In The Evolution of a College Student, educator William Hyde described the typical 1890s-era freshman as homesick, the sophomores as arrogant, the junior as socialist, and the senior as religious--with an "ascetic, egotistical fiancée intent on becoming a settlement house worker.29
Attending college, Missionaries sparked the greatest wave of campus rebellions since the 1830s. The "settlement movement" (also known as the "New Franciscanism") belongs almost entirely to this generation. Between 1886 and 1911, 17,500 students and recent graduates, mostly from affluent families, joined Jane Addams on her urban crusade--a far higher percentage of the national student body than the circa-1965 Peace Corps.30
During the decade and a half between 1886 and 1903, in college or out, these youths raised on Santa Claus and Horatio Alger came of age as stern reformers, bellowing prophets, and spiritual explorers.31
The Missionary Generation came of age spearheading the Missionary Awakening (also called the "Third Great Awakening" or the "Age of Reform" or the "Age of Revivalism" or the "Age of Labor Radicalism"), 1886-1903. Students accused anxious Progressive teachers of sharing what Ray Stannard Baker called the "enlightened selfishness" of the Gilded era. "As for questions," remembered Lincoln Steffens, "the professors asked them, not the students; and the students, not the teachers, answered them."32
Missionaries came of age during a boom era for youthful outdoor sports: golf, tennis, and roller-skating in the 1880s, and amusement parks and the "bicycle craze" of the 1890s. Young women actively participated in looser clothing and reinvented "bloomers" (called "rationals" in 1895) for bicycle riding.33
During the 1890s, Missionaries produced the largest-ever surge of famous authors in their twenties--including Jack London, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Booth Tarkington. Joined a decade later by the like-aged Upton Sinclair, Ray Stannard Baker, William Allen White, and Lincoln Steffens, young Missionaries dominated the ranks of turn-of-the-century "muckrakers." According to historian Louis Filler's composite biography, the typical muckraker--"born in the Eighteen Sixties" and "raised in the shadow of momentous events"--became "radical in his college days," "bloomed" with the rise of Theodore Roosevelt, and "invariably" supported America's entry into World War I.34
Young writers flayed the Gilded-built world for "soulless money-getting," "immense banking, roaring industries," and "hugeness and disorder." In the early 1890s, George Herron drew huge crowds to hear his "Message of Jesus to Men of Wealth." While "there may have to be some dying done before our social wrongs are thoroughly righted," Herron exhorted his listeners: "A simple generation of Christians, yea, a single generation of preachers and teachers . . . could regenerate the world."35
After steadily rising from 1880 on, per capita alcohol and drug consumption peaked around 1905--just as last-wave Missionaries were reaching their twenties. Then it began to decline.36
Reflecting back on his twenties, Frederic Howe wrote: "That was the thing that interested me--finding myself; and I wanted to be surrounded by people who were interested in finding themselves, who wanted to understand life and its meanings."37
Not content with mere words, many young Missionaries turned to symbolic acts of violence. They founded anarchist communes (including the radical Massachusetts enclave of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman), where they contemplated their rage against "bosses"--and then vented it at the Haymarket Riot, Homestead Massacre, and Pullman Strike. They often succeeded in martyring themselves for the workers' revolution. One convicted anarchist, Louis Lingg, blew himself up with a dynamite cap in his mouth rather than go to the gallows. "Perhaps there is no happiness in life so perfect as the martyr's," O. Henry later observed in one of his short stories.38
Fledgling writers such as Stephen Crane strained to mix holiness with gore ("The clang of swords is Thy wisdom/ The wounded make gestures like Thy Son's"), while the headlines of the young "New Journalism" publisher William Randolph Hearst shrieked of wrecks, fires, and foreign atrocities. "If bad institutions and bad men can be got rid of only by killing them, then the killing must be done." So read an unsigned Hearst editorial not long before 28-year-old anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot and killed President McKinley.39
Four years later, the public began to hear the singing voice of young Wobblies: "Onward Christian soldiers, rip and tear and smite/ Let the gentle Jesus bless your dynamite." "We shall bear down the opposition," screamed Upton Sinclair at the close of The Jungle. "Chicago will be ours! Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!"40
Having been born the first generation never to know slavery, Missionary blacks came of age just as southern Jim Crow laws were stripping them of their rights as citizens--an era historian Rayford Logan calls "the Nadir" of black history. At least 60 blacks were reported lynched each year between 1885 and 1904 (peaking at 161 in 1892). This generation of blacks--women especially--became legendary for its principled racial leadership. Journalist Ida Wells chaired the Anti-Lynching League; educator Mary McLeod Bethune organized the black women's movement; and in 1909, W.E.B. DuBois, founder of The Crisis, joined James Weldon Johnson in issuing "the call" for a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).41