Don't Forget the Lassies
by
MB
The war had dragged on for years by 1917, and morale in the mud-mired trenches of France was slipping. Evangeline Booth (daughter of William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army), guessing correctly that the men were desperate for moral and spiritual support, begged General John J. Pershing, head of the American Expeditionary Force, to allow some members of her “army” to tend to the needs of his troops overseas.[1] He approved of the plan, and she sent Salvationist lieutenant-colonel William S. Barker to judge conditions and necessity in France. Barker cabled “SEND OVER SOME LASSIES,” [2] and Booth sent four women whom she had personally selected to France in August of 1917. Other (primarily female) groups had been sent to Europe since 1915 by other charitable organizations, such as the Red Cross and the Y.M.C.A.; however, these, particularly those from the Y.M.C.A., were disliked by soldiers in general[3].
Preparations for the momentous task ahead were scant. The women were issued equipment appropriate to their expected conditions—gas masks, helmets, and .45 caliber revolvers—and unleashed upon the front trenches in all their freezing, muddy, miserable glory[4]. Pre-constructed accommodations proved to be functional, at best, with leaky roofs, no floors or doors, and paper-thin walls. Frozen feet were not uncommon, and the unprepared women survived these conditions until a work crew was assembled to build a tiny village of sorts for their use.[5] Little huts were constructed, and services, matinées, and concerts were held in them. A small store stocking razor blades, candy, and various essential and sundry articles was quickly established, selling its wares for a fraction of the original cost. But most significantly (and, to the soldiers, endearingly), the women built a makeshift kitchen and managed, under heavy fire, to produce pies, cakes, cookies, and gallons of hot coffee, which were available to the soldiers at no cost. Crews of Lassies, laden with victuals and pitchers, made rounds in the trenches, dispensing spiritual support in equal parts.[6] Their greatest success, however, was yet to come.
A new supply of ingredients meant for fudge had been delivered to the kitchen, but two girls, Helen Purviance and Margaret Sheldon, decided that a new sweet was in order and set about making doughnuts. After procuring the necessary, but extremely scarce, eggs from an obliging farmer, they mixed the batter and fried the doughnuts, seven at a time, in improvised frying equipment consisting of a helmet filled with lard balanced on a foot-stove. However primitive their pans, the doughnuts were an absolute hit with the soldiers, who lined up eager for “a taste of home.”[7] Only one hundred and fifty doughnuts were made, due to scant ingredients, but the soldiers happily took up a collection for more, and so kept the girls busy frying.[8] Originally, only twisted strips were fried, for lack of a modern doughnut cutter, until Purviance managed to get a blacksmith to weld an empty tube of shaving balm to a condensed-milk can for a more familiar shape[9]. Production increased to over eight thousand per day, and popularity soared.[10] These ministering angels distributing sweets and coffee while dodging the occasional shell or bit of shrapnel raised morale significantly, and letters home enthusiastically described the happiness which they brought. The author of one such letter, later reprinted in the Boston Daily Globe, gushed, “Can you imagine hot dough-nuts [sic], and pie, and all that sort of stuff? Served by might [sic] good looking girls, too.”[11] The Salvation Army effort was a resounding triumph. A second shipment followed in September of that same year, and thus began the Salvation Army “Doughnut Lassies”—kind, brave, and well versed in the “winsome, attractive coquetries of the round, brown doughnut and all its kindred.”[12]
News of Booth’s success in the trenches quickly reached the New York Times, which arranged for an interview and wrote up the full story in the spring of 1918.[13] A photographer (whose name has, unfortunately, been lost to time) was sent out,[14] and newspapers were peppered with images of uniformed girls handing sticks of doughnuts to happy soldiers.[15] No pains were spared when describing the conditions under which they labored. Concussions from shells knocked pans from benches and made shambles of pantries,[16] wayward bullets and pieces of shrapnel whipped through tents, causing terror amongst the Lassies and, in one instance, nearly killing them—the girl in question had just straightened up from a full pan of doughnut dough only to have it blasted off the stove by a piece of shell casing.[17] Gas attacks and shells, while somewhat rarer, also wreaked havoc.[18] Despite such harrowing circumstances, the average daily production for the original camp of three girls was two thousand five hundred doughnuts, ninety-six cupcakes, fifty pies, eight hundred pancakes, and two hundred and fifty-five gallons of cocoa, as one of Purviance’s letters home tells.[19] Conditions were tough, but the doughnuts got made, and such steadfastness in the face of hardship increased their appeal enormously.
