The Missionary Generation

The Missionary Generation grew up in Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, amid industrialization, urbanization, Jim Crow, mass immigration, labor conflict, and conspicuous wealth. They were the engines for significant reform, including muckraking journalism, prohibition, women’s suffrage, labor rights, and moral regulation. They are hence named for their reforming zeal: their peculiar conviction that modern society had become corrupt, exploitative, drunken, dirty, or unjust, and hence required their intervention.