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These things developed very early. All of this is rooted in the good old days of the free market, when the robber barons could hire their own forces to police the workers. The practice obviously did not disappear when professional police and other agencies brought the government in to perform this function in a more coordinated and standardized way. In the 1888 CB&Q strike at Galesburg, Illinois the railroad had a number of detectives working undercover among the strikers, as well as armed goons. In the earlier strike (1877), the local government deputized armed strikers to keep order in the town, but the railroad controled the place eleven years later and the town simply deputized whoever the railroad hired. There were so many different groups operating in this little town that the local records indicate that the cops were sometimes actually arresting each other ... I doubt this was unique among what amounted to company towns. There are also antebellum accounts of organized violence against strikers, which seem from the press accounts to have been deputized hirelings of the bosses or maybe even gangs associated with local political machines. The practice likely came from various sources. ML
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