Bosses and Tips

One hundred years ago, the dominant history of tipping in America told a story that pointed in two directions. On the one hand, it stretched back into the far recesses of precapitalist Europe to the “vails” listed in medieval and premodern account books, records of coins given to servants by their masters or guests in the house. Even slaves got cash gifts; for example, Billy Lee received a vail from the secretary of his master George Washington when Lee persuaded a white servant not to complain to the general that the secretary had tried to rape the servant’s daughter.^{Footnote 12}

On the other hand, histories of tipping consistently linked it to the development of merchant capitalism in London, especially its taverns and coffeehouses, where men on the make flocked to drink, gossip, and cut deals. The earliest entry in the Oxford English Dictionary (1707) is from The Beaux’ Strategem, a popular play comparing the craven commercialism of the tavernkeeper Boniface and his household with the charity of Lady Bountiful. In other languages, the word for “tip” evolves from the words for “drink,” also referring to payments in taverns. In the second half of the eighteenth century, a distinguished London coffeehouse printed the words “To Insure Promptitude” on a bowl and encouraged patrons such as Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith to deposit coins in it. The words “tip” and “vail” were often used interchangeably in the press and the diaries of men such as the famous diarist Samuel Pepys and pioneering ornithologist Gilbert White, but a distinction grew as merchants’ new taste for dividing private from public, women from men, and home from work spread to the rest of the bourgeoisie.

These two invented histories (the feudal practice and the commercial convention) converged in the late nineteenth century, when Americans newly rich on industrial enterprise tried to penetrate the old-world aristocracy on grand tours of Europe. They consistently tipped to bolster their insecure status, and out of sheer misunderstanding of etiquette. When these vacationers returned to America, the habit—a capitalist’s bad impression of a semi-capitalist, semi-feudal tradition—stuck and spread.^{Footnote 13}

American mass media told this history as the growth of the service sector brought tipping to the attention of an urban avant garde of writers and journalists. They taught the rest of the country that whether and how to tip was socially significant. Most often, they reported that it was a seemingly unavoidable social evil. Scribner’s Monthly and The Ladies’ Home Journal condemned tipping for demeaning customers, lightening their pocketbooks, and shaming and spoiling waiters and other service workers. Articles compared it to bribery, beggary, extortion, the spoils system of machine politics, and the worst excesses of Wall Street speculation. Humorous periodicals such as Puck made light of these complaints without challenging their accuracy. Even articles that tacitly accepted the existence of tipping could not resist a few jibes against “the hungry tiger” who looks as though he will murder you when you neglect him “in the settling of the bill.”^{Footnote 14}

The controversy over tipping led to a reform movement in the first decades of the twentieth century. Some establishments banned tip-taking or instituted intricate payment systems intended to discourage the practice. In 1913, the Breslin Hotel on Broadway paid waiters a bonus of 10 percent of the amount of each check above 50 cents; the experiment was declared a failure before the end of the year because customers continued to tip anyway. In 1929, the restaurant at the new Lexington Hotel, some blocks east of the Breslin, added an automatic 10 percent service charge to all bills; complaints from staff and customers scuttled the plan in four weeks. In 1933, the Statler Hotel chain banned tips for checking hats and coats, a surprisingly clumsy move for a company that usually controlled work with innovative design (the rudimentary vending machine that E. M. Statler invented in his youth; ice water piped into every room; sheets with hems of different sizes signaling full, queen, or king; and the introduction of the Servidor, a small chamber in the center of the hotel room door that opened from either side, where bellhops placed items for guests or vice versa while avoiding any personal contact, perhaps allowing guests to avoid tipping without discomfort).^{Footnote 15}

Some union leaders inveighed against tipping. Several state legislatures outlawed it entirely. William Rufus Scott, whose studies of Panama and newspaper management are still in print (2009 and 2010), published the decidedly out-of-print anti-tipping screed The Itching Palm (1916) and organized anti-tip clubs across the nation. However, employers’ efforts remained isolated and the laws were hard to enforce and eventually were struck down by state courts or repealed by state legislatures. These results came, in part, from a lack of political will. Alongside female suffrage, child labor, temperance, and all the causes available to join during the Progressive Era, banning gratuities was less compelling. Anti-tip leagues also failed, however, because of reformers’ misunderstandings about the history of tipping and its function in modern capitalist society.^{Footnote 16}

The real story of tipping is a society of slaves and servants reimbursed with room, board, and an occasional coin becoming a society of service workers paid regular wages and regularly tipped. The significant moment in the history of tipping was not the feudal past or the coffee houses of eighteenth-century England, but right then and there—America in the nineteenth and especially at the turn of the twentieth century. Although the word “tip” had been used before, the modern concept—a fairly regular but somewhat indeterminate payment for service that was added to a regular wage—did not spread until those years. As urban growth and changing consumer tastes multiplied the number of servile tasks that an entrepreneur could bring to scale in a new business model, servitude declined, and service work grew. Between 1890 and 1920, the proportion of Americans who worked as servants dropped by half, from 2.3 percent of the U.S. population to little more than 1 percent. At the same time, the number of service workers—waiters, bartenders, janitors, cleaners, elevator operators, and the like—exploded. The rates of decline and expansion were sharpest in urban centers like New York City, where restaurants, hotels, nightclubs, and shoeshine stands proliferated. In this context, tipping was a new way to pay—regular wages and regular tips—for a new kind of work, one of many multiplying and often overlapping systems developed and standardized under high capitalism: piecework, commissions, seasonal and performance bonuses, stock shares, pensions, health insurance plans, paid vacations. The writers who criticized tipping did not realize that they stood at the beginning of its history.^{Footnote 17}

Anti-tippers also misunderstood two important advantages that tips offered to employers of service workers. First, it provided a new tool of labor control in a society experiencing a sharp decline in the institution of servitude, but not in the way critics imagined. Popular media portrayed serious anxieties about service workers because they seemed like servants, but also seemed to lack the extensive supervision that household masters usually provided. Tips seemed a form of discipline to replace missing masters by delegating part of the payment to customers, who would praise or punish with cash. They also preserved a touch of paternalism, the noblesse oblige associated with tossing a coin to an obedient underling. Just as the Southern system of sharecropping seemed to offer a compromise between freed slaves and their former masters, with some liberty but not very much, tipping seemed like a compromise between servitude and wage work. The popular press saw this as the function of tipping—giving customers a little master-like supervision and authority over service workers to protect the quality of service—and declared that it had failed.^{Footnote 18}

