SOURCE: “Henry Blake Fuller and the ‘New Immigrant’,” in American Literature, Vol. 53, No. 2, May, 1981, pp. 246-65.

In the following essay, Szuberla traces Fuller's attitude toward immigration and the idea of the American “melting pot” in his life and work.

Like many of his contemporaries, Henry Blake Fuller (1857-1929) frequently paired his ideas and his fears of the “new immigrant” 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, “to 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.¹ 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...