RN-T columnist James Cook dies
♦ The longtime Georgia Highlands College history professor’s specialty was on Georgia’s past.
James Cook, a Georgia Highlands College professor emeritus of history and guest columnist of the Rome News-tribune, died Friday. He was 80.
Cook was born in the Panama Canal Zone and grew up in Washington, DC, but he went to college in Georgia and made Georgia his home. He lived in Cedartown from 1970 to 2007 before moving to Rome.
With a doctorate in history from the University of Georgia, he taught at GNTC before the name change from Floyd College, retiring in 2000.
Cook’s specialty was on Georgia’s past, with professional papers ranging from the state’s founding and Civil War raid of Abel Streit to its gubernatorial politics. He contributed biographical sketches of several governors to state historical publications and the Georgia State University Georgia Governmental Documentation Project.
Among his popular RN-T columns was a prescient essay in October 2016 comparing the 1966 election of populist Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox to the rise of Donald Trump, who won the presidential election a month later.
“Maddox overcame enormous odds to win the governorship a half-century ago. Can Trump prevail against overwhelming odds in 2016? Can lightning strike twice?,” Cook wrote.
The outspoken conservative also predicted a change in his 2015 column “Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic Party,” in which he compared the Founding Father’s principles to those of the modern party.
“In short, the modern Democratic Party is Jeffersonian in name only,” Cook wrote,
a few years before the state party changed the name of its annual fundraiser from the Jefferson-jackson Dinner to the Georgia Giants Dinner.
Aside from his national and state professional activities, Cook participated in a number of local organizations, including the Polk County Historical Society, Polk and Floyd Republican parties, the Rome Noon Optimist Club, Grace Presbyterian Church of Cedartown, Northside Church, Western Promenaders Square Dance Club, Rome Ballroom Dance Club and the Georgia Mountain Music Club.