United States Military Academy
New York
1802
In the late 1800s the US Military Academy (West Point) used black and gray as its school colors. But gold was added to black and gray in 1899, probably because they are the dominant colors of the academy’s cadet uniform.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): black/gray (1895-1897); black/gray/gold (1900-1904); black/gold/gray (1906-1935)
The Commission sent a copy of the Intercollegiate Code along with a list of schools and their colors to the Living Church Quarterly, which included this information in its 1896 edition (published in December 1895). The list of college colors the Commission appended to the Intercollegiate Code was largely copied from the 1894 World Almanac. But some colleges and universities in the Commission’s list do not appear in the World Almanac, so information about these colors was probably supplied by Cotrell & Leonard from their client records. The Commission’s list of college colors represented the first attempt by the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume to create a record of hood linings used by American colleges and universities, but unfortunately the list did not identify which institutions on the list had actually applied to the IBAC for a hood lining assignment, nor did it describe the heraldic patterns the Bureau used to divide the colors within those hoods. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to assume that the Intercollegiate Bureau assigned hood lining designs to the clients of Cotrell & Leonard in the Commission’s list as early as 1895 or within a few years after that.
The “national colors” of the US Military Academy (West Point) appeared in the Commission’s list but not in the 1894 World Almanac, which means Cotrell & Leonard probably supplied this color information to the Commission. And since West Point was a client of that firm, the IBAC is likely to have registered a hood lining pattern for the academy c.1895-96. It is not known how the Bureau arranged the red, white, and blue colors in the academy’s hood lining, especially since the US Naval Academy was listed with the same colors. Having two schools with the same hood lining pattern ran counter to the Intercollegiate Code, so the IBAC quickly reassigned each military academy a unique hood lining pattern.
On 16 May 1895, the Intercollegiate Commission on Academic Costume approved a uniform system of academic costume for American colleges and universities called the “Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume”. The Intercollegiate Code stipulated that the college color or colors of the institution granting the degree would be used in the lining of the institution’s hood but did not define how multiple colors would be combined in the hood lining. One of the advisors to the Commission was Gardner Cotrell Leonard, the Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC), an organization affiliated with the academic costume manufacturing firm Cotrell & Leonard. Since 1887 the IBAC had maintained a database of information about academic regalia in the US and Europe, so the Commission entrusted the Intercollegiate Bureau with the responsibility of assigning a unique hood lining design to every college and university that chose to adopt the Intercollegiate Code.
The first complete IBAC description of West Point’s hood did not appear until 1927, where it was stated to have a “black, gold, and gray” hood lining, which meant that the hood lining was black above gray with a gold chevron in between. This description did not change in subsequent IBAC lists. This new design may have been adopted as late as 1904 or 1905, when the 1906 World Almanac began listing the three colors in an order resembling the hood. The gray is the same medium shade as the academy’s cadet uniform.