Surrogate Supervisors: Railway Spotters and the Origins of Workplace Surveillance

Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Volume 5, Issue 1

DOI 10.1215/15476715-2007-055 © 2008 by Labor and Working-Class History Association

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For their comments and critiques, I thank Christine Walker, Cindy Hahamovitch, Sam Luebke, Scott Nelson, Steve Meyer, and the editor and anonymous reviewers for Labor.

1. New York Times, September 26, 1874. A few months earlier, the newspaper reported a similar sce-nario on the Dry Dock line, when conductor Thomas Sheridan turned in spotter John R. Fiddler for the same spoils-sharing scheme. Likewise, Sheridan was arrested along with the spotter. New York Times, June 7, 1874. See also New York Times, August 15, 1882, for a “blackmailing spotter” also arrested in Yorkville.

Surrogate Supervisors: Railway Spotters and the Origins of Workplace Surveillance

Jennifer Luff

In 1872, Walter Pitt worked as a conductor on the Second Avenue Railroad, a horse-drawn street railway in New York City. As passengers boarded the train, he collected their five-cent fares, and he was responsible for maintaining order on the train. One day in November, a passenger named Stephen Force got on his train at Peck Slip and struck up a conversation. Casually, Force sized Pitt up, and then Force told Pitt that he was a “spotter,” hired by the railroad to watch Pitt secretly and report whether he turned in all the fares or pocketed any nickels for himself. Force offered Pitt a deal: he would give the conductor a clean report if Pitt agreed to split whatever he skimmed off the fares.

Pitt listened carefully to the spotter’s proposal, then he agreed to the swindle and gave Force a dollar bill to seal the arrangement. Force rode along with Pitt until they came to the next stop. When the streetcar stopped, Pitt stepped off the train and called to a mounted policeman. He reported Force’s fraudulent scheme, and the policeman found Pitt’s specially marked dollar on Force. But the street railway filed a complaint against both of them, suspecting that Pitt conspired with Force. The rail-way trusted Pitt no more after his proof of honesty than before.1

Undercover agents called “spotters” posed as passengers and surreptitiously watched railway conductors on railroads and streetcars across the United States begin-ning in the 1850s. Although unfamiliar to historians, spotters were ubiquitous on railways and infamous among conductors. Spotters rode trains and tried to make

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themselves inconspicuous while discreetly observing conductors, watching especially for thefts of passenger fares. Spotters then reported their findings to railway man-agement. Conductors loathed this secret scrutiny, as an anonymous bit of doggerel suggests:

Dear Spotter:The conductor yearns to yank theeTo his brawny breast and squeezeThy palpitating gizzardThrough thy vest.2

However, conductors and their unions were hamstrung by the embarrassing fact that conductors did steal fares, sometimes prodigiously. Railway workers and their unions struggled to criticize the excesses of the spotter system while conceding the problem of worker theft.

Reconstructing the skirmishes between spotters and conductors yields a fresh angle on the battle for workplace control in industrializing America. Spotters were like surrogate supervisors, watching on behalf of a remote management, and conduc-tors experienced a form of managerial supervision that was unique in their era. Con-ductors condemned fare-palming as an antisocial act that encroached on the railway profits that paid everyone and caused mistrust of all conductors, innocent or guilty. Their unions conceded the problem of fare theft, and thus while artisans and craft workers fought employers for control of the shop floor, conductors’ unions accepted the legitimacy of an intense, invisible form of supervision.

The unions generally withheld mutual aid from accused conductors. But con-ductors hated being watched. As one conductor put it:

For a man to enter upon a work over which he learns there is a secret espionage, creates a conscious sensation of distrust which destroys any pleasurable assurance that the employe enjoys the confidence of his employer. Not only does this suspicion of distrust rest with the employer and employed, but a hazy veil of shadowy doubt seems to hang suspended between the employe and the average patron. Nothing is so provokative of discontent; nothing so offensive to the human instinct.3

And conductors feared being falsely accused or conned by spotters, like New York conductor Walter Pitt. Left to fight spotters on their own, conductors turned to the courts, where sympathetic juries frequently exonerated them. Vast public outrage toward railroads and streetcar companies buoyed popular support for accused con-ductors, and apparently helped drive the adoption of antispotter laws in some states with little help from the railway unions.

2. “Sunshine” [Martin P. Wheeler], Judas Exposed; or, The Spotter Nuisance: An Anti-Secret Book Devoted to the Interests of Railroad Men (Chicago: Utility Book and Novelty Co., 1889), 13.

3. Motorman and Conductor, January 1904, 21.

Railw ay Sp o t t e r s and t he Or ig ins o f Wor k p lac e Sur vei l lanc e 49

Rather than draw on this public support to limit spotters, the streetcar union embraced a technological fix: fare boxes, the union hoped, would remove fare collect-ing from conductors and eliminate the need for spotters. Instead, the fare box elimi-nated conductors’ jobs. Meanwhile, the same firms that created the technique of spot-ting expanded into labor espionage, a more insidious form of workplace surveillance. While spotters posed as passengers, labor spies posed as workers, penetrating union meetings and collecting lists of agitators for employers. When detectives moved from the railcar into the union hall, they brought a “hazy veil of shadowy doubt” to divide railway workers, undermining organizing campaigns and strikes. Undercover work-place surveillance began as a way to detect theft by individual workers but grew into a method to disrupt solidarity among entire workforces.

Evidence about spotting survives in union papers and journals, newspapers and periodicals, exposés and advice books for spotters, and court cases. These sources tend more toward anecdote than systematic data, making it difficult to precisely quan-tify the scope of conductor theft and railway spotting or to periodize the changes in these practices. This essay starts with the beginnings of spotting on railroads and then turns to its introduction on streetcars. Spotting practice was the same on both railroads and streetcars, although working conditions differed greatly. Much more evidence survives about streetcar spotting, however, and most of the following argu-ment focuses on streetcar conductors as they contended with spotters on their trains, in courtrooms, and in their unions.

As railroad track spread across the United States in the nineteenth century, employee rolls swelled. National railroad employment shot up from less than ten thousand in 1840 to more than four hundred thousand in 1880. In the running trades, or the occupations associated with operating trains, a majority of workers came from native farm families, and the roads trained workers on the job.4

A hierarchy of labor emerged immediately. Brakemen and firemen had dirty and dangerous jobs with low wages and little hope of promotion, and at the pinna-cle of the running trades perched engineers and conductors. Engineers earned the most money and exercised great autonomy on their trains, and conductors ranked just beneath engineers in pay, with responsibility for managing both passengers and freight. Conductors and engineers earned higher wages than most skilled occupations throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.5

4. Walter Licht, Working for the Railroad: The Organization of Work in the Nineteenth Century (Prince-ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 221–22. While white native-born workers dominated the run-ning trades and shop crafts, European and Chinese immigrants and native-born African Americans laid track. On track laborers, see Scott Reynolds Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry: The Untold Story of an American Legend (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), and Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880 –1930 (New York: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 2000); on the shop crafts, see Colin J. Davis, Power at Odds: The 1922 National Shopmen’s Strike (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997.)

5. Shelton Stromquist, A Generation of Boomers: The Pattern of Railroad Labor Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 106–10.

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Conductors and engineers rapidly invented their own traditions. Eager to shore up their desirable positions, they developed a craft consciousness and mim-icked the exclusionary techniques of long-standing craft trades. In the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (BLE) and the Order of Railroad Conductors (ORC), work-ers in the running trades built unions dedicated to strict self-interest and unalterably opposed to solidarity with workers of other ranks on the railroads. They abjured strikes, looking instead for a collaborative approach with railroad managers. The BLE considered “the interests of engineers and the railroads they served as identi-cal,” wrote historian Shelton Stromquist, and the ORC was “infamous in the circles of organized railroad workers for its identification with the interests of management.” 6 Elite railway men aspired to social status commensurate with their workplace rank. Passenger conductors took a particular interest in creating a craft identity of culture and refinement. Conductors wore fine suits and uniforms, carried fancy watches, and pursued literary interests. As workers enjoying some of the best jobs in the nineteenth century, railway men developed and relished an image as sober and refined gentle-men of standing.7

Conductors’ predilection for theft undermined this cultivated persona. On the Concord Railroad in 1866, widespread theft led the railroad to fire all of its conduc-tors en masse and issue writs against their property totaling $300,000.8 Two Pennsyl-vania Railroad conductors were convicted of selling unused railroad tickets for $300 to a traveling salesman, who scalped them in Baltimore, in 1884. Conductors in Syracuse developed an elaborate kickback scheme in 1893. Saloon keepers and businessmen who were in on the scam showed specially marked cards to conductors, who charged them half the regular price and pocketed the fare.9 Appropriations of passenger fares were so widespread that the practice earned its own slang: Americans referred to con-ductors’ embezzlements as “knocking down.”10

Their role as ticket takers gave conductors opportunity and temptation. Rail-roads sold tickets at stations, and railroad conductors collected tickets from passengers after they boarded. Most roads also permitted passengers to pay their fares directly to the conductor on the train. Both of these scenarios presented a chance to steal. Con-ductors carried books of tickets with them for issuance to passengers who paid on the trains. These ticket books could be pilfered and sold. As for tickets purchased from agents, conductors were to punch these tickets with a hole or mark, invalidating them for repeat usage; if a conductor failed to punch the ticket, it could be resold. For fares paid aboard the train, no record of the fare existed save what the conductor kept. It

6. Stromquist, A Generation of Boomers, 108–9.7. Licht, Working for the Railroad, 221–22; Stromquist, A Generation of Boomers, 106–10.8. New York Times, February 18, 1866; Licht, Working for the Railroad, 95.9. New York Times, March 24, 1893. Conductors on the Hudson River Railroad the previous year ran

a similar operation, using a newsboy and a saloon keeper to scalp the tickets.10. The Oxford English Dictionary finds the first use of “knocking down” in 1854. “Knock,” Oxford

English Dictionary [online], n.d., dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/ 00127503/00127503se23?query_type=word& querywword=knock (accessed July 31, 2004).


was easy enough simply to pocket the money. With no manager on board the train, conductors were free to choose their course, since brakemen subservient to them were the coworkers most likely to witness their thefts.

