WILLIAM COLE JONES

A Gentleman and a Scholar0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-ALIGN: justify; tab-stops: 25.0pt">        “Gentlemen and scholars have gone together since there were scholars and gentlemen.   This excerpt from an alumni address given by William Cole Jones at Mercer University in 1939, goes far toward understanding the man himself.  In his life and work he endeavored to live up to these two ideals, in their truest and broadest sense.

        Throughout his long career as an editorial writer and interpreter of the editorial policies of the Atlanta Journal he embodied somewhat opposing qualities. He was gentle but courageous, peace-loving but forceful, vigorous in support of great causes yet masterful at championing small ones. To him “The gentleman has within him something of the timeless and changeless.  He antedates Homer and Troytown, he was weathered a thousand revolutions and doubtless he will survive our darkening 1900’s.  This could not be said if we considered him dependent on certain institutions or fashions or prerogatives.  Some fear that democracy means the elimination of the gentleman; that he cannot flourish or hold his own save in a society that treats him as a privileged character. But it seems to us that Milton saw more deeply into the matter when he wrote of ‘Honest-offered courtesy which oft is sooner found in lowly sheds with smoky rafters, than in the tapestry halls and courts of princes where it first was named…’  Likewise, ‘the authentic scholar, for all his quietness and love of peace, is not wanting in mettle.  He is no mere bookworm, or book worshiper.  If he seems to stand aloof from life, he does so that he may view it in a larger and clearer perspective. He looks backward, the better to understand their growth. He is concerned with the essential rather than the incidental, with the abiding rather than the transient’.”  To William Cole Jones the essentials of a gentleman and a scholar were “courtesy, freedom, honor, truth, and the gladness of learning and teaching, the beauty of a wisdom whose ways are pleasantness and peace.”  He embodied these qualities in his own life, and brought them to his work as well.  What he did not include in his catalog, but which he himself possessed in abundance, was the quality of humor. Wit and a lively sense of the ridiculous enlivened his work and lightened his life and the lives of those around him. Through troubles and losses and the grueling constancy of his writing he never lost his ability to see the humor in a situation, or the capacity to laugh at the foibles of his own and others’ natures.

        William Cole Jones, who was to spend his adult life chronicling the crisis of the first half of the twentieth century, was born only sixteen years after the Civil War in Beaufort, North Carolina on December 13, 1881. Since his two brothers were fifteen and thirteen and his mother was considered past child-bearing age, William was first thought to be a tumor! At a very early age his family moved to Macon, at that time a small city of about13,000.  Both his parents were college graduates, both his grandfathers and one great-grandfather were Methodist ministers.  His eldest brother, Malcolm Dupont, began the practice of law in 1889, when Will, as he was generally called, was only eight years old.  Malcolm became judge of the Superior Court of the Macon Circuit Court in 1920, and held that position uninterruptedly for twenty-seven years, until his retirement in 1947. The second brother, Herman Cole, became a Methodist minister and was for fifