28:39 Damn. I can’t believe how far Robert Pattinson has come. From Twilight, to Governor of Pennsylvania in 1892 to playing Batman. What a crazy career.
17:28 -- It's very unsettling to see the founder of the Pinkertons writing during the hight of the Gilded Era call Unions "a relic of the old despotic days". And his core argument for why 'the old despotic days' are over is "I got rich selling a private army to corporations. Everybody else can to." No they can't Allan. You literally created the army that exists to stop it from happening again.
This is actually really interesting to learn about. I'm from an area where 'Pinkerton Thug' was used by people like my grandfather to basically mean 'Coniving Snake willing to sell his brother for a buck'. And now I know why.
great video! I knew of the Pinkerton's in their union busting but never in depth. I always appreciate how well you tie everything together, and I always learn something new from your videos.
I've been waiting for this essay! I can't wait to spend an hour listening to the history of the group that... pick an act of violence against unionizers.
I love how angry you got during the streams when the Pinkerton stuff kept coming up with no real-life context XD I adore that you made this video out of that spite.
It was the fact that it *just kept happening* like I'm sure I'll harp on it more when the video eventually gets made but she never stops saying it. Like she'll even say something along the lines of "I'm doing this for the Pinkertons" or something occasionally when you select her in the detective stuff and it's just like... girl I need you to CHILL lmao
Great video, but I’d disagree on the point that Booker being the ‘good’ timeline shouldn’t reflect the Pinkerton’s being responsible for that. There’s shades of grey to the fact that he’s the protagonist and technically the hero, but thats because in a game about choice it is his that ends the Comstock/Booker cycle. Just because he kills Comstock, doesn’t mean he’s a hero. What makes the difference in the timelines, too, isn’t that he was a Pinkerton, it’s because he had a daughter. All his actions in the game are decided by his choices to protect Elizabeth and amend his sins to her. I actually think Booker being a Pinkerton reflects how terrible they were for the time. Repeatedly, it is shown that he is a violent, terrible, and selfish man who doesn’t believe in redemption, with that belief being the only difference that makes Comstock. Him being at wounded knee, hating his mother, willing to kidnap what he thought was an innocent girl, and being a pinkerton show him as a villain, or the very least someone with an ends to the means mentality. He doesn’t even care about the revolution and has to be blackmailed into happen, he’d probably just as work for Comstock if it got him what he wanted. And he acknowledges this fact in the quote you show, the pinkertons reflect how terrible he is, not that they are part of his best outcome. Finally, the best outcome timeline we are shown is where he never sold his daughter and cleaned himself up, which had nothing to do with the Pinkertons.
I think I worded it poorly in the video because a couple people have mentioned this, but to clarify, I didn't mean that the Pinkertons were responsible for him being good. The point was that, in the timelines where he becomes the character we play as the protagonist, he must also be a Pinkerton - and that it's something exclusive to that version of him. Comstock was never a Pinkerton since that happens after they diverge, and that makes it unique compared to Wounded Knee which he shares with multiple characters including Comstock. There's correlation but not causation; the Booker we play as who goes on to save the day will always be a Pinkerton, but him being a Pinkerton isn't *why* he saves the day, it's just something that is inevitably part of the timelines where he becomes the protagonist. As far as the other stuff goes, I think where I disagree is that it's Wounded Knee that's used to establish him as a villain long before they ever really touch the Pinkerton stuff. They never really explore what he did as a Pinkerton beyond just alluding to vaguely being violent to workers compared to *really* digging in with the Wounded Knee stuff, and his rhetoric around the Pinkertons is often framed in contrast with Fitzroy like the "Sometimes you need someone like Fitzroy because of someone like me" stuff, which creates weird implications when it turns out that Daisy's character is just doing a spontaneous 180 where all of a sudden she's evil and bad and opposing her (and implicitly people like her) is the correct, if difficult, thing to do. I think it's mostly just severely underutilized. It's less of a "This was done in the wrong way" and more "This was under-done and results in some messy implications" thing for me - it feels like a vestigial plot point that was initially supposed to be explored more along the lines of Wounded Knee but then eventually got edited down to this incomplete aspect of his character that never really gets developed.
