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FEW Americans have heard of Howard Conklin Baskerville, but most Iranians know his name. A native of Nebraska, Baskerville graduated from the Princeton Theological Seminary and moved to Iran as a Presbyterian missionary. He was 23. The year was 1907. Baskerville was an idealist at a time of idealism in Iran.

The year before Baskerville’s arrival, the ailing king of Iran, Mozaffar ud-Din Shah, had bowed to popular demands for a constitutional monarchy and Iranians had drafted the first Constitution of their 25-century-long history. A parliament, the Majlis, was established and each city elected an assembly, or Anjoman. Tabriz — where Baskerville worked as a schoolteacher — was the capital of the constitutionalists and its assembly assumed a national role in the movement. Many Iranians presumed that the time for change had finally arrived.