"There is but one side in a moral question. Which do you take?" prodded William Jennings Bryan, helping to transform what had been the tepid Progressive "temperance" movement into Missionary-style "Prohibition." At last taking over the very institutions they had attacked in their youth, Missionaries now wanted to run them with zeal.51
When they were combat-age, Missionary men faced a lower risk of dying in war than any other American generation--yet none can match the Missionaries for crusading zeal abroad. In all three wars of their lifecycle--the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II--they led the call for intervention, often over resistance from their elders or juniors.52
In 1917, after pushing yet another Progressive President into war, they used their growing political clout to harness the brief emergency for "moral" purposes: not just the constitutional agendas of rural drys and feminists (both of whom quickly triumphed), but more sweeping means of controlling the younger Lost Generation, whose hedonism they despised and whose wildness they feared might taint a new generation of Greatest children.53
General "Black Jack" Pershing took brutal action against doughboy war deserters. Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis sentenced hundreds of younger (and no longer inspirational) Wobblies to hard time, and then turned his cudgel to cleaning up baseball. Attorney General Mitchell Palmer (the "Fighting Quaker," famous for addressing enemies as "thee") rounded up 4,000 supposed Bolsheviks on a single night and deported a shipful. James Truslow Adams admitted that his peers had found a "scapegoat" and that "the name on its collar is 'The Younger Generation.'"54
While Progressive President Wilson complained that the war unleashed a "spirit of rising brutality" that made Americans "forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance," many Missionary reformers welcomed how the war effort brought to America "union and communion" (Mary Follett), a "wider and wiser control of the common interests" (Robert Park), and "true national collectivism" (Robert Woods). When Senator Borah and his fellow "irreconcilables" denied Wilson his postwar League of Nations, Americans could sense that the Progressives were at last yielding to a more passionate and less genteel generation of leaders.55
As the 1920s wore on, thanks to a well-timed bull market, the midlife urban elite rose at the expense of their rural and evangelical peers. But still the caustic moral tone deepened. Henry Ford offered a "just share" to workers who passed his exam "on the clean and wholesome life." Calvin Coolidge insisted "true business" would bring "moral and spiritual advancement"--making this "Puritan in Babylon" (according to the like-aged William Allen White) a man "wise according to his day and generation."56
Congress virtually halted immigration; "Czar of the Movies" Will Harrison Hayes pushed a "Code of Decency" against sex on camera; Ku Klux Klan leaders tried to "Americanize" the heartland; and the nation's first "vice squads" began to hunt down bootleggers.
Moving into midlife, Missionaries launched their memorable drive to eradicate all forms of substance abuse (as well as crime and pornography), and by the mid-1920s they succeeded in pushing alcohol consumption to its lowest level in American history.57
While even DuBois expressed alarm at the growth in youth crime, a new generation of Missionary judges meted out more executions (the number doubled in the 1910s) and longer prison terms, and state health officials began authorizing "eugenical" sterilizations.58
By now, Missionaries began hearing the younger Lost Generation revile them as "Babbitts" or as "Tired Radicals." An occasional Missionary joined in. Self-proclaimed "debunker" H. L. Mencken gleefully roasted his "homo booboisie" peers. But as the 1920s drew to a close, most of the high-toned generation agreed with Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt that America needed a "New Humanism," an austere new ethic of social order and self-discipline. With the rise of Herbert Hoover, renowned as a brilliant humanitarian of global vision, Missionaries hoped that their best man was in position to propel the "Gospel of Business" overseas--to eliminate poverty, promote Christianity, and raise moral standards worldwide.59