Frostpunk's DLC "The last autumn" is a good one that covers the ideas of unions and labor. It does so from both sides and can get to the extremes of both sides too, either burying would be union/strike leaders in concrete foundations and turning the worksite and every worker there into a penal colony, or workers enforcing a reign of terror that publicly executes people every day to keep motivation high. The whole game and it's sequel are all about that kind of abuse of power and pushing the player to do it themself, and having them suffer consequences from the people they did or didn't give power to.
your videos are always super insightful. also i appreciate how nuanced you are and how you dont go black and white like a lot of video essayists do nowadays.
A good deep dive. A great history lesson and also a nice exploration of the intersection of reality and fiction. I feel like the analysis of the Pinkertons in Bioshock Infinite kinda misses the mark. Booker DeWitt is not a good guy, and the game makes it a point to show that. Booker even says it himself. "Sometimes people need a person like Fitzgerald...Because of people like me." When Elizabeth mentions getting Fitzgerald the guns, Booker's response sounds like it does because he knows how people like Fink responds to poor workers arming themselves; they hire people like him. Now, the Pinkerton stuff does fall kinda flat because of how the Vox Populi are portrayed (both Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite are centerist "both sides are equally bad"), and they definitely could have brought it up more. The fact that Booker becomes a Pinkerton but Comstock doesn't also read to me like "Only Good Guy Booker is a Pinkerton." Booker and Comstock are mirrors of each other. Comstock, believing himself absolved of his evils, proceeds to do much more evil acts because he thinks himself as always good. Booker accepts his evil deeds and continues to do evil because he believes himself to be evil, which allows him to finally confront what he's done and try and be a better man for his daughter. You are right that Infinite is not as deep as it thinks it is. If a player did not already know how bad the Pinkertons were, then Booker working for them doesn't have the same impact. But, I do think the intention of the Pinkerton reference is to show Booker is not a good man and has done horrible things. Now, whether or not the game did a good enough job of *showing* that intention, well...
The point wasn't that Booker is squeaky-clean, but in the game he's definitely presented as the morally correct one when it all comes down to it versus the other villains of the game. Whether it's Slate or Fink or Comstock or Fitzroy, he beats them all and he's framed as being correct for doing so - which he usually is, although in the case of Daisy Fitzroy comes 1000% down to her character just being thrown off a cliff for no reason in order to justify it. I never meant it as him being a Pinkerton is related to what eventually made him a good guy, but moreso that the only paths in which he saves the day are the paths in which he also became a Pinkerton. Him participating in Wounded Knee is part of every timeline that's relevant to the game, and both Booker and Comstock have that in their history, but I do think it's notable that Comstock doesn't have the time as a Pinkerton in his backstory while Booker does. It creates a weird dilemma where Comstock will go after Booker for the sins of his past including both Wounded Knee and the Pinkertons, one of which is a sin Comstock shares but sees himself as cleansed of, whereas the other is something a totally different version of himself did. And I do think a lot of it just comes down to Bioshock Infinite having that very clumsy centrism at its core. Slate, Comstock, and Booker all share Wounded Knee. They were all on the same side of it, but what mattered was that they took different things from it. The act of participating in Wounded Knee is bad, but it didn't necessarily lead everyone to the same place, which I think makes it a more interesting thing than the Pinkerton stuff which never gets explored because nobody else is a Pinkerton and they refuse to get specific about what he did as a Pinkerton. And it's weird because it would've made sense to tie part two of the game to a specific event like Homestead and have the other characters in that part of the game be related to it the same way part one and a handful of the major characters are tied to Wounded Knee. Have Daisy be a former Pinkerton herself, or have her be one of the strike leaders that he fought against that he now has to work with - something to flesh out what it actually means to Booker to be a Pinkerton beyond some ominous "I did some bad things for some bad people" stuff he mentions now and then. It's kinda hard to tell what the writers wanted, because Infinite is a game that really wants to say something but didn't really know what it wanted to say. Honestly, the Pinkerton stuff feels like something that was supposed to be more relevant in that second part of the game but just kinda kept getting chopped down until eventually it was basically just flavour text, especially with the dialogue with Fink where he talks about how he could use a Pinkerton to deal with labour unrest that never goes anywhere. Plus it falls kind of weak because by the time attention turns to the Pinkerton stuff we already know he was a bad man who did bad things after all the details about Wounded Knee come out. Arguably nothing he did as a Pinkerton probably would've compared to what he did at Wounded Knee, which also makes it weird that they never explain what Booker actually did as a Pinkerton.
