Members of the idealistic Missionary Generation, which include some of our ancestors, were born between 1860 and 1882; the youngest of that generation left the world's stage about 1962.1 Their parents were either the last wave of the reactive Gilded Generation or the first wave of the adaptive Progressive Generation, who nurtured them in a relaxing way. The Missionary Generation (of the Prophet archtype in the Great Power Saeculum, or Cycle) grew up as increasingly indulged youths after a secular crisis (the Civil War), came of age inspiring a spiritual awakening (the Missionary Awakening at the end of the Nineteenth Century), fragmented into narcissistic rising adults, cultivated principle as moralistic midlifers, and emerged as visionary elders guiding the next secular crisis (the Depression and World War II). They became the indulged home-and-hearth children of the post--Civil War era. They came of age as labor anarchists, campus rioters, and ambitious first graduates of black and women's colleges. Their young adults pursued rural populism, settlement house work, missionary crusades, muckrake journalism, and women's suffrage. In midlife, their Decency brigades and fundamentalists imposed Prohibition, cracked down on immigration, and organized vice squads. In the 1930s and 1940s, their elder elite became the Wise Old Men who enacted a New Deal (and Social Security) for the benefit of youth, led the global war against fascism, and reaffirmed America's highest ideals during a transformative era in world history.2
In 1896--as the aging Gilded elite reeled from labor violence, student evangelism, and agrarian revivals--36-year-old William Jennings Bryan swept to the Democratic Presidential nomination with an exhortation that was as generational as it was partisan: "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." The "Boy Orator of the Platte" then added, in a slap at McKinley's Progressives, "We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them."3
With these words, Bryan's coming-of-age Missionary Generation pushed to a climax its passionate attack on the soulless Darwinism of Gilded elders. George Herron, the 27-year-old "Prophet of Iowa College," challenged "the wicked moral blindness of our industrialism." The thirtyish Jane Addams, "Our Mother Emancipator from Illinois," launched social reforms from Hull House. In The Octopus, The Jungle, and Shame of the Cities, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, and Lincoln Steffens lashed out with a literary venom not seen since the early writings of Whitman and Thoreau.4
Meanwhile, thousands of their young peers were forming what essayist John Jay Chapman termed a "galaxy and salvation army of militant benevolence" with "an inner life and social atmosphere peculiar to itself, its tone and mission." As some youths summoned forth a "Kingdom of God," others shouted anarchist slogans, threw bombs, lynched blacks, and called for the conquering of heathen lands.5
The aspiring youth elite simply absorbed the mood, enjoying "the bright college days" of a noisy decade they would afterward remember as the "Gay Nineties"--at Stanford (Herbert Hoover), West Point (Douglas MacArthur), and Harvard (Franklin Roosevelt).
Missionaries first appeared as the welcomed postwar youngsters of the late 1860s and 1870s. Indulgently raised and educated by the midlife Gilded in a world of orderly families and accelerating prosperity, they came of age horrified by what George Cabot Lodge called "a world of machine-guns and machine-everything-else" and what Stephen Crane, gazing at a coal mine, called "this huge and hideous monster . . . grinding its mammoth jaws with unearthly and monotonous uproar."6
This inner rebellion of "moral" sons against "laborious" fathers, recalled best-selling American novelist Winston Churchill in 1908, triggered "the springing of a generation of ideals from a generation of commerce."7
Missionary first-wavers, leavened by the first large influx of non--Anglo Saxon white immigrants, entered their twenties as preachy student leaders, rebellious career women, and Haymarket rioters. Last-wavers reached adulthood while the fires of Chautauqua revivalism, muckraking, and labor radicalism still raged. Their tumultuous awakening defined the Missionaries for life as a generation of moral pathfinders, men and women to whom any opinion was a religion once they decided it was right. William Allen White recalls that Bryan's campaign "was a fanaticism like the Crusades. Indeed the delusion that was working on the people took the form of religious frenzy."8
Unlike their Progressive next-elders, Missionaries were attracted by the specter of purifying confrontation. "People who love soft words and hate iniquity forget this," Chapman wrote in 1898, "that reform consists in taking a bone away from a dog." A fellow student had earlier attributed Chapman's popularity to sheer zeal. "He is glowing and beautiful like fire . . . destructive like fire, seeking heaven like fire."9
Missionary anger remitted into self-discovery during Theodore Roosevelt's second term. When the economy slumped after the Panic of 1907, they hardly noticed. Instead, reveling in the personal independence of their new automobile age, they shifted their attention from messianic upheaval to the serious task of reshaping self and community. Their lofty-worded movements spread the spectrum from the holy (Billy Sunday's fundamentalism, "White Angel" Booth's Salvation Army) to the domestic (Elmer McCollum's fruit faddism, Frank Lloyd Wright's "Prairie Style" architecture); from the utopian (Bill Haywood's Wobblies, Emma Goldman's anarchists) to the mean-spirited (William Simmons's reborn Ku Klux Klan, Henry Goddard's eugenics movement); from the uplifting (Jane Addams's settlement houses, Walter Rauschenbusch's "Social Gospel") to the sober (Andrew Volstead's crusade against liquor, Francis Harrison's against narcotics).10
Not least, for rising adults who loudly hailed "the New Woman," was the unprecedented strength of their female cadre--including Isadora Duncan (celebrating sexual emancipation by dance), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (assailing This Man-Made World), Margaret Sanger (broadcasting birth-control advice in Woman Rebel), and countless others in what came to be annual suffrage marches up New York's Fifth Avenue.11
Whatever their causes, Missionary mental approach remained a generational constant: a fierce desire to make the world perfect according to standards that welled up from within.
