Missionary Generation

The Missionary Generation is the designation given by Strauss and Howe in their book Generations (ISBN 0688119123) to that generation in the United States of America born from 1860 to 1882. They became the indulged home-and-hearth children of the post-Civil War era. They came of age as labor anarchists, campus rioters, and ambitious first graduates of black and women's colleges. In rising adulthood, they had an Awakening that had given birth to the Bible Belt, to Christian socialism, to Greenwich Village, to the Wobblies, and to renascent labor, temperance, and women's suffrage movements. Their young adults pursued rural populism, settlement house work, missionary crusades, and muckrake journalism. In midlife, their Decency brigades and fundamentalists imposed Prohibition, cracked down on immigration, and organized vice squads. In elderhood, they presided over the twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II. Their elder elite became the Wise Old Men who enacted a New Deal (and Social Security) for the benefit of youth, led a global war against fascism, and reaffirmed America's highest ideals during a transformative era in history.

In Strauss and Howe's Generations categorization, The Missionaries' typical grandparents were of the Transcendental Generation. Their parents were of the Gilded Generation and Progressive Generation. Their children were of the Lost Generation and G.I. Generation; their typical grandchildren were of the Silent Generation.

23% of the Missionaries were immigrants; 1% were slaves at any point in their lives.

A sample list of Missionary celebrities includes the following members, with birth and death dates as this generation is fully ancestral:

• 1860 William Jennings Bryan (1925)
• 1860 Jane Addams (1935)
• 1863 Billy Sunday (1935)
• 1863 William Randolph Hearst (1951)
• 1868 W. E. B. DuBois (1963)
• 1869 Frank Lloyd Wright (1959)
• 1869 Emma Goldman (1940) (immigrant)
• 1871 Theodore Dreiser (1945)
• 1871 Orville Wright (1948)
• 1875 Mary McLeod Bethune (1955)
• 1878 Isadora Duncan (1927)
• 1879 Albert Einstein (1955) (immigrant)
• 1879 Margaret Sanger (1966)
• 1880 Douglas MacArthur (1964)
• 1880 John Llewellyn Lewis (1969)
• 1880 H.L. Mencken (1956)
• 1880 Helen Keller (1968)
• 1880 George C. Marshall (1959)

The Missionaries had four U.S. Presidents: Warren G. Harding (1865-1923), Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933), Herbert Hoover (1874-1964), and Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945). They held a plurality in the House of Representatives from 1909 to 1937, a plurality in the Senate from 1917 to 1943, and a majority of the Supreme Court from 1925 to 1943.

Prominent foreign-born peers of the Missionaries include Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948), V. I. Lenin (1870-1924), Winston Churchill (1874-1965), Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973).

Sample cultural endowments include the following:

• Intolerance (film, D. W. Griffith)
• "Into My Own" (Robert Frost)
• Prejudices (H. L. Mencken)
• Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser)
• the syndicated column that Will Rogers wrote
• The Shame of the Cities (Lincoln Steffens)
• Living My Life (Emma Goldman)
• "What I Believe" (Albert Einstein)
• Women and the New Race (Margaret Sanger)
• Beale Street Blues (W. C. Handy)
• The Souls of Black Folk (W. E. B. DuBois)
• "I Am the People, the Mob" (Carl Sandburg)
• The Last Puritan (George Santayana)

The last member of the Missionary Generation, the American Sarah Knauss, died on December 30, 1999.