@@TheViveros Totally fair. The fact that we are even having a conversation shows that the writing was so vague regarding the Pinkertons that we can these differing opinions. The game just doesn't do a good job of explaining Booker's connection to the Pinkertons and that leaves the door open to interpretation. In the broader context of the Pinkertons in media, you do have a point. It's not something I considered so maybe my interpretation is biased because I only know the Pinkertons as strike breakers. Food for thought the next time I play through the Bioshock games again.
True, especially compared to how black-and-white they were with a lot of the rest of the game. They're not subtle with the stuff about Wounded Knee, but they give the Pinkerton stuff even less focus than they give to the Boxer Rebellion, and combined with how weirdly they wrote Daisy and the Vox it's hard to tell what they were actually trying to say there. And yeah the first time I played through it in 2016 I don't think I had any idea who the Pinkertons were and that whole aspect of the game just completely sailed over my head. Replaying it with that knowledge somehow made a lot of it make more sense but also less sense at the same time lmao
i know you mentioned it briefly but disco elysium is actually so goated, not even just for the labour politics its just straight up peak political commentary, please play it if you havent yall. or, read it really. lol
One day I will make a video about Joyce bc it's been a year since I played it and I still can't get over how exactly correctly they nailed that character. I said it when I was playing it but I knew at least a dozen Joyces when I was in politics and it was crazy to see someone get that character right.
loving it so far but the bit at the beginning with the occasional glitching visuals is kind of distracting/eye-strain-y. I've played process of elimination and I always had to hold my hand over most of the screen at those parts 🤧
The US Education system does a really bad job telling us about a very important organization to our US history. At any given time of their operations, even now, you could arguably point to the way the PInkertons behave, and who they act on behalf of, and have an idea what the majority sentiment of the US is at that time. Meat riding big business has been a staple of our culture for generations, and that hasn't really changed. As for the rest, there's a very thin line between actual criminals, and those who are only painted as such because of laws and institutions that pretty much gave them no other choice than to be branded as such. When it came to slavery, even though liberation was the idea with more backing and resources, racism was still in top form. All this is to say what I already said: They're an organization that should be taught in the US education system, or just any education system, because just studying them alone gives you a very good perspective on the general sentiments of the entire US at the time. This isn't to say more progressive and populist ideologies never formed, but they're counter cultures bordering on niche compared to how many people support what the Pinkertons seemed called in to regularly enforce.
Boosting engagement so you can buy RDR2 AND groceries❤️ phenomenal game. And great video their portrayal in the games so much more sense now. I always thought the armies of them felt off for a detective agency
i really think you should make a video about assassins creed and the historical accuracy there. i always find that there is a stunning lack of videos from minority creators about asassins creed, and its strange considering that the cinversation you bring up here is the conversation i think we need to have about assassins creed. how do the ways assassins creed as a franchise characterize these real world events and groups of people harm our understanding of the real history?
My last name is Pinkerton, does that count as hearing from them? If so, be very afraid Viveros! J/k im not sure if i actually have family ties to them but unions are almost as based as this channel, keep up the fantastic work!
ah good, finally someone can explain what the hell was the pinkertoons, you'd think with posh even with the bias would mention something. Honestly process of elimination is kinda meh, falls into a lot of death game tropes, and I almost predicted everyone who would die, Its alright I guess, I love the investigation mechanic at least. Could just use a stronger story, and do better to hide who was gonna die. also I don't like the new game + system, since I feel like it wasn't a good way to learn about the characters more
Fantastic video, I learned a lot from it! I always look forward to Viveros essays, informative and never dull. Soothing and relaxing but never boring or tiring.
28:39
Damn. I can’t believe how far Robert Pattinson has come. From Twilight, to Governor of Pennsylvania in 1892 to playing Batman. What a crazy career.
Everyone underestimated his range back when he was in Harry Potter but look at him now
17:28 -- It's very unsettling to see the founder of the Pinkertons writing during the hight of the Gilded Era call Unions "a relic of the old despotic days".
