"Children are not generally indulged enough," insisted Jacob Abbott in Gentle Measures in the Management of the Young, the leading parental manual of the 1870s. In Home Treatment for Children, Mattie Trippe urged parents to let kids "revel in the absolute sense of freedom, feeling only the restraints of affection" Missionaries were the indulged children of the Gilded Age--an age of big constructions, rapid economic expansion, and an adult belief in science and experience over faith. Older generations felt themselves living in a rapidly modernizing era whose main shortcomings were ethical and could someday be remedied by the young.21
Likening the nurture tone of the 1870s and 1880s to that of the Dr. Spock 1950s, historian Mary Cable described this "long children's picnic" as "a controlled but pleasantly free atmosphere." W.E.B. DuBois remembered his childhood as "a boy's paradise," Jane Addams how her girlfriends had been "sickened with advantages," Henry Canby how families had "more cheerfulness" and "more give and take between parents and children" than the "previous generation" had enjoyed.22
Today's idyllic image of the traditional American Yuletide--Christmas trees, jingle bells, sleigh rides, chromo cards, and a jolly, present-toting Santa (first sketched by Thomas Nast in 1863)--was created mainly by the midlife Gilded for the benefit of Missionary children.23
The Missionaries also benefited from a huge expansion in education, led by rising-adult Progressive teacher-experts and funded by midlife Gilded taxpayers (and, later, by elder Gilded philanthropists). In Northern cities, Missionaries included the first American "kindergarten" students--in the South, the first generation of black youngsters to grow up mostly literate.24
The early Missionary childhood witnessed an unprecedented growth in American primary schooling. During the 1870s alone, the number of high schools more than doubled, and the year 1880 marks the Nineteenth Century' high-water mark for the share of all Americans under age 20 attending school. During the next couple of decades, secondary education expanded rapidly. From 1884 to 1901, the number of women attending coed colleges rose sevenfold. From 1884 to 1907, the number of college and postgraduate degrees tripled.25
While Gilded-era science elevated "Mama" in a child's eye, it pushed "Papa" into a world of adult competition outside the home, a world many children would later condemn as spiritually hollow. Inspired by Little Lord Fauntleroy and best-selling piano songs such as "Always Take Mother's Advice," magazine fiction put unprecedented stress on Mama's central child-rearing role. The link between Missionaries and mothers would last a lifetime. Billy "Rosebud" Hearst was a notorious "mama's boy." Al Smith lived alone with his mother until he married at age 27. Frank Lloyd Wright benefited from a mother who purposely meditated on "fine architecture" while he was still unborn. When the teenage Douglas MacArthur entered West Point, his mother came right along with him and found lodgings outside the gates.26
Many eminent Missionaries would later credit Mama for their success--or, in the case of Sara Delano Roosevelt, author of My Boy Franklin, Mama would make the claim on her own. In this Darwinian age, the most popular children's books (Black Beauty, Heidi, and Horatio Alger's Bound to Rise) joined Gilded mamas in assuring children that the good-hearted always got rewarded.27
Churches deemphasized death and damnation, and Sundays became a day for family outings. "The parents left religion to the Church, and the Church left it to the service and the Bible," recalled Canby. "There was a tacit understanding between generations that hellfire had been overdone." Coming of age, however, many Missionaries chose to renege on their side of this "tacit understanding."28