The Missionary Generation

1860–1882

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“Wisdom is knowing what to do next. Virtue is doing it.”
David Starr Jordan, 1898

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.

GEORGE BLAKE ROGERS. 1864–1935. My first cousin five times removed. George Blake Rogers was a first cousin of Alida Little Chase (1856–1934), my great³-grandmother and the mother of Arthur Morgan Chase as described in My Father’s Son; he is hence my first cousin five times removed. George was a man of thorough learning and is primarily remembered as President of Baldwin University (later Baldwin Wallace University) from 1905 to 1907. He appears in the contemporary catalogue Progressive Men of Northern Ohio (1906), which describes him thus on page forty-five:

George Blake Rogers, Berea, Ohio. President of Baldwin University. Born Oshkosh, Wis., April 5, 1864. Educated Cambridge, Mass., High School, Boston University, Drew Theological Seminary and Post Graduate Department Boston University. Has received the following degrees; A. M., Ph. D., B. D., and A. B. Director in the Equity Savings & Loan Co., The Babbitt & Crummel Co., The Brilliant Electric Co. and The Melody Publishing Co., all of Cleveland. Has devoted his entire life to educational work. Member Masons, Royal Arch Chapter, Knight Templar and Odd Fellows. Politically a Republican.

Like the Chases into which his cousin Alida married, George represented a cohort of cerebral, bespectacled, upper-class Wisconsinite Republicans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As no photos of George appeared on genealogical sites at the time I was researching him in early 2026, I was left with his cropped portrait in the aforementioned catalogue as my only reference for his appearance. I reached out to Baldwin Wallace’s Ritter Library with the hope that they had a clearer original and was kindly answered by archivist–historian Kieth A. Peppers. “I received your research request,” wrote Kieth, “and can happily report that we successfully located a lone image. Due to his rather short tenure, the misfortune of being here prior to our student newspaper, as well as the absence of our yearbook during his tenure, we have no other photos of Mr. Rogers.” He attached the full scan thereof; the portrait can be viewed here and its verso here.