The magazines and the protesters, however, had it backward. A good tip was not a reward for superior service; it was a directive to give better service. In other words, a good tip was the cause of good service, not the effect. This was true when the tip was given ahead of the service, by handing a bill to the desk clerk or maitre d’. It was also true when the tip was paid after the service, often because a repeat customer could be counted on for the same tip as the last time. Even if a stranger walked in the door, the worker would size him or her up, predict the tip, and give the appropriate level of service. Although some bosses wanted standard service for all customers and deplored the effects of tips on differentiating service quality, many seem to have appreciated the incentive it gave workers to show special attention to high-rolling customers. Critics of tipping always saw the privileged service given to high tippers as an insult to other customers, an unfortunate by-product of a failed system, and could not image that this was the whole point. They confused standardization with democracy and ignored that the service experience was nonstandard in many other ways, too. If a customer could pay more to get a better hotel room or bottle of wine, why not also pay for more attentive service?¹⁹

The second way that managers used tips was to control their labor costs, although there was also confusion about how this worked. Most often, critics claimed that tipping forced customers to shoulder the employer’s rightful responsibility to pay workers a living wage. During a 1915 hearing of the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, Robert Todd Lincoln (son of the Great Emancipator and chairman of the board of the Pullman Car Company—as the saying went, Lincoln freed the slaves and his son hired them) admitted that Pullman porters could not live without their tips, but when Commissioner Austin Garretson asked whether Lincoln believed that “the corporation should get the benefit of [tips] rather than the coon,” Lincoln argued that tips were not, even in the context of low wages, a subsidy of the Pullman Company by the general public.^{Footnote 20} If tips were abolished and wages raised, as many reformers demanded, the Pullman Company likely would have passed the extra cost on to customers with higher prices or special charges for services. In other words, tips were not a subsidy to the corporation but part of the price, which customers would pay one way or another.

Employers gained a different fiscal advantage from tipping—it transferred the risk of low revenue onto the backs of employees. When workers received tips, bosses paid a smaller portion of the wage, and the other portion—the tip—decreased automatically as business declined. One cannot always fire someone without damaging business even more, and pay cuts are bad for morale; tips pass on the costs of hard times to employees in smaller gradations, and are more sensitive to changes in sales. To do away with tipping and pay workers more might have resulted in a similar average wage, but it erased that benefit of dispersing the risk of low revenue, a kind of flexibility that was especially useful to managers of hotels, restaurants, and other places where patronage fluctuated by the hour, day of the week, and season, as well as more mysterious trends.^{Footnote 21}

Workers and Tips

These fluctuations sometimes meant hardship, but workers also found benefits from taking tips. You wouldn’t know it from their union leaders. American Federation of Labor President Samuel Gompers wrote that tipping “tends to lessen the self-respect of a man who accepts a tip.”^{Footnote 22} Gompers rolled cigars before he became a union leader; he had no experience as a tipped worker. The leadership of individual labor unions sometimes spoke out against tipping, usually to the dismay of their rank and file. In 1909, several New York locals of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union (today’s UNITE-HERE) announced a fight against tipping and directed members to refuse all tips. The strategy was meant to put pressure on hotel and restaurant owners to increase wages; it failed because workers ignored their leaders’ directive.^{Footnote 23} In 1912, President Paul Vehling and Secretary Joseph Vehling of the International Hotel Workers Union (IHWU), a radical union associated but not formally affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World, were unanimously expelled from the union by a vote of the membership (135–0) for mismanaging funds, but also for speaking out against tipping. Joseph Vehling had addressed the Commercial Traveler’s League without the union’s permission, wearing a bit button that read “no tips.” A city paper offered Paul Vehling $75 a week to write columns against tipping. The membership of the IHWU called this anti-tip lobbying “detrimental to our interests.”^{Footnote 24} In 1925, A. Philip Randolph assumed leadership of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters with no experience as a porter himself, and initiated a campaign asking the Interstate Commerce Commission to ban tipping, hoping that such an order would force the railroads to increase wages. This stance was widely unpopular among the rank and file. In each case (1909, 1912, and 1925), we do not know too much about the pro-tipping stance of the common worker. One could infer a strategic difference between leaders and followers over how to maximize earnings while eventually phasing out tips and winning a higher wage. Or perhaps workers sincerely preferred to keep receiving tips because they thought it would lead to a higher income. Maybe they preferred tipping for reasons that had nothing to do with a rational measure of their economic self-interest. Historians have tended to assume the first possibility, without sufficient evidence.^{Footnote 25}

There are fewer sources by or about tipped workers who were not in union leadership roles, but perhaps we can assume that their managers were better informed than popular magazine writers, at least, about their practices and preferences. According to some bosses, workers enjoyed many benefits from tipping. Working for tips could be fun and profitable. Workers gambled on the generosity of customers as they walked in the door. A bellhop, for example, would pay a coworker a nickel or dime for the privilege of skipping him in the queue and waiting on a certain guest, betting that the tip would more than cover the payment. Waiters also traded customers and tables in exchange for small fees, and developed complex systems to divine the tipping propensities of customers who walked, dressed, or ordered their drinks in a certain way. Occasionally this dynamic would be reported in the popular press, without understanding of its significance. For example, in 1905 Harper’s reported that an old gentleman who stiffed his waiter in a Baltimore hotel asked him, “What the deuce are you thanking me for?” The waiter replied, “I bet No. 10 fifty cents dat you wouldn’t ‘tip’ me.” The example was offered as a joke, not an insight into the sociology of tipping.^{Footnote 26}

