Tipping the Scales: Progressive Ideals and the Limits of American Class Protest in the Early Twentieth Century

In the United States during the first few decades of the 20th century, tipping was controversial.  A Harvard professor of German, H. C. Bierwirth, complained about "the trouble, the vexation, the agony that the traveler suffers in the uncertainty as to the amount of the compensation expected.”  If he tipped too little, Bierwirth grumbled, he “reproaches himself” for his “meanness;” if he tips too much, he invariably feels “self-disgust . . . at having been duped.”  At a time in which gratuities increasingly seemed to serve as passkeys to the public sphere, newspapers railed, customers boycotted, and some states attempted to ban the practice.  While complaints came from all quarters of society, it was the middle class and its allies in the press that shouted loudest. 

“Tipping the Scales: Progressivism and the Limits of American Class Protest in the Early Twentieth Century” explores the often complex class politics of tipping.  Invoking the spirit of Progressive reform, vocal critics of tipping described gratuities as a social scourge that hurt the workingman and exposed the undemocratic dissipation of the rich.  For these anti-tipping advocates, restaurateurs, Pullman car operators, and hotels were, as W. F. Pack told readers of The Outlook in 1915, not unlike “enormously wealthy corporations” that exploited their workers and filled their pocketbooks at the expense of the consuming public.  But despite these Progressive and paternalistic paeans to the dignity of the waiter (as well as the support of some restaurateurs and hoteliers), middle-class anti-tipping crusaders failed to forge alliances across class divides or to unite middle-class consumers to effect lasting change.  As such, the failed struggle to bar tipping in restaurants and other enterprises demonstrated the political limits of the emerging middle class and the fecklessness of consumer protests in an age of mass consumption.