Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

the streets" is another elastic charge often used on such occasions. Sometimesthe arbitrary conduct of the police passes belief.Newspapers favoring the strikers' cause have been confiscated andprinting establishments closed on the supposition that they would "inciteto riot." Meetings of workingmen have been prohibited or broken up onthe theory that the men were planning a strike, and specific individualshave been denied the right to speak for the reason that they were "labororganizers." "I have this strike broken and I mean to keep it broken," adirector of public safety told me, as if breaking strikes were one of theregular functions of the police. ISSuch coercive activity is now generally considered the exclusive domain ofgovernments. but the use of violence to break strikes was at first the right andresponsibility of private employers. In the period immediately following the CivilWar, company guards were sometimes relied on to perform this function, whilein other cases the company reimbursed the city government for expensesincurred during strikes. 1(, Either way, capitalists facing unruly workers werecaught between the desire to directly control strikebreaking activity, and theexpense and difficulty of maintaining security forces at the necessary level. Itwas under these conditions that the Pinkerton Detective Agency grew to nationalprominence, achieving special notoriety for its use of an agent provocateuragainst the radical miner's organization, the Molly Maguires.17 By the mid-1880s,the Pinkertons had become part of the standard response to labor trouble, andtheir dual roles as spies and leg-breakers were often sanctified by deputizationinto local police departments.lsIn the coal fields of Pennsylvania, recurring unrest led the coal companies todispense with the Pinkerton middle-men and maintain an industry police of theirown, the "Coal and Iron Police." For a fee of $1 per officer, the state conferredpolkt> powpr" upon these company-controlled guards.19 In 1915, the COllunissionon Industrial Relations noted with disapproval thatone of the greatest functions of the State, that of policing, [was] virtuallyturned over to the employers or arrogantly assumed by them . .. [and by]criminals employed by detective agencies clothed, by the process of deputization,with arbitrary power and relieved of criminal liability for their acts.20During the early-twentieth-century Progressive Era, such civic-mindedconcerns, matched with the employers' unwillingness to bear the full cost ofstrikebreaking, shifted responsibility for these duties to the public police.The creation of the state police illustrates this process clearly. After the 1902Great Anthracite Strike, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed a body to investigatethe conflict and make recommendations concerning the unresolved disputes.The Anthracite Coal Strike Commission, as it was called, took this task a step further,recommending thoroughgoing changes in the policing of strikes. After quite a fewdamning words about the strikers,21 the commission concluded: "Peace and order ...should be maintained at any cost, but should be maintained by regularly appointedand responsible officers ... at the expense of the public."22 In May 1905, Pennsylvaniagovernor Samuel Pennypacker signed into law an act creating a state police force?3The Pennsylvania State Constabulary proved an effective force against strikes,since it recruited from across the state, thus minimizing the influence of any particu-108