Service workers found other ways to increase tips, from the headwaiter who could remember the names of thousands of regular guests, to the doorman who could start a “tipping chain” in the line queued for taxis by inducing the first person to tip, or the bellhop who demonstrated every device in the room (blinds, radio, water taps) until the guest shooed him away with a coin. Some waiters confronted poor-tipping regulars with overwhelming shows of service, refilling water and wine glasses constantly, serving food “with a flourish resembling a magician producing a missing lady,” and rushing to light cigarettes before patrons put them in their mouths. Other workers shared information, such as barbers in Manhattan hotels who identified nickel-, dime-, and quarter-tippers by tapping a shaving brush against a cup a certain number of times. Service workers also looked out for unusual tipping opportunities, such as the Statler bellhop who purposely broke several electric lamps to be handed out as party favors to female guests at a large banquet. When the ladies’ escorts returned to complain, he summoned his best look of concern and picked out an unbroken lamp. By the end of the night his guests had collectively thanked him with hundreds of dollars. Waiters, barbers, doormen, and bellhops appreciated the extra money that came from identifying and working good tippers, but they also reveled in the skill and craftiness they displayed, both for its own sake and as a subtle way to overturn the social hierarchy implied by their positions. Like so many others, service workers enjoyed turning the tables on their supposed betters.^{Footnote 27}

Tipping also helped service workers impose their own social hierarchy in the workplace. Tips became the subject of struggles that reinforced the power structure at work, as when cooks insisted that waiters hand over a cut in exchange for customers’ special orders, or headwaiters demanded a share of their waiters’ nightly profits. Headwaiters seated good tippers in the stations of their favorite waiters, investing these work relationships with immediate financial importance, and encouraging waiters to kick back. All this was decidedly to the disadvantage of some workers, who complained loudly and appealed to unions to break up such privileges.^{Footnote 28}

These glimpses of workers’ opinions in the management journals of their bosses would warrant skepticism, if it were not for more contemporary sources that show today’s service workers making the same uses of tips. This is especially clear in the writings and memoirs of tipped workers, along with the scholarship of Rachel Sherman, a sociologist who spent many months working in various positions in two California hotels in the 1990s. Sherman devotes an entire chapter of her book on hotel workers to the gambles and games that workers play, often with tips, which she argues help workers “pass the time, reduce fatigue, and establish skill” with the ultimate benefit of giving workers some feeling of control over their labor and decreasing their feelings of subordination.^{Footnote 29} Waiter/writer Steve Dublanica’s Keep the Change, an investigation of the dynamics of tipping published in 2010, and Jacob Tomsky’s Reference Tomsky2012 memoir of hotel work, Heads in Beds, also describe contemporary workers using tips to play games, increase income, demonstrate skill, and impose hierarchy within the workplace. Dublanica’s understanding of tips evolves over the course of the book; he begins by stating that “gratuities in this country are a gigantic pain in the ass,” and has soon repeated most of the common complaints about tipping, but he eventually concludes that tips are an important tool for building meaningful relationships between workers and customers. Tomsky is less analytical but more consistent; he shows how tips work, revels in the intricacies of the tipping game, and notes that a coworker who felt demeaned by working for tips was the exception to the rule.^{Footnote 30}

It is probably not a coincidence that Tomsky’s “humiliated” co-worker was a young African-American man. Before the civil rights movement, racism often trapped black men and women—even those with college and graduate degrees—in low-status service jobs. Racism made those jobs more difficult for black people, and raised expectations of certain kinds of demeaning servility among white customers. The legacy of this racism, which still rears its ugly head today (for example, celebrity chef Paula Deen’s recent fantasy of a plantation-themed wedding with an all-black waitstaff),^{Footnote 31} no doubt affects the experience of tipping for some black workers. Black leaders and intellectuals have sometimes identified the tip as an engine of racial discrimination, and it is not hard to see why—white people kept pointing them in that direction. Back in 1905, F. Hopkinson Smith (a prolific author, illustrator, and the contractor who built the base for the Statue of Liberty) told a reporter, “I love to give darkeys 25 cents. … I took one of them with me to Mexico once as a messenger. There was never a more faithful, trustworthy, and willing darky than that fellow.”^{Footnote 32}

Black service workers themselves have been less critical of tips than their historians, who lay out conflicting and sometimes ambiguous evidence that does not match their strong anti-tip conclusions. We know most about the experiences of Pullman porters, whose history has been studied in greater detail than any other kind of American service worker. The scholarship on Pullman porters is consistently excellent, except when it tries to analyze the ethics of tipping. In hearings before a pre-World War I Commission on Industrial Relations, when asked whether tips “disgraced or humiliated in any way,” Pullman porter G. H. Sylvester replied that “degredation [sic] would be if we did not get them.” Historian Eric Arnesen, who quotes Sylvester in his history of black railroad unions, nevertheless argues that tips forced Pullman porters “to assume a persona that was at once cautious, cheerful, even obsequious before their white patrons.” Arnesen’s statement involves several leaps of faith that are not borne out by his evidence: that porters were generally cautious, cheerful, even obsequious (this is his most reasonable conclusion, though not true of all porters); that tipping was a more important factor in encouraging such a demeanor than the policies and extensive rules of the Pullman Company, which were enforced by a system of undercover inspectors posing as passengers; and that caution, cheer, and obsequiousness were not also tools that porters consciously used to get the better of white passengers, turning racism against the racists. Arnesen says that workers showed “ambivalence” because they wanted both to be paid higher wages and to keep their tips. But this is not ambivalence; it is a preference for two things that are not mutually exclusive.^{Footnote 33}

Historian Larry Tye also mentions the “ambivalence” that porters had about “the bizarre rituals of tipping,” but gives little evidence about the negative side: he claims, without quotes or detail, that some of his interviewees found “the bizarre rituals of tipping exhilarating” and that others did things for tips that they later regretted (lying about tip amounts to coworkers, neglecting riders who could not afford to tip, degrading themselves to win tips). Tye does quote Malcolm X, who worked briefly on a train in his teens and wrote (with Alex Haley) in his autobiography that porters

Tye comments only that Malcolm X’s experience selling sandwiches down the aisles of trains, watching people give and take tips, informed his understanding of race relations. One could say a lot more about the strategic essentialism of those servant-psychologists, whose enactments of racist stereotypes both reinforced those stereotypes and used them to get a leg up. Although it is hard to unequivocally celebrate porters who Tommed for tips, it is also incorrect to conclude that the tip itself was the root of the problem, and that doing away with tips would have ended the need for Tomming. Banning tips would not have ended racist oppression; it would have removed a weapon of the weak against racists.^{Footnote 34}

Beth Tompkins Bates offers more concrete evidence of anti-tipping sentiment than other historians of porters—a 1931 article by a porter published in the American Mercury, another porter-penned article from 1948 in Cornet magazine, and porter Charles Anderson’s 1904 book Freemen Yet Slaves, which cited tipping as the most demeaning aspect of the job. She—as do Arnesen, Tye, and other historians of Pullman porters—notes that some porters seemed to enjoy and find value in tipping; Bates offers the same statement from G. H. Sylvester that Arnesen quoted in his earlier book.^{Footnote 35} Despite the care each of these historians shows in presenting porters’ opinions on both sides of the issue, when speaking in their own voices, they condemn tipping as a root cause of indignity, poverty, and oppression.

