A few months back we indulged in a round of idle speculation concerning
the labor history of servants in American taverns.  A new book tells this
story.  Apparently travelers steadily imported this custom from Europe.
In 1840 tipping was very uncommon in American hotels; British visitors
were stunned to get away so cheaply.  Over the next fifty years, Americans
acquired a reputation for innocently overtipping while abroad.  By the
1890s waiters and bartenders routinely accepted tips throughout America.
Tipping thus "seems to have started with the traveling aristocracy and
spread downward class by class" (5).  The book is Kerry Segrave's
_Tipping:  An American Social History of Gratuities_ (Jefferson, NC and
London: McFarland, 1998), ISBN 0-7864-0347-0.

Segrave constructs this history, in large part, through published
anti-tipping polemics.  These provide amusing reading, and set the tone
for the book.  Segrave begins: "In its early years [1880-1919], tipping
was a much-hated custom, branded as un-American and undemocratic.  Much
opposition rose against it from labor, from clubs formed specifically to
fight it, and from state and city governments, which in some cases went so
far as to pass laws prohibiting tipping" (vii).  (This was news to me: In
1909, Washington State outlawed tipping.  By 1915, so had Mississippi,
Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Iowa.)

Jon Miller
University of Iowa