Henry Blake Fuller and the "New Immigrant"

Abstract

IKE MIANY of his contemporaries, Henry Blake Fuller (I857-I929) J.L frequently paired his ideas and his fears of the new with the spectre of a declining or dispossessed native American stock. Much like Henry James in The American Scene, he pondered what it meant, and what it would mean, share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with the inconceivable alien.... Though those words belong to James, the sense of dispossession they express belonged to Fuller too.' Over the course of his long career as a writer he shifted between the view that the immigrant might be assimilated into a homogeneous American race and a set of beliefs close to those that marked the strenuous of his time. He feared the unmeltable and alien influence of the new (Eastern and Southern Europeans) and, on occasion, exaggerated the virtues of the old (the descendants of a vaguely defined or American race). Some of the typology of race and character historians have come to call the nativism of the American I89os, then, flows into his first city novels. Present in crowds, in gangs, or swarming hordes, immigrants in these novels seem to possess but a half-life, a virtually nameless, subterranean existence. Their speech and manners mark them, in the eyes of many Anglo-Saxon characters, as unclassifiable foreigners. They are almost uniformly associated with the