Chicago Foodways: Tipping in the early 20th Century 1/7/2012

Chicago Foodways Roundtable

"Grudge-stained Middle-class Tip": Class Warfare and Consumer Democracy in the Early Twentieth Century
with Andrew Haley, PhD

Saturday, January 7, 2012 at 10 AM

Kendall College, School of Culinary Arts
900 North Branch Street, Chicago
(West of Halsted Street, North of Chicago Avenue)
Free Parking
Cost: $3,
Free to Kendall students and faculty with ID.

In first decades of the twentieth century, no issue inspired more acrimonious discussions and heated editorials than tipping. The American middle classes, eager to participate in the burgeoning restaurant culture of American cities, resented paying gratuities. Concerned that their social betters were buying the best service with exorbitant tips, worried that the cost of tipping might soon surpass the cost of dinner, and fearful that under-tipped waiters would spit in the their soup, middle class activists set out—with considerable enthusiasm—to end the “tipping evil.” Despite legislative victories and imaginative technological solutions, the struggle against tipping was not altogether successful; nonetheless, it demonstrates the degree to which the middle class believed in the ideal of a consumer’s democracy.

Andrew P. Haley is an associate professor of American cultural history at the University of Southern Mississippi where he studies class, culture, and cuisine from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. His first book, Turning the Tables: American Restaurant Culture and the Rise of the Middle Class, 1880-1920, was published by University of North Carolina Press in May 2011, and he is currently working on a second book on food, Dining in High Chairs, that examines children and eating, both in public and in private.

This program is hosted by the Chicago Foodways Roundtable. To reserve, please call (847) 432-8255, then leave your name, telephone number and how many people in your party or e-mail: chicago.foodways.roundtable@gmail.com

A gentle reminder this is tomorrow morning.

After reading a notice of this event in The Reader, a taxi driver inquired if this was an anti-tipping organization. We are not, though the presentation is on early 20th efforts to ban tipping. I hope he shows up as promised, because he certainly had ideas on tipping.

After he called, I checked out the notice to try to understand his reaction:

A service economy, in which employees' livelihoods rely on tipping, is imperfect: anybody who's waited tables will tell you that customers are fickle, nasty motherf*ckers. Is there another way? In a lecture titled "Grudge-stained Middle-class Tip," Andrew P. Haley, a historian from the University of Southern Mississippi, discusses an early-20th-century movement to abolish the practice, which activists thought was "evil." They worried that the rich would buy their way to better service.

Regards,

..Winners of the 2012 James Beard media awards

— Reference and Scholarship

"Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880-1920" by Andrew P. Haley

... Our speaker from January ...