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STENHOUSE VIA BRUCE KNOX VIA MACFARLANE

When Randall Wallacestarted to cry I knew Iwas on to something.In person thescreeenwriter whowrote Braveheartseems to have comestraight from centralcasting; his skin isbaked a light gold bythe Califonia sun, hehas blond streaks inhis hair and he speakswith a soft Tennesseeaccent. He wasstanding in theincongruous setting ofa Scottish old folkshome in Chicago,speaking about theauld country, whenunexpectedly the tears began to flow.

First though, the setting. An eight-foot bronze piperguards the gates of the Scottish Home in NorthRiverside, Illinois. He is marching out with a jauntyrhythm, and if you press a button near his foot ahidden loudspeaker belts out a cheery bagpipe tune.

He’s the most appropriate person to guard thethreshhold of an uprooted bit of Scotland which seemsto have come straight from the glens of Brigadoon.

Inside the carpets are tartan, the walls are covered inpaintings of Rabbie Burns, and stags’ heads keep abeady watch over the stairwells. The Scottish Homewas set up by Scottish immigrants to the Windy City tolook after their impoverished old people in the 1800sand it has been performing that function ever since. Inthe basement a museum celebrates the memories ofthe residents who lived there before leaving this bit ofScotland behind for good. Its shelves groan withJimmy Shand records, pots of Dundee Marmalade,Oor Wullie annuals and a green knitted Nessie with aTartan Toorie jauntily fixed to her head with a singlecross-stitch.

It was in this room that Randall Wallace was due tospeak to the ranks of the Illinois St Andrew’s Society.In the world of the American Scots, Randall Wallace isa demi-god, and his ancestor a full-blown deity.Whenever he went to speak to Scottish societies, heconfessed, he was told that before Braveheart theyhad an active membership in the hundreds, but thatafter Mel Gibson had taken to the big screen as theblue and white painted freedom fighter, their ranks hadswelled 10 or even 100-fold.

But as he told a story abouttaking his father to Scotland forthe first time and standing onthe esplanade of StirlingCastle imagining WilliamWallace leading his forces intobattle on the plane below, hestopped, swallowed andstruggled to get the words outthrough his tears.

You could have heard a pindrop: the audience ofAmerican Scots weretransfixed by this overflowingof emotion from the man whohad recreated William Wallacefor the modern world.

At my table a native born Scotwho had emigrated to Chicago in the last year rolledhis eyes and leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘Can youimagine getting away with this in Glasgow?’

Of course not. It’s hard to imagine a greater contrastthan that between the colourful, innocent patriotism ofScottish Americans and the glum attitudes of modern,civic, devolutionary Scotland where Victorianism isdespised and the dominant mood is what theHungarians call honfibu – patriotic sorrow. In Scotlandthe general view of American Scots is that they areembarrassing idiots. I think we could learn a lot fromthem.

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When I left Chicago, Wayne Rethford, standing downafter almost 30 years as head of the Illinois StAndrew’s Society, gave me a gift of a book he hadwritten on the Scots contribution to Illinois life. Inside,almost as an after-thought he wrote the words ‘Scotsare great’.

It’s a sentiment which more and more of hiscountrymen share.

In the North America of the early 21st century there isno more fashionable leaf in the salad bowl than thethistle. James Webb, who was Ronald Reagan’ssecretary for the Navy, has just published a bookcalled Born Fighting which celebrates the contributionsof the Scotch-Irish to American life. Arthur Herman’sbook on how Scots invented the Modern worldcontinues to sit high in the best-seller charts and MaryWalters, the Harvard Sociologist, has just completedresearch which shows that of the white ethnic

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‘Just better than them’: ScottishSuperiorism

David Stenhouse

identities in the US, Scottishness is now amongst themost popular, whereas at the end of the 1980s, it wasthe least popular of all. Even if their mother wasGerman and their father Scottish, 20 years ago whiteAmericans were more likely to identify themselves asGerman than Scottish. Now the Germans, Italians,English and even the Irish are on the slide: being aScots American is where it is at.

