State governments chartered corporate private police armies to crush organized labor
Evidence
Private law enforcement has often been an attractive idea, and still is: think of the tens of thousands of security guards. A statute of 1865, in Pennsylvania, gave railroads the power to employ their own police. An act of 1866 extended this law to any “colliery, furnace or rolling-mill,” thus creating the “coal and iron police.” The state here authorized “a veritable private army,” at the request of “powerful interests.” These private police—they existed in other states as well— were deadly enemies of the unions. They were “toughs,” strikebreakers, inimical to organized labor. The companies nominated members of the coal and iron police. The governor then appointed them. They had the same authority as city police officers. It was not until the 1930s that they were finally abolished in Pennsylvania. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3309
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the ch84 claim that nineteenth-century police functioned as municipal strikebreakers; both show capital enlisting state coercive power directly against labor. — connects to: Social democracy made the state police the working class it claimed to represent.; Fascist corporations displaced autonomous trade unions by state-granted sole bargaining rights
- SEED: A ‘private armies of capital’ essay tracing how state authorization turned corporate police (coal and iron police, Pinkertons) into the enforcement wing of Gilded Age employers.