Note and Comment

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 23, 1914

The Private Armies of Capital

IN a book, “Violence and the Labor Movement,” by Robert Hunter, recently issued by the Macmillan Company, it is charged that there are hundreds of detective agencies in the United States employing men by the hundreds or thousands, who “are to the money kings of today what mercenaries were to the medieval dukes and princes.” One agency is said to employ constantly five thousand men, ready and competent to serve in any capacity desired in connection with labor troubles. Mr. Hunter deplores the ever-increasing commerce of these industrial soldiery as being “as great an evil as has ever afflicted any country at any time.” He presents, according to the review of his book in the Literary Digest of April 4, this pen picture of conditions:—

You have only to call on the telephone any one of hundreds of “detective” agencies to obtain an assassin of the very choicest brand. You should not, of course, ask for a thief or a pickpocket or a murderer. You should ask for an operator or a special officer or a private detective. But, no matter what you ask for, you will get a man carefully selected for his skill in criminal work. You will obtain a man who can shoot straight, an agent who needs no troublesome explanations or detailed instructions. He will be an understanding person, who will comprehend very easily and quickly the nature of the work to be done. Trained in the ways of the underworld, the “detective” will undertake to see that the patron is successful in whatever mischief he wants done. He will steal the correspondence of a business rival, bribe his clerks, burn his factories, or incite a strike among his employees. He will dynamite his works, slug him or any one else, and, in case court work is necessary, he will obtain enough perjured evidence to accomplish almost any purpose whatsoever. There is, in fact, hardly any conceivable crime that the mercenaries supplied by the American mafia are not capable of committing. And, most important of all, no matter what the agents do, it is understood that they will be fully cared for by the mafia and protected all along the line by its able attorneys. This American mafia has its agents in every city and town in the country.

To convey an idea of the extent and profits of this line of work, Mr. Hunter offers the following figures:—

An agent operating in West Virginia and Colorado testified that he has employed as many as 5,000 men. Another agent has testified that he supplied in one strike as many as 1,000 men. Still another witness says that, in one of our great strikes, there were over 2,000 armed detectives employed, while several hundred more were scattered for secret service among the strikers. Mr. Leroy Scott, a few years ago, undertook to describe in the World’s Work the activities of one of the great strike-breaking agencies. He declared that the particular agency had 35,000 men enrolled, and that the head of the agency was in communication with 7,000 or 8,000 others. In one brief strike he supplied 5,000 men, and his income for handling that strike was equal to the annual salary of the President of the United States. This gives some idea of the immense profits that come to the manipulators of this commerce. In reality, they make enormous sums, which is clear from the fact that they pay their men from two dollars to three dollars a day, while they receive from the employers on an average of five dollars a day. Of course the profits of these agencies depend upon the number of men employed, and consequently the chief interest of these agencies is to get more and more of their men employed. An agency that can supply 1,000 men and make out of them $2,000 a day is conducting an enormously profitable concern.

This is a startling revelation of conditions growing out of the struggle between capital and labor. What the future will reveal in this struggle only time will tell. We know this, that conditions will grow worse and worse, even as sin in general will increase, till the end of all things.

While it is possible that the statement in the first quotation may be overdrawn, yet the outcome of many trials, the ease with which many guilty persons escape justice, and the failure even to apprehend the perpetrators of many crimes, lend color to the picture drawn in the above quotation. But even if it is overdrawn, the widespread suspicion that those conditions exist, and the publication of such statements as facts, are hastening the day when the disastrous clash will come between these opposing forces.