Nor is it simply a matter of ethnicity; many of the mostfervent American Scots would be hard-pressed to finda pinch of Scottish DNA in their bloodstreams, andlegions of O’Leary’s, Scarlattis and Cohens aredesperate to prove their connection to Scotland byjoining Scottish clan societies. Some of thesesocieties are now so popular that they have closedtheir books to new members.

And the popularity and pride which now attaches tobeing a Scottish American has been fuelled by onecentral element – a recognition and celebration ofScottish over-achievement.

In North America, the Scot has been hymned as aheroic over-achiever since the end of the 18th century.In the 20th century there was Charles Hanna’s TheScot in North Britain, North Ireland and North America(1902) George Fraser Black’s Scotland’s Mark onAmerica (1921), John H Finlay’s The Coming of theScot (1940) and, to take the series right up to date,Duncan A.Bruce’s The Mark of the Scot (1996). Thesebooks all have one thing in common: the assumptionthat Scots are remarkable, indeed exceptional people,and that they have made a disproportionate impact onthe countries where they have chosen to live. In theintroduction to a soon-to-be-published collection ofessays on ‘Transatlantic Scots’ the American academicCeleste Ray describes the Scots as ‘freakishly over-achieving’. To Scottish ears it sounds like pietisticnonsense; it’s rapidly becoming an orthodoxy in NorthAmerica.

It’s hard to measurethese claims for Scottishover-achievementagainst any meaningfulyardstick. Just how big acontribution is animmigrant community‘normally’ supposed tomake to its host country?Are the Scots who signedthe American Declarationof Independence, whofounded AmericanUniversities andeventually siredPresidents of the UnitedStates lucky immigrants,who managed to float tothe top of America’smoiling economy, orsomething more?

Either way, the rhetoric of

over-achievement is central to Scottish Americanidentity; almost as central in fact as the rhetoric offailure is to Scots at home.

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Before I left Scotland I sent six boxes of books toShelter. Most of them I hadn’t read for more than adecade, and at the back of one shelf I discovered aparticularly dusty relic. Fifteen years ago, Beveridgeand Turnbull’s book The Eclipse of Scottish Culturecoined a term which was quickly adopted into theScottish political lexicon: inferiorism.

Applying Franz Fanon’s model of Africancolonialisation to Scotland, the two argued thatScotland’s indigenous culture was systemicallyundervalued, reframed as parochial and anomalous bydominant English culture and set up to have itsdifferences ‘reformed’ away.

The idea of Scottish inferiorism found a readyaudience in a country which felt under pressure from aThatcherism blue in tooth and claw: at that timeScotland was routinely described by Thatcheriteministers as being anomalous in not having embracedthe deregulation which had produced such a boom inthe South East of England: Scotland, so the argumentwent, clung to outmoded practices and attitudes andneeded to be jolted out of its complacency.

But though Fanon’s theory had never been applied inquite this way before, and many questioned whetherapplying the model to a country which had prosperedso conspicuously from colonialism was in bad taste,the idea that Scotland’s culture is in some senseintrinsically inferior to others around the world has adeep resonance in Scotland.

As Paul H.Scott has so eloquently shown, almostimmediately after the Union, whilstsupporters praised Scotland’sopportunities in expansive terms,opponents of the settlement focusedon the extent of Scotland’sdiminution, its loss of autonomy, itsdisappearance as an independentinternational power and, crucially, itsshame. A country which sold itsstatehood and downgraded itspolitical institutions for the pecuniaryadvantage of its ruling class lostmoral capital as well a politicalautonomy.

The smallness of Scotland, itsphysical inferiority, is foreverassumed even when it is explicitlyrejected; from MacDiarmid’s ‘Scotlandsmall?’ to the flipping of Scotland’spresumed weakness into a (moral)strength. Michael Marra’s ‘Hairmless’with its celebration of the small townvalues of staying innocuous andstaying safe is wittier than most but

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assumed Scottish powerlessness is normally implicitrather than sung about.

