Where the angry spiritualism of Transcendental youth culminated in the apocalypse of the Civil War, the Missionaries demonstrated how a youthful generation of muckrakers, evangelicals, and bomb-throwers could mature into revered and principled elders--wise old men and women capable of leading the young through grave peril to a better world beyond. From the 1880s through the 1940s, the Missionary hand can be seen pushing American ideals and history forward.70
Just as we today honor the reforms of the Progressive Era as a testament to fair process, we remember Prohibition, the New Deal, World War II, and the Marshall Plan as a testament to the imperative that "good" must triumph over "bad." Some of what they did in pursuit of morality, of course, they overdid. And when excesses were committed, it was usually the younger, more pragmatic Lost Generation who had to bear the punishment and clean up the mess left behind: from the Palmer Raids to Prohibition, from Hoovervilles to Yalta.71
By the late 1940s, as younger Americans began yearning for some national purpose less lofty than rectitude, the Missionary star faded at last. Perhaps it was time. "Do not be deceived--we are today in the midst of a cold war," announced 77-year-old Bernard Baruch only two years after VJ-Day. These were ominous words from a man and a generation that had always been able to find extra moral stature in every new war and every new crusade.72
Without question, Americans today have the Missionaries to thank for lifting America to its present-day status as a great global power. America still lives by the visions they glimpsed. In foreign policy, the very term "foreign aid" was invented by elder Missionaries (Herbert Hoover and Herbert Lehman), perhaps recalling those classmates on Mount Hermon who first set their sights on "The Evangelization of the World in This Generation."73
At home, the term "Great Society" was similarly popularized by elder Missionaries (James Truslow Adams and Fiorello La Guardia), perhaps recalling that youthful image of Bryan--"the bard and prophet of them all," wrote Vachel Lindsay--who claimed that "a nation can be born in a day if the ideals of the people can be changed."74
In 1948 at age 83, art critic Bernard Berenson defined "culture" as "the effort to build a House of Life . . . that humanistic society which under the name of Paradise, Elysium, Heaven, City of God, Millennium, has been the craving of all good men these last four thousand years or more." Franklin Roosevelt had something similar in mind when he described his "Four Freedoms" just nine months before leading America into war. "That is no vision of a distant millennium," he explained. "It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation."75