jesse James briefly here because it's an important thing to get an understanding of what the sort of conflict that's going on in the West is at this point. And the thing that's incredibly important to understand about the story of Jesse James versus the Pinkertons is that there are no heroes here.

Every single person involved in all sides is just an absolutely terrible person. So Jesse James is an ex-Confederate terrorist who somehow managed to make robbing trains uncool by doing it dressed in a KKK rope with the aim of like restoring the honor of the Confederacy. So this sucks. And this is where part of the sort of like rebel flag, like that part of the sort of like lost cause mythos comes from, right? There are these sort of frontier outlaws who are like ex-Confederates whose thing is like, yeah, we're like against the man. And like the man is like the North, right? But these people suck, right? These are people who fought and died for slavery.

these are people who fought and died for slavery i jesse james in particular like he's again he's in this group of like gorillas who are fighting in in kansas and missouri and they do they do things that are genuinely unspeakable so these people suck right the problem is the people going after them are the pinkertons and we're gonna learn a lot about the pinkertons by what they managed to accomplish by going after, again, ex-Confederate terrorists who are like some of the worst people who've ever lived. So the Pinkertons take this case in 1871.

He sends in a bunch of agents to try to infiltrate the gang and Jesse James just like smokes them all. So in a very sort of modern cop move, the Pinkertons do a raid on Jesse James' house. So they throw in this weird pseudo it's a very weird kind of explosive device thing that I don't know they claim that they were just trying to scare like the family out of the house so they could arrest them. But the family sees this thing that looks like a bomb and they throw it into

their fireplace and it blows up. And instead of smoking the family out, they have now blown up Jesse James's nine-year-old stepbrother and maimed his mom. So the Pinkerton's absolutely suck, right? Like so far in their attempt to catch Jesse James, they have managed to blow up a child and maim a woman. Now you could ask the question, right? Like, so far in their attempt to catch Jesse James, they have managed to blow up a child and maim a woman? Now, you could ask the question, right? Okay, so they have killed a child, they have maimed a woman. Do they get Jesse James? No, no, they don't. They never get him.

Because that's what happens when, you know, you have an ex-Confederate in places with a bunch of ex-Confederate, with a bunch of people who support the Confederacy, right? They won't turn over their own people. And, you know, and when the people they're going up against are the Pinkertons, who are like the hired guns of Northern Capital, a bunch of people, you know, what happens is a bunch of random people end up dead. And yeah, both sides of this are incredibly deeply evil. Jesse James is later shot by one of his own men.

And yeah, that is that that that is the famous story of jesse james versus the pinkertons which i i think is useful in establishing that like god like the south are obviously the bad guys in uh the civil war but a lot of the people in the union are sort of genuinely awful hired gun for capital people and you know that's not that's not so much of a big deal during the war but after the war you know you get these battles just like oh god everyone here is like everyone here should simply die now ellen pinkerton dies in 1886 and he is replaced by his even worse sons. And at this point, the Pinkertons cease even sort of the pretense of being a detective agency, and they devote themselves full-time to being strikebreakers.

Now, they have spies everywhere. They have, you know, over a thousand of them at their peak, spread across dozens and dozens and dozens of unions. They are spying on meetings reporting with the pinkertons and this allows corporations for example if you know who's in a union meeting right you can just fire all of them and this is especially easy in the in you know in this sort of pre-1930s period where like there is no protected right to strike right like if you if you if you stop working, that is illegal. The other thing they do is provide, quote-unquote,

security for corporations between strikes. What this looks like in practice is shooting people. And, you know, sometimes those people are striking workers, like the three strikers that killed in the Pennsylvania coal strike of 1890. Sometimes they just shoot random bystanders, like the random guy they shot in 1866 while providing security.

And, you know, again, when you're shooting a random bystander, you have to ask like security for who? Like who is the security you're providing for when you're just shooting random people? You know, nominally it's for the bosses who in a dock strike. And sometimes, like in 1877, they shoot children, where they shot and killed a 15-year-old in a Jersey Cole wharf strike. You know, and they do stuff like this all the time, right?

