How the Scots Invented the Modern World

by Arthur Herman

  When Samuel Morse had sent his first telegraphic message from Baltimore to Washington in 1844, the words he chose came from the Bible: “What hath God wrought?” The words have since seemed prophetic, expressing the sense of astonishment, almost foreboding, at how the world would change over the next century and a half, thanks to technology and the industrial age. From that point of view, he could have sent a slightly different message:

  “What have Scotsmen wrought?”

  Conclusion

  Breathes there a man with soul so dead,

  Who never to himself has said,

  This is my own, my native land!

  —Sir Walter Scott

  I

  As the nineteenth century waned, the intellectual capital of the Scottish Enlightenment waned with it. James McCosh was probably that tradition’s last survivor in the field where it all started, moral philosophy. Other isolated giants remained. Alexander Bain, virtually self-educated and the son of a weaver, rose to become professor of logic at Marischal College, Aberdeen, and founder of Mind, Britain’s most important philosophical journal. The University of Glasgow laid claim to one of the two most important physicists in Britain, William Thomson, Lord Kelvin. Aberdeen had the other, James Clerk Maxwell, the father of modern electrodynamics, whose work cleared the way for Einstein’s theory of relativity. In 1890 Sir James Frazer published The Golden Bough, which revolutionized modern anthropology. However, Maxwell had left Aberdeen early in his career for the University of London and then Cambridge. Frazer looked as much to German and French thinkers as he did to the “System of the North,” or Scottish school.

  Scotland’s days as the generator of Europe’s most innovative ideas were over. However, she had done her work: the future direction of the modern world, which Scotland had done so much to chart and establish, was now set. What still hung in the balance was the fate of Scotland herself.

  In one sense, Scotland had finally arrived—at least as far as Great Britain was concerned. Glasgow was now the industrial workshop of the empire. Its thriving banking and business center boasted an imposing neoclassical architecture of marble, granite, and sandstone to rival that of Edinburgh. Its iron and steel foundries and shipbuilding yards turned out close to one-third of the nation’s total output in each industry. It supplied locomotives and boxcars to Canada, South America, and the rest of Europe, as well as India and Asia. Shipbuilding firms along the Clyde, such as Napier’s, John Brown’s, and Fairfield’s, turned out one-fifth of the world’s total shipping tonnage. They made the British navy the most modern afloat and built the revolutionary new battleship Dreadnought in 1902.

  As Glasgow’s population neared the one-million mark, seven out of ten men and women living in the city worked for some kind of industrial manufacturer—including twelve thousand at the new Singer Sewing Machine factory in Clydebank, one of the largest in the world. Other cities, such as Dundee and Paisley, flourished as well. Paisley was home to the largest cotton-thread-making company on earth, Coates-Paton, which dominated nearly 80 percent of the world market. Scotland had become a dominant player in the “global economy” long before the phrase was invented.

  Scots dominated British politics, just as they pretty much ran the empire. Westminster saw five prime ministers hold office between Gladstone’s resignation in 1894 and the battle of the Somme in 1916. Three were Scots: Lord Rosebery, Arthur James Balfour, and Henry Campbell-Bannerman; a fourth, Herbert Asquith, was married to a Scotswoman, and sat for Scottish constituencies for his entire thirty-five-year political career.

  The election in 1906 was a landslide for the Liberal Party, which owed its existence and credo to Scots. The Liberals took fifty-eight out of seventy-two Scottish seats. Balfour, the defeated Conservative prime minister, who claimed descent from Robert the Bruce, had also had a Scottish chancellor of the Exchequer and a Scottish home secretary. Another future prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, sat in the new Parliament as a member of the rising new Labour Party, which had also been founded by a Scot, Keir Hardie.

  Scotland’s landed families were now pillars of Britain’s social and political elite. They sent their sons to England’s finest schools, Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge. Worrying about “scotticisms” in speech and behavior was a thing of the past; Scotland’s ruling class was now indistinguishable from its English counterpart. Archibald Primrose, the fifth Earl of Rosebery, was educated at Eton and Oxford, and married a Rothschild. In addition to being prime minister, he was also a prominent figure in English horseracing and the Turf Club.

