The ethnic caricature that didn't stick
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# Scotch type: Shoddy Goods 061 ### The ethnic caricature that didn't stick
Jason Toon
Sep 9
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I’m Jason Toon and I look at a lot of vintage ads. Which means I see a fair amount of ethnic caricatures. Most of them are about what you'd expect, but in this Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about consumer culture, I look at one advertising-friendly stereotype that seems to have faded from our collective memory…
Aye, 'tis a bonnie wee loyalty redemption program Some brand names are so ubiquitous, they go straight past genericization to the point where we stop hearing the words that make them up. We have to be reminded of the "clean" in Kleenex, the syllable "lollipop" gave to Popsicle, and the "Scotch" in Scotch Tape. Ever wondered what the deal is with that last one? It has its origins in a now-forgotten ethnic stereotype, one that looks particularly odd to our modern sensibilities: that Scottish people are cheap. And it was far from the only product to trade on the caricature of the thrifty Scot. American ads of the 20th century are rife with tams and tartans as signifiers of value. As one 1952 Better Homes & Gardens ad put it, "For down-to-earth economy, this cook book would make a Scotchman blush!" The Ballad of Sticky McTape But 3M corporate lore has it that the name wasn't exactly chosen to evoke thriftiness. The story goes that in 1925, a 3M engineer named Richard Drew was developing the first masking tape. The initial idea was just to put adhesive on the outside edges of the tape, to make it cheaper to produce. But of course, that also made its hold less firm. An auto body painter testing the product supposedly told Drew to tell his "Scotch bosses" to stop being so stingy with the sticky stuff, "Scotch" being a widely used synonym for "cheap". For whatever reason, the 3M brass liked that and named their entire line Scotch Tape. Call me cynical, but that origin story doesn't make a ton of sense. Why would 3M executives in the 1920s take an insult about the shoddiness of their product and use it as a brand name? Who did they think they were, Meh? To me it reeks of a retrofit, an attempt to ground the name in some mythic flash of inspiration beyond all those other products that also traded on the clichéd myth of the miserly Hibernian. And maybe, just maybe, to dissipate any whiff of ethnic stereotyping.
A curtain taped is a penny earned Certainly, Scotch never shied away from invoking thrift in its advertising. It happened to be a perfect fit for the Great Depression, when the transparent tape became an icon of frugality, used to mend everything from torn curtains to cracked doll heads. And in a world densely populated with be-kilted mascots, Scotch Tape had one of the Scottiest, the tartan-draped, burr-spouting Sticky McTape, his glengarry-hat ribbon and plaid scarf trailing jauntily behind as he zips around clicking his heels.
Braveheart died for this? Canny, thrifty, and short of kilt Sticky McTape's clansmen and women were legion. Safeway's store brand for decades was Scotch Buy, giving the world such joys as this commercial featuring Ray "Scarecrow" Bolger doing a perhaps less-than-authentic jig and a Scottish accent worse than a teenager who's just seen Trainspotting. Plaid Stamps, one of those trading stamps promotions that housewives rose up against, was represented by a flame-haired, highland-flinging lassie. The burger chain Sandy's also featured a cartoon Scotswoman in a rather abbreviated kilt, with the slogan "Swifty and Thrifty" and a value meal called "The Scotsman". The Thrifty Scot Motel chain hosted budget-conscious wayfarers across the Upper Midwest. All of these caricatures represented one and the same value: value. If it's thrifty enough for the penny-pinching Scotch (a term the Scottish hate and do not use unless they're talking about whisky), it must be a great deal.
You pay the high price and I'll pay the low price and I'll be a Scotsman before ye Clearly, by its ubiquity, the equation of "Scotch" with "cheap" was something pretty much everybody understood. But, like, what? Prominent Scottish-Americans, like Andrew Carnegie, Douglas MacArthur, and Alexander Graham Bell, don't particularly evoke "thrift". There's never been a huge wave of visibly Scottish immigrants and they've pretty much been assimilated from the get-go: no American city has ever had a Scottish Quarter. Few 20th-century Americans would have ever met a Scottish person, at least one whose ancestors hadn't come to America a century or two before. Where did this come from? From England, that's where. The uneasy relationship between the two kingdoms that united into the United Kingdom was reflected in a set of contradictory stereotypes held by the English: that Scots are fierce warriors and shiftless layabouts, shrewd schemers and childlike bumpkins, dour puritans and dissolute degenerates. The humor magazine of the English imperial establishment, Punch, indulged in so much of this kind of thing that in 1907 they were able to fill an entire book of "Scottish Humour", meaning English writers mocking everything from Scots' accents to their hygiene to, yes, their poverty. Ha ha?
Aunt Mildred sends her love and a gratuitous ethnic caricature This stuff had wings in an age when excruciatingly unfunny ethnic "humor" was a mainstay of the emerging entertainment industry. I'm not just talking minstrel shows and Irish jokes. There were whole subgenres of "Swedish" vaudeville routines and "Hawaiian" novelty songs that would still be unlistenable today even if they weren't, let's just say it, racist. Apparently, people thought funny accents were a lot funnier back then. Anyway, the "Scottish = cheap" idea didn't disappear due to some public outcry. It seems to have faded as generations passed, the association getting weaker and more abstract until that particular auld acquaintance be forgot. And Scotch Tape has long since become one of those universally recognized brands whose name no longer refers to anything but itself.. I feel like I used to use Scotch tape all the time, though these days it’s mostly in bungled attempts to wrap some misshapen present without using the whole roll. What are the weirdest things you’ve tried to hold together with tape? How’d that work out for you? Let’s hear about ‘em in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat! —Dave (and the rest of Meh) Speaking of bargains, these Shoddy Goods stories remain available at the low price of free: Will there ever be a new physical media format? The grossest, scariest, funniest advertising monsters The deep-fried world of fast food journalism
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