The propaganda potential of glorified cigarette girls parading around in trenches, cheerfully and unfailingly dishing out coffee and doughnuts under heavy fire, was evidently not lost on the press, which published headlines such as “Pies More Potent Than Prayer,” [20] or the Salvation Army, which jumped at the opportunity for improving their public image from, as Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., so inelegantly put it, “a well-meaning lot of cranks,” [21] to ranks of smiling, hard-working girls, Christian to their flying fingertips and as American as the apple pies they served, fully dedicated to helping their soldiers on the front. They were cast as modern Ste. Lucias, risking life and limb to bring happiness in doughnut form to the boys in France. Stella Young, a 20-year-old stationed in Ansonville,[22] became the poster child of the Lassies, figuring on the iconic “Doughnut Girl” poster. The poster, which served as the cover illustration to the popular song “Don’t Forget the Salvation Army (My Doughnut Girl)”, features a helmeted Young clasping a bushel of doughnuts in her hands and beaming out to all—a feminine, pacifist equivalent to Uncle Sam.[23] Doughnuts became the permanent image of the Salvation Army, and were used to great advantage as media for raising funds in the years after the war.[24] [25] Their status as a prevailing symbol of aid and happiness would persist to World War II, when the Red Cross adopted them for their Clubmobiles, proving so popular that the slogan “Doughnuts will win the war!” became commonplace among soldiers.[26] The Christian element had been pushed somewhat out of the foreground, but doughnuts and the girls who gave them retained their place as delicious sources of morale-boosting propaganda.
Appendix A
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Footnotes
[1] Lettie Gavin, Women in World War I: They Also Served (Niwot, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 1997), 209.
[2] Lorraine Boissoneault, “The Women Who Fried Doughnuts and Dodged Bombs on the Front Lines of WWI”, Smithsonian, 12 April 2017. <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/donut-girls-wwi-helped-fill-soldiers-bellies-and-get-women-vote-180962864/> (accessed 24 March 2018).
[3] Gavin, Women in World War I: They Also Served, 210.
[4] Susan Mitchem, “Doughnut! The Official Story”, The Salvation Army Fort Wayne, 9 April 2015. <http://corps.salvationarmyindiana.org/fortwayne/about-us/history-2/history-of-the-donut-girls/> (accessed 25 March 2018).
[5] Gavin, Women in World War I: They Also Served, 213-214.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Mitchem, “Doughnut! The Official Story”.
[8] Gavin, Women in World War I: They Also Served, 214.
[9] Ibid. See also Mitchem, “Doughnut! The Official Story.”
[10]Boissoneault, “The Women Who Fried Doughnuts and Dodged Bombs on the Front Lines of WWI”.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingstone Hill, The War Romance of the Salvation Army (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1919), 5.
[13] Edwin Carty Ranck, “Salvation Army’s Methods with the Doughboy”, The New York Times, 4 August 1918.
[14] United States War Department General Staff. Catalogue of Official A.E.F. Photographs (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), 51, 56, 70, 79, 82, 92, 103, 142, 145, 165, 167, 169, 270, 291, 340, 359, 443, 521, 523, and 543.
[15] Boissoneault, “The Women Who Fried Doughnuts and Dodged Bombs on the Front Lines of WWI”.
[16] Ranck, “Salvation Army’s Methods with the Doughboy”.
[17] Boissoneault, “The Women Who Fried Doughnuts and Dodged Bombs on the Front Lines of WWI”. This same girl, Stella Young, was chosen as the poster child for the ensuing propaganda.
[18] Special Correspondence of The New York Times, “Salvation Army Is a ‘Hit’ in France”, The New York Times, 27 April 1918. See also Gavin, Women in World War I: They Also Served, 228.
[19] John T. Edge, Donuts: An American Passion (New York, New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2006), 24.
[20] Ranck, “Salvation Army’s Methods with the Doughboy”.
[21] Boissoneault, “The Women Who Fried Doughnuts and Dodged Bombs on the Front Lines of WWI”.
