Ashley Day Leavitt - World War I

World War I

Leavitt enlisted and served in YMCA camps at home and abroad during World War I. The YMCA's own World War I efforts were memorialized in Yip Yip Yaphank, a Broadway musical developed in 1917 by Irving Berlin to included a song entitled "I Can Always Find a Little Sunshine in the Y.M.C.A."

At the height of World War I in 1918, Leavitt was the Pastor of the State Street Congregational Church in Portland. In awarding Leavitt a Doctor of Divinity (D.D.) honorary degree that same year, Bowdoin College noted that Leavitt "at all times an eloquent preacher of Christian duty, and in wartime a convincing teacher of the principle that only the righteous nation that keepeth truth may enter in the gates of the Kingdom."

In 1921, Leavitt was serving in a two-year position on the Congregational Educational Foundation. In June 1925, he conducted the services in Appleton Chapel at Harvard University. Rev. Leavitt also frequently spoke at the graduation exercises of nearby Radcliffe College.

In 1927, Leavitt was the pastor at Harvard Church. In December of that year, he attended the Centennial of the Boston Seaman's Friend Society and spoke about the predecessors to the society,

"But this Society was the successor of another organization which was called ‘The Society for the Moral and Religious Improvement of the Poor’. That is the kind of thing they were doing one hundred years ago. This Society for the Moral and Religious Improvement of the Poor was the successor of another Society for the Moral and Religious Instruction of the Seaman. Fancy trying to do business in such an organization today! But that is what they had in a great deal of their religion a hundred years ago - a kind of condescension. The people that were capable the people that were fortunate, went out in pity to do work for the unfortunate, and they expected a certain subserviency and obeisance on the part of those who were the recipients of the benefaction. A finer democracy has come now. . . No Christian today thinks of going out to elevate his fellow man."

In November 1928, Swami Yogananda spoke to the Harvard Congregational Church during Leavitt's tenure, and Leavitt later wrote to the Swami thanking him for the speech: "Best of all was the background of fine understanding which made all feel in the same human brotherhood with you."

Prior to 1941, Leavitt was a frequent speaker at Phillips Academy, the same University preparatory school in Andover where his son Hart, a graduate of Andover's rival Phillips Exeter Academy, had become a professor. In 1948, Leavitt spoke at Union Chapel at Little Boar's Head, New Hampshire.