Further, a robust secondary market made stolen tickets easy to liquidate. Inde-pendent ticket agents called “scalpers” began selling passenger tickets in the 1850s. Scalpers obtained unused tickets from passengers who were unable to use them and sold them at a small discount. As railroad fare competition escalated, passengers fig-ured out that a long-distance ticket was often cheaper than a shorter trip; by the 1870s, a passenger traveling from New York to small-town Indiana could buy a less-expensive ticket to St. Louis, get off the train at her Indiana destination, and sell the remaining ticket between her small town and St. Louis. Railroads themselves sold batches of tickets to scalpers when fare wars broke out. In addition to professional scalpers, saloon keepers and merchants casually sold tickets if they got some. Conduc-tors had ample venues for trafficking stolen tickets.11

For conductors, no customary right of takings sanctioned their thefts (as, for example, eighteenth-century shipyard workers in England, long permitted to take scrap wood, could claim).12 Relatively well paid, trainmen could hardly argue that palmed fares supplemented an inadequate wage. Conductors and trainmen likely stole because they could. This fare-palming looks more venial than political. Among

The appropriation of passenger fares by conductors was so common that it led to the term “knocking down” being introduced into the popular lexicon, as shown in this Los Angeles Times cartoon from June 24, 1901.

11. On the phenomenon of scalping, see New York Times, July 28, 1874; ibid., April 14, 1875, and March 19, 1882.

12. On the gradual criminalization of customary rights of takings in eighteenth-century England see Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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oppressed groups–African American workers living under slavery or Malaysian peasants surviving an authoritarian regime—historians have analyzed theft as an “infrapolitical” act of resistance, undertaken in part because traditional political acts are proscribed. Well-paid native-born white conductors enjoyed full political enfran-chisement and the protection of a craft union. It is hard to see their thefts as a form of resistance.13 At the same time, fare thefts bear little resemblance to the graft endemic to the Chicago craft trades described in Andrew Wender Cohen’s fascinating Rack-eteer’s Progress. Conductors did not collude with management to steal, nor did they embezzle from the union treasury.14 Knocking down looks most like a petty crime of opportunity.

Railroads searched endlessly for technologies and ticketing procedures to thwart conductor theft. Early on they tried to permit ticketing only by agents, as an 1864 American travelogue remarked, because conductors “grew rich on the money they could not be made to account.”15 But it was impossible to eliminate on-train tick-eting, as some passengers always boarded without a ticket, “because of indifference; others through forgetfulness,” and some “from improper motives.”16 Railroad accoun-tants recommended that cash receipts must be issued to all passengers, and tickets were issued with passenger names inscribed on them, not to be transferred to another person. Elaborate numbering and double-bookkeeping systems to account for tickets aimed to make thefts easier to detect.17

Allan Pinkerton had another idea. Pinkerton had been picking up work as a freelance investigator around Chicago in the early 1850s, apprehending counter-feiters and working as a postal inspector. In 1855, Pinkerton convinced six Chicago-area railroads to jointly sponsor a railroad-checking business; Pinkerton would sup-ply detectives to report on the “habits and associations of the employees.” Within a few months, Pinkerton’s agents had caught a conductor on the Chicago & Burling-ton Railroad with a pocketful of ticket receipts, valued at $36.18 Railroads swiftly embraced spotting. By 1861, a guide to railroad management took the practice for granted: “the faithful conductor has no power to prove his fidelity, nor the railway

13. On workplace theft as “infrapolitical,” see James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 289–303; Robin D. G. Kelley, “We Are Not What We Seem: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” Journal of American History 80 (1993): 89–95.

14. Andrew Wender Cohen, The Racketeer’s Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern Ameri-can Economy, 1900 –1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

15. Thomas L. Nichols, Forty Years of American Life, vol. 1 (London: John Maxwell and Company, 1864), 89.

16. Marshall M. Kirkman, Handbook of Passenger Traffic and Accounts (Chicago: Chas. N. Trivess, 1890), 68.

17. See, for example, J. E. White, White Audit System: Detail of Operation (n.p., 1914), for an example of the proposed systems that circulated.

18. Licht, Working for the Railroad, 122; Frank Morn, The Eye That Never Sleeps: A History of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 17–19.


managers any exact means to prove the truth of any suspicions they may entertain, except by espionage.”19

Pinkerton emphasized the benefits of using an outside firm to spot conduc-tors: detectives were upright and professional, while supervisors entangled in a web of obligation with their employees may have been loath to investigate theft. More practi-cally, conductors would instantly recognize a supervisor riding the train, while detec-tives could observe anonymously. Further, using an agency permitted railroads to claim some distance from the awkward complexities of figuring out whether employ-ees stole. A former spotter thought that railroads contracted the spotting function out “principally because the roads wish to be relieved of all liability and the direct responsibility of dickerings and controversies with their employees and the railroad brotherhoods.”20 Railroad executives using agency spotters could counter protests by local managers and workers alike by invoking the neutrality of an outside observer.

Whatever his skills as a detective, Pinkerton was a genius at marketing. From his first contract in 1855, railroad spotting grew to constitute “a large extent” of his business, with “detection of embezzlements by Railroad Passenger Conductors a spe-cialty.” Pinkerton produced an advertising circular, Tests on Passenger Conductors, with pages of tables to show the big savings he could offer. He claimed that on the Phila-delphia and Reading, “in 1863, Conductors in that Railroad embezzled 32 per cent of the collections, or, 18 cents per mile; whereas, in 1866, only 6 per cent of the collec-tions, or less than one cent per mile was taken by other conductors; thus exhibiting the practical advantages of the tests applied upon that Railroad.”21 Pinkerton soon faced competition from a number of other firms that streamed into the business. A major rival emerged in St. Louis: Gus Thiel’s Detective Agency, founded in 1873 by a former Pinkerton detective.22 As railroad employment grew, so did potential demand for spotters.23

Street railways also offered a burgeoning market for spotters. Street railway work had none of the cachet of the railroad running trades. Street railways operated with a driver to drive the horses or a motorman to operate an electric car. Conductors rode the cars to collect fares and maintain order on the car. As with railroad work-ers, most street railway employees came from farm backgrounds. Worker turnover

19. John B. Jervis, Railway Property: A Treatise on the Construction and Management of Railways (New York: Phinney, Blakeman and Mason, 1861), 217.

20. [Clarence Everly Ray], The Railroad Spotter: An Expose of the Methods Employed by Detective Agen-cies and Bonding Companies (St. Paul, MN: Virtue Printing Co., 1916), 6.

21. Allan Pinkerton, Tests on Passenger Conductors (Chicago: G. H. Fergus, 1864), 4.22. J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 84–85.23. Spotting spread to department stores by the 1890s, according to Elaine S. Abelson. Detectives and

agents visited stores to browse while surreptitiously surveilling clerks; they tested clerks’ honesty by mak-ing purchases and leaving change behind, to check whether the clerk would keep the change. Elaine S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-thieving: Middle Class Shoplifting in the Victorian Department Store (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 109–111.

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was extremely high. On New York City streetcars in 1904, 99 percent of employees had been with the company for less than one year; in Spokane, 1904, 40 percent less than one year and 59 percent less than two years.24 Drivers and conductors endured long workdays that often involved split shifts, rode in open vestibules exposed to the elements, and were often forbidden to sit while working, leading to painful hernias, varicose veins, and other ailments.25 In the 1870s, streetcar conductors got about $1.50 per day, and drivers slightly less than conductors—about half the wage of their rail-road counterparts and less than most skilled and semiskilled occupations.26 A street-car workers’ union official commented in 1907 that “most men enter the occupation to tide over a period of idleness, without any idea of making it permanent. Few fol-low the vocation through choice.”27

Streetcar unionism grew slowly until the turn of the century. Workers started organizing in the 1870s with the Knights of Labor, but these unions rose and fell along with the fortunes of the Knights.28 As the Knights’ national profile shrunk in the aftermath of the Haymarket massacre, the American Federation of Labor looked to take over its locals and founded the Amalgamated Association of Street Railway Employees in 1892. The new union struggled in its first years, and the Amalgam-ated actually shrunk in the 1890s. When the union enjoyed a burst of growth at the turn of the century, Amalgamated officers attributed the increase to an inculcation of “discipline” among sometimes “impulsive” members, but more likely the rising eco-nomic tide lifted the Amalgamated along with the rest of the labor movement, which saw explosive membership growth in the same period. The union’s membership grew from approximately three thousand workers in 1900 to nearly sixty thousand in 1915, and its number of agreements with railway companies jumped from 22 in 1901 to 203 in 1915.29 The union concerned itself with bread-and-butter issues and fought hard for material improvements in the cars, earning loyalty from its members. Priorities included enclosure of the vestibules in which drivers rode, to protect them from wind and cold; seats for conductors; reductions in working hours; and, of course, wages.

