The bombs and riots triggered by twentyish hotheads during the 1890s later embarrassed this generation as its members moved into their thirties and forties. During the Progressive Presidencies of Roosevelt and Taft, late-starting Missionaries shrugged off a souring economy and tried to catch up with their personal lives and careers. Richard Hovey, who had earlier accused the Gilded of being "like an oyster, all stomach," now admitted that he had "no real objection to a bathtub and clean linen."42
But if their fire turned inward and fragmented into separate channels, it did not extinguish. By degrees, these young men and women entirely reshaped American values and culture. While Christian socialists preached the Social Gospel to urban immigrants, Billy Sunday preached "fundamentalism" to an emerging rural Bible Belt. While poet-guitarist Carl Sandburg, "Ragtime" Scott Joplin, and "Father of the Blues" W. C. Handy enlivened Greenwich Village, new martyrs like Joe Hill ("the man who never died") kept the radical Wobbly fringe alive.
Cheering Progressive Roosevelt's "Great White Fleet," many young adults asserted a holy creed of white world supremacy--spearheaded by D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation and by young Senator Albert Beveridge's "Almighty Plan" to rid the world of "savage and senile peoples." Meanwhile, W.E.B. DuBois began rallying his black peers to defy Progressive Booker T. Washington's "Tuskegee Machine" and quit apologizing to whites. Insisting that "younger men believed that the Negro problem could not remain a matter of philanthropy," DuBois launched the Niagara Movement, the first national black platform that refused to accept second-class social and political status.43
"The decades that straddle the turn of the century," writes historian Harvey Levenstein, "constituted a veritable Golden Age of food faddism." As lifelong advocates of "New Nutrition," Missionaries pioneered vegetarian diets, introduced salads and cole slaw, counted calories, and discovered vitamins. After Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906, public disgust at the sight and smell of Gilded meatpacking triggered an immediate fall in beef prices--and a long-term decline in protein's role in the American diet. During World War I, while Missionary food crusaders urged "meatless" and "wheatless" Sundays, the verb "to Hooverize" (coined after Herbert Hoover, the 43-year-old director of Wilson's Food Administration) became synonymous with "to do without."44
As their spiritual energy split into separate streams, two Missionary propelled inventions--the Wright brothers' airplane and the automobile of Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan, and Walter Chrysler--joined technology to the individuating of inner aspirations. Migrating and commuting far more than their Progressive elders at like age, Missionary rising adults embraced new social inventions such as the "vacation," "motel," "suburb," and "country club."45
A number of rural-born authors fled eastward (theirs being the first large generation of western frontier babies), where they criticized what Sherwood Anderson labeled "lives of quiet desperation" in rural small towns. "I loathed you, Spoon River," wrote Edgar Lee Masters, "I tried to rise above you."46
Missionary women married at a higher average age than women of any other American generation until the Boom. As late as 1915, two of every five 1880s-era women's college graduates remained single. Nine percent of all Missionary women had never married by age 60--the largest share ever recorded for that age. "The 1890s were a boom time for being single," write historians Ruth Freeman and Patricia Klaus of "the first generation of bachelor women" who took pride in calling themselves "spinsters."47
The children of the Missionary Generation were either the reactive, nomadic Lost Generation or the heroic, civic-minded Greatest Generation, who were nurtured in a relaxed way.
Avoiding marriage, many thirtyish women ignored popular warnings that "the home is in peril" and wondered along with novelist Ellen Glasgow why they must "sit at home and grow shapeless and have babies galore." Those who did not start families rejected the stodgy Victorianism of their parents and sought simpler lives (the "servantless kitchen") and smaller houses (what historian Gwendolyn Wright calls the new "minimalist house").48
Through their lifecycle, Missionaries entirely redefined the role of women in American public life. Around the turn of the century, Missionary women surged into previously all-male professions (law, theology, medicine, dentistry, journalism), became the first female "secretaries," and began to monopolize primary school teaching. According to historian James McGovern, "the great leap forward in women's participation in economic life came between 1900 and 1910." In politics, moreover, Missionary women stood at the head of their generation's two successful constitutional amendments (women's suffrage and Prohibition). Nineteen Missionary women won election to Congress--versus two women from all prior generations combined.49
Self-assured, righteous, and generally intolerant as they approached midlife positions of power, the Missionaries reflected a sublimated sexuality among a generation whose men and women, Canby later admitted, "tacitly agreed to look upon one another as sexless." While the tall, mannish "Gibson Girl" became the symbol of young women invading the male professional world, muckraking and ministerial young men laid claim to a moral pedestal that the Gilded had left to the lady.50