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In 1923 Robert Dollar from Falkirk inaugurated the first "round the world" passenger service. Undoubtedly, the most prominent nineteenth-century Scoto American was Andrew Carnegie, the son of a Dunfermline weaver who ended his career as "the richest man in the world."

Most Scots and Scotch-Irish immigrants, one may safely say, did not do quite that well. But nineteenth-century America had great need of miners, granite workers, cattlemen, maids, shepherds, bankers, farmers, and missionaries. Because of their history, the Scots possessed long experience with all those occupations. If the average Scots immigrant never quite equaled Carnegie’s success, neither did he or she appear with regularity on the nineteenth-century welfare rolls.

American historians did not pay much attention to these Scoto-American links until the late nineteenth century. Then, faced with the arrival of thousands of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, people of Scots or Scotch-Irish descent began vigorously to champion the role that their ancestors had played in "creating the American republic." Second and third-generation historians wrote scores of books and articles with the contributions of the Scots or Scotch-Irish as their central theme. From the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876 forward, these filiopietistic studies appeared with regularity, bearing titles such as Presbyterians and the Revolution (1876); Scotch and Irish Seeds in American Soil (1879); The Scotch-Irish in America (1896); and The Scotch-Irish in America (1906).

Turn-of-the-century popular magazines often struck the same chord. In "The Sons of Old Scotland in America" (1906) Herbert N. Casson proudly listed the most prominent Scoto Americans of his day: California congressman James McLachlan; House speaker David Henderson; Buffalo, New York, mayor James N. Adam; New Hampshire governor John McLane; secretary of agriculture James Wilson; noted inventor Alexander Graham Bell; cleric George Gordon of Boston’s Old South Church; educators William Kaller and John Kennedy; naturalist John Muir; industrialist Andrew Carnegie; and so on. "A remarkable record and a remarkable race," he concluded.

The Scotch-Irish patriotic groups went even further. In 1889 they inaugurated an annual series of conferences to extol the virtues of "the race," and they faithfully did so for over a decade. Declaring their absolute neutrality on all political or religious issues, these regional and national Scotch-Irish societies declared their purpose solely "to impress upon the pages of history the heroic deeds of the sons of the Scotch-Irish race." Scottish men, incidentally, were not welcome unless they had married Scotch Irish wives. When the collected speeches of the conferences were published, they contained few surprises. Appeals to Scottish history—which the Scotch-Irish equally claimed as theirs— extolled the virtues of William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Burns. One speaker in 1891 declared that the synonym for the Scotch-Irish "race" lay in the phrases "national freedom, general education, and sound scriptural faith."

Such celebrations of ancestral ties formed an integral part of white middle-class fin de siècle life. It was during this era that most city libraries established genealogical divisions, and the figure of the professional genealogist became a familiar one in the nation’s archives. When Scottish women formed their own ethnic organization, the Daughters of Scotia, in 1898, they reflected the same concerns that animated the national Daughters of the American Revolution (formed in 1890) and the regional United Daughters of the Confederacy (formed in 1894).