  The Duke of Buccleuch hunted foxes on his 433,000-acre estates, just like any English squire. Others regularly invited English guests to their Highland castles or Lowland shooting-boxes to join in the annual slaughter of deer, grouse, pheasant, snipe, woodcock, trout, and salmon, which consumed so much of the leisure time of Edwardian upper-class males. The Clearances had left the Highlands devoid of people, but they did leave it a playground for the rich, and a vacation spot for tourists from London and Manchester and Glasgow and Edinburgh.

  Yet, by the same token, Scotland’s upper and middle classes were losing that hard-driving entrepreneurial edge which had been a part of their cultural heritage. They increasingly settled into the ideal of the English gentleman. The values of Eton, Cambridge, and Oxford, of the Reform and Athenaeum clubs, and of Lord’s Cricket Grounds steadily replaced those of a grittier homegrown variety. Balfour, who was a founding member of the super-elitist Cambridge Apostles as well as the darling of English upper-crust society, once described a member of his cabinet as “that rare bird, a successful manufacturer who is fit for something besides manufacturing.” Lord Rosebery admitted, “There is no thought of pride associated in my mind with the idea of London” or Britain’s great urban industrial wealth. When Andrew Carnegie proposed giving Scotland’s four universities more than two million pounds for sponsoring new science and engineering programs, he received a stern rebuke from Blackwood’s Magazine, now the voice of genteel British conservatism. “Success for him is the accumulation of dollars. . . . Maybe Mr. Carnegie has never heard the fable of Midas. . . . To get money you must strangle joy and murder peace.” If Carnegie had his way, Blackwood’s warned, “presently the American ideal will be our own.”

  The sad truth was that, to many educated Scots, their own culture now seemed more provincial than ever. Scotland’s success had brought with it a sense of disquiet, an increasing feeling that the rewards were not everything that had been promised. Part of it was due to being the “good child” of the United Kingdom, while the “bad child,” Ireland, stole the headlines with the issue of Home Rule. Also, in the two decades before the start of World War I, Scotland learned some unpleasant truths about the costs and consequences of becoming a modern nation in such a rapid and headlong way.

  For one thing, for all of Scotland’s industrial growth, poverty remained as intractable a problem as ever. Wages in Glasgow always lagged behind those in the rest of Britain; that was partly what made it so attractive to manufacturers. Quality of life suffered, however. Infant mortality remained higher than in other British cities. Disease and malnutrition haunted the crumbling tenements of Glasgow’s inner city. Scotland’s other industrial cities told similar stories. In Dundee in 1904, for example, one-fifth of the city’s six thousand houses had no toilets or sanitary accommodations. Belatedly, Glasgow’s city authorities began to push large-scale slum clearances and new housing. But the damage had already been done. At the start of the Boer War in 1898, two out of three Glasgow recruits for the British army had be turned away because they could not meet the minimum health requirements. As one writer has put it, “Scotland in the Edwardian era was no place to be poor, sick, aged, or unemployed.”

  Farther north, the nightmare of the Highland Clearances was over, although fierce confrontations between crofters and landlords had continued down to the 1880s. Poverty remained the fate of most of those who stayed. Their diet had changed little from almost two centuries earli
er—oatmeal porridge, bread and oatcakes, a little beef or mutton. No wonder emigrants continued to stream out of the country in record numbers. In the first decade of the twentieth century, almost a quarter of a million people left Scotland—and not only from the Highlands. Town and rural laborers in the Lowlands realized a much brighter future awaited them in Canada or America; in the fifty years before 1920, in fact, more than half of Scotland’s emigrants headed for the United States.