These historians all quote folklorist Jack Santino’s path-breaking work on the stories of Pullman porters.^{Footnote 36} Santino pays very close attention to stories about tips, but his conclusion that “it was the tipping system itself that allowed passengers to be so rude and insensitive to porters in the first place” does not follow from them. The stories that porters told Santino show that certain ways of tipping were demeaning (such as tearing a bill in half and giving one piece to the porter with the promise of the second half at the end of the ride). One tipping story that Santino discusses at great length suggests that tips could also be used to assuage or apologize for demeaning behavior—when a U.S. senator from a southern state kicked porter Ernest Ford Jr. in the behind, the senator’s fellow passengers felt enough shame to pass the hat and offer Ford a sizable tip. Like the historians who came after him, Santino admits that tips were not all bad: “[E]ven though there are problems intrinsic to the tipping system, the stories are often funny. To porters, getting tips represented a kind of triumph over the system that shackled them. The bigger the tip, the greater they considered the victory.”^{Footnote 37} Santino’s evidence that tipping caused mistreatment is slim. It seems just as likely that the job, the broader policies of the Pullman Company, and the climate of racism in America encouraged discrimination, and acts of tipping reflected that racism, rather than contributing to it in any meaningful way.

Sources from the early twentieth century that offer the voices of Pullman porters and other black service workers, unmediated by historians, tend not to depict tips as demeaning. Nat Love, a black cowboy who spent his later years as a porter, simply noted that as he got better at his job, his tips improved. Melvin Whitfield Carter, Sr., a musician who earned his living as a railroad red cap in Saint Paul, noted that “[y]ou’d live off your tips, which were considerable. … You worked hard, you’d get paid good, and if not, you didn’t.” Willie Lee Frelix, another Pullman porter, said, “The pay wasn’t no good, but you made a lot of money in tips when I first started and that’s what I loved.” In his autobiography, porter Robert E. Turner told many happy stories about tips he received on the job. Turner complained about making beds, passengers’ lost wallets and handbags, undercover Pullman agents who policed the quality of service, people who flushed the toilets while the train was still in the station, and various other aspects of the job, but his only complaints related to tips were about people who didn’t tip and people who asked how much his tips amounted to, implying that he was overpaid. Other porters recounted the tricks they used to increase tips, told funny stories about tips with relish (like the time one porter earned $50 for supplying bacon grease to a man suffering from hemorrhoids), and remembered the celebrities who tipped them best; more than one mentioned Bing Crosby. George Henry Smock’s only complaint was that tips helped some of his fellow porters earn too much. “Many of them, it made them foolish in that they made so much money—more than any other person in his surroundings or in his caliber of life—that they became gamblers or they became alcoholics.”^{Footnote 38}

Some whites did degrade blacks for tips, but even in these cases the role of the tip itself is complicated. While working for an optical company in Memphis, Richard Wright got to know an elevator operator named Shorty, a proud intellectual who was forthright and outspoken about the injustices of racism when he was out of earshot of whites. But many times, as Wright later recounted in his autobiography Black Boy, he saw Shorty play the fool to earn a quarter. His special method was to bend over and suggest that a white passenger kick him in the ass. Wright spends a couple of pages describing in great detail how Shorty degraded himself, begging to be kicked. When Wright eventually confronted Shorty about it and argued that a quarter was not fair payment for the indignity, Shorty replied, “Listen, nigger, my ass is tough and quarters is scarce.” Wright never mentioned it to Shorty again.^{Footnote 39}

It is possible to interpret this story in line with the theories of Pullman porter historians—the institution of tipping drove Shorty, an otherwise dignified man, to accept and even encourage the racism of his time and place. The young Wright clearly felt that way. Years later, the author was not so sure.^{Footnote 40} Malcolm X would have counted Shorty among his servant-psychologists. Folklorists like Santino would call it playing trickster, and sociologist James Scott would call it “laying it on thick.”^{Footnote 41} Tipping is a tool that Shorty used to turn already-existing racism to his short-term advantage. Tipping was not necessary to create racism or encourage blacks to perform racial stereotypes for whites. Racism was already there. In his non-tipped job at the optical company, Wright felt the same pressure to fake his demeanor. Tipped jobs were special only in the immediacy with which performers of racist stereotypes could get paid.

One can make the same arguments about sexism and tipping. In the early twentieth century, many tipped jobs—especially waiting tables—shifted from black men to white women. The labor shortages of World War I played a role in this shift, and so, it seems, did changing consumer tastes, as the Victorian era faded out and fantasies of racial domination gave way to sexual desire.^{Footnote 42} According to the anti-tip narrative, whereas tips once made black men act like fools, they now encouraged white women to act like prostitutes. Progressive-era reformers condemned the effects of tipping on women, and historians such as Dorothy Sue Cobble have repeated these attacks (and also suggested that tipping fostered competition and a lack of solidarity among workers).^{Footnote 43} From the waitresses themselves, however, we hear no chorus against tipping and complaints about sexual harassment from non-tipped female service workers (especially early flight attendants) are often more extreme.^{Footnote 44} The causal link between tipping and sexual harassment is, therefore, just as thin as the one between tipping and racial discrimination.

Customers and Tips

The dominant narrative of tipping that first developed around the turn of the twentieth century misunderstood the benefits that managers derived from tipping—differentiating the quality of service for various customers and sharing the risk of low revenue with employees. It claimed harm on behalf of workers—even though workers themselves were less inclined to complain—and posited tips as a cause of various forms of discrimination that had independent causes and probably would have existed in much the same form had a culture of tipping never developed. It ignored the benefits of tipping to workers: enjoyment, a sense of craft skill, a way to impose hierarchy, and a tool to cynically manipulate discrimination for profit. Although one cannot argue that tips were an absolute good for bosses and workers, the common arguments showing them to be a nearly absolute evil have not been substantiated.