There's a famous incident in Chicago where a bunch of people are yelling at them because, again, the Pinkertons have a really bad reputation among workers at this point. And, you know, there's a point where they're going by on a train, and people yell at the train, and the Pinkertons have a really bad reputation among workers at this point. And, you know, there's a point where they're going by on a train and people yell at the train and the Pinkertons respond by taking out the rifles and shooting four people out the window. So, you know, these are good people, TM, right? The other thing they do is they start getting into breaking strikes by being a company you can hire to import scabs. And this culminates in the Homestead Strike.

Again, this is another thing that's like a Giant Bastards episode on, but we'll do a short version of the Homestead Strike. So the Homestead Strike is this giant confrontation between steel workers and the forces of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick. Carnegie and Frick like lock the union out of the factory and they call a Pinkerton army

to seize control of the town of Homestead. This is from the book Inventing the Pinkertons. Quote, By the end of June, he had built around the mills a protective 12-foot fence

that included rifle holes, water mains capable of blasting strikers with boiling water, and wires attached to a generator which could be electrified. In response,

workers dubbed the mills fort frick now dragging steel workers and other residents of of homestead here the pinkertons are coming and they they you know they the pinkertons are trying to land on these like invasion barges that they've modified and so the homestead people go to try to stop the barges and the pinkertons start shooting at them and this is this is another thing that's very interesting about this whole story is that, okay. Every account at the time agrees that the first person, the people who started shooting first with Pinkertons later accounts,

suddenly like mysteriously later on, you suddenly start to claim it like, well, nobody really knows you started the shooting in the, in these fights or like, maybe it was a worker, but like, again, everyone at the time started the shooting in these fights, or like maybe it was a worker, but like, again, everyone at the time

goes, it was the Pinkertons, so I, and given what we know about the track record of Pinkertons, of shooting children, of shooting random people yelling at them outside of a train, of shooting just literally random people on the street, I, we can be pretty sure the Pinkertons started this, but you know,

the workers in Homestead are heavily armed and this starts a massive gun battle. Uh, I'm going to read from, from inventing the Pinkertons again. This serious battle would last the next 14 hours. After an initial surge, the Pinkertons were pinned down in their barges. After several hours, the crowd attempted to sink the barges by cannon fire. Residents borrowed the cannon that had been been that the city used for commemorations by the way that that's a civil war cannon that they're using in 1890 to try to sink these boats the crowd also sent burning rail cars rolling towards the barges and sprayed oil into the river which they attempted to light on fire

in hopes of burning the pinkertons out of their barges. The lubricating oil thrown onto the water proved impossible to set aflame. So the Pinkertons, like, try to surrender, but by this point, people hate them so much that every, they do this four times, and each time someone will hold up a white flag, and a sniper will shoot the flag and refuse to let them

surrender. On try five, the Pinkertons are finally allowed to surrender, and the Pinkertons are crushed allowed to surrender and the pinkertons are crushed but unfortunately the state militia is brought in to sort of break the strike and the union movement in pennsylvania is essentially destroyed but pr wise this is terrible from the pinkertons and they start trying to do like a giant pr op to sort of recover their reputation and a lot of what the sort of popular image of the Pinkertons, right. Comes from the PR op.

The agency does like after the homestead strike that gets reproduced by like TV producers later on. So fast forwarding a little bit to some other stuff that they're involved in. In late 1905, someone blew up the notoriously anti-union governor of Idaho who'd sent troops to kill striking workers a few years ago. Now, Idaho hires a Pinkerton detective to just torture a guy into confessing to the

murder and then also claiming that basically every instance of violence in the last five years in that part of the US was committed by the IWW, who are, the IWW are a very, very radical union whose thing basically was that society should be run by like confederations of direct democratic unions like run you know all of society all production should be run by workers in these in you know in in in in the form of like one giant direct democratic union and people hate this my people i mean like bosses absolutely hate this the idw very idw very popularly with workers bosses are going to spend the next rest of their just murdering them you know but having having tortured this guy into uh saying into fingering the the industrial workers

of the world in this conspiracy they get big bill haywood who is one of the most famous and like successful organizers of the iww and several other iww leaders kidnapped and taken to idaho to stand trial for murder which again they had nothing to do with uh haywood is defended by clarence darrow of the infamous scopes monkey trial and haywood gets off but the case does serious damage to the iww um if you want to learn more about this whole story, go listen to cool people who did cool stuff. There's two episodes about the IWW in this period

called the IWW and the Hobos Who Saved Free Speech. It's good stuff. You know, and I should also briefly mention, right, another thing that the Pinkertons do is, okay, so if someone's wanted in one state, right, instead of having to, like, make, you know, the government havingons do is, okay, so if someone's wanted in one state, right? Instead of having to like make,

you know, the government having to like, the state government have to making requests, having to make requests to another state in order to get them to extradite someone, they would just have the Pinkertons kidnap them. This is one of the sort of big services they provide. They also seemed, it's very unclear. I don't know.

