Transatlantic Scots

Contributors

States I must have met personally ten thousand people who claimed acquaintance with me . . . I shook hands with them all . . . and presented signed postcards to one at least out of every ¤fty! (1928, 160–61) It is likely that Lauder’s onstage success translated into extensive sales of his recordings and, at a time when family music making was still a signi¤cant social activity, sheet music of his songs, both among transatlantic Scots and beyond. Yet again, the research questions relate to the construction of Scotland offered by these songs and their role in shaping ideologically the transatlantic Scots community. In the period before extensive intercontinental travel and telephoning, the major means of contact between transatlantic and “homeland” Scots was the letter or postcard. The same questions posed about the other utterances and activities of transatlantic Scots might be asked of their letters—to what extent are they always already textual and discursive and informed by the Scottish Discursive Unconscious? Postcards pose an additional question. As well as their written messages, which might be interrogated in terms similar to the letters, what visual messages did the cards carry? Austria in 1875 is usually cited as the point of origin of the picture postcard, although the period 1900 to 1918 is spoken of as “the golden age of the postcard” (Byatt 1978), the period when postcard production, collection, and transmission were at their height. A signi ¤cant number of “Scottish” postcards were produced, collected, and sent during the “golden age,” some manufactured within Scotland, many manufactured elsewhere. A particular postcard “genre” is especially interesting in relation to transatlantic Scots—the “Hands Across the Sea” card. Although not restricted solely to “Scottish” cards (there are English and Irish variants), it is a signi¤cant presence in the Scottish context, and there is even a subgenre that foregrounds the Scotland-North America connection (see frontispiece images). I have written elsewhere (McArthur 1981–1982) of “Scottish” postcards frequently displaying “semiotic overkill,” that is, the insistent signi¤cation of “Scottishness” being carried redundantly in several dimensions. Thus on the bottom left cover image there is not only the tartan, the lion rampant, and the Kailyardesque written sentiment, but also that other icon of Scottishness, the purple heather in the corners of the card. The Kailyardesque element is more explicit in the top right cover image with its invocation of Burns and the use of the Scots language. The central point, however, is the hegemony of Tartanry and Kailyard in “Scottish” postcards, and the research question is yet again, What was their circulation in the transatlantic Scots community and their contribution to the formation of identity narratives? 352 / McArthur Finally, the rearticulation of discourses relating to Scotland in mass circulation magazines should be considered, assuming that the magazine-buying habits of transatlantic Scots did not differ signi¤cantly from those of other hyphenate communities in North America. The leading critical work on National Geographic describes its rise to mass circulation status since its founding in 1888 as “a ‘slim, dull and technical’ journal for gentleman scholars [evolving] into a glossy magazine whose circulation is the third largest in the United States,” reaching a peak of nearly eleven million in the mid-1970s (Lutz and Collins 1993, 16). National Geographic has offered constructions of Scotland in two ways. Virtually since its inception the magazine has run intermittent pieces on Scotland (sixteen substantial articles, always lavishly illustrated, between 1917 and 1996). It would be an oversimpli¤cation to suggest that Tartanry and Kailyardism are indisputably hegemonic in these pieces, but they are substantially present, constructing Scotland as an additional exotic Other, the delivery of which to bourgeois Americans is the central function of the journal . Also, apart from its articles on Scotland, National Geographic has, at least since the 1930s, carried adverts for Scottish tourism that invariably invoke Tartanry . Other North American mass circulation magazines (e.g., Life, Saturday Evening Post, Colliers) have also been a channel for the circulation of discourse relating to Scotland, occasionally in their articles (e.g., “They Like to Dress That Way,” Saturday Evening Post, 1944, and “Robert Burns: These Scottish Scenes Inspired His Poems,” Life, 1949), but more centrally in their adverts. Apart from the frequent (but not invariable) recourse to Tartanry in these magazines’ adverts for Scotch whisky, they consistently offer the common melding of Tartanry and Kailyardism. An enormous number of their adverts invoke the legendary thrift of the Scots. Within Scotland itself this is a lowland discourse, with...