WHAT THE PRESS SAID
Among the many editorial comments that the disclosures of the Walsh Commission evoked is the following from the St. Louis Republic:
The most captious critic of the Pullman company cannot deny that it merits a unique distinction. Other corporations before now have underpaid their employees ... but it remained for the Pullman company to discover how to work on the sympathies of the public in such a manner as to induce that public to make up, by gratuities, for its failure to pay its employees a living wage.
It began this forty years ago, when the "plantation" darky of ante-bellum days was still abroad in the land. It used him, his pathetic history, his peculiar attitude toward the white man, for the accomplishment of its purpose. There at the end of the journey, after the traveler had paid $2, $2.50 or $3 for his berth, stood the porter with his whisk broom and his smile.
And back of him was the pathetic fact, industriously circulated, that "the company" did not pay him enough to live on, so that he was dependent on the gratuities of passengers who had already paid full price for accommodations and services. We were expected to pay him simply because the Pullman company didn't. And we paid him. Tens of millions of passengers have paid him millions of dollars.
It wasn't really philanthropy to the porter; it was philanthropy extended to the Pullman company, which was glad to have the fact of its meanness in its relations to its colored employees—ill-informed of the rights of workingmen and dependent by instinct—published to the world.
It was the Pullman company which fastened the tipping habit on the American people and they used the negro as the instrument to do it with.
It may be remarked in closing this phase of the discussion that an act of Congress forbidding tips on inter-state carriers would effectually reach the Pullman situation.
XIV
THE GOVERNMENT AND TIPPING
It has been asserted in this discussion that tipping is incompatible with a democratic form of government. Yet we find officials of our Government following the custom and allowing tips as a legitimate item of expense of traveling to be paid out of the public treasury.