24. Emerson P. Schmidt, Industrial Relations in Urban Transportation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1937), 84.

25. Ibid., 102–5, 74–75.26. Licht, Working for the Railroad, 126; Schmidt, Industrial Relations in Urban Transportation, 103–5.27. Motorman and Conductor, February 1907; quoted in Schmidt, Industrial Relations in Urban Trans-

portation, 83.28. According to Schmidt in Industrial Relations in Urban Transportation, the Knights’ unions faded

because of the Knights’ community base, which allowed workers from other trades to manage negotiations for streetcar workers and focus on the twelve-hour day. Schmidt’s work, based heavily on interviews with Amalgamated leadership, vindicated the Amalgamated’s craft union approach, but little research exists that compares the broad-based Knights to the Amalgamated. David Scobey found that the New York streetcar Knights grew along with the city’s radical working-class campaign to elect Henry George in 1884 and collapsed when labor unity fractured after the campaign’s defeat, in some ways supporting Schmidt’s assessment. Scobey, “Boycotting the Politics Factory: Labor Radicalism and the New York City Mayoral Election of 1884,” Radical History Review 28–30 (1984): 280–325.

29. Schmidt, Industrial Relations in Urban Transportation, 156–57.


Streetcar conductors collected cash fares in small change from constantly shifting large crowds and often made change for customers out of their own pockets. Opportunities to skim off fares were numerous. Conductors scalped transfers and tickets; they made change with counterfeit coins.30 News stories and anecdotes about streetcar conductor theft filled the newspapers, some recurring like urban legend. One anecdote described a conductor who split his fare collections fifty-fifty, half to his pocket and half to the railway. Debating whether to keep the final nickel of his run, the conductor flipped the coin, but when the company won the flip, he flipped repeat-edly and finally kept the nickel anyway. The company superintendent sent him a note firing him, saying, “We might have been able to stand for the fifty-fifty arrangement, but when the company won that last nickel twice and you refused to abide by the result it was too much.” 31

Newspapers editorialized that streetcar conductors stole because they were underpaid and overworked: “By reducing their requirements of these men, the com-panies would, not improbably, increase their own receipts, and at the same time diminish their expenses by the wages of some of their spies and ‘spotters,’ whose ser-vices would become superfluous.” 32 Streetcar workers did not echo these sentiments. Of course, in private, streetcar workers (and railroad conductors) might have endorsed fare-palming or collaborated on it. In their public writings, however, conductors con-demned their co-workers’ thefts because of the consequences: increasing workplace surveillance of all workers and the enrichment of the thief at the expense of everyone. “Graft will not be tolerated,” a Gary, Indiana, conductor put it. When the company made a profit, “we want it equally divided, and in the shape of increased wages.” 33 Conductor fare theft sought individual gain at the expense of the common good.34

Street railway companies tested all sorts of devices to reduce conductor theft. The use of tokens and tickets at least inconvenienced conductors by requiring them to traffic the token or ticket to realize a gain. An instrument called a bell punch, invented sometime in the 1860s, proliferated on street railways. Variants abounded, but all bell punches had two key features: a bell and a paper record. When he col-lected a fare, the conductor squeezed the punch, which rang a bell. The punch marked an internal roll of paper, and railway auditors could then compare the paper

30. Washington Post, April 23, 1901; New York Times, September 26, 1896; New York Times, Septem-ber 23, 1872.

31. Washington Post, December 14, 1914.32. New York Times, April 14, 1874.33. Motorman and Conductor, August 1909, 30. I found an exception to this claim. An anonymous con-

ductor told Motorman and Conductor that lack of a union drove him to steal: “When I worked on a union road I never stole a nickel. When I worked upon a scab road I stole all I could get. Now, from long experi-ence, I know the union man to be a pretty honest fellow. With very few exceptions I always found the scab to be a thief,” September 1906, 23.

34. That is, knocking down did not benefit fellow workers. In some cases, conductors colluded with other people, shopkeepers or frequent passengers, and perhaps in that light could be seen as a form of com-munity solidarity.

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record to a conductor’s fare collections. Equally important, however, was the bell: pas-sengers giving their fares to conductors could hear whether the conductor registered the fare, and passengers were conscripted into disciplinary service.

The bell punch captured popular imagination, as a symbol of moral laxity and machine discipline. A poem in Appleton’s magazine imagined a “Universal Bell-Punch”:

The world is waxing evil; ’Tis time that we kept vigil O’er the hydra-headed monster who defies us in his lair; When a bell-punch universal Is our safest reimbursal, With which, on tickets, forms, and contracts, all must punch ‘with care.’35

An 1875 cartoon in Harper’s Bazaar showed a priest collecting church donations with a bell punch to shame the faithful; Puck’s imagined the constant din if New York’s liquor stores recorded sales with bell punches.36

The bell punch aroused indignation among some passengers, who consid-ered it degrading to rider and conductor alike, reported the Washington Post in 1888: “There are gentlemen and ladies whose feelings are outraged whenever they see a car conductor carrying a bell punch. You can see them looking out of the window in order that they may seem not to notice the conductor when he rings his bell.” 37 Averted gazes would have missed resourceful streetcar conductors thwarting the bell punch. By 1873, Boston conductors were arrested for sounding small gongs, car-ried hidden in their left hands, while they feigned use of the bell punch in their right hands.38 An ex-employee of Colt Manufacturing, a major bell punch producer, charged conductors in New York $5 to “pick the combination and regulate the indi-cator” of Colt bell punches in 1877.39

Fare boxes proved more difficult to crack but still susceptible to determined conductors. Fare boxes aimed to eliminate the conductor entirely from the transac-tion by providing an impenetrable receptacle for coins. Improved technology eventu-ally made fare boxes standard on street railways, but in their early days conductors figured out ways to burgle them. On the Chicago City Railway, a conductor obtained his own fare box; periodically he swapped his fare box into the official spot, collected fares, and swapped it back out, leaving no record for the company of its losses. He got

35. Fanny Barrow, “The Universal Bell-Punch,” Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science and Art, May 13, 1876, 640. Mark Twain described a ditty that circulated in the 1870s calling the conductor to “punch with care, all in the presence of the passenjare!” Twain, “A Literary Nightmare,” Atlantic Monthly, Febru-ary 1876, 167–69.

36. Harper’s Bazaar, March 13, 1875; Puck, April 3, 1878.37. Washington Post, July 29, 1888.38. New York Times, August 8, 1873.39. New York Times, August 11, 1877.


caught when the company noticed a drop in its receipts from the route and placed a spotter on his car, who witnessed the operation.40

A curious phenomenon of massive citizen resistance to fare boxes arose in various cities. Some street railway lines in the late nineteenth century introduced fare boxes on “bobtail” cars–which had no conductors, only motormen or drivers. Pas-sengers in Chicago, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia refused to pay fares into their fare boxes, demanding that the railways return conductors, in 1878. When “prominent cit-izens” in Racine, Wisconsin, organized a fare box boycott in 1899, the street railway put strikebreakers on the cars to force fare payment. Passengers argued against the bobtail because conductors maintained order on cars and because the fare box gave no change, but Scientific American also detected truculence, saying that “perverse people decline to be ordered to do anything by the railroad.” It appears that passenger resis-tance prohibited many companies from using fare boxes as a labor-saving device and slowed their adoption altogether until the twentieth century.41

That there was tension on trains surrounding the bell punch is suggested by this 1876 Currier and Ives print, “Bell-y Punch.” From the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs collection

40. Chicago Daily Tribune, January 31, 1908.41. New York Times, September 19, 1875; New York Times, February 20, 1878; Scientific American, Sep-

tember 8, 1877. See also Washington Post, March 17, 1887; for a bobtail fare box boycott in Racine, Wiscon-sin, see Chicago Daily Tribune, October 3, 1899.

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Spotters watched street railway conductors as early as 1860, as suggested by a Saturday Evening Post poem about a conductor:

On the monotonous road, Backward and forward he rides, With curses and growls of a heedless crowd, And his time to make besides— For along the walk doth a spotter stalk, From whom all woe betides.42

The basic elements of street railway spotting mirrored the practices used by railroads. In the estimation of a railroad spotter, the principal difference between working the two systems lay in the relative difficulty of streetcar spotting. Constant passenger boarding meant that “in checking passengers of street and interurban railway cars even the professional checker is apt to make errors, but when the novice tries it the result is a mess of a report which apparently makes every conductor a grafter of the most flagrant character.” 43

Much more evidence survives about street railway spotters than railroad spot-ters, in newspaper stories, books, and union records. The mechanics of street rail-way fare collection—generally coin payments, on crowded cars—may have led to more thefts or greater concern by street railway officials that thefts could occur. Street railway workers may have been more vocal about the phenomenon and riders more aware of spotters in their midst. Whatever the reason, street railway spotters register more clearly in the historical record than their railroad counterparts.