The authors of the dominant narrative (journalists, anti-tip activists, government officials, and scholars) have almost always been customers. We might conclude, therefore, that this third constituency (after bosses and workers) really did suffer from tipping, and then projected that suffering onto the other two parties. Clearly, some tippers have felt a social anxiety over the past century, but there are counter-narratives here as well, which show that some American customers, like bosses and workers, have used tips as a social and economic resource. Tipping helped them receive better service, flaunt their status, impress friends and acquaintances, show care and affection for workers, and even drum up good publicity, as when Henry Ford left a $46 tip for a $4 bill and ended up on the front page of the New York Times. One rare author wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1911 that tipping “lets me show my measure of fraternity, good-will, affection, obligation, that is not susceptible to measure.”^{Footnote 45}

Some American novelists bucked the anti-tipping trend in the first half of the twentieth century.^{Footnote 46} They normalized tipping as an almost unremarkable part of modern life, and also depicted people using tips to infuse money with nonmonetary values. F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, often wrote about tips from the perspective of the tragically spoiled. In This Side of Paradise (1920), the protagonist overtips but refuses to pay most of the bill and tears it up in the waiter’s face. Later, his friend neglects to tip a room service waiter, which is probably why a hotel detective is soon banging on their door, accusing them of violating the Mann Act by transporting the young women with them across state lines. In The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), a young man goes to war and takes note of all the waiters he meets—before he had known waiters only to tip them. In “May Day” (1920), Fitzgerald tries on the perspective of two poor men fantasizing about the big tips waiters make off millionaires dining at Delmonico’s, but mostly he shows rich kids defying the Protestant ethic by drinking, carousing, and leaving big tips. Fitzgerald was just that sort of person in real life—when he had money, at least. He drank and tipped extravagantly in front of his agent, Harold Ober, who had lent him money at 6 percent interest, assuming it would be used for food and rent.^{Footnote 47} Fitzgerald’s wasteful tips turned most tragic in his late, semiautobiographical story, “Babylon Revisted” (1931):

Sometimes a wasteful tip is a rich nihilist’s protest against carefully measuring cash values. Sometimes it is an attempt to avoid unbearable memories.

The great artist of the wasteful tip is Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. More than any other work of fact or fiction that I know, this novel lays bare how tipping confronts us with ethical choices that help us learn and show who we are. On the one hand, protagonist Francie’s life is saturated with money’s rational power. On the other, she learns ways to imbue tips with non-cash values, using them to put other goals ahead of accumulating money.

The people around her sometimes avoid money with barter, credit, gifts, and coercion,^{Footnote 49} but most often, goods and services come with cash prices. They are noted everywhere in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Here are things that cost a penny: an ice cream sandwich, a piece of candy or a prize bag at the candy store, a toot of broken sweet-cracker crumbs, an apple, a big pickle, a square of fabric for embroidering, a small reel of embroidery cotton, a bribe to school bullies to use the toilet, a chocolate soda, a sheet of writing paper and an envelope, small firecrackers for the Fourth of July, a mask or a tin horn for Halloween, a test tube to decorate into a hat pin holder, a turn on the weighing machine at the El station, and a pretzel to feed to the birds in the park. When there is no money for food, Francie and her family pretend they are explorers trapped by a blizzard in a cave near the North Pole. They ration food carefully. When more money comes in, Francie’s mama buys groceries and a little cake, in which she sticks a small flag and says, “We made it, men. We got to the North Pole.” The flag costs a penny.^{Footnote 50}

Conversely, Betty Smith’s characters are constantly choosing values to live by that are not measured in pennies. Katie Nolan teaches her children to haggle over a salary or the price of a hat, but not to take charity.^{Footnote 51} Most importantly, she teaches the importance of a little waste. She makes a big pot of coffee every day, allows the family as much as they like (though only three cups with milk), and pours the rest down the drain after supper. This makes Francie feel “richer because she had something to waste.”^{Footnote 52} Aside from this ritual and other rare occasions, Katie acts for the economic self-interest of her family. When the ice man moves the family furniture to a new place in Williamsburg, she pays the agreed-on dollar, but holds back the dime for a pint of beer, the traditional tip for a mover. “Katie reasoned: ‘We’ll never see him again. Besides, the dollar is enough. Think of all the ice he’d have to sell to make a dollar.’”^{Footnote 53}

Francie’s papa uses tips to strike a different balance between thrift and waste. Johnny is extravagant and irresponsible—a singing waiter who brings his sporadic wages home and gives his tips to his saloonkeeper. He loves an extravagant gesture like tipping a nickel to a boy who brings him the news that he has been fired. Johnny equates dignity with easy spending and loose accounting, and Katie’s drive to put pennies in a tin-can bank nailed to the floor of a closet is beneath him. Smith’s use of the verb “to unfasten” in the passive voice—“[a] dozen times one prong [of the tin-can bank] was unfastened and a nickel fished out with a knife to provide Johnny with car-fare”—amplifies the distance between Johnny and the central object in the family’s attempts to save money.^{Footnote 54}

Francie learns about money from her mother, father, and the other philosophers of value who surround her.^{Footnote 55} She learns ways to use money that have nothing to do with its cash value; a quarter, for example, makes a good template for drawing circles on red and white tissue paper, to cut out and paste on an old cigar box.^{Footnote 56} And from an early age, Francie learns to earn tips. Every Saturday, she delivers a week’s collected junk to Carney the Junkie: gutter-picked foil from gum wrappers and cigarette packages, rags, paper, rubber, metal, and seltzer bottles with the metal tops knocked off. Each week, after he pays Francie for her junk, Carney turns to her, his “rusty eyes” fixing her with “a rusty junked look,” and takes a hard pinch at her cheek. Then he adds an extra penny, smiles, and turns to holler at the next kid in line. It is a tradition in her family that wages go to the family but tips are for your own pleasure, so Francie spends the penny on candy.^{Footnote 57}

This pinch for a penny is much like Shorty’s kick in the pants for a quarter in Richard Wright’s Black Boy. Victorian critics of tipping would have recoiled in horror from the suggestiveness of the scene, but it also shows how tips can be considered with ambivalence rather than scorn. Even in bad conditions, tipping gives workers choices, and abolishing tipping would mean taking those choices away. People balance different values in their heads, and sometimes choose the money. When Francie gets older and Carney pinches “something else,” Francie measures differently and stops going to him.^{Footnote 58}

Katie gives no tip to the ice man who helps her move house, but she also measures differently one day at Scheefly’s Ice-Cream Saloon. The family is there to celebrate Francie and Neeley’s graduation from high school, and they laugh and sing alongside other raucous graduation parties until the moment of reckoning arrives. When the waiter puts the check down, the table goes silent. Katie’s sister Evy hopes “she’s not fool enough to tip him,” Neeley hopes she knows that “special parties” are expected to leave a nickel, and Francie expects that “[w]hatever mama does … it will be the right thing.” Katie puts down a fifty-cent piece, the last coin in her purse, and the waiter brings back four nickels in change, expecting Katie to pick up three of them.

