The long gray lie: West Point in children's fiction

Abstract

In the popular imagination, West Point is a college version of the French Foreign Legion where the callow but eager teen-age boy next door is transformed, through a vigorous and strict training program, into an athletic, honest, handsome, clean-cut gentleman-soldier. In this idealized West Point, more college than army post, the all-American boy serves his country by living a romantic life consisting mainly of strolls down Flirtation Walk, parades in dashing full-dress uniforms, victorious football games, and dances with beautiful admiring dates who are awed by the cadet's self-sacrifice and spartan military bearing. But few people are aware that an active public relations office at West Point, suppressing negative information, produces films, newspaper articles, and speeches that accentuate the romantic image of the academy celebrated in American popular culture. Hollywood movies about this mythical academy include Flirtation Walk, in which smiling Ruby Keeler, escorted by handsome cadet Dick Powell, is serenaded by a chorus of tap-dancing cadets. Ray Bolger and Nelson Eddy sing and dance in Rosalie, another Cadet musical. In The West Point Story Gordon Macrae is a typical cadet with Doris Day as his typical cadet date, while in The Long Gray Line, Gary Cooper plays an old sergeant who wants to remain at West Point until he dies.