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The Missionary Generation is the designation given by Strauss and Howe in their book Generations 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.

Place in Time

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.

This generation is fully ancestral, with the last member of the Missionary Generation, the American Sarah Knauss, having died on December 30, 1999.

Prominent Americans

The Missionaries had four U.S. Presidents:

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.

Sample cultural endowments

Prominent non-U.S. Peers

American generations | 1860s births | 1870s births | Year of death missing

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Missionary Generation".

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