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.
FREE AND EQUAL
This state of affairs proves that the work of 1776 and 1787 was limited practically to one phase of democracy, namely, the political. Washington and Jefferson lived in a day when political equality was the passionate ideal. This they and their associates achieved in ample measure. They gave the waiter or the barber or the bootblack an equal voice in government with themselves.
Let those Americans who think that the abolition of tipping would be too radical a step toward social democracy consider how repulsive the attitude of Washington and Jefferson was to the aristocratic thought of their day. No matter what arguments the aristocrats presented against political democracy, their real objection was just this granting of voting equality to persons whom they rated as socially submerged.
But having founded our government upon political democracy, the straight line of development is toward social and industrial democracy, in order to complete the ideal entertained by Washington and Jefferson. That both of these idealists tipped servants and that Washington owned slaves is indisputable, but they left records that prove that they merely "suffered it to be so now." Washington clearly foresaw the trouble in which slavery would involve his country, and would have freed his slaves if he could have done so without precipitating what to him appeared a greater evil in view of all the circumstances of his day.
The Revolutionary period did all that can be asked of one generation when political equality was established. It remains for our generation to finish the work of democracy by establishing social and industrial democracy. The prospect of a street cleaner or your valet being your social and industrial equal may seem either utopian or undesirable, but it must be remembered, as stated, that two centuries ago the thought of granting an equal vote to such persons was precisely as distasteful to the aristocratic mind.