And his core argument for why 'the old despotic days' are over is "I got rich selling a private army to corporations. Everybody else can to."
No they can't Allan. You literally created the army that exists to stop it from happening again.
This is actually really interesting to learn about. I'm from an area where 'Pinkerton Thug' was used by people like my grandfather to basically mean 'Coniving Snake willing to sell his brother for a buck'.
And now I know why.
great video! I knew of the Pinkerton's in their union busting but never in depth. I always appreciate how well you tie everything together, and I always learn something new from your videos.
Process of Elimination was the first time I heard about the name Pinkertons. I didn't realize it was based on a real organization.
I've been waiting for this essay! I can't wait to spend an hour listening to the history of the group that... pick an act of violence against unionizers.
I love how angry you got during the streams when the Pinkerton stuff kept coming up with no real-life context XD I adore that you made this video out of that spite.
It was the fact that it *just kept happening* like I'm sure I'll harp on it more when the video eventually gets made but she never stops saying it. Like she'll even say something along the lines of "I'm doing this for the Pinkertons" or something occasionally when you select her in the detective stuff and it's just like... girl I need you to CHILL lmao
Your work ethic is admirable
Great video, but I’d disagree on the point that Booker being the ‘good’ timeline shouldn’t reflect the Pinkerton’s being responsible for that. There’s shades of grey to the fact that he’s the protagonist and technically the hero, but thats because in a game about choice it is his that ends the Comstock/Booker cycle. Just because he kills Comstock, doesn’t mean he’s a hero. What makes the difference in the timelines, too, isn’t that he was a Pinkerton, it’s because he had a daughter. All his actions in the game are decided by his choices to protect Elizabeth and amend his sins to her.
I actually think Booker being a Pinkerton reflects how terrible they were for the time. Repeatedly, it is shown that he is a violent, terrible, and selfish man who doesn’t believe in redemption, with that belief being the only difference that makes Comstock. Him being at wounded knee, hating his mother, willing to kidnap what he thought was an innocent girl, and being a pinkerton show him as a villain, or the very least someone with an ends to the means mentality. He doesn’t even care about the revolution and has to be blackmailed into happen, he’d probably just as work for Comstock if it got him what he wanted. And he acknowledges this fact in the quote you show, the pinkertons reflect how terrible he is, not that they are part of his best outcome.
Finally, the best outcome timeline we are shown is where he never sold his daughter and cleaned himself up, which had nothing to do with the Pinkertons.
I think I worded it poorly in the video because a couple people have mentioned this, but to clarify, I didn't mean that the Pinkertons were responsible for him being good. The point was that, in the timelines where he becomes the character we play as the protagonist, he must also be a Pinkerton - and that it's something exclusive to that version of him. Comstock was never a Pinkerton since that happens after they diverge, and that makes it unique compared to Wounded Knee which he shares with multiple characters including Comstock. There's correlation but not causation; the Booker we play as who goes on to save the day will always be a Pinkerton, but him being a Pinkerton isn't *why* he saves the day, it's just something that is inevitably part of the timelines where he becomes the protagonist.
As far as the other stuff goes, I think where I disagree is that it's Wounded Knee that's used to establish him as a villain long before they ever really touch the Pinkerton stuff. They never really explore what he did as a Pinkerton beyond just alluding to vaguely being violent to workers compared to *really* digging in with the Wounded Knee stuff, and his rhetoric around the Pinkertons is often framed in contrast with Fitzroy like the "Sometimes you need someone like Fitzroy because of someone like me" stuff, which creates weird implications when it turns out that Daisy's character is just doing a spontaneous 180 where all of a sudden she's evil and bad and opposing her (and implicitly people like her) is the correct, if difficult, thing to do.
I think it's mostly just severely underutilized. It's less of a "This was done in the wrong way" and more "This was under-done and results in some messy implications" thing for me - it feels like a vestigial plot point that was initially supposed to be explored more along the lines of Wounded Knee but then eventually got edited down to this incomplete aspect of his character that never really gets developed.
@@TheViveros understandable, it’s nice to see other perspectives
Thank you for bring up this topic! I never knew about this and now I have something new to research!