Even that persistent nationalist argument about howScotland should become ‘just like the other smallnations of Europe’ valorises Scotland as a timrousbeastie, closer to a Denmark or a Luxemburg than toits constitutional bed partner these last 300 years.

Size is indeed an issue in Scotland, but not in the waywe think. Like Grampa Broon in one of DudleyWatkins’ most entertaining strips, Scotland oftenseems to be wearing a pair of glasses whichexaggerates the smallest details to the size ofmountains and reduces looming facts to a microscopicscale.

If, around the world, Scotland is thought to be aremarkable place, and in Scotland, according to arecent poll, only 44% are ‘proud’ or ‘very proud’ ofbeing Scottish, where exactly does the problem lie?

Helpfully, running counter to the rhetoric whichaccepts, valourises or laments Scottish inferiority, thereis another persistent strain of argument whichmaintains that Scotland is intrinsically better than theother nations of the world, and certainly than itssouthern neighbour: let’s call it Scottish Superiorism.

Though Scottish superiorism is now accepted mostreadily outside Scotland, it was once a Britishorthodoxy. In the 19th century the idea that Scotswere culturally, even genetically, programmed forsuccess, was an accepted part of the British nationaldebate, and opinion formers went to considerablelengths to explain it. To take only one exampleamongst thousands, in November 1898 the Revd JohnWatson, who as ‘Ian McLaren’ had published TheBonnie Briar Bush four years earlier, spoke to theLiverpool Caledonian Society on the occasion of StAndrew’s Night. The subject of his talk was ‘ScottishCharacter’.

When the Scot went to a foreign country, he had akeen sympathy with the political struggles of thatcountry, and was not inclined to quarrel with its politicaltraditions: but left to himself, nine Scots out of 10reverted to that just and strong democracy which wascreated by John Knox, who found a number of noblesand their retainers and left a consolidated andindependent nation. (Applause.)

No-one would try this today, but if they did, it would beseen as a hoary Victorian piece of J.M. Barrie-ismwhich is irrelevant to the real issue of Scotland andScottishness.

But while the Scottish opinion making classes nowbelieve themselves to be too sophisticated to swallowsuch stuff, it’s easy to find evidence of Scottishsuperiorism in popular culture: the bookshelves groanunder the weight of books with titles like Great Scots!,Famous Scots or Scottish Achievers, celebratingScottish achievements at home and abroad.

Nor is the idea that Scotland is a remarkable countrywhich produces remarkable people confined to thepopular press:

‘I remember being at a party with [then Labour leader]John Smith,’ John Lloyd, the editor of the FinancialTimes magazine told me, ‘and he said, “why don’t they[the English] realise we’re just better than them?”’

To many in contemporary civic Scotland this talk justsounds plain weird. It’s important to realise thoughthat in the great scheme of things, it’s those who don’tbelieve it who are the odd ones out.

In November this year I went to see Duncan Bruce,the author of The Mark of the Scots, first published inthe mid-1990s and the book which first turned manyAmerican Scots on to the splendours of their tartanheritage. We were speaking about the relationshipbetween the Scottish diaspora and the Scots inScotland. One thing he said has stayed with me eversince: ‘What you must realise in Scotland is that thereare thousands of people all around the world who thinkof themselves as Scottish. They may not vote inScotland, they may not follow the twists and turns ofScottish politics but they, we are Scottish.’

That statement, with its vision of a global Scottishnesswhich straddles international boundaries and policalsystems, offers a profound challenge: to somehowconnect domestic civic Scottishness with expansiveUK and international Scottishness and to reframeScottish experience in such a way that theconspicuous successes of Scots abroad are seen, notas the exception to Scottish experience, but as a rulewhich can inspire life in contemporary Scotland.Perhaps the first element in that would be for civicScotland to stop treating the Scottish diaspora assomething between a joke and an embarassment andstart listening to their views. In the process we mightlearn that we’re not as small as we thought we were.

David Stenhouse is the author of the best-selling Onthe Make: How the Scots took over London, and is theIllinois St Andrew’s Society’s Distinguished Citizen of2004-2005.

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