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The Itching Palm, A Study of the Habit of Tipping in America, a non-fiction book by William R. Scott |
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Chapter 3. Barbary Pirates |
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_ CHAPTER III. BARBARY PIRATES The American people became fully aroused on one occasion to the iniquity of tipping--on an international scale. In 1801 President Jefferson decided that the United States could tolerate no longer the system of tribute enforced by the Barbary States along the shores of the Mediterranean. Before our action, no European government had made more than fitful, ineffectual attempts to break up a practice at once humiliating to national honor and disastrous to national commerce. Candor requires the admission that we, too, submitted for years to this system of paying tribute to Barbary pirates for an unmolested passage of our ships, but the significant fact is that American manhood did finally and successfully revolt against the practice. By 1805 our naval forces had brought the pirates to their knees and all Europe breathed grateful sighs of relief. Even the Pope commended the American achievement. The practice was contrary to every dictate of self-respect.
These pirates of Algiers, Tunis, Morocco and Tripoli did not pretend to have any other right behind their demands for tribute than the right they could enforce with cutlass and cannon--a right ferociously employed. It was not robbery in the ordinary sense of the word. They demanded a fee based on the value of the cargo for the privilege of sailing in the Mediterranean, and this being paid, the ship could proceed to its destination. Ship-owners soon began to figure tribute as a fixed expense of navigation, like insurance, and passed the added cost along to the ultimate consumer. This practice of paying tribute was a system of international tipping. The Barbary pirates granted immunity to those who obeyed the custom, but made it decidedly warm and expensive for those who dared to protest against it--just as do our modern pirates in hotels, sleeping cars, restaurants, barber shops and elsewhere. If a ship refused to pay tribute it was sunk, and the sailors went to slavery in the desert, or to death by fearful torture. President Jefferson could not see any basis of right in the position of the Barbary States that the Mediterranean was their private lake through which ships could not pass without paying toll. He sent Decatur to register our protest. With the Pinckney slogan: "MILLIONS FOR DEFENSE--NOT ONE CENT FOR TRIBUTE!" the American naval forces made good our position. The tips that skippers of our nation had been paying to the pirates were saved and the custom soon was abandoned by other nations. * * * * * To-day, the old battle cry is reversed to read: "Millions for tribute--not one cent for defense!" It is certain that a greater tribute is paid in one week in the United States in the form of tips, than our merchantmen paid during the whole period that they knuckled to the Barbary pirates. In New York City alone more than $100,000 a day is paid in gratuities to waiters, hotel employes, chauffeurs, barbers and allied classes. But New York has reached a subserviency to the tipping custom that is amazing in a democratic country. This vast tribute is paid for not more real service than the Barbary pirates rendered to those from whom they exacted tribute. It is given to workers who are paid by their employers to perform the services enjoyed by the public. If the Barbary pirates could see the ease with which a princely tribute is exacted from a docile public by the tip-takers, they would yearn to be reincarnated as waiters in America--the Land of the Fee! _ |
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