Spotters worked in secret, of course, their success dependent on avoiding detec-tion. But a glimpse into the methods of early spotters can be found in the 1889 exposé Judas Exposed; or, The Spotter Nuisance: An Anti-Secret Book Devoted to the Interests of Railroad Men, authored by “Sunshine.” 44 Sunshine’s rambling diatribe described “Zeal’s Detective Agency,” which specialized in railroad spotting.45 Clearly “Zeal’s” is wordplay for “Thiel’s,” the St. Louis–based Thiel’s Detective Agency.46 In Judas Exposed, Sunshine reprinted Thiel’s rule book for spotters, annotated with his own comments. According to Sunshine, the rule book was distributed by Thiel to drum

42. “The Horse Railway Conductor,” Saturday Evening Post, October 6, 1860.43. [Clarence Everly Ray], Railroad Spotter, 61.44. Sunshine, Judas Exposed. Cataloguers at the Library of Congress attributed authorship of Judas

Exposed to a Martin P. Wheeler, about whom nothing is known. Through the 1940s or so, cataloguers at the Library of Congress doubled as sleuths, ferreting out information about the books and authors they catalogued. For anonymous authors, cataloguers often consulted the copyright documents filed with the book and judged whether the copyright registrant should be also considered the author. In the case of Judas Exposed, the cataloguers attributed authorship to Wheeler; they did the same with another anonymous text discussed later in this chapter, The Railroad Spotter. Thanks to librarian Thomas Mann at the Library of Congress for help with this question.

45. Sunshine, Judas Exposed, 22–23.46. As J. Anthony Lukas notes in Big Trouble (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 85.


up business by revealing his rigorous guidelines for operatives. Taking the reprint at face value, its dicta give some insight into spotter practices.

Feigning nonchalance while scrupulously observing and recording conductors’ actions and passenger movements tested spotters’ memories and ingenuity. Spotters were admonished to act “naturally” and appear blasé. Simultaneously, they were to count passengers boarding and disembarking, note the names of conductors and other workers, watch as conductors punched tickets and collected fares, and note the cir-cumstances of any malfeasances. Because making notes on the train would attract the attention of railroad workers, spotters were supposed to step into the water closet or the men’s lounge car to record their notes, or wait until they got off the train altogether.47

The difficulty of their work is apparent. On a crowded train for many hours, a spotter could easily miss important transactions—a conductor winking and bypassing a soldier in uniform or returning to collect fares from passengers digging in their wal-lets. Maintaining an air of artless ease while steadily staring at the conductor would have been an impressive achievement. Moreover, delaying note-taking for minutes or hours certainly could impair the accuracy of spotters’ reports.

Railroads questioned the veracity of their information and checked up on the spotters from time to time. Thiel warned that railroad managers had at times “put some one on the train to prove the accuracy of the observations” and instructed oper-atives that “I desire to report nothing to my patrons excepting what can be substanti-ated under oath.” 48 Accordingly, Thiel threatened to penalize spotters who missed a palmed fare by docking their pay. Crucially, however, Thiel warned of no such pen-alty for overreporting of passengers or other errors. Docking spotters for underreport-ing implied that excessive faultfinding would protect spotters from discipline while more generous assessments led to reprimand. Here Thiel’s rules expose the contra-diction at the core of spotter work. Should a spotter detect no thefts, presumably his agency’s services would be unneeded. Although detectives pitched their services on the basis of neutrality, they had an inherent interest in finding misdeeds that justified their retention. This critique recurred repeatedly in workers’ discussions of spotting.

Instruction books and exposés published over the next thirty years echoed Judas Exposed. Clarence Everly Ray, who claimed he had worked as a spotter for fif-teen years, anonymously published The Railroad Spotter: An Expose of the Methods Employed by Detective Agencies and Bonding Companies in 1916.49 Thiel’s rules for

47. Sunshine, Judas Exposed, 45, 63.48. Ibid., 48, 50. Several other spotter sources mention the use of spotters by steamship companies.49. [Clarence Everly Ray], Railroad Spotter.As discussed above (see note 44), Library of Congress cata-

loguers attributed authorship to Ray.Ray’s dime-novel oeuvre raises intriguing questions about the genre of the spy confessional. Ray pub-

lished books like The James Boys: A complete and accurate account of those famous bandit brothers, Frank and Jesse James, and Buffalo Bill, the scout; His boyhood days, life on the prairies, trapper, soldier, hunter and show-man. Whether his dime-novel output should cast doubt on the veracity of his account of railroad spotting is worth considering. Surely a railroad spotter may have also authored cowboy and bandit stories; likewise, perhaps a prolific author of sensational novels for working-class readers wrote a fictional autobiography of

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spotters and the practices they reveal reappear in Ray’s discussion of methods then in use. Ray emphasized the ubiquity of spotting, saying that “practically all railroads use these spies,” and outlined common tactics of spotters, such as sitting in the rear of the train and dressing like a “lumberjack or tramp.” Ray found scoundrels among conductors and spotters both; crooked spotters wrote false reports and thieving con-ductors knocked down regularly.50 A 1910 advice book called The Spotter: Simplified Instructions repeated many of the same guidelines: wear inconspicuous clothing (“You should never wear the latest cut of clothes, or a hat like a freak”), take care not to be alone in the car with the conductor; regarding relations with conductors and passen-gers, “Keep away from lonesome districts at night-riding, as you are in more dan-ger in such districts than in the more busy sections when riding in cities.”51 Over the years, the basic elements of spotter practice remained the same.

A repentant spotter named Leroy H. Wagar showed readers the seamier side of spotting in his 1918 memoir, Confessions of a Spotter. After losing jobs as a cub reporter and a railroad patrolman, Wagar rode streetcars for a series of detective agen-cies, perfectly willing to manufacture reports for a chief demanding a quota of infrac-tions: “I always managed to make the number, but quite frequently was forced to draw on my imagination to do so.”52 Wagar bumbled through seven years of work as spotter, sometimes cheating the company by taking bribes from conductors because “it didn’t make much difference whether I beat the office or the men.”53 After a series of picaresque adventures, Wagar changed careers and found work as a carnival barker, and he regretted his years as a spotter: “I felt that I was free; and, strangely, there appeared in the twinkling of an eye the desire to try and undo to the best of my hum-ble ability, some of the wrongs I had done.”54 He wrote his memoirs to that end.

Wagar’s memoir highlights the potential for abuse built into the spotter’s role. Spotters’ reports purported to be accurate and dispassionate, but conductors argued that only rogues would take such jobs, and detective agencies inflated spotter reports to demonstrate the ongoing need for their services. Evidence suggests that some spot-ters and detective agencies abused their authority. Spotters blackmailed conductors, threatening to report them for theft unless conductors paid them, either with a flat

a spotter. Michael Denning found dime novels to be a semiautonomous cultural space where working-class readers and sometimes authors “contested” key concerns and ideologies. The Railroad Spotter presents itself as a straightforward and pragmatic advice book for workers as well as an exposé; Ray generally eschewed hyperbole and even narrative, instead describing and dissecting the inner workings of the spotter industry, but the connections between labor spy and spotter confessionals and dime novels warrants further study. Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1987). For other examples of the genre, see Mary Tupper Jones, The System’s Hand (Chicago: Mid-West Publishing and Producing Co., 1920); GT-99, Labor Spy (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1937).

50. [Clarence Everly Ray], Railroad Spotter, 45–46.51. William J. Lee, The Spotter: Simplified Instructions (New York: Williams Publishing, 1910), 13, 70.52. Leroy H. Wagar, Confessions of a Spotter (St. Louis, MO: Wilson Printing, 1918), 11. The story was

originally serialized in the San Francisco Bulletin in May 1913.53. Wagar, Confessions of a Spotter, 13.54. Ibid., 109.


sum or by splitting the fares. Ray recommended that railway companies pay detec-tive agencies a flat fee, to remove incentives for false reports and “remove the ‘spotter’ from the influence of graft or the personal malice of his employer.”55 One conductor described the quandary spotters posed: “Imagine yourself working constantly in strik-ing distance of such a hidden snake. If you offend him, he will report you as a viola-tor of rules and will get your job. If you know him and seek his favor, you are placing your soul in the power of a sneak who will pervert you for his personal gain under the penalty of winning his displeasure.”56 Conductors could only deny the charges, and whether innocent or guilty, hope to convince the railway. Honest and dishonest conductors alike faced the risk of discipline or discharge at the hands of spotters.

Spotting originated as a technique to detect theft, but a side function of spot-ting emerged: watching workers to make sure they did their jobs properly. All aspects of job performance, from conductors’ manners to the condition of their cars, fell within the spotter’s purview: “nowadays he is expected to have an eye to the behav-ior of the conductor and motorman toward the public, and to report explicitly upon any event of the trip which may affect the company,” wrote Samuel Adams in 1901.57 Exactly when or why this shift occurred is hard to pinpoint. Thiel’s rulebook from 1889 directed spotters to “familiarize yourself with the books of regulations” issued by employers and report any violation of the rules, such as, “Were electric bells in work-ing order? Were crew familiar with each other? Was there any sleeping on watch?”58 The spotter’s duties expanded beyond simply checking to see whether conductors stole into reporting on trainmen’s performance of all their duties.

