Optimist's Creed on the donut (1904)

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

I looked further in Sally Levitt Steinberg's THE DONUT BOOK. (She'll need a
third edition when I'm done.) There are a few pages about The Donut Plant
(gotta  go back). This is on page 163:

A VARIATION ON THE
OPTIMIST'S CREED

An American writer, McLandburgh Wilson, wrote in 1915:

"Twixt optimist and pessimist
The difference is droll:
The optimist sees the doughnut,
The pessimist, the hole."
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16 May 1904, Arizona Republican, pg. 8, col. 4:
_THEY'RE BOTH THERE._

'Twixt optimist and pessimist
The difference is droll;
The optimist the doughnut sees--
The pessimist the hole.
--New York Sun.
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18 July 1904, Chicago Daily Tribune, pg. 7:
_WAR TO GIVE PLACE TO PEACE_

_Stockyards Strike and Hostilities in the_
_Orient Will End, Says the Rev._
_Walter Nugent._

The coming of peace between labor and capital at the stockyards and the end
of hostilities between Russia and Japan were looked forward to by the Rev.
Walter H. Nugent yesterday in his sermon in St. Paul's Reformed Episcopal
church.

"The pessimist is given a doughnut and grumbles because of the hole in the
center, while the optimist sees only the cake itself," said the minister.
"Christ was an optimist. ..."

(But did he like glazed or plain??--ed.)
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8 January 1905, Los Angeles Times, pg. II3:
_HEART OF RIIS_
_EVER IS OPEN._
(...)
"A pessimist," he said, "is a man who looks only at the hole in a doughnut;
an optimist sees the cake."

Riis never sees the hole in a doughnut.
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29 May 1906, Chicago Daily Tribune, pg. 10:
The difference between an optimist and a pessimist is that the optimist  sees
the doughnut and the pessimist sees the hole.
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7 September 1907, New York Times, pg. 8:
DOUGHNUTS

It is written, and will go into history, that Prince WILHELM of Sweden, on
the eve of his departure for his native land, while sitting on a high stool in
the railroad restaurant at Pittsfield, Mass., ate doughnuts. But did he? The
testimony comes from New England, and in the matter of doughnuts that part of
 this country has never been orthodox. Up in Maine they call a cruller a
doughnut; and in Massachusetts their comprehension of a doughnut is uncertain.
Witness this stanza of poetry from a New England oracle of so high standing as
The Boston Transcript:

"Twixt pessimist and optimist
The difference is droll;
The optimist the doughnuts sees--
The pessimist the hole.

Now we contend, without fear of intelligent contradiction, that though a
doughnut may include a hole, a hole is not distinctive of a doughnut, and that
the real doughnut of the days of plain, substantial living contained no hole.
An  apple pie may be builded around a hole, but it will not be a typical apple
pie.

WASHINGTON IRVING knew the doughnut well, and described it as a round ball
of sweetened dough, fried in hog's fat. Out Dutch ancestors esteemed it at its
solid worth. A doughnut contains some yeast, or, in these degenerate days,
baking powder. It is soft and spongy.

On the other hand, the cruller is made with eggs, and consists of shortened
dough twisted around holes. A cruller is crisp and as "short" as a good Welsh
rabbit. That hole the pessimist sees is in the cruller. We sadly fear that
Prince WILHELM ate a cruller or two at Pittsfield, and will carry the memory of
 them back to Sweden to the detriment of this great Republic.