This passage is the culmination of Francie’s education in value. Evy rationalizes, Neeley wants sodas and good etiquette, and Katie wastes with style, as when she spills coffee down a drain. Francie thinks, “I wish I could always wear a white dress and carry red roses and that we could always throw money around like we did tonight.”^{Footnote 60} In the early twentieth century, most writers who commented on tipping did it from the perspective of the customer, and implicitly or explicitly condemned the practice. Novelists such as Smith and Fitzgerald tended to be the outliers, bringing ambiguity to the subject and sometimes describing how a tip can help people think about values, balance economic self-interest against other drives, make the anguish of life bearable, or even make life beautiful.

The Red Cap’s Gift

You picked up a man’s bags at the curb and put them on a train. Or you took them from him coming off the train and jostled with the cabbie to put them in the cab. They say that Leroy Paige made a sling to carry several at once so people started calling him Satchel, but most red caps carried bags in their hands and under their arms, no more than two or three at a time.^{Footnote 61} You might purchase tickets for passengers, move ill people on stretchers and in wheelchairs, announce when a train was coming in, or page somebody to come to the phone or pick up a telegram. If a child came off a train alone, it was your responsibility to take the child to Traveler’s Aid to be registered. If children were waiting for a connecting train, you made sure they got on the train. Sometimes you carried a man’s bags as you followed him to the bootblack’s stand, the newspaper vendor, and all around the station, replying politely when he spoke to you. In a case like that, you might make more than your usual dime or fifteen cents.^{Footnote 62}

According to railroad lore, men first appeared at stations offering a service the railroads had not thought to provide—portering from the entrance of the railroad station to the train and back again, for travelers without servants or without enough of them. This closed the last gap in a circuit of labor lifting and carrying luggage, mostly for tips: house servants, hansom and then motor cabbies, red caps, railroad porters, red caps again, cabbies, hotel bellhops, and back along the same route home. Railroad stations, generally owned by railroad companies, eventually wrote up rules about cleanliness, comportment, and attire, mandating the cap that gave the occupation its name. Station masters began to assign red caps unpaid tasks such as mopping, delivering mail, or running an elevator in exchange for plum positions manning the main entrance or busy platforms. Some red caps even got wages directly from the railroad station’s budget, although after the crash in 1929, virtually all red caps reverted to what had, at any rate, been the norm: payment solely in tips. Kickbacks to station managers and senior red caps chiseled away at this already minimal wage. Men looked over their shoulders at the masses of unemployed eager to replace them, and held on to what they could.^{Footnote 63}

In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Francie’s papa tells her about the labor movement.

This is exactly what happened to red caps in the 1930s. When times got bad and station managers stopped paying wages and started demanding kickbacks instead, they joined the International Brotherhood of Railway Clerks (IBRC). They won a series of cases and federal hearings concluding that red caps were employees of the railroad stations, not independent contractors, as the stations argued; that they were engaged in interstate traffic, and therefore subject to federal regulations; and, as railway employees, they fell under the Railway Labor Act of 1926, and therefore, even though the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 specifically excluded tipped workers from receiving a minimum wage, the exclusion did not apply to red caps—despite being tipped workers, they would get a minimum wage. These decisions forced railroad companies to recognize unions of red caps, to bargain with them in good faith, and, starting in 1938, to offer them the new federal minimum wage of twenty-five cents an hour.^{Footnote 65}

Could bosses count their workers’ tips as part of their wages? In lawyers’ terms, was a tip a gift or a payment? At least since the 1920s, the IRS had been interested in this question, but the advent of New Deal benefits—unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, Social Security—raised it urgently. In a variety of trials and hearings, tipped workers argued to count tips as wages, because increasing the overall wage meant a higher payment when they were laid off or injured to make up for lost wages, and for higher Social Security payments at retirement. The decisions of state and federal courts on these questions were inconsistent. The FLSA, a late addition to the New Deal, brought red caps to embrace the opposite position—they did not want tips counted toward wages because they wanted to make tips on top of a full wage.^{Footnote 66}

Until 1938, employers cared little about whether a tip was a gift or a payment. Government paid Social Security, and workers’ compensation was paid by insurance companies, which set the premiums they charged according to the size of a railroad station, restaurant, or other company’s operations, not the amount of wages or tips received. Unemployment insurance laws, which required payments from bosses, did affect employers, but not enough to attract their full attention. The FLSA specifically exempted most service and sales workers, the bulk of tip receivers, until amendments to the law in the 1960s, so most employers of tipped workers did not face the question until then. But with the magic words “interstate travel,” lawyers, judges, and bureaucrats pushed red caps through a loophole that demanded an answer—for the purposes of the FLSA, was a tip a gift or a payment? Railroad lawyers argued that a tip was a payment for services rendered, something that belonged to the boss and could be returned to the worker as part of the minimum wage. In local and federal courts and agencies across the nation, union lawyers argued the other side.

While waiting for rulings, railroad stations followed their interpretation of the law, instituting what they called the “accounting and guarantee” plan. Stationmasters ordered red caps to report tip earnings to management on slips of paper. If a red cap came in below two dollars a day, management would pay the shortfall. If a red cap made two dollars or more a day in tips, the boss would owe him nothing.^{Footnote 67}

The accounting and guarantee plan was similar to one of those bets that bellhops made as they sized up customers coming in the door. All over the country, railroad stations bet on their employees’ tip-making abilities. If tips remained stable, they would subsidize the railroads’ newfound labor costs. If they dropped, management would have to pay wages. Of course, it differed from a bellhop bet because no one was taking the other side. Red caps did not have a choice about it—they came to work one day to find it forced on them—and there was no upside for them. Whatever happened, workers would, at best, earn the minimum wage or the total of their tips, whichever was higher—nothing more, and (as we will see) generally much less.

