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

[Mark Lause]

Dashiell Hammett is a very good example.

There's a number of others, starting with Charles Christian's 1812
tract laying out a role for those who police New York as protectors of
those without other protection, the poor and the innocant...a vision
of the police as social workers.

Then, there's one of the figures highlighted in my forthcoming book on
the origins of bohemianism in the U.S.: George S. McWatters.  A
wonderfully strange old bird who may well have been involved with the
Chartists abroad before coming to the US and, after various odd jobs,
found himself in the Modern Times socialist community out on Long
Island in the 1850s, while he was working as a theatrical agent in the
city.  Somehow, he wound up doing some private detective work and, as
another one of those active in the abolitionist underground, joined
the Republican police force, organized from Albany, which functioned
(sort of) side by side with Tammany's Democratic police force.  After
the former prevailed institutionally, he stayed with the police
department through the Civil War and set up the original bureau for
lost children, before leaving in 1870.  Right through all of this,
"Officer Mac" raised money for strikers and maintained close ties to
radicals on both sides of the Atlantic.

I'm sure these kinds of ambiguities in terms of law enforcement became
more difficult as time went on, but it's strange that it happened at
all.

ML