36:08 You're so bloody real for that lmao
Frostpunk's DLC "The last autumn" is a good one that covers the ideas of unions and labor. It does so from both sides and can get to the extremes of both sides too, either burying would be union/strike leaders in concrete foundations and turning the worksite and every worker there into a penal colony, or workers enforcing a reign of terror that publicly executes people every day to keep motivation high. The whole game and it's sequel are all about that kind of abuse of power and pushing the player to do it themself, and having them suffer consequences from the people they did or didn't give power to.
Only halfway through but damn this is such a good history lesson - evil stuff but v interesting to to learn abt!
your videos are always super insightful. also i appreciate how nuanced you are and how you dont go black and white like a lot of video essayists do nowadays.
A good deep dive. A great history lesson and also a nice exploration of the intersection of reality and fiction.
I feel like the analysis of the Pinkertons in Bioshock Infinite kinda misses the mark. Booker DeWitt is not a good guy, and the game makes it a point to show that. Booker even says it himself. "Sometimes people need a person like Fitzgerald...Because of people like me." When Elizabeth mentions getting Fitzgerald the guns, Booker's response sounds like it does because he knows how people like Fink responds to poor workers arming themselves; they hire people like him. Now, the Pinkerton stuff does fall kinda flat because of how the Vox Populi are portrayed (both Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite are centerist "both sides are equally bad"), and they definitely could have brought it up more. The fact that Booker becomes a Pinkerton but Comstock doesn't also read to me like "Only Good Guy Booker is a Pinkerton." Booker and Comstock are mirrors of each other. Comstock, believing himself absolved of his evils, proceeds to do much more evil acts because he thinks himself as always good. Booker accepts his evil deeds and continues to do evil because he believes himself to be evil, which allows him to finally confront what he's done and try and be a better man for his daughter.
You are right that Infinite is not as deep as it thinks it is. If a player did not already know how bad the Pinkertons were, then Booker working for them doesn't have the same impact. But, I do think the intention of the Pinkerton reference is to show Booker is not a good man and has done horrible things. Now, whether or not the game did a good enough job of *showing* that intention, well...
The point wasn't that Booker is squeaky-clean, but in the game he's definitely presented as the morally correct one when it all comes down to it versus the other villains of the game. Whether it's Slate or Fink or Comstock or Fitzroy, he beats them all and he's framed as being correct for doing so - which he usually is, although in the case of Daisy Fitzroy comes 1000% down to her character just being thrown off a cliff for no reason in order to justify it. I never meant it as him being a Pinkerton is related to what eventually made him a good guy, but moreso that the only paths in which he saves the day are the paths in which he also became a Pinkerton. Him participating in Wounded Knee is part of every timeline that's relevant to the game, and both Booker and Comstock have that in their history, but I do think it's notable that Comstock doesn't have the time as a Pinkerton in his backstory while Booker does. It creates a weird dilemma where Comstock will go after Booker for the sins of his past including both Wounded Knee and the Pinkertons, one of which is a sin Comstock shares but sees himself as cleansed of, whereas the other is something a totally different version of himself did.
And I do think a lot of it just comes down to Bioshock Infinite having that very clumsy centrism at its core. Slate, Comstock, and Booker all share Wounded Knee. They were all on the same side of it, but what mattered was that they took different things from it. The act of participating in Wounded Knee is bad, but it didn't necessarily lead everyone to the same place, which I think makes it a more interesting thing than the Pinkerton stuff which never gets explored because nobody else is a Pinkerton and they refuse to get specific about what he did as a Pinkerton. And it's weird because it would've made sense to tie part two of the game to a specific event like Homestead and have the other characters in that part of the game be related to it the same way part one and a handful of the major characters are tied to Wounded Knee. Have Daisy be a former Pinkerton herself, or have her be one of the strike leaders that he fought against that he now has to work with - something to flesh out what it actually means to Booker to be a Pinkerton beyond some ominous "I did some bad things for some bad people" stuff he mentions now and then.
It's kinda hard to tell what the writers wanted, because Infinite is a game that really wants to say something but didn't really know what it wanted to say. Honestly, the Pinkerton stuff feels like something that was supposed to be more relevant in that second part of the game but just kinda kept getting chopped down until eventually it was basically just flavour text, especially with the dialogue with Fink where he talks about how he could use a Pinkerton to deal with labour unrest that never goes anywhere. Plus it falls kind of weak because by the time attention turns to the Pinkerton stuff we already know he was a bad man who did bad things after all the details about Wounded Knee come out. Arguably nothing he did as a Pinkerton probably would've compared to what he did at Wounded Knee, which also makes it weird that they never explain what Booker actually did as a Pinkerton.