Conductors’ job duties—taking fares, maintaining the order and cleanliness of the car, and helping customers on and off the train—really constituted a service occupation. Most service workers in this era worked for small local firms, like hotels or retail stores. Conductors were among the first service workers to work for large employers.59 Thus railway experimentation with spotting was an early innovation in service sector management, in some ways analogous to the methods Frederick Wins-low Taylor would later develop for manufacturing. Fundamentally, spotting aimed to increase the yield of conductors’ labor by capturing all their collected fares, with mon-itoring conductors’ performance of their order-keeping duties a secondary function.60 Spotting, and the threat of spotting, routinized conductors’ job performance; manag-ers would not deploy such tactics for other service sector occupations for decades.

55. [Clarence Everly Ray], Railroad Spotter, 656. Motorman and Conductor, August 1915, 15.57. Samuel H. Adams, “Spotters: The Secret Surveillance System in America,” Ainslee’s Magazine,

February 1901, 52.58. Sunshine, Judas Exposed, 70–71.59. Department store clerks were similarly situated, as service workers employed by large firms.

Department stores also used spotters, also called “shoppers,” as early as 1869. See note 23.60. It was an important function given the enormous number of lawsuits railroads and street railways

faced. The vast majority of court cases involving conductors and detectives concern lawsuits brought by pas-sengers and citizens against the railways and conductors for accidents and other injuries.

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Railway workers regarded spotters with odium. Sunshine printed menacing notes to spotters from railroad workers, such as:

Mr. Spotter: I hear you call yourself smart on roads, and others say you are too; if you come back some night and find your barn burned down and house too, I think you’ll find you went one road too many. I give you this to chew on. Night Owl.61

Railway men used secret codes and signals to warn each other of a spotter’s presence. Streetcar conductors might have rung the signal bell rapidly or asked the motorman for the time. Motormen rang the footbell three times or made a special salute to the conductor.62 Occasionally, workers attacked spotters. In Bakersfield, California, in 1905, two Santa Fe railroad workers invited a suspected spotter to the Del Monte Café for a drink; when he arrived, they jumped him, one holding him down while the other kicked him in the ribs.63 Trainmen suspected a traveling salesman riding the Rio Grande in the Utah Territory in 1892 of being a spotter. When he stepped off the train, a railroad worker blindsided him with a shovel, and soon two unidentified men joined in beating him nearly senseless.64 These assaults underline the urgency of remaining undercover for spotters; if detected, spotters risked loss of life and limb as well as their jobs.

In other cases, conductors turned to the courts for redress. It is worth not-ing that no known court action by conductors challenged the right of railways to use spotters. The Nevada Supreme Court expressed an apparently settled consensus that employers had an uncontested legal right to hire detectives in 1880. A railroad worker prosecuted by the Central Pacific Railroad for embezzlement had sued the Central Pacific for malicious prosecution and won. In overturning his victory, the Nevada Supreme Court remarked parenthetically on the legality of spotting:

[The railroads’] property is so vast, and their business so extended and complicated; they are so constantly and in so many directions exposed to the danger of loss by theft, robbery, and embezzlement, that they are compelled, by the same policy that induces penal legislation on the part of the state, to let it be known that they will prosecute vigorously and systematically all criminal acts by which they are directly injured. That they act in conformity with this policy, is notorious. They have not only their corps of legal advisers and their local attorneys, but they keep a force of detectives continually employed in ferreting out depredations on their rights, and assisting the public authorities in bringing them to justice. No law and no public policy restrains them in this respect.65

61. Sunshine, Judas Exposed, 100–101.62. Lee, The Spotter: Simplified Instructions, 27–28.63. Los Angeles Times, August 10, 1905.64. Joseph Krantz, appellant, v. Rio Grande Western Railway Company, respondent, 12 Utah 104, 41 717,

(1895), Utah Lexis 12 (August 31, 1895).65. E. E. Ricord, Mother and Guardian of W. C. Ricord, a Minor, and W. C. Ricord, Respondents, v. Cen-

tral Pacific Railroad Co., Appellant, No. 957, Supreme Court of Nevada (1880).


Rather, conductors challenged the veracity of spotters’ reports.66 In 1889, the Rome, Watertown, & Ogdenberg (RW&O) fired eleven conductors accused of knock-ing down. Several conductors had salaries due, but the RW&O held the money back to cover the cost of lost fares. At least five of the fired conductors sued to recover the withheld wages. Conductors Lory O. Rand and David Francis got their cases before juries. Rand not only lost wages of $123 when spotters reported him, but the com-pany demanded an additional $150 for fares stolen by Rand the previous year. Sev-eral detectives testified that they saw Rand pilfer, and Rand said he had not. Jurors sided with Rand. Outraged, the RW&O appealed to the New York Supreme Court, arguing that the jury’s verdict flouted the evidence—numerous detectives’ eyewit-ness accounts versus Rand’s simple denial. The Supreme Court declined to reverse the jury, affirming Rand’s victory.67 As for Francis, he was owed $114.50 in back wages, and five Pinkerton detectives took the stand to describe Francis’s fare pock-eting. Again, jurors found for Francis, and again the New York Supreme Court did not disturb the jury verdict.68

The refusal of juries to credit spotter reports in these cases may reflect a gen-eral disaffection for the railroads; in this era of railroad litigation over local ordi-nances, accidents, and rates, juries may have doubted the credibility of anything the railroads said in court.69 Finding for conductors who apparently offered weak rejoin-ders to multiple detectives, though, also indicates public skepticism of spotters. The difficulties of defending spotter reports before juries led agencies to double- and triple- check their reports, in hopes of burying complaining conductors with testimony, according to Ray: “Owing to the increasing number of civil suits they have had to contend with in recent years, the usual procedure today, when a lone spotter has con-nected in an irregular transaction with some trainman, is not to take action at that time but later have the spotter repeat the transaction in the presence of one or more other spotters.” 70

New York streetcar companies came up with a creative solution to the prob-lem of sympathetic juries. They tried to preclude recourse to the courts at all by oblig-

66. The court cases discussed below are significant for what they reveal about workplace maneuver-ing between employers and workers. Their relevance to the development of labor law appears slim; these cases seem to have been rarely cited by other courts or treated by appellate courts to develop case law. Work-ers’ victories in spotter-related lawsuits before judges, though, appear to fit with the broader trend toward liberalization of the common law master-servant doctrine inherited from English courts, as discussed by Karen Orren in Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

67. Rand v. Rome, W.&O.R. Co., 10 N.Y.S. 300 (1890). Note that the supreme court’s ruling does not men-tion an employment contract and thus did not rule on any aspect of employment contracts and their legality.

68. Francis v. Rome, W.&O.R. Co., 12 N.Y.S. 939 (1891). The outcome of the other nine conductors’ suits is unknown.

69. See, for example, David O. Stowell, Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877 (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1999), 4–10.

70. [Clarence Everly Ray], Railroad Spotter, 8–9.

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ing conductors to sign contracts forfeiting their right to sue. In January 1876, conduc-tors on the Second Avenue Railroad arrived at work to find managers waiting for them with a new contract and orders to sign it or be fired. Conductors had to deposit $25 with the railroad—about two weeks’ wages. In the event of “any loss or dam-age” to the company resulting from “any neglect, carelessness, dishonesty, miscon-duct, disobedience, unfaithfulness, incompetency, or dereliction of duty of any kind,” the company would retain the $25 as “liquidated damages,” in addition to a week’s wages. Any spotter report would be “final and conclusive evidence of any fact stated in the report,” and conductors gave up the right to ask to see the report or the spot-ter. Moreover, by his signature, the conductor conceded in advance the truth of any alleged misdeed “as binding and conclusive evidence between the parties in all courts of justice, civil or criminal, and before all Magistrates, or Justices of Peace.”71

In its exhaustive detail, this extraordinary contract suggests extensive battling over spotter discipline on the railroad. Conductors likely had already paid depos-its to the railroad but resisted their seizure on the report of spotters. Demanding to face their accusers and see their reports, conductors must have harassed managers with outraged denials. In the scope of potential malfeasance described in the con-tract—carelessness, incompetence, misconduct—a broader scope of scrutiny appears. Not just fare-palming, but laziness, bad attitudes, or losses resulting from striking fell under the aegis of the contract. With these contracts, railways held all the cards. Retaining the deposit and the week’s wages compensated for alleged thefts and prob-ably left a good bit over. The railroad could still pursue criminal prosecution and pen-alties against the conductor, with an admission of guilt already supplied. And, most important, the railways hoped to prevent conductors from marshaling public support in the courts.