Even for management, it was a bad bet. In Kansas City, Jacksonville, Pittsburgh, Boston, and Harrisburg, red caps reported declines in tipping from 5 to 50 percent following institution of the accounting and guarantee plan.^{Footnote 68} John R. Lee, a thirty-year veteran red cap at Grand Central Terminal in New York City and chairman of the executive board of the International Brotherhood of Railway Clerks, testified that his tips had not gone down because “having worked there so long, naturally people know me by sight and know me by name and you know some people, their ego wouldn’t allow them to reduce their tip,” but acknowledged that most red caps did not have such “an advantageous position as I am placed in, the cry is that their tips have been decreased materially.”^{Footnote 69}

Although railroad managers had lost their bet, they quickly found ways to shift the costs of the loss onto the red caps themselves. Joe Banks, a red cap in St. Louis Union Station for twenty-four years, explained to the Wage and Hour Board one way it happened:

In other stations it was different, but the broad pattern was the same. In Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, and Jackson, Mississippi, red caps were pressured to report more tips than they actually received.^{Footnote 71} At Broad Street Station in Philadelphia, managers explicitly told red caps that men who reported less than two dollars would be fired.^{Footnote 72} At Newark Penn Station, men who reported less were admonished and even intimidated, but it seems that none was fired.^{Footnote 73} In Jacksonville, a bunch of moonlighting baseball players reported that they had made more than the minimum, hoping to curry favor with management.^{Footnote 74} At Grand Central Terminal in New York City, when men first handed in slips showing less than two dollars a day, Assistant Station Manager Hutchinson complained to John R. Lee that they reported less than they made. Hutchinson warned Lee that the work would be reassigned to the baggage department if red caps kept reporting under two dollars a day, and ostentatiously ordered a hundred new hand trucks for the baggage department. That scared some red caps, who started falsifying their slips upward, but others continued to report less than two dollars. Then management started laying off red caps—first five, then ten, then forty-five all at once. The story made it to the papers. Management claimed there wasn’t enough work to go around, but it seemed like a warning to the rest. Eight still refused to falsify their records. Terminal Superintendent Welsh hired a detective to follow them, then called them in and read them the detective’s reports—how long they took on particular jobs, how much time they spent loitering in the locker room, when they went to lunch or wandered across the street. He threatened that they would be fired at the next infraction. They started reporting two dollars a day. In winter, the battle over reporting tips having been won by management, John R. Lee asked Welsh to reinstate the sixty men he had fired to make his point; Welsh hired back twenty-five.^{Footnote 75}

If a tip helps a worker to maximize scarce resources, then the accounting and guarantee plan, as practiced by railroad management, took away much of its power. If a tip is a tool to infuse money and capitalism with other values, such as style, sympathy, or dignity, then the confusion and ill will created by the accounting and guarantee plan also severely compromised its role. Tipping got awkward. Some customers felt it their duty to explain why, in light of the new minimum wage law, they would not be giving so much any more, or would not tip at all. Most red caps did not feel comfortable explaining to customers that their real income was lower than ever before. Even to describe the accounting and guarantee system accurately was an affront to customers’ expectations of red caps’ subservience and ignorance.^{Footnote 76} Whenever Eugene Frazier, the first international vice president of the International Brotherhood of Railway Clerks, worked up the courage to explain the real situation to men of capital and industry, they did not believe him, and told him he didn’t understand his business.^{Footnote 77} Red cap F. H. Kyle did not correct a little old lady in the station at Harrisburg, but when he went uptown the same night and everyone said they had read about his new hourly wage in the paper, he couldn’t help but reply, “We ain’t got no 25 cents an hour. You might think so, but we ain’t.”^{Footnote 78} In response, the International Brotherhood of Railway Clerks urged members not to report any tips above twenty-five cents an hour, arguing that management was entitled to know only whether employees had earned a minimum wage in tips, and not how much more.^{Footnote 79} According to John R. Lee, the union also tried to get a reporter for the New York American to report accurately on the accounting and guarantee plan. The journalist replied, “Now, boys, I don’t know whether I can get this in … you mustn’t really expect it because I don’t know whether they will allow it through or not.” The article never appeared in print.^{Footnote 80}

The IBRC’s most successful strategy was challenging railroad stations in administrative hearings and civil trials. They and the United Transport Service Employees of America convinced the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor to hold hearings in 1939; the two unions brought suits against the accounting and guarantee plan in almost every federal district court in the nation. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled against the unions in Williams v. Jacksonville Terminal Co. (1942), asserting that tips could be counted as wages for the purposes of the Fair Labor Standards Act. This principle would eventually be repeated in the amendments to the FLSA in the 1960s that brought all service workers under its jurisdiction and set up the “tip credit”—the boss’s right to pay a lower minimum wage to tipped work—that still exists today.^{Footnote 81}

By the time the Supreme Court ruled, the question of whether red caps’ tips were gifts or payments for the purposes of the FLSA was moot. The railroads had already replaced the accounting and guarantee plan with the “check and charge” plan. For a payment of a dime, a red cap would tear the stub off a perforated tag, give it to the customer, and tie the other end to a bag. Both sides were printed with the same serial number. Red caps piled the bags on carts—many passengers’ bags at once—and rolled them from the curb to the platform or from the platform to the curb, where the passengers took custody of their luggage again (if only to give it over to another service worker on a train or in a cab). Twice a month, red caps went to the office of the stationmaster to pick up a paycheck. They made the full federal minimum wage, by then thirty cents an hour.^{Footnote 82}

