During the early decades of the 20th century, a newspaper called The Avery Boomer served the 200 or so citizens of Avery, Iowa. It was irregular in frequency, and in other ways as well. Each issue was written and typeset by one Axel Peterson, a Swedish immigrant who described himself as “lame and crippled up,” and who had to make time for his journalistic labors while growing potatoes. A member of the Socialist Party, he had once gained some notoriety within it for proposing that America’s radicals take over Mexico to show how they would run things. Peterson was well-read. He developed a number of interesting and unusual scientific theories — also, it appears, certain distinctive ideas about punctuation.

Peterson regarded himself, as he put it, as “a Social Scientist ... developing Avery as a Social Experiment Station” through his newspaper. He sought to improve the minds and morals of the townspeople. This was not pure altruism. Several of them owed Petersen money; by reforming the town, he hoped to get it back.

But he also wanted citizens to understand that Darwin’s theory of evolution was a continuation of Christ’s work. He encouraged readers to accelerate the cause of social progress by constantly asking themselves a simple question: “What would Jesus do?”

I discovered the incomparable Peterson recently while doing research among some obscure pamphlets published around 1925. So it was a jolt to find that staple bit of contemporary evangelical Christian pop-culture — sometimes reduced to an acronym and printed on bracelets — in such an unusual context. But no accident, as it turns out: Peterson was a fan of the Rev. Charles M. Sheldon’s novel In His Steps (1896), which is credited as the source of the whole phenomenon, although he cannot have anticipated its mass-marketing a century later.