The historical record is a bit muddled they seem also to have been people you could hire if so if like your spouse was trying to divorce you which sucks it's deeply evil they they they do sort of uh lots more deeply evil stuff which we will get into after these ads. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

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All right, we're back. So speaking of deeply evil stuff, they also send 100 detectives to break a strike of the Mostly Black Brotherhood of Timber Workers, which is an IWW affiliate in Louisiana. Brotherhood of Timber Workers, which is an IWW affiliate in Louisiana. Now, they try to break this union by walking into a union meeting, shooting 44 people and killing four of them. There are like 40 more stories of a guy with a Pinkerton walks in, shoots a bunch of people that I could put here. I had to find the limit at some point to how many stories about Pinkertons murdering people that I could sort of put. But, you know, there's an interesting shift that starts to happen in sort of as the 1900s turn into the 1910s. The Pinkertons start to figure out that it's more effective to form mobs of vigilantes than it is to fight unions directly.

And there's a few benefits here, right? There's less danger to Pinkerton detectives themselves. It's easier to deploy large numbers of people instead of having to sort of like pay an enormous amount of money for a bunch of like 800 detectives and weapons and logistics. You can just sort of whip up a mob and get them to do the shooting, right? The Pinkertons also get plausible deniability, which is very helpful for their reputation. And, you know, the Pinkertons are very much ahead of the curve here. The government, you know, who is going to displace the Pinkertons as sort of the main force opposing the IWW and later sort of like CIO union organizing that, you know, turn into the two red scares, they're going to start taking pages from the Pinkertons book.

And eventually they're going to, you know, instead of like sending the U.S. Army to invade Nicaragua, which is what they would have done in the 1800s by, you know, by the time you get to the 1980s, right? They are sending people to train Nicaraguan death squads. And so we can track the shift here, right? As the 19th century comes to a close and we get to sort of the October Revolution to the height of the Red Scare, we're in a place where there's starting to be enough cops and enough federal agents to do the job the Pinkertons had done in previous generations. And there's sort of robust arguments in the sort of historiography about to what extent J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were influenced by the Pinkertons. I think there's decent evidence that they were influenced by them, but the FBI kind of turns into what the Pinkertons are. They're the people who suddenly are showing up and shooting people, showing up and arresting union organizers, deporting union organizers from the

country. But this puts the Pinkertons in kind of a weird spot, right? The Pinkerton name has become synonymous with sort of this kind of like, they're called sort of like feudal retainers, right? These sort of lawless private armies that are not supposed to exist in a democracy. And so in the 1930s, when the Wagneragner act like makes strikes legal right i talked about the wagner acts a long time ago an episode called the union makes it strong but uh after this they tried robert pinkerton the second who's the new sort of owner of the pinkertons tries to do a rebrand um and he has this great quote that's a quote he's talking about union busting that is a phase of our business that we are not particularly delighted or proud of, and we're out of it. However, there was nothing illegal

about it at the time. Now, okay, you can say a lot about what was or wasn't illegal in a period when, you know, you could order a drink that was cocaine mixed with wine and, you know, you could just get like opium prescribed to your baby, but torturing and murdering people was still legal back then. Now, I guess if you, you know, if you really wanted to have fun, you can get into an argument that like nowhere in the constitution is murder specifically banned, but like, you know, have fun with that. But FDR and the New Dealers go after the Pinkertons very hard. And this has a lot of interesting effects. What it means is on the one hand, you can't have some guy with a detective badge who works for a corporation walked into a union meeting and start the killing. But it also

means that when you need someone to smash a union by force, it's going to be the state doing it. And the apotheosis of this, the sort of one of the internal contradictions that destroys the New Deal is that its reliance on the state to contain the worst exes of capitalism means that, you know, they have in turn directly enormously empowered the state and the state's military capacity. And this means that in the 1980s, unions are going to be destroyed by the state that the new deal had built. The Pinkertons are replaced by Hoover and the G-men and the G-men are

