Being a Scot living in the US gives you something of a blank canvas. Most Americans have a theoretical understanding of what a Scotsman is, but the reference points tend to be bounded by ‘Brigadoon’, Sean Connery, ‘Braveheart’ and occasionally ‘Trainspotting’; so in reality almost no practical idea whatsoever.
Some wealthier Americans who view links golf courses as ancestral hallowed ground have seen live Scots (typically caddies and barmen) in their natural habitat, but for most Americans, Scots are right up there with the Finns and the Portuguese; they know we exist, but unless we’re wearing a kilt they need a field guide to recognise us.
Of course many Americans could just look in the mirror. There have been multiple waves of Scottish immigration to the US, with one of the biggest being in the mid 18th century, when Scots (via the plantation of Ulster) were the pathfinders into the wilds of Appalachia. If you’re an anthropologist, I am sure the Scottish influence is still visible in the incessant banjo playing and poor dental health, but for the most part the Scottish-American identity has been subsumed by the dominant Redneck-American identity which has lots of time for guns and God and very little time for ethnography.
Contrast this anonymity with the day-to-day stereotypes that more recent immigrant populations offer. Red-haired, red-nosed Irish policemen in Boston; pizza-tossing Italian-Americans who look like extras from the ‘Sopranos’; Eastern European orthodox Jews in Brooklyn with their 19th-century fashion sense and ringlets. Compared to these protrusions of ethnicity a Scottish-American is pretty much invisible.
So being Scottish-American is a bit of an empty vessel into which émigrés like myself can pour whatever it is about being Scottish that they think will appeal to their adopted homeland.
In fact in the 2000 US census only 1% of Americans claimed Scottish heritage and we’ll probably see that drop further when the 2010 results are published. Of course it’s a completely different ballgame if you fly an hour to Toronto. The first person I ever met in Canada was an airport bus driver who hailed from Port Glasgow and immediately asked (in the pre-internet era) how the Morton were doing, and my experience is that every white Caucasian in Ontario has a granny from Alloa – or Benbecula if you make it to Nova Scotia.
So being Scottish-American is a bit of an empty vessel into which émigrés like myself can pour whatever it is about being Scottish that they think will appeal to their adopted homeland. This purposeful act of creation has been on my mind a lot lately having just finished Craig Ferguson’s autobiography ‘American on Purpose’.
Craig and I have a lot in common. Born into working class families a few years apart in the suburbs of Glasgow – him in Cumbernauld and me in Renfrew. Initial forays to the US in our 20s that resulted in both of us coming home thinking life back in Scotland was the better option. Finally, a conscious and long-term choice in our 30s to desert the old country and make America our home. Despite the similarities, Craig’s life story also has many things that are thankfully absent from my own – all of which generally make for a more interesting biography. Nonetheless the overall arc feels very familiar.
I’m not sure how many people in Scotland will even recognise the name Craig Ferguson. He had a brief period of local Glasgow fame in the late 80s as a stand up comic under the pseudonym Bing Hitler, when he notched up such career-defining highlights as being the lead in the Tron panto, having his own BBC sketch show, guest starring on the seminal ‘Red Dwarf’ and most impressively co-hosting the STV Hogmanay show with Muriel Grey. For a while he was also head barmen at the Ubiquitous Chip in Glasgow’s West End, which bizarrely helped keep his alcoholism at bay.
I remember watching him die spectacularly one night at the Glasgow University Union’s Daft Friday Christmas Ball, when he had the poor judgment to use a routine from his BBC show only to be drowned out after about five minutes by hundreds of drunken students shouting ‘telly, telly (pause) telly telly’ to the tune of a then popular football chant. Of course having read the book I now understand that he was almost certainly more than a little under the influence that night and probably didn’t give a rat’s arse what the crowd thought as long as he got his fee.
I’ve got to admit that I then lost track of him for a while. I presumed he had disappeared into obscurity and was toiling Kenneth Williams, like in a bedsit somewhere, trying to recapture the glory days of being booed off stage by drunken students. So when I moved back to the US at the beginning of 2005 I was more than a little surprised to find Craig successfully hosting the ‘Late Late Show’ on the CBS network five nights a week. Now hosting a 12.30am talk show many not seem like the pinnacle of a TV career, but in the US the late-night hosts are about as close to TV royalty as you can get, with a lineage going back to the great Johnny Carson who hosted the ‘Tonight Show’ for 30 years.
David Letterman and Jay Leno are the current co-kings of late night talk, being on at the slightly more respectable time of 11.30pm (an almost sensible 10.30pm if you live in Chicago). So to find a washed up Scottish comic from my student days as the heir apparent to Letterman was a bit discombobulating. Not only was he a respected talk show host, but it turned out he had also starred in various US sitcoms and had directed a couple of movies. As an indication of his stature in his adopted homeland, he had even hosted the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which for American comics is the equivalent of the Royal Variety Show with the president playing the role of the Queen. The key difference is that in the land of the free you have complete licence (and are indeed expected) to thoroughly roast your host; and given that the host that night was George W Bush there was obviously no shortage of material.
For all its crassness, its exceptionalism and its recurring political lunacy, it is still a land of opportunity and a fascinating work in progress of a country.
Having now fully understood the often very funny journey that took the erudite Mr Ferguson from Cumbernauld to fame and fortune in the US, I now recognise a bit better why we both ran away to America. On the surface the appeal is the opportunity to create somebody that wasn’t there before. To undo the mistakes of 30-plus years and get it right this time by reinventing yourself. Sadly human nature isn’t that malleable. Being an anonymous immigrant in a far off land does give you a fantastic opportunity, but it’s to strip things away, not layer stuff on.
What shines through Craig’s story is not that he is someone different to who he was in Cumbernauld, but rather that he can be just that and nothing more. He can be thoroughly and completely Scottish in his attitude and humour without the extraneous stuff that goes with it if you actually live in Scotland; and he’s happier as a result. I think that’s why I’m here as well. In New York no one ‘kent ma faither’ or cares if I’m a Billy or a Tim. I can be a management consultant without being demonised (which unfortunately happens quite often in the Scottish Review). I can even be friends with public school educated Englishmen without it feeling like an act of class and national betrayal.
The final thing that Craig and I share is our guilt complex. We both love Scotland, we’re proud of our roots and we recognise that we are who we are because of them. But even although a nice detached in Milngavie is now well within our monetary reach, we both choose to live somewhere else. I care deeply about what happens to Scotland and I invest a lot of time in my family, business and personal ties; like occasionally writing for the Scottish Review.
But for both of us the pull of America is stronger. For all its crassness, its exceptionalism and its recurring political lunacy, it is still a land of opportunity and a fascinating work in progress of a country. It would appear that whether you are a washed-up stand-up comedian or a rather less interesting management consultant with four young kids, the freedom to be just what you choose to be and nothing more is not only attractive but addictive.
Alan McIntyre is a Scottish-born partner in a New York-based financial services company
