Returning to his American homeland in 1904, after more than twenty years of living abroad, Henry James discovered to his astonishment that the physical and cultural landscape of his “old neighborhood” had been utterly transformed by the palpable signs of immigration. The sounds and smells of the new New York City startled his refined sensibilities. Observing the picturesque urban spectacle of the Lower East Side, James was both fascinated and appalled by the overflowing scene of recently arrived humanity. Walking the ghetto's streets on a “warm June twilight,” James reports in The American Scene (1907) the sensation of “a great swarming, a swarming that had begun to thicken, infinitely, as soon as we had crossed to the East side.” James' response to what he called the “Hebrew conquest of New York” is indeed telling: “the scene here bristled, at every step, with the signs and sounds, immitigable, unmistakable, of a Jewry that had burst all bounds...where multiplication, multiplication of everything, was the dominant note...here was multiplication with a vengeance” (The American Scene, 131-132).

Most striking about James' views on immigration is his deep consciousness of a profound change looming in American speech, and thus in American culture in general. Taking in the strange sounds issuing from the ghetto streets, James heard, with nervous anticipation, the “Accent of the Future,” the tones of rhetorical newness – the grafting of immigrant speech onto English, the “accent of the very ultimate future, in the States” – which he associates with the realm of the popular.