eventually sort of become known as the dreaded modern fed who you know lurks at every doorstep eating babies and is the the the terror of every sort of political movement in the u.s now the pinkertons for for their part right with union busting now technically illegal and when i say union busting like i mean walking in shooting people stop them from forming a union uh they start working basically as as regular security guards and then they move on to selling surveillance equipment and training for government organizations and this reflects a kind of larger shift in what what kinds of military operations the corporations run which is that instead of directly running

armies or hiring groups like the Pinkertons to do violence for them, now what they're in the business of is intelligence operations. And this changes the way that corporations kill people enormously. When Coca-Cola now needs to kill union organizers, they have paramilitaries for this. Now, some of these guys are contractors, some of them are paid under the table, some of them are in it for ideology, some of it for money. But it's not quite like Coca-Cola has its own military force like it would have been in the 1800s, in the early 1800s. hiring a specific private military contractor, right? The way they do it tends to be they, you know, sort of semi-clandestinely arm paramilitary. Now, there are limited exceptions where sort of like oil companies will have private armies in places where civil wars are going on, but that's usually a thing that happens when they're in a place that doesn't have state capacity.

When they're in a place that does have state capacity, like for example, Nigeria, you get a very, very different story. So Nigeria is a major oil producer, and this has a number of consequences on the places where that oil is extracted. A huge amount of it comes from the Niger Delta, where the government faces an almost perennial insurgency. So, okay, why is there an insurgency there, right? Part of the reason is that there is an indescribable amount of wealth coming out of the oil in Niger Delta, and that money goes mostly to, I mean, I say mostly, 90% of it, right, goes to Nigerian elites and corrupt foreign oil companies. And, you know, another part of the reason this turns into an insurgency is that

people try nonviolent civil disobedience in the Niger Delta to protest the sort of horrific environmental consequences of companies like Shell doing oil extraction. You know, and they have these marches that will draw out 300,000 people in places where this is half of the population, half the total population of the ethnic group being affected. The Nigerian government responds by publicly executing one of the movement's leaders the famous activist ken saru wewa by hanging him and then dissolving his body in lime so he couldn't be buried which is some real british empire shit and okay so at this point you've come to the sort of crossroad of a non-violent movement right where the government's

answer to non-violence is we will publicly hang you and you get you get to this, do you take up arms? And the answer is, yeah, a lot of people do, right? This is a very complicated insurgency in a lot of ways that, you know, we can't do justice here too. But I want to read something from this interview from a guy from the movement for the emancipation of the Niger Delta, MEND, which is one of the like many, many, many, many, many like militant groups that appear in the Delta over the last 25 years. Quote, This is our territory. The soldiers dare not come here now.

They came and we defeat them, he says. We are civilized people, educated people, and we do not want our children to be deprived as we have been deprived so other people can get rich from what is under our feet. The oil companies have had many years to treat us right. They have never done that. Now we are making them think. Now, if this is, you know, 1820, right?

And Shell is dealing with people taking up arms and cutting off their ability to sort of like extract profits from oil, they would form an army of semi-literate Belgian and British barbarians, arm them with cannons and conquer the region and place the entire area under direct corporate rule. You know, if this was, say, like the 1890s, right, they would hire the Pinkertons and the Pinkertons would go shoot these people for them. But this is the 1990s and the 2000s. So instead, what Shell does is literally pay the salaries of Nigerian cops who go slaughter protesters in the streets, and eventually they move to spending hundreds of millions of dollars just between 2007 and 2009 alone, directly funding, equipping an army, the Nigerian army, and a special war crimes task force called the Joint Task Force, the JFTE, which is this – war crimes task force called the joint task force, the JFT,

which is this, like, it's this sort of incredible thing where the army, the Navy, and the police do a fusion dance to massacre civilians. And, you know, I say there's hundreds of millions of dollars, right?