[22] N.N., Salvation Army girls, Gladys & Irene McIntyre, Myrtle Turkington, and Stella Young
with steel helmets and gas masks make pies free each day for the soldiers, 26th Division, Ansonville, France. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress (access number 89715788) <https://www.loc.gov/item/89715788/> (accessed 10 March 2018)
[23] Robert B. Brown, Billy Frisch, Elmore Leffingwell, and Jimmie Lucas, “Don’t Forget The Salvation Army (My Doughnut Girl)” (New York, New York: Broadway Music Corporation, 1919). Retrieved from the Library of Congress (access number 2014562095). <https://www.loc.gov/item/2014562095/> (accessed 10 March 2018). Lord Kitchener figured on the original “I Want You” poster; it was later adapted for American use.
[24] The New York Times, “To Sell Doughnuts at Dollar Apiece: Loan Booths to be Used in Salvation Army Campaign for Funds”, The New York Times, 17 May 1919.
[25] The New York Times, “Money Flooding In On Salvation Army: Public Responds Enthusiastically on First Day of Drive for $13,000,000 Fund”, The New York Times, 20 May 1919.
[26] Eliza Berman, “The Surprising History Behind National Doughnut Day”, Time, 5 June 2015. <http://time.com/3860708/national-doughnut-day-history/> (accessed 24 March 2018).
Preparations for the momentous task ahead were scant. The women were issued equipment appropriate to their expected conditions—gas masks, helmets, and .45 caliber revolvers—and unleashed upon the front trenches in all their freezing, muddy, miserable glory[4]. Pre-constructed accommodations proved to be functional, at best, with leaky roofs, no floors or doors, and paper-thin walls. Frozen feet were not uncommon, and the unprepared women survived these conditions until a work crew was assembled to build a tiny village of sorts for their use.[5] Little huts were constructed, and services, matinées, and concerts were held in them. A small store stocking razor blades, candy, and various essential and sundry articles was quickly established, selling its wares for a fraction of the original cost. But most significantly (and, to the soldiers, endearingly), the women built a makeshift kitchen and managed, under heavy fire, to produce pies, cakes, cookies, and gallons of hot coffee, which were available to the soldiers at no cost. Crews of Lassies, laden with victuals and pitchers, made rounds in the trenches, dispensing spiritual support in equal parts.[6] Their greatest success, however, was yet to come.
A new supply of ingredients meant for fudge had been delivered to the kitchen, but two girls, Helen Purviance and Margaret Sheldon, decided that a new sweet was in order and set about making doughnuts. After procuring the necessary, but extremely scarce, eggs from an obliging farmer, they mixed the batter and fried the doughnuts, seven at a time, in improvised frying equipment consisting of a helmet filled with lard balanced on a foot-stove. However primitive their pans, the doughnuts were an absolute hit with the soldiers, who lined up eager for “a taste of home.”[7] Only one hundred and fifty doughnuts were made, due to scant ingredients, but the soldiers happily took up a collection for more, and so kept the girls busy frying.[8] Originally, only twisted strips were fried, for lack of a modern doughnut cutter, until Purviance managed to get a blacksmith to weld an empty tube of shaving balm to a condensed-milk can for a more familiar shape[9]. Production increased to over eight thousand per day, and popularity soared.[10] These ministering angels distributing sweets and coffee while dodging the occasional shell or bit of shrapnel raised morale significantly, and letters home enthusiastically described the happiness which they brought. The author of one such letter, later reprinted in the Boston Daily Globe, gushed, “Can you imagine hot dough-nuts [sic], and pie, and all that sort of stuff? Served by might [sic] good looking girls, too.”[11] The Salvation Army effort was a resounding triumph. A second shipment followed in September of that same year, and thus began the Salvation Army “Doughnut Lassies”—kind, brave, and well versed in the “winsome, attractive coquetries of the round, brown doughnut and all its kindred.”[12]
News of Booth’s success in the trenches quickly reached the New York Times, which arranged for an interview and wrote up the full story in the spring of 1918.[13] A photographer (whose name has, unfortunately, been lost to time) was sent out,[14] and newspapers were peppered with images of uniformed girls handing sticks of doughnuts to happy soldiers.[15] No pains were spared when describing the conditions under which they labored. Concussions from shells knocked pans from benches and made shambles of pantries,[16] wayward bullets and pieces of shrapnel whipped through tents, causing terror amongst the Lassies and, in one instance, nearly killing them—the girl in question had just straightened up from a full pan of doughnut dough only to have it blasted off the stove by a piece of shell casing.[17] Gas attacks and shells, while somewhat rarer, also wreaked havoc.[18] Despite such harrowing circumstances, the average daily production for the original camp of three girls was two thousand five hundred doughnuts, ninety-six cupcakes, fifty pies, eight hundred pancakes, and two hundred and fifty-five gallons of cocoa, as one of Purviance’s letters home tells.[19] Conditions were tough, but the doughnuts got made, and such steadfastness in the face of hardship increased their appeal enormously.