If the accounting and guarantee plan had confused passengers, the check and charge plan infuriated them. George W. Davis of South Station, Boston, reported “a general hostility from the traveling public” when the new plan was put in place, and specific hostility toward the red cap union, which the assistant stationmaster kept telling everyone was the cause of the new ten-cent charge.^{Footnote 83} W. Arthur Ricks testified that the number and kind of complainers had grown, especially Southerners, who became abusive when they heard the cost per bag: “In the days of straight tipping there were not so many. When someone was intoxicated, someone would be a little nasty, but you would put him in his place and it would be all right.”^{Footnote 84} The process of tearing the tags and attaching them to each bag slowed down the work. Tipping decreased even more than it had under the accounting and guarantee plan. Eleanor Roosevelt, ignorant of the system, underpaid a red cap who was too embarrassed to correct her, never mind the tip. The railroad companies claimed that the percentage of nonpayment was low—usually less than 1 percent of total bags handled—but there were probably other red caps who did not tell management about an underpayment and ask for a reimbursement. Sometimes stationmasters fined or fired red caps who lost checks. Verbal abuse was a common complaint. “Well,” Cornelius Thompson of Broad Street Station, Philadelphia, told the Wage and Hour Board, “I had one man to curse the president, the Labor Act and me. … Well, you don’t argue with those kind of people.” Thompson encountered many of “those kind of people” in Philadelphia.^{Footnote 85}

Aside from this new abusiveness, red caps noted wide-ranging changes to the job that were created by the check and charge system. They did not like the new supervisory role that management assumed, looking for a return on the wages it now had to pay. Red cap after red cap complained that management spread spies throughout the railway system, creating a general anxiety among the workers that affected their job performance.^{Footnote 86} They complained about being driven and abused by stationmasters who did not understand that certain shifts or positions within the station would never earn enough to cover the cost of the minimum wage. The older red caps resented that seniority meant less now, and that skill, experience, and long-time relations with customers had much less impact on their incomes. They felt no joy in loading bags onto a hand truck.^{Footnote 87}

Red caps also missed the personal relationships that they had been able to foster under the old system, when they were paid in tips and managed their own time. At the Wage and Hour hearings, Cornelius Thompson had this to say:

New Deal bureaucrats declared that under the check and charge system, “[t]he Redcap is no longer a servant who strives to give personal and obsequious service. He is now an employee with some dignity, who has a job to be done and whose remuneration does not depend upon the extent to which he can ingratiate himself with the passenger whom he serves.”^{Footnote 89} This conclusion followed the dominant narrative about tipping, not the testimony they had heard. Bags and Baggage, the monthly newspaper of the union, published many articles on the nuances of tipping policy and practice, but in its pages, only three people—United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis, University of Chicago economics professor Mary Barnett Gilson, and Mary Anderson, director of the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor—condemned the institution of tipping. Red caps themselves never wrote against it.^{Footnote 90} Speaking about the check and charge plan, they told a different story, one of loss. Many red caps recognized that under the new system they made more money than before, and even those who found themselves making less money recognized the benefit of a stable income. Money was not their only goal, however, and neither was dignity. They also wanted to care for their customers. Some explicitly testified that they liked the job less despite the fact that they now earned more. For them, a tip was not just a way to maximize gain; it fulfilled other functions in their lives. No doubt they felt the loss of opportunities that tips offered workers—a show of skill, a game to play, a measure of another man's humanity. But when they spoke about it, red caps talked like Cornelius Thompson. What they missed most was the time and independence that the tipping system gave them to build meaningful relationships with customers.^{Footnote 91}

Perhaps inadvertently,^{Footnote 92} federal tipping policy put a more profound downward pressure on tips than anti-tip campaigns and state laws ever mustered. The accounting and guarantee plan lowered red cap wages when it was supposed to raise them, and deranged relations between workers and customers. The check and charge system, though stabilizing red cap wages, resulted in even lower tips and garnered many reports of outright hostility from passengers. In the testimony of the courts and agencies of the New Deal, we hear both red caps and customers describe new confusion and conflict around the act of tipping. When asked whether he preferred the check and charge plan to the old system of just receiving tips, T. W. Winchester, a red cap in Chicago, replied that he preferred neither.^{Footnote 93} Today we can only imagine the world that Winchester had thought within reach, the world his union fought for and lost—a full minimum wage and tips on top of that.

Tipping endures. The railroads systematized red capping and employment decreased. The railroad system shrank dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century, and employment decreased some more. But from Boston’s South Station to Union Station in L.A., red caps are still being tipped. In 1966, other tipped workers got a minimum wage with a tip credit, like the accounting and guarantee plan but with a subminimum wage thrown in.^{Footnote 94} The public knew about this extra income, and they kept tipping. The Soviets tried to ban tips in the Communist world, the American media continued to speak against it, the dominant anti-tipping narrative rolled on, and the public continued to ignore all the propaganda. The tipped subminimum wage has not been raised in more than twenty years (it is $2.13 an hour), the public does not know that those extremely low wages make tips even more necessary for survival, and yet they keep tipping. The practice of tipping continues to expand to new services, with the standard percentage still on the rise.^{Footnote 95}

Would the red caps who testified in 1941 have preferred our current tipping regime to the three payment regimes they had recently cycled through: the straight tip wage, the accounting and guarantee plan, and the check and charge plan? Probably. Tipping policy is still rife with problems—tipped workers deserve a higher minimum wage and enforcement of their right to get topped off during occasional slow times. There has to be better way to run a tipping pool than the “valid tip pool exception,” which allows managers—even those whose businesses are already quite profitable—to take all the tips and divide them up again, an irresistible opportunity for employers to skim off the top.^{Footnote 96} Despite these problems, the current system shows that it is possible to offer workers a subminimum wage without endangering tipping and all its uses. Even with a full minimum wage, people would probably keep tipping, because a tip does so much more than provide workers with an income.

The red cap’s gift was many things. It was the extra effort, the emotional labor that red caps provided when they built meaningful relationships with their customers—something beyond the parameters of the service being purchased. It was the extra meaning of the tip that the customer handed over—a gift as well as a payment. It was the dream that high wages and tips could exist side by side, preserving all the uses of tips without sacrificing a solid and steady income. It was the accounting and guarantee plan, a compromise offered by management, rejected by the IBRC, and replaced rather quickly with something worse, but also an experiment that would resurface in the vastly flawed but viable tip credit system we use today. And the gift was the stubbornness with which red caps testified to the Wage and Hour Division that something was lost even when more money was earned. This was their greatest gift to us: the reminder that Karl Marx was wrong—cash value is not everything, and it will never become everything as long as we keep investing money and its exchange with our other ideals, like Katie in a crowded ice cream parlor, pushing four nickels across a table.