That's an underestimate. That's just three years. That's just what we know about the actual total that they sunk into sort of like literally funding. The Nigerian army is enormous. Now what's, what's interesting here is that shell does have its own security guards, but the ratio of what they spend on the Nigerian army

versus what they spend on their own security guards is two to one. And this goes to demonstrate the point that I've sort of been making this episode, right? Which is that there's been a shift in, you know, know, if, if, if, if you are a company like shell, right. Who has a need, you know, who are horrifically exploiting a bunch of people to the point where you need to shoot them in order to keep them in line,

instead of going to like a private detective agency or having your own army, they are increasingly simply funding the state. And, you know, this, this means that right again, again, instead of the Pinkertons,

the actual trigger pullers are cops, they are the police, they are the military, they're weird special forces groups. And, you know, where that sort of leaves space for groups like the Pinkertons now is the area that's left for them is in corporate intelligence. And this seems to be most of what the Pinkertons have been up to recently. Amazon hired them in the last few years to work with their intelligence division, the Global Security Operations Center, which they use to try to stomp out union organizing in their warehouses. And Amazon isn't just sort of spying on union organizers. They're spying on basically every social movement they can get their hands on.

Here's from Vice. In 2019, Amazon monitored the Yellow Vest Movement, known as the Gilets Jeunes, a grassroots uprising for economic justice spread across France and solidarity movements in Vienna and protests against state repression in Iran. They've been deployed against strikes of communication workers in West Virginia. Google and Facebook deploys them against their own employees to root out leakers. Now, this is all in line with the pivot of sort of corporate repression

towards mass surveillance. Interestingly, the Pinkertons have been planting stories in the press about going back to their roots as mercenaries, pitching themselves as, you know, the force that can stop climate chaos with ex-military forces. The company claims to have been deployed

by corporations in Puerto Rico after the hurricane, after Hurricane Maria in 2017. I don't know if that's true. This is possible, but again, this is something that you have to be very careful with the Pinkertains, is that they are very, very brand obsessed, even though they're now owned by like a different sort of Swedish security company.

And they lie constantly. So it's very difficult to sort out sort of the myth from the fact when myth making has been such a vital part of their branding from the beginning. For another example, here's from New York Times Magazine. Among their most popular news services is the Pinkerton Dedicated Professional, in which agents join a client's company like any other new hire, allowing them to provide intel on employees. By 2018, the agency said it could count among its clients about 80% of Fortune 1000 companies. Are these numbers correct? Who knows? They absolutely could be lying, right? On the other hand,

here's Gizmodo talking about the current reach of the Pinkertons in Magic the Gathering. There are other connections between Wizards of the Coast and the Pinkerton agency. Robert M. Klimmich, who's been the Director of Security Risk Management at Hasbro Inc., which is the parent company, Wizards of the Coast,

for 12 years, was previously the Director of Supp risk management at hasbro inc which is the parent company wizard of the coast for 12 years was previously the director of supply chain security practice at pinkerton consulting and investigations the current manager of global investigations is also a forward pinkerton agent so what we saw in the fact that you know wizards of the coast said the pinkertons after a guy who made a YouTube video showing some cards that he bought from someone else is you know you can see in that the arc of the arc of what of what the Pinkertons are trying to do right you have on the one hand the Pinkertons falling back into their sort of intelligence role you also have them like specifically trading on their reputation to intimidate people and the other reputation they acquired by killing unfathomable numbers of people between the

1800s which they used to sort of intimidate people by just sort of the power of their reputation you can see something very interesting which is that the pinkertons don't arrest dan cannon directly right they're able to leave with the sort of goods, but what they threaten Dan Cannon with is the regular police. And that is, I think, a very important aspect of what the story actually is, which is it's a story about the modern division of labor of violence against people who corporations don't like.

And that division of labor runs through security you know you you have your major you have a major corporation that corporation has its own security division that security division is connected to the pinkertons they use the pinkertons as an intelligence network and they have done several times now and then you know when it comes time to you know you can use the pinkertons as like the people with the stompy boot but when it comes time to actually do violence against someone when it comes time to arrest someone that's the state's job and that that i think is the thing that's that you know that that that's very important to understand about the way all of this stuff works is that the thing that is true now about the year 2023 that was not true about the year like 1873

is that the the the the sort of primary driver of corporate violence in you know in in in the u.s and abroad is not necessarily private security companies it is the state and it is the police. And yeah, this has been It Could Happen Here. The police suck, ACAB. Get rid of them. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com,

or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

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