[Marxism] A note on Pinkerton [Was: Our Favorite Communist Films]

[Greg McDonald]

Interesting train of events.

Mark L. wrote:

Pinkerton wasn't the first and wouldn't be the last serious radical
drawn by the logic of events into police work or one sort or another.

It'll prove a fruitful field for serious research and thought.


And then you have the example of Dashiell Hammett, who started as a  
Pinkerton and became radicalized as a result of his experience  
repressing wobblies out west:


Hammett lived a politically contradictory life. From 1915 to 1922, he  
was an agent of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. From the late 1930s  
until his death in 1961, he supported the Communist Party. During the  
McCarthy period, he fell victim to anti-Communist hysteria and was  
jailed for several months for refusing to cooperate with anti- 
Communist investigations. Hammett bore a large burden for his  
political sympathies: besides being jailed, he was also fined  
$140,000 for back taxes, and FBI head J. Edgar Hoover unsuccessfully  
opposed his burial in Arlington National Cemetery (see Brower 27-29;  
Hamlin). Christopher Metress notes, "Hammett's association with the  
Communist Party hurt his critical reputation in the academy" (67).  
Hammett wrote his most famous works, including Red Harvest, The Dain  
Curse, The Maltese Falcon, and The Thin Man in the space of time  
between these two opposite careers. While many former radicals had  
become anti-Communist neo-conservatives by the 1960s, Hammett is one  
of the few to have gone from being an agent of the premier anti- 
labour organization in the United States to being a supporter of  
socialism.

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-33839296_ITM