Imported from Europe, the custom of leaving gratuities began spreading in the U.S. post-Civil War. It was loathed as a master-serf custom that degraded America's democratic, anti-aristocratic ethic.
Today's restaurants abandoning the tipping system are part of a long heritage of people — including Emerson and Twain — raging against the gratuity system.
With New York restaurateur Danny Meyer banning tips in his restaurants and Berkeley restaurateurs Andrew Hoffman and John Paluska joining the no-tip bandwagon, the tipping debate has clinked back into the headlines of late.
Except it never really went away.
To tip or not to tip constitutes one of the oldest and nastiest debates surrounding America's restaurant business.
When tipping began to spread in post-Civil War America, it was tarred as "a cancer in the breast of democracy," "flunkeyism" and "a gross and offensive caricature of mercy." But the most common insult hurled at it was "offensively un-American."
Loathed as a master-serf custom of the caste-bound Old World that went back to the Middle Ages, tipping was blamed for encouraging servility and degrading America's democratic, puritanical, and anti-aristocratic ethic. European immigrants surging into the U.S. were charged with bringing this deplorable custom with them. But in fact, it was also American tourists, like the characters in Henry James' novels, who picked up the restaurant conventions of the Continent, and imported them back to America.
In James's 1897 novel What Maisie Knew, 6-year-old Maisie, breakfasting with her English stepfather, Sir Claude, at a quayside French café, watches the waiter retreat "with the 'tip' gathered in with graceful thanks on a subtle hint from Sir Claude's forefinger." Significantly, the word "tip" is in quotation marks, indicating its newness to the little girl, as well as to James' American readers.
For their part, Europeans were irked by wealthy Americans who ruined the rates by over-tipping — not just during the Gilded Age, but in more recent times as well. According to Kerry Segrave's Tipping: An American Social History of Gratuities, conservative thinker William F. Buckley Jr. was in the habit of leaving a scandalously lavish propina for the staff of the Swiss chateau he rented in the 1980s. He used the Spanish word for tip, his son Christopher explained, "since it's money, you know, it's best not to discuss it directly."