@@TheViveros Totally fair. The fact that we are even having a conversation shows that the writing was so vague regarding the Pinkertons that we can these differing opinions. The game just doesn't do a good job of explaining Booker's connection to the Pinkertons and that leaves the door open to interpretation.
In the broader context of the Pinkertons in media, you do have a point. It's not something I considered so maybe my interpretation is biased because I only know the Pinkertons as strike breakers. Food for thought the next time I play through the Bioshock games again.
True, especially compared to how black-and-white they were with a lot of the rest of the game. They're not subtle with the stuff about Wounded Knee, but they give the Pinkerton stuff even less focus than they give to the Boxer Rebellion, and combined with how weirdly they wrote Daisy and the Vox it's hard to tell what they were actually trying to say there.
And yeah the first time I played through it in 2016 I don't think I had any idea who the Pinkertons were and that whole aspect of the game just completely sailed over my head. Replaying it with that knowledge somehow made a lot of it make more sense but also less sense at the same time lmao
Well im gonna have something to listen while im studying
i know you mentioned it briefly but disco elysium is actually so goated, not even just for the labour politics its just straight up peak political commentary, please play it if you havent yall. or, read it really. lol
One day I will make a video about Joyce bc it's been a year since I played it and I still can't get over how exactly correctly they nailed that character. I said it when I was playing it but I knew at least a dozen Joyces when I was in politics and it was crazy to see someone get that character right.
OH MY GOD IM SO DOWN!! JOYCE IS SO WELL-WRITTEN ITS NUTS
loving it so far but the bit at the beginning with the occasional glitching visuals is kind of distracting/eye-strain-y. I've played process of elimination and I always had to hold my hand over most of the screen at those parts 🤧
as a MTG lover, f*ck wizards of the coast
The US Education system does a really bad job telling us about a very important organization to our US history. At any given time of their operations, even now, you could arguably point to the way the PInkertons behave, and who they act on behalf of, and have an idea what the majority sentiment of the US is at that time. Meat riding big business has been a staple of our culture for generations, and that hasn't really changed. As for the rest, there's a very thin line between actual criminals, and those who are only painted as such because of laws and institutions that pretty much gave them no other choice than to be branded as such. When it came to slavery, even though liberation was the idea with more backing and resources, racism was still in top form. All this is to say what I already said: They're an organization that should be taught in the US education system, or just any education system, because just studying them alone gives you a very good perspective on the general sentiments of the entire US at the time. This isn't to say more progressive and populist ideologies never formed, but they're counter cultures bordering on niche compared to how many people support what the Pinkertons seemed called in to regularly enforce.
we’re eating GOOOOOD today …. thanks for giving me something to listen to during class 🫶
Boosting engagement so you can buy RDR2 AND groceries❤️ phenomenal game. And great video their portrayal in the games so much more sense now. I always thought the armies of them felt off for a detective agency
weezer reference
i really think you should make a video about assassins creed and the historical accuracy there. i always find that there is a stunning lack of videos from minority creators about asassins creed, and its strange considering that the cinversation you bring up here is the conversation i think we need to have about assassins creed. how do the ways assassins creed as a franchise characterize these real world events and groups of people harm our understanding of the real history?
My last name is Pinkerton, does that count as hearing from them? If so, be very afraid Viveros!
J/k im not sure if i actually have family ties to them but unions are almost as based as this channel, keep up the fantastic work!
ah good, finally someone can explain what the hell was the pinkertoons, you'd think with posh even with the bias would mention something. Honestly process of elimination is kinda meh, falls into a lot of death game tropes, and I almost predicted everyone who would die, Its alright I guess, I love the investigation mechanic at least. Could just use a stronger story, and do better to hide who was gonna die. also I don't like the new game + system, since I feel like it wasn't a good way to learn about the characters more
Fantastic video, I learned a lot from it! I always look forward to Viveros essays, informative and never dull. Soothing and relaxing but never boring or tiring.