The propaganda potential of glorified cigarette girls parading around in trenches, cheerfully and unfailingly dishing out coffee and doughnuts under heavy fire, was evidently not lost on the press, which published headlines such as “Pies More Potent Than Prayer,” [20] or the Salvation Army, which jumped at the opportunity for improving their public image from, as Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., so inelegantly put it, “a well-meaning lot of cranks,” [21] to ranks of smiling, hard-working girls, Christian to their flying fingertips and as American as the apple pies they served, fully dedicated to helping their soldiers on the front. They were cast as modern Ste. Lucias, risking life and limb to bring happiness in doughnut form to the boys in France. Stella Young, a 20-year-old stationed in Ansonville,[22] became the poster child of the Lassies, figuring on the iconic “Doughnut Girl” poster. The poster, which served as the cover illustration to the popular song “Don’t Forget the Salvation Army (My Doughnut Girl)”, features a helmeted Young clasping a bushel of doughnuts in her hands and beaming out to all—a feminine, pacifist equivalent to Uncle Sam.[23] Doughnuts became the permanent image of the Salvation Army, and were used to great advantage as media for raising funds in the years after the war.[24] [25] Their status as a prevailing symbol of aid and happiness would persist to World War II, when the Red Cross adopted them for their Clubmobiles, proving so popular that the slogan “Doughnuts will win the war!” became commonplace among soldiers.[26] The Christian element had been pushed somewhat out of the foreground, but doughnuts and the girls who gave them retained their place as delicious sources of morale-boosting propaganda.
Appendix A
- Cover of “Don’t Forget The Salvation Army (My Doughnut Girl)” (composed by Robert B. Brown, Billy Frisch, Elmore Leffingwell, and Jimmie Lucas for Broadway Music Corporation)
- Brown, Robert B.; Frisch, Billy; Leffingwell, Elmore; and Lucas, Jimmie. “Don’t Forget The Salvation Army (My Doughnut Girl).” New York, New York: Broadway Music Corporation, 1919. Retrieved from the Library of Congress (access number 2014562095). <https://www.loc.gov/item/2014562095/> (accessed 10 March 2018).
Primary Sources
- Booth, Evangeline, and Hill, Grace Livingstone. The War Romance of the Salvation Army. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1919.
- Brown, Robert B.; Frisch, Billy; Leffingwell, Elmore; and Lucas, Jimmie. “Don’t Forget The Salvation Army (My Doughnut Girl).” New York, New York: Broadway Music Corporation, 1919. Retrieved from the Library of Congress (access number 2014562095). <https://www.loc.gov/item/2014562095/> (accessed 10 March 2018).
- N.N. Salvation Army girls, Gladys & Irene McIntyre, Myrtle Turkington, and Stella Young with steel helmets and gas masks make pies free each day for the soldiers, 26th Division, Ansonville, France. France, 9 May 1918. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress (access number 89715788). <https://www.loc.gov/item/89715788/> (accessed 10 March 2018)
- Ranck, Edwin Carty. “Salvation Army’s Methods with the Doughboy”. The New York Times, 4 August 1918.
- The New York Times. “Money Flooding In On Salvation Army: Public Responds Enthusiastically on First Day of Drive for $13,000,000 Fund”. The New York Times, 20 May 1919.
- The New York Times (Special Correspondence). “Salvation Army Is a ‘Hit’ in France”. The New York Times, 27 April 1918.
- The New York Times, “To Sell Doughnuts at Dollar Apiece: Loan Booths to be Used in Salvation Army Campaign for Funds”, The New York Times, 17 May 1919.
- United States War Department General Staff. Catalogue of Official A.E.F. Photographs. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919.
Secondary Sources
- Berman, Eliza. “The Surprising History Behind National Doughnut Day”. Time, 5 June 2015. <http://time.com/3860708/national-doughnut-day-history/> (accessed 24 March 2018)
- Boissoneault, Lorraine. “The Women Who Fried Doughnuts and Dodged Bombs on the Front Lines of WWI.” Smithsonian, 12 April 2017. <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/donut-girls-wwi-helped-fill-soldiers-bellies-and-get-women-vote-180962864/> (accessed 24 March 2018)
- Gavin, Lettie. American Women in World War I: They Also Served. Niwot, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 1997.