  Scotland had been the first fully literate nation. Its education system, particularly its universities, had once inspired the rest of the English-speaking world. Now it seemed to lag far behind. In 1882 the rector of Edinburgh’s hallowed High School, James Donaldson, bitterly complained that the curricula of Scottish universities were still pretty much what they had been three hundred years earlier. In terms of modern research facilities and laboratories, Donaldson suggested, the Scottish university was “the handloom weaver of the intellectual world.” Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen no longer attracted Scotland’s best and brightest: anyone in pursuit of an advanced degree in the humanities or sciences went to Cambridge, Oxford, or London instead.46

  Ten years later the universities tried to update themselves by instituting entrance exams, creating the bachelor of science and honors degrees, and finally admitting women. University students of thirteen or fourteen years old were now a thing of the past; the academic body more closely resembled that of other Western universities. It was not clear, however, whether all this was really for the better. Poorer and less qualified students, who once could have sneaked into Edinburgh and St. Andrews and gotten their university training, now got caught in the mesh of entrance exams. Overall, the Scottish university became more elitist in its orientation, all in the name of higher standards and professional excellence. And still the best and brightest traveled south for their degrees.

  Other parts of the education system struggled to keep the old egalitarian ideal intact. In 1872 Parliament created for Scotland the first system of compulsory primary education in Britain, and transferred control of the traditional burgh schools to a new public board, which also provided money so that schools could now abolish students’ fees. One out of seven Scottish children went to secondary school in 1914, compared with one in twenty in England. But the problem of drawing into school those who most needed it, the poorest and most disadvantaged, remained as intractable as ever. Something like 15 percent of Glasgow’s children never saw the inside of a classroom. Increasingly it was government that was called in to help; as with urban renewal and social reform, reform in education steadily passed out of private hands or church-based organizations and into the arms of the state, which meant London.

  Scottish businessmen had once led innovations in the printing industry and the book trade. The Edinburgh Review had set the standard for the English-speaking world of serious intellectual culture. The last issue of the Review appeared in 1929. (Blackwood’s managed to hang on until 1980.) Now Scots were pioneers in a new field: the tabloid press. Alfred Harmsworth set up the half-penny-a-copy Daily Mail in 1896, which spawned a host of imitators, such as the Daily Mirror and Daily Express. The best-known Scottish writers were no longer philosophers or political economists or essayists or historians, but masters of the field of fantasy and escapist literature. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island delighted children and adults alike, while Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae put the final touches on the Highland myth Sir Walter Scott had started. Arthur Conan Doyle not only authored the most famous detective of the age, Sherlock Holmes, but a series of science-fiction novels, including The Lost World. A Roman Catholic, Doyle was a champion of spiritualism and seances—a far cry from the hard-headed realism of Hume and Reid. James Barrie led a pack of authors writing sentimental stories about rural Scotland, which critics dubbed “the Kailyard school.” But his most famous work, Peter Pan, with its tale of a talented boy who refuses to grow up, reflected a Scottish intellectual tradition that now seemed to be running in reverse.

  Traditional Scottish culture had likewise retreated into self-caricature. Music-hall comedian Harry Lauder had come up from nothing. He had worked at a flax mill in Arbroath at age twelve, and then as a miner. He went on to become the most popular entertainer of the age. But his stories and songs, such as “The Lass o’ Killiecrankie” and “Roamin’ in the Gloamin’,” created a Scottish persona of the “ower thrifty wee mannie” with a thick brogue, battered bonnet and kilt and beard, which dominated the outside world’s view of the typical Scot for nearly half a century. Sentimental ballads such as “The Blue Bells of Scotland” and “Loch Lomond” conveyed the impression that Scotland was a land of bekilted lads and lassies who wandered wistfully o’er the glen and sighed for the return of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Charlie himself, or at least his smooth, youthful visage, graced tins of Walker’s Butter Buscuits. Robert the Bruce helped to sell tartans and scarves.