Entering midlife around World War I, this generation often found itself split into opposite camps, rural evangelicals versus urban Social Gospelers (or "modernists"). Yet growing pessimism about America's future in the hands of their nihilistic Lost juniors brought them together behind a common generational mission: the vindication of social good over social evil. Thus did fiftyish Missionaries transform into enthusiastic circa-1917 "Crusaders for Democracy," and later into the "Decency" enforcers of the 1920s. They pushed through Prohibition, woman's suffrage, immigration restriction, Smoot-Hawley, Red deportation, "vice squads," and punitive criminal laws--all in an effort to rekindle higher principles of national community.12
With the Great Depression and global totalitarianism of the 1930s, this effort matured into a sense of historical imperative. And when the era of crisis culminated in war, a still younger generation looked to aging Missionaries for wise leadership, for a fresh definition of national purpose they could dutifully champion against all enemies. "That is the conflict that day and night now pervades our lives," President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed after the attack on Pearl Harbor. "No compromise can end that conflict. There has never been--there never can be--successful compromise between good and evil. Only total victory can reward the champions of tolerance, and decency, and freedom, and faith." In old age, this generation of moralists--the likes of Roosevelt, MacArthur, Henry Kaiser, and George Marshall--established America as a global beacon of revitalized civilization.13
Throughout their lives, Missionaries startled older and younger generations by their fixation on mind and spirit, by their odd detachment from the material realities of life. They championed the inner life, from Jane Addams's "higher conscience" in immigrant neighborhoods, to W.E.B. DuBois's "black consciousness" in race relations, to the "stream of consciousness" novels of Stephen Crane--even to the "primitive consciousness" of Jack London's Call of the Wild and Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes.14
By the time America was rallying behind this generations leadership at a moment of national emergency, incoming President Franklin Roosevelt remarked of "our common difficulties" that "they concern, thank God, only material things." Several years later, Roosevelt repeated "the belief I have already affirmed many times that there is not a problem, social, political, or economic, that would not find full solution in the fire of a religious awakening. . . ."15
In Confessions of a Reformer, Frederic Howe explained that
early assumptions as to virtue and vice, goodness and evil remained in my mind long after I had tried to discard them. This is, I think, the most characteristic influence of my generation. It explains the nature of our reforms, . . . our belief in men rather than institutions and our message to other people. Missionaries and battleships, anti-saloon leagues and Ku Klux Klan . . . are all a part of that evangelistic psychology . . . that seeks a moralistic explanation of social problems and religious solution to most of them.George Santayana was surely thinking of his fiftyish peers when he observed in 1920: "Americans are eminently prophets. They apply morals to public affairs. . . . They are men of principles, and fond of stating them."16
The word missionary symbolized this generation's lifelong quest for global reform. The effort began with what Ivy League students proclaimed to be the "missionary crusade" of the 1880s, sealed by an 1886 assembly at Mount Hermon, Massachusetts, at which students proclaimed "the kingdom of God on earth" and adopted the motto many would apply into old age: "The Evangelization of the World in This Generation." In vast numbers, these young zealots built Christian encampments all over Asia. They loved calling themselves "missionaries," the Latin plural derivative of the Greek "apostle," or "one sent." When hundreds of them were massacred during the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1900 (some decapitated torsos found with their hands still locked in prayer), thirtyish peers back home took to heart their role as global martyrs, "ones sent" to bring new values to the "Brotherhood of Man" by force of their example.17
Thirty-three years later, Franklin Roosevelt became the leader whom "young men followed"--notes historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.--"as they followed no American since Lincoln." And forty-five years later, FDR became the only President whose death was universally likened to the martyrdom of Lincoln. "He was just like a daddy to me always," confessed the young Greatest Lyndon Johnson. "He was the one person I ever knew, anywhere, who was never afraid. God, God--how he could take it for us all."18
What they achieved themselves early in life hardly compared to what others saw in them late in life. Sherwood Eddy recalled of Robert Speer, his crusading classmate of the 1880s and author of Missionary Principles and Practice: "What he was, was more important than what he did."19
This is the first generation to which many living Americans feel a personal connection. Today's elders recall Missionaries as history saw them last, as the visionary leaders who guided America through the Great Depression and World War II. Today's 60-year-old probably remembers at least one Missionary grandparent; today's 85-year-old, a Missionary parent or two. Chances are, those memories are of stern old Victorian patriarchs and matriarchs, devoted to what we would now describe as traditional religion. In one respect, Missionaries were literally the last "VIctorians": They were the last Americans to come of age before the grand queen died in 1901.
Yet the full story of their lifecycle cannot possibly be told by invoking the Victorian stereotype, nor indeed by recalling the steel-willed leaders of the mid-1940s--a cadre of elders now sometimes remembered as "the World War II Wise Men." Instead, the full story must include very different images--of youthful indulgence, coming-of-age fury, rising-adult introspection, and midlife pomposity and intolerance. What finally emerged late in life, the austere and resolute persona, was largely self-created by a generation determined (in Edith Wharton's words) "to build up, little by little, bit by bit, the precious thing we'd smashed to atoms without knowing it."20
Here is a table of contents for a deeper exploration of the Missionary Generation's lifecycle:
Birthyears for the Missionary Generation
(Linked names are ancestors of ours;
linked "G-" numbers refer to the family generations of those ancestors.)
See the next generation
See the previous generation