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{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
—Baltimore. And in 1915 he answers an ad - a blind ad for somebody who is looking for adventure, willing to travel, and is quick-witted - he applies and it turns out that he's applied to the Pinkerton Detective Agency, the most famous- "The Eye that Never Sleeps", if you'll remember.

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Now the Pinkertons - I don't want to go off too far on this because it's an incredibly sordid tale in and of itself - by 1915 had a rather checkered reputation—

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—which was - that in addition to doing the ordinary work of getting evidence in divorce and industrial espionage cases - they were well-known for being strike-breakers.

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They were known as the "arm of industrial capitalism" and the most famous example of that is in 1886 at Homestead Steel strike where the owners, in Pittsburgh of the U.S. Steel Company, hire the Pinkertons who used a machine on a barge to kill 26 strikers. So their career is more than a little bit checkered.

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By 1915 - although we tend to forget that the Socialist Party was very strong in the United States, labor radicalism was still in the ascension - and this supposedly caused a huge- what was the beginning of Hammett's radicalism because he worked with the Pinkertons from 1915 to the early 1920s—

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—um, and this is where Hammett's career gets a little murky in a way that I don't feel it's been well-served by his biographers—

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—because, on the one hand he's living this adventurous life: riding the rails looking for Ferris wheels—

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—on the other hand he's involved because he's in the West, um, the Socialist Party and the new International Workers of the World, the I.W.W., is very strong in the mining and farming communities of Idaho, the Dakotas, Wyoming, and California—

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—he's also running up against this sense of injustice with these people being disenfranchised.

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And the story is - by his lover and long-time companion, Lillian Hellman - that around about 1917 he was given an offer of between 5 or 10,000 dollars to kill Frank-assassinate Frank Little, the I.W.W. leader—