  The commercialization of traditional Highland culture played a crucial role in the formation of the Scotch whisky industry, as well. For centuries Scottish families had distilled their own spirits or uisge beatha, “water of life.” In the eighteenth century it had been the drink of choice of the lower classes, as it continued to be, despite tax excises and temperance campaigns, in the nineteenth. Then Parliament in 1823 lifted the onerous taxes and made owning a distillery legally and financially possible. By 1870 Scottish distillers discovered there was a huge market for whisky south of the border. Two in particular, John Walker and Tommy Dewar, skillfully tapped into it.

  John Dewar had worked in a wine shop in Perth before he started his own business, offering whisky in glass bottles instead of the traditional jars or wooden casks. His sons Jimmy and Tommy opened a branch in London in 1885, and exploited the associations between whisky and the romantic land of tartans and bagpipes in their advertising. The symbol of Dewar’s was a Highland drum major with a bearskin bonnet and kilt: in fact, Highland costumes, bagpipes, and kilts became de rigeur for all Scotch whisky advertising for nearly a century. But their “Scotch,” like that of their counterpart John Walker of Kilmarnock, was geared to English tastes. Blended whisky took the husky, peaty edge off the traditional Scottish malts. It made it smoother and more appealing to the southern palate. By the 1890s whisky-and-soda became the preferred drink of the English gentlemen. The Dewars became multimillionaires. Tommy Dewar entered the House of Lords—the first Whisky Lord to do so—and was the third man in Britain to own a motorcar. (The first was the Scottish tea magnate Thomas Lipton; the second was the Prince of Wales.)

  The Scottish character did continue to be recognized and admired: its moral discipline, its integrity and honesty, its capacity for hard work and ambition for advancement. But it, too, found itself on the verge of a cultural distortion as the new century dawned. The Scottish Enlightenment had always dubbed man a “social animal,” meaning that interaction with others was indispensable for his or her intellectual and moral development. Adam Smith had even insisted that the opinions of others acted as a kind of moral mirror, without whose reflection we never form a sense of right and wrong. But when carried to extremes, such a view bred in the middle-class Scot of the late Victorian and Edwardian era an acute need to conform to social norms. The emphasis on conformity blocked innovation and creativity in ways that could be stifling, even dangerous. James Barrie put it best with a bitter irony: “The grandest moral attribute of a Scot is that he’ll do nothing which might damage his career.”

  As all of Europe mobilized for war in August 1914, believing its soldiers would be home “before the leaves fall,” three of the most important soldiers in the British army were Scots: Field Marshal Lord Robertson, Sir Ian Hamilton of the General Staff, who had been Lord Kitchener’s chief of staff, and General Douglas Haig, later Field Marshal Earl Haig. For more than a century, Scots had been the backbone of the British army. One out of every four officers had been of Scottish birth as early as the 1750s. But what had made them so useful, besides their physical
courage and sense of honor, was their daredevil attitude, their willingness to defy the rules as well as the odds. One looked high and low for such qualities in these three men. Hamilton was largely responsible for the disastrous Gallipoli campaign in Turkey; Lord Haig presided over the ceaseless slaughter at the Somme, Ypres, and Passchendaele, which sent more than half a million Britons to their deaths. Robertson, despite his own misgivings, refused, out of professional courtesy, to stop him.

  Intelligent and conscientious soldiers, Haig, Robertson, and Hamilton had mislaid the habit of independent judgment, the ability to think outside the box. Trained to concentrate on the means, they had lost sight of the ends. They were vivid examples of what Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson had warned might happen in an overspecialized modern society, where “the minds of men are contracted and rendered incapable of elevation”—but now at the top of society rather than the bottom. Thousands of English, Welsh, Canadian, Scottish, Irish, Australian, and Indian soldiers paid the price.

  The end of World War I ushered in a period of acute hardship and unemployment for Scotland. World War II revised the picture somewhat, when Scottish factories turned out the Spitfires and Rolls-Royce Merlin engines that won the Battle of Britain. In the 1950s, the great shipyards along Clydeside continued to produce nearly 15 percent of the world’s shipping. Coal, iron, steel, and engineering were as essential to Scotland’s economy as ever, although they were almost all nationalized. The average workingman’s income in 1958 was almost three times what it had been in 1938.