- Edge, John T. Donuts: An American Passion. New York, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2006.
- Mitchem, Susan. “Doughnut! The Official Story.” The Salvation Army Fort Wayne, 9 April 2015. <http://corps.salvationarmyindiana.org/fortwayne/about-us/history-2/history-of-the-donut-girls/> (accessed 25 March 2018)
Footnotes
[1] Lettie Gavin, Women in World War I: They Also Served (Niwot, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 1997), 209.
[2] Lorraine Boissoneault, “The Women Who Fried Doughnuts and Dodged Bombs on the Front Lines of WWI”, Smithsonian, 12 April 2017. <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/donut-girls-wwi-helped-fill-soldiers-bellies-and-get-women-vote-180962864/> (accessed 24 March 2018).
[3] Gavin, Women in World War I: They Also Served, 210.
[4] Susan Mitchem, “Doughnut! The Official Story”, The Salvation Army Fort Wayne, 9 April 2015. <http://corps.salvationarmyindiana.org/fortwayne/about-us/history-2/history-of-the-donut-girls/> (accessed 25 March 2018).
[5] Gavin, Women in World War I: They Also Served, 213-214.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Mitchem, “Doughnut! The Official Story”.
[8] Gavin, Women in World War I: They Also Served, 214.
[9] Ibid. See also Mitchem, “Doughnut! The Official Story.”
[10]Boissoneault, “The Women Who Fried Doughnuts and Dodged Bombs on the Front Lines of WWI”.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingstone Hill, The War Romance of the Salvation Army (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1919), 5.
[13] Edwin Carty Ranck, “Salvation Army’s Methods with the Doughboy”, The New York Times, 4 August 1918.
[14] United States War Department General Staff. Catalogue of Official A.E.F. Photographs (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), 51, 56, 70, 79, 82, 92, 103, 142, 145, 165, 167, 169, 270, 291, 340, 359, 443, 521, 523, and 543.
[15] Boissoneault, “The Women Who Fried Doughnuts and Dodged Bombs on the Front Lines of WWI”.
[16] Ranck, “Salvation Army’s Methods with the Doughboy”.
[17] Boissoneault, “The Women Who Fried Doughnuts and Dodged Bombs on the Front Lines of WWI”. This same girl, Stella Young, was chosen as the poster child for the ensuing propaganda.
[18] Special Correspondence of The New York Times, “Salvation Army Is a ‘Hit’ in France”, The New York Times, 27 April 1918. See also Gavin, Women in World War I: They Also Served, 228.
[19] John T. Edge, Donuts: An American Passion (New York, New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2006), 24.
[20] Ranck, “Salvation Army’s Methods with the Doughboy”.
[21] Boissoneault, “The Women Who Fried Doughnuts and Dodged Bombs on the Front Lines of WWI”.
[22] N.N., Salvation Army girls, Gladys & Irene McIntyre, Myrtle Turkington, and Stella Young
with steel helmets and gas masks make pies free each day for the soldiers, 26th Division, Ansonville, France. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress (access number 89715788) <https://www.loc.gov/item/89715788/> (accessed 10 March 2018)
[23] Robert B. Brown, Billy Frisch, Elmore Leffingwell, and Jimmie Lucas, “Don’t Forget The Salvation Army (My Doughnut Girl)” (New York, New York: Broadway Music Corporation, 1919). Retrieved from the Library of Congress (access number 2014562095). <https://www.loc.gov/item/2014562095/> (accessed 10 March 2018). Lord Kitchener figured on the original “I Want You” poster; it was later adapted for American use.
[24] The New York Times, “To Sell Doughnuts at Dollar Apiece: Loan Booths to be Used in Salvation Army Campaign for Funds”, The New York Times, 17 May 1919.
[25] The New York Times, “Money Flooding In On Salvation Army: Public Responds Enthusiastically on First Day of Drive for $13,000,000 Fund”, The New York Times, 20 May 1919.
[26] Eliza Berman, “The Surprising History Behind National Doughnut Day”, Time, 5 June 2015. <http://time.com/3860708/national-doughnut-day-history/> (accessed 24 March 2018).