A WWI-era doughboy, c. 1919
20 November 2023
Doughboy is a slang word for an American soldier, particularly an infantryman, that is most often associated with the First World War, but the term is almost a hundred years older than that war, dating to at least 1835. Why the soldiers were dubbed doughboys is unknown, but that hasn’t stopped people from speculating.
The earliest use of the doughboy to refer to a soldier that I’m aware of is in a letter published in the Army and Navy Chronicle of 30 July 1835. The letter is critical of the new volume of tactics published that year. The use of doughboy is somewhat cryptic here, but it seems to mean an infantryman (I have no clue as to what “Ghost of Indian Warfare” refers):
Mr. Editor:—I call the Infantry Tactics of ’26, made by a board of officers, a system sufficiently good for the United States’ Infantry as now organized, and I’ll prove it to you. The Military Tactics of ’35, I call a system not so good as that of ’26, for several reasons.
Dough-boy’s Ghost of Indian Warfare. (Extract from “Military Tactics, &c.”) The formation in three ranks, provided for in this system, is, for the present, suspended, and will not be adopted in practice until other orders are given from this department.
From this, you must perceive how valuable and how beneficial this system is to be the army [sic]. A careful comparison of the two systems will show that the three rank formation is the distinguishing feature of that of ’35; that the alterations are trifling, but sufficiently great to cause much confusion and considerable trouble to officers and men for the next twelve months. If the three rank system is not to be used why was it translated? Why could it not remain in French until needed, and then put into the hands o the printer? There is a principle to which all military men concede, viz: never to alter a regulation or order unless such alteration be manifestly beneficial, and that in great degree, and in tactics it is particularly applicable.
The extract reading, “The formation in three ranks […] from this department,” is taken from a notice by then Secretary of War Lewis Cass contained in the front matter of the manual on infantry tactics published that year. But the phrase Dough-boy’s Ghost of Indian Warfare and the individual words doughboy, ghost, or Indian do not appear in that manual. What the letter writer is referring to with this phrase is something of a mystery.
But what the standalone word doughboy means is made clear in another letter published in that newspaper on 27 August 1835. This letter makes clear that a doughboy is an infantryman:
It seems as if the inventive powers of some individuals were endless. When we advised a different colored binding for the several volumes of the Infantry Tactics, for the sole purpose of distinction, it did not occur to us that this distinction, to be complete, should address itself to more senses than one. To effect the omission on our part, the brigadier in charge of the printing and binding has caused the second volume to appear in red and gold; the red cloth, unlike the blue imitation of seal skin, is smooth, and the emblematic bugle horn of the Dough Boys is stamped on the flanks of each book, so that by day or by night the most blind may find which is the Military Tactics and which the Infantry.
Doughboy would remain an army slang term and wouldn’t often make its way into print until much later in the nineteenth century. But we do see it some diaries and correspondence of soldiers. Napoleon J. T. Dana, an Army officer, uses it in his diary entry of 1 January 1847 during the Mexican-American War:
We were off at daylight, and the morning was mighty cold, so our pace was soon quickened almost to what is vulgarly called a dogtrot until we were stopped about eight o’clock at the foot of a large steep hill, where we “doughboys” had to wait for the artillery to get their carriages over. But after we did get over, we went even faster than before.
We see it in a Civil War context, but only in a text written decades after the fact. Robert Goldthwaite, in his Four Brothers in Blue, which was serialized in 1898, writes of an exchange between Union cavalrymen and infantry on 20 September 1862. The cavalry, returning from a battle, passed an infantry column fording a river:
The cavalry were met returning. The splashing of their horses the water flying into the faces of some of our grumblers, who out of spite, shouted out, “Are there any dead cavalry-men ahead? What guerillas do you belong to?” etc., etc., to which the answer comes back promptly, “Yes, you bummers, we do the fighting and leave the dead cavalry-men for the ‘dough boys’ to pick up. Go to the rear you “worm crushers”!”
It's not until the First World War that the doughboy makes it way out of army slang into general parlance.
There is a much older, probably unrelated, somewhat more literal use of doughboy to mean a boiled or deep-fried dumpling. We see this usage as early as 1685 in Basil Ringrose’s Bucaniers of America:
These men that were landed, had each of them three or four Cakes of Bread, (called by the English Dough-boy’s) for their provision of Victuals; and as for drink, the Rivers afforded them enough.
Also, in the early nineteenth century doughboy was also used as a slang term for a baker’s assistant.
A number of explanations for why American soldiers were called doughboys have been promulgated over the years. Perhaps the name comes from a penchant for consuming doughboys. Or maybe infantryman, because of their youth and inexperience, were likened to bakers’ doughboys. Some suggest it comes from the round buttons on the military uniform, which resembled the pastry. Others say it comes from using white dough to mask blemishes on the white belts worn by the soldiers. But these are all just speculation, with no solid evidence behind them.
Sources:
Carter, Robert Goldthwaite. “Four Brothers in Blue.” 20/2. The Main Bugle, January 1898. HathiTrust Digital Library. [Green’s Dictionary of Slang dates this source to 1862, which is not quite accurate. The event described happened in that year, but the account was written in 1898.]
Cass, Lewis. Letter, 10 April 1835. As front matter to Winfield Scott. Infantry-Tactics, vol. 1 of 2. New York: George Dearborn, 1835. HathiTrust Digital Library.
“Communications: New Infantry Tactics.” Army and Navy Chronicle (Washington, DC), 30 July 1835, 247. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals.
———. Army and Navy Chronicle, 27 August 1835, 277. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals.
Dana, Napoleon Jackson Tecumseh. Diary, 1 January 1847. In Ferrell, Robert H., ed. Monterrey Is Ours!: The Mexican War Letters of Lieutenant Dana, 1845–1847. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990, 166. JSTOR.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. doughboy, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2014, s.v. doughboy, n.
Ringrose, Basil. Bucaniers of America, vol. 2. London: William Crooke, 1685, 4. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Photo credit: Spurr Studio, Waterloo, Iowa, c. 1919. Library of Congress. Public domain image.