Some, having signed them to keep their jobs, fought the contracts in court once fired. Joseph Riley, an elderly conductor on New York’s Broadway, Forty-second Street, and Grand Street Ferry Railroad had signed a contract like the one forced on the Second Avenue conductors. He paid a $25 deposit and agreed to forfeit a week’s wages upon a negative spotter report. When he got fired in June 1880, the Broadway and Forty-second seized his deposit but paid up his wages. Riley sued for the deposit. In court, the judge demanded that the spotter take the stand and face Riley with his accusations. The spotter stammered over the details and could produce no notes to document Riley’s theft. The judge held for Riley, the newspaper reported, because “he believed that such a contract was wrong, because unjust and dishonest employers could make it a means of oppressing and robbing persons employed by them.”72

Other judges shared his skepticism of spotters. In Chicago, a spotter who “acknowledged that he had induced” an El worker to steal tickets got upbraided by a judge who told him: “A great mistake was made by the grand jury when it failed to indict you. Any man who under the guise of friendship and assumed good-

71. New York Times, January 17, 1876. The article quotes long passages from the contract.72. New York Times, July 22, 1880.


fellowship induces another to commit a crime is more guilty than he who actually does the act.”73 Likewise, when New York conductor Harry Rozen sued the Dry Dock, East Broadway, and Battery Railroad for withholding his deposit and wages pursuant to an employment contract, the railroad produced five detectives to tes-tify that Rozen failed to register all his fares. A judge similarly inclined excluded their testimony and ruled that their reports were “not conclusive upon” Rozen. He instructed the jury to assess the evidence themselves and make their own determina-tion of Rozen’s guilt. The jury found for Rozen, and Dry Dock was ordered to pay the lost deposit and wages.74

Like jurors, passengers often sympathized with conductors beset with spot-ters. One conductor, commenting on congenial relations with passengers, said that “sometimes they carry their friendliness too far. I have known passengers, when they got a fair opportunity, to insist that the conductor should take their fare without reg-istering it, and to get angry if the request was refused.”75 Other times, Lee warned, “passengers try to make other passengers and the conductor think that they are spot-ters,” by staring at conductors and taking notes conspicuously, to trick a real spotter into thinking that the car was already covered.76 (Efforts by conductors and passen-gers to spot the spotters does not mean, however, that spotters operated openly and were easily identified. Rather, all the gambits conductors and passengers used suggest the difficulty of identifying them.)

In many cities, citizens tended a coal of resentment in their hearts for the companies operating street railways. Complaints ranged from the prosaic to the politi-cal. Passengers deplored the filthy, crowded cars; heaving, struggling horses (which often collapsed and died in the streets) and humming electric motors annoyed them. Despite the unsatisfactory service, riders wanted more of it—lines could not be extended fast enough to satisfy riders. More maddening was the graft and profiteering of the street railway companies. Cities issued franchises to private companies to oper-ate the lines, generally requiring little disclosure or accountability from tycoons who enjoyed great fortunes from their exclusive contracts. City officials receiving kickbacks were loath to challenge their patrons. Passengers shared a sociable hostility toward street railways and a corresponding sympathy for the workers who toiled for them. This sympathy proved helpful for conductors as they confronted spotters.77

73. Chicago Daily Tribune, October 17, 1893.74. Harry Rozen, Respondent, v. The Dry Dock, East Broadway & Battery Railroad Co., Appellant, Com-

mon Pleas Court of New York, 7 Misc. 130 (1894); Misc. Lexis 120 (February 1894). The railway won on appeal, as the appellate judge noted Rozen “was able to read and write, and no claim is made that he was prevented by any act or representation of the defendant from acquainting himself with the terms of the contract before he signed it. . . . Under the contract of employment the reports of the detectives were con-clusive upon the plaintiffs.”

75. Lippincott’s Magazine, June 1886, 633; see also Washington Post, July 28, 1901.76. Lee, The Spotter: Simplified Instructions, 14, 24.77. On popular rancor toward streetcar companies, see especially Georg Leidenberger, Chicago’s Pro-

gressive Alliance: Labor and the Bid for Public Streetcars (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006);

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Spotters and conductors alike noticed the warm sentiments passengers felt toward conductors. This dynamic combined sympathy for conductors and animus toward street railway companies. The depth of public feeling for streetcar workers was manifest in overwhelming public support for street railway strikes. Across the country, huge mobs boycotted the streetcars when workers struck in city after city. Crowds dynamited tracks, pelted strikebreaking workers with bricks, and blocked cars with their bodies. In Houston, Cleveland, Chicago, and Brooklyn, massive out-pourings of public support emboldened street railway workers to demand union rec-ognition and higher wages. This support translated into disproportionate victories for streetcar workers, compared to strikers in other industries. As Robert Babcock notes, from 1893 to 1914, streetcar strikers won 60 percent of their strikes as reported by the Amalgamated, a higher proportion than the 46 percent victory rate for strikers across the economy from 1881 to 1905.78

Scholars of streetcar strikes have found confirmation for Herbert Gutman’s hypothesis that nineteenth-century workers built cross-class solidarity in their com-munities and that this solidarity often proved determinative in strikes and labor con-flict.79 To explain the ardor of streetcar strike sympathizers, historians have pointed to the depredations of the streetcar companies, social dislocations from rapid urban-ization and industrialization, and accidents caused by streetcars. As Georg Leiden-berger has shown, often streetcar workers linked their demands directly to public ser-vice, as when strikers argued that their strenuous work hours contributed to accidents in the 1903 Chicago streetcar strike.80 Another explanation may be antipathy aroused by the labor discipline to which streetcar workers were subjected. Passengers riding streetcars watched conductors endure the gaze of spotters and the various mecha-nisms used by companies to check their honesty, and sometimes passengers joined the drama by trying to thwart spotters on the cars. Public sympathy for streetcar work-ers enabled the union to win fight after fight with streetcar companies; as a conduc-tor commented, “passengers, as a rule, are apt to take sides with the conductor in any

for railroads, see Stowell, Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Fron-tier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 109–10; Schmidt, Industrial Relations in Urban Transit, 63–69.

78. Robert H. Babcock, “‘Will You Walk? Yes, We’ll Walk!’: Popular Support for a Streetcar Strike in Portland, Maine,” Labor History 35 (Summer 1994): 374. On public support for streetcar workers, see also Sarah M. Henry, “The Strikers and Their Sympathizers: Brooklyn in the Trolley Strike of 1895,” Labor History 32 (Summer 1991): 329–53; Georg Leidenberger, “‘The Public Is the Labor Union’: Working-Class Progressivism in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago,” Labor History 36 (Spring 1995): 187–210; Shelton Stromquist, “The Crucible of Class: Cleveland Politics and the Origins of Municipal Reform in the Pro-gressive Era,” Journal of Urban History 23 (January 1997): 192–220; and Robert E. Ziegler, “The Limits of Power: The Amalgamated Association of Street Railway Employees in Houston, Texas, 1897–1905,” Labor History 18 (Winter 1977): 71–90.

79. Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrial America (New York: Knopf, 1976), 234–92.

80. Leidenberger, Chicago’s Progressive Alliance, 86–87.


question between the conductor and the company which employs him.”81 Popular antipathy for spotters apparently drove the passage of a rash of antispotter laws—with little support from the Amalgamated or the ORC.

In 1915, the California legislature considered a “spotter’s law” granting con-ductors on streetcars and trains accused of theft based on spotters’ reports the right to a hearing before the company could discharge them.82 The notoriously anti-union Los Angeles Times editorialized, “Union labor demands the right to steal.” The bill originally required railways to produce its spotters at these hearings—thus unmask-ing undercover agents to workers. After railway lobbyists succeeded in removing the provision from the bill, “all its teeth had been drawn,” and “union labor lobbyists” professed not to care whether it passed at all.83 But it did pass and remains California law to this day.84 Identical laws passed legislatures in Nevada in 1915 and in Ohio and Michigan in 1917; a Massachusetts bill failed in 1915.85

Just how these laws came about at all remains mysterious. In this era, unions battling labor spies in other sectors of the economy began experimenting with laws requiring detective agencies to register their operatives with state government, since registration would similarly expose undercover spies to the public.86 Central labor councils or railway unions acting independently may have borrowed the logic of the detective registration laws and devised and lobbied for the spotter laws.87

The ORC and the Amalgamated were the unions most affected by the stat-utes. Little more than a trace of the measure can be found in the papers of the ORC, however, and the short shrift the law received in the union’s journal, which discussed other legislative priorities at length, suggests its relative insignificance to the union.88

81. Lippincott’s Magazine, June 1886, 633. Here Robin D. G. Kelley’s study of black passengers’ frontal assault on Jim Crow on Birmingham buses and streetcars is instructive. Kelley sees the buses and streetcars as performance spaces in which passengers seated in theater-style rows “witness, or participate in, a wide variety of ‘skirmishes’ that shape their collective memory, illustrate the limitations as well as possibilities of resistance to domination, and draw more passengers into the ‘performance.’” For nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century passengers, streetcars offered a similar stage for the drama of workplace surveillance. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 57.

82. Los Angeles Times, January 27, 1915.83. Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1915; Los Angeles Times, April 12, 1915.84. See Deering’s California Codes Annotated, Public Utilities Code, Division 4, Chapter 7, Article 3,

“Use of ‘Spotter’ Reports,” Cal. Pub. Util. Code § 8251 (2001), which prohibits “any public service corpo-ration” employing a “‘spotter,’ for the purpose of investigating, obtaining, and reporting to the employer information concerning its employees, to discipline or discharge any employee” based on a spotter report without a hearing.

85. On the Massachusetts bill, see Christian Science Monitor, June 5, 1915. The spotter laws in Ohio, Nevada, and Michigan remain on the books as well.

86. See Darryl Holter, “Labor Spies and Union-Busting in Wisconsin, 1890–1940,” Wisconsin Maga-zine of History 68, no. 4 (1985): 245–50.

87. Research into the legislative history of spotter laws in Ohio and California proved fruitless. 88. In Confessions of a Spotter, Leroy Wagar reported learning of the pending bill in Michigan and

traveling there to testify before a legislative committee in 1917, where the ORC’s lobbyist helped broker his appearance. The ORC had some involvement, then, in the Michigan law’s passage at the least.

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Likewise, the Amalgamated never listed such legislation in its lobbying reports, even though its convention passed a resolution in 1915 calling for officers to push for spot-ter’s laws.89 Two years later, the Motorman and Conductor dismissed spotter’s laws, remarking, “Where men are organized they find sufficient protection without invok-ing the law. Where they are unorganized they are unable to invoke it.” 90 This com-ment implies that laws without collective strength to enforce them were useless. As a political stance, this would be more credible if the union had not pursued a broad legislative agenda to compel railways to shorten shifts, provide breaks, employ a speci-fied number of workers on each car, and a raft of other initiatives that would seem to intervene just as directly in labor relations without regard to collective activity.

The reasons for the Amalgamated’s disinterest in state regulation of spotters can only be guessed. Their general acceptance of spotting as a supervisory preroga-tive may be one explanation; their long-standing discomfort with dishonest conduc-tors may be another. Lobbying against spotters would have obliged them to confront and respond to discomfiting claims about the integrity of their members, in full pub-lic view. Anxiety about sustaining public support for their unionization struggles may have underlay their reluctance to do so. In his study of a 1905 Houston streetcar strike, Robert E. Ziegler explored the limits of public support for streetcar workers’ strug-gles. The Houston workers exerted themselves mightily to prevent disorder and main-tain a sober, respectable image with sympathetic riders. But ongoing inconvenience to riders, combined with continued eruptions of violence and dynamitings, gradually eroded their support. Having staked their success on the willingness of citizens to boycott as well as their warm relations with riders, streetcar workers were “placed on the defensive,” and ultimately “to pursue the strike required individual strikers to risk the status they enjoyed as accepted members of the community.” 91 Such fears found confirmation in Chicago, where Georg Leidenberger describes the deterioration of a powerful coalition uniting workers and middle-class reformers after a militant and violent teamster strike alarmed reformers.92 In the Progressive Era, popular support for workers’ struggles often hinged on their good behavior.

Hence the Amalgamated’s reliance on public support in its streetcar strug-gles likely hobbled the union in its struggle with spotters. But popular anger toward the spotters, as revealed in jury verdicts, spotter instruction books, and the passage of antispotter laws, suggests that the union’s timorousness may have foreclosed a fron-tal assault with real potential to undermine the spotter system. If antispotter legis-lation could be passed with scarce effort from the union, what other opportunities were missed?

The conductors’ unions proved equally chary about taking on spotters on the shop floor. The ORC maintained a loud silence about the matter. The ORC was noto-riously conservative, and its members were concerned with preserving a self-image

89. Motorman and Conductor, September 1915, 135.90. Motorman and Conductor, August 1917, 36.91. Ziegler, “The Limits of Power,” 89–90.92. Leidenberger, Chicago’s Progressive Alliance.


of responsibility and refinement. Evidence suggests, however, that spotters were less prevalent on railroads than they had been. Over time railroads built internal appa-ratuses that also performed surveillance functions. Labor peace between conductors and railroads may have affected roads’ use of spotters and spies as well.93 Likely the ORC did not agitate against spotters and labor spies because railroads used them less over time.94

Not so on street railways, where spotters proliferated. Nor did street railway workers lack rancor for the spotter system. In their journal, Motorman and Conduc-tor, conductors regularly spat invective toward “Mr. Spotter,” described variously as a snake, a “slimy monster of greed and blood sucking,” and a “leper masquerading under the foul mantle of an espionage agency.” 95 “The sense of the presence of a spot-ter is the spark which touches to life the spirit of rebellion,” wrote one conductor,96 but few examples of systematic, collective strategies, such as striking over spotters or demanding their elimination in a contract settlement, could be found.

The Amalgamated favored arbitration to settle workplace disputes, includ-ing terminations. Some hints suggest that the Amalgamated used the arbitration process to settle terminations based on spotter reports. For example, the union’s 1903 master agreement with the New Orleans streetcar companies included a clause pro-viding that “in the case of discharge on account of irregularity in registering fares or transfers, the properly accredited officers of the Association bringing written author-ity for the discharged employee shall receive a hearing from the officers of the Rail-ways company as at present.” 97 Because the entire contract was arbitrable, presumably the outcome of such a hearing could also go to an impartial arbitrator. But inten-

93. As Shelton Stromquist has remarked, “after decades of conflict, railroad workers in the running trades negotiated a peace with the railroads” that “created for workers in the running trades an unprec-edented level of security and recognition. Most American workers had to wait until the 1930s to enjoy the guarantees that were granted to the railroad brotherhoods and their members at the end of the nineteenth century.” Stromquist, Generation of Boomers, 274. On railroad policing, see Henry Stephen Dewhurst, Railroad Police (Springfield, IL: C. C. Thomas, 1955); William A. Bowers, Strikebreakers and Their Private Armies (Harris burg, PA: G. B. Rasadean, 1916).

94. A 1931 survey of major railroads reported that few relied on spotters. The Pullman Company con-ducted an internal audit in 1930 and discovered substantial fare shortages. At the time, Pullman relied on a force of twenty-two train auditors, Pullman employees who periodically checked its three thousand con-ductors and nineteen hundred porters. Pullman queried eight railroads about their checking strategies and learned that most used a small force of full-time railroad train auditors to periodically check their conduc-tor forces. Many echoed the Chicago Great Western official who “prefer[red] open checks rather than the use of ‘Under-Cover’ men.” The Illinois Central and the Santa Fe both ceased using spotters because “proof of derelictions not acceptable to Order of Railroad Conductors.” Like the other railroad firms, Pullman elected to eschew spotters in favor of assigning current, uniformed employees from the auditing depart-ment to conduct periodic checks of conductors. Pullman Papers, 06/01/01, folder 26, Newberry Library, Chicago.

95. Motorman and Conductor, November 1906, 21, and May 1909, 11.96. Ibid., January 1904, 21.97. Amalgamated Association of Street, Electric Railway, and Motor Coach Employees of America,

“Miscellaneous Labor Pamphlets: AASRE Yearbooks, 1903–1910” [microfilm, State Historical Society of Wisconsin].

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tional irregularities did not warrant protection, as the union’s journal argued in 1906: “There are cases of discharge that are not only justifiable but necessary, and with which, further than an investigation, the union should not interfere. Dishonesty can-not be upheld.” 98

The Amalgamated accepted the spotter system as execrable but inevitable. In 1906, an Amalgamated local in Lowell, Massachusetts, discovered that the town had loaned its police officers to the street railway to work as spotters on the road. The local’s president told the press, “We do not doubt that the company employs spot-ters, and believe that they have a perfect right to do so.” 99 Two years later, in an arti-cle about conductors trafficking in transfers, the Motorman and Conductor criticized the conductors and remarked, “The work of conductors is open to inspection at all times and by patrons as well as officials. There is no opportunity in the work for the thief.”100 When several spotters working for Thiel’s were unexpectedly exposed in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1911, the journal criticized the use of Thiel’s but empha-sized that spotter use “in no way reflects upon the purpose of management, who desire to attain practical knowledge of the peculiarities of their employees.”101

Indeed, the union appeared to be more concerned with establishing that its members were honest than with criticizing spotting. At one of its first conventions, in 1897, the union resolved that “the officers of locals [be] instructed to be severe on any case of dishonesty that might come into their hands for adjustment, for what is wanted by the Association is better conditions for all street railway employes, and the convention was determined that that should not be defeated by the dishon-esty of a few . . . there is no place in the ranks of the Amalgamated Association for dishonesty.”102 Several months later, the union reported that a street railway manager had written to ask the union’s policy on “knocking down.” The Amalgamated firmly advised the manager that unionization would mean “the least dishonesty, less acci-dents, less drunkenness, more honor, self-respect and sobriety.”103 Fifteen years later, after the union had achieved remarkable organizing gains, concern about conductors’ honesty remained. When conductors in Cleveland got caught counterfeiting tickets, Motorman and Conductor hoped that “any guilty of such work may be found out and punished,” because “we cannot expect to get another increase when there are a few who are dishonest enough to rob the common fund from which such an increase to all of us must come.”104

Rail unions conceded the problem of conductor theft while they chafed at the railroad’s solution. Because conductors worked alone on trains, workers could

98. Motorman and Conductor, May 1906, 6–7.99. Ibid., September 1906, 3.100. Ibid., November 1908, 26.101. Ibid., April 1911, 15.102. Ibid., March 1898, 6.103. Ibid., July 1898, 6.104. Ibid., July 1911, 23.


not police each other and detect fare-palmers. Rail unions had few good options for dealing with conductor theft. The unions denied accused conductors mutual aid, like bargaining or striking over spotters, but a spotter’s accusation was no proof of guilt, so while the unions did not offer accused conductors much support, nor did they publicly criticize or expel them. This left conductors to individual tactics—lawsuits, beatings—to combat a collective problem, and it left the streetcar union hoping for a technological salvation. By the early twentieth century, streetcar conductors embraced machine technology, such as fare boxes, as an improvement over spotters.

Although passengers had opposed the introduction of fare boxes, conductors applauded them, despite the fact that fare boxes could (and, eventually, did) make conductors redundant. In 1907, major urban systems began installing new streetcars with fare boxes placed by each door, and while passengers continued to resist the new cars in some cities, conductors applauded them.105 In Akron, conductors competed to get the new cars, while the Worcester, Massachusetts, local bragged that their cars “were the latest in style and make.”106 Chicago conductors agitated for better fare box technology “that would protect the conductor in the honest performance of his duty” and from “the suspicion of dishonesty” in 1911.107 As fare box technology improved, conductors hoped that the responsibility of collecting and recording fares could be lifted from their shoulders entirely, leaving them to supervise affairs and maintain order inside the cars, but fare boxes obviated conductors’ primary function. Gradually, streetcar companies merged the jobs of conductor and motorman, and although the Amalgamated fought it, even the union’s president thought the one-man car operat-ing system “inevitable.”108

In 1924, the New York Times proclaimed “Spotters Obsolete”:

The spotter has almost disappeared from the scene and his profession is becoming an obsolete one. The adoption of mechanical cash-handling devices by public utility and other large corporations has done away in part with the need for his services. . . . Today the conductors of New York surface cars are rarely “spotted.”109

But while railway spotting declined, its offshoot proliferated. Labor espionage grew out of spotting, and Pinkerton again led the way. In 1873, Pinkerton had a force of spotters working on the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. When violence erupted

105. On the introduction of PAYE cars, see Chicago Tribune, September 21, 1907; New York Times, November 17, 1907; Washington Post, April 25, 1909; Los Angeles Times, August 18, 1909.

106. Motorman and Conductor, February 1915, 22. For examples of other cities: Victoria, British Columbia, Motorman and Conductor, January 1914, 19; Youngstown, Ohio, Motorman and Conductor, May 1914, 23; Easton, Pennsylvania, Motorman and Conductor, June 1914, 31; Schenectady, New York, Motorman and Conductor, November 1914, 32; Butte, Montana, Motorman and Conductor, April 1915, 29.

107. Motorman and Conductor, April 1911, 8–9; see also Motorman and Conductor, May 1908, 26, and June 1913, 28. Of course, removing fare collections from their duties could eliminate the need for conduc-tors too.

108. Schmidt, Industrial Relations in Urban Transportation, 244–46.109. New York Times, November 26, 1924.

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in the road’s Pennsylvania coal mines, the railroad asked Pinkerton to send detectives to investigate. Pinkerton assigned James McParlan, a new spotter working the Chi-cago streetcars, to the account. McParlan continued the spotter’s practice of under-cover work, but this time he posed as a coal miner. After a two-year stint, McParlan surfaced and swore that a conspiracy called the Molly Maguires had infiltrated the mines. His dramatic court testimony helped sentence accused miners to death. The Molly Maguire case is the first known instance of labor espionage, in which employ-ers hired undercover agents to pose as workers and collect intelligence about their employees, especially concerning their union proclivities.

Sensational publicity accompanying the Molly Maguire trials aroused corpo-rate interest in the technique of labor espionage. Pinkerton began offering the service to his railroad clients and eventually to other employers as well; an advertising circular promised to enable “railroad companies and other corporations, as well as individuals who are extensive employers of labor to keep a close watch for designing men among their own employes, who, in the interest of secret labor societies, are inducing their employes to join these organizations and eventually to cause a strike.”110 The other spotting agencies also added espionage to their repertoire. Thiel’s became one of the biggest firms, developing an extensive practice in mining and supplying the secret agent who accused Bill Haywood of murdering the Utah governor.111

Railroads and streetcars embraced labor espionage. Labor spies working as conductors attended union meetings, making lists of supporters for management; they reported strike plans and incipient organizing campaigns and helped employ-ers build blacklists. The Amalgamated regularly exposed spies in its midst. Victor Le Boeuf started work on the Muncie, Indiana, streetcars as a strike loomed. When “his conduct excited the suspicion of reliable members” of the union, they held a trial and discovered him to be a detective from Cleveland, and possibly a former mem-ber of the Cleveland local.112 Frederick G. Wacker, alias Golly, won the confidence of streetcar workers in Chester, Pennsylvania, by flashing a membership card from the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen. He “passed himself off as a union man” while he collected information on the union for the Pinkertons.113

Labor spies could halt organizing campaigns in their tracks. In 1912, con-ductors in Milwaukee held a secret meeting at midnight attended by nineteen con-ductors to plan an organizing drive. But a spy in their midst reported them to their

110. U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Investigation of Homestead Troubles, 52d Cong., 2d sess., 1892–93, 223.

111. On labor espionage, see Stephen H. Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Rob-ert Michael Smith, From Black jacks to Briefcases: A History of Commercialized Strikebreaking and Union-busting in the United States (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003); J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble (New York: Touchstone Books, 1997); Robert P. Weiss, “Private Detective Agencies and Labour Discipline in the United States, 1855–1946,” Historical Journal 29 (March 1986): 87–107.

112. Motorman and Conductor, February 1908, 18.113. Ibid., November 1908, 34.


employer, who fired eighteen of them the next morning. The nascent campaign col-lapsed.114 Workers in Indianapolis struggled to organize despite “an army of spies, labor detectives, road inspectors, and spotters” in 1907. The “parasites” and “suckers” among their ranks who “numbered among the spies” maddened the union. When they demanded an explanation from one exposed spy, he pled poverty, and “upon being asked by an organizer if his conscience didn’t prick at the thought of being a hired tool to help restrain the carmen from organizing so they could get better wages and conditions? he replied that ‘if they hadn’t sense enough to organize in spite of anything he could do that he didn’t consider he was responsible.’ ”115 It took another seven years before the Indianapolis lines got organized.

Even spotters disdained labor spies. Wagar said “there was never a spotter of my acquaintance who didn’t look down upon the ‘inside’ man as several degrees fur-ther down the ladder than himself.”116 Clarence Ray warned workers that their union halls were no safer from surveillance than their trains: “Why not get a few spotters of your own, you union organizations, and keep step with your employer’s spies who make note of the inside workings of your every meeting? I have been present in the back rooms of many detective agencies and observed a goodly number of these union spies come in and write their reports after each union meeting.”117

Whether spotters or spies, the people who chose to work as undercover agents on the streetcars earned the contempt and loathing of the union. However, the union viewed spotting as a basically legitimate management tool but labor spying as thor-oughly indefensible. The distinction hinged on the purpose of employers’ surveillance and their self-image as a workforce. Because the union believed that dishonest con-ductors and motormen did steal from the railways and that these thefts undermined their craft dignity, it credited management’s reasons for watching them. To the extent that spotters performed a supervisory function, the union criticized their performance but did not challenge their existence. Labor spying, on the other hand, aimed solely to sow distrust and discord among workers and to frustrate workers’ fundamental right to organize collectively. The union never granted any legitimacy to labor spying.

Spotting arose to prevent theft, and the practice withered when a better tech-nology replaced it. But labor espionage had a broader purpose and persisted much longer. Undercover agents remained on the trains after spotters left, watching for signs of organizing drives and sometimes following workers to their homes, as Joshua Freeman found on the New York subways after World War I.118 While spotters cre-ated “a hazy veil of shadowy doubt” between conductors and passengers, labor spies

114. Ibid., August 1913, 21.115. Ibid., September 1907, 22–23.116. Wagar, Confessions of a Spotter, 20–22.117. [Clarence Everly Ray], Railroad Spotter, 46–47.118. By the 1920s or so, New York transit workers called these agents “beakies.” Joshua B. Freeman,

In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933 –1966 (1989; repr., Philadelphia: Temple Uni-versity Press, 2001), 14–15, 62.

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kindled distrust among workers, as an anonymous Cincinnati streetcar worker told Senator Robert M. La Follette Jr. in a 1936 letter:

There are times that we man suspect some of are own officers of our union but we have no way to tell just who or which one is doing it but we do know it is a body of man that trying to keep the man down and not only that the man are afraid to try to find out because the first one that dares try will be fired out of a job, it is hell to have to be afraid to work like that.119

Labor espionage flourished even as spotting, its original form, shrank. But the Cincinnati streetcar worker’s letter conveyed the far more insidious nature of labor espionage: labor spies were not distinct from their coworkers, but indistinguishable from them; they were not just the enemy of the union, but the enemy within the union.

119. Unsigned letter to Senate Civil Liberties Committee, Records of the La Follette Committee, box 86, folder “April 1936 and previous,” National Archives, Washington, DC.

Surrogate Supervisors: Railway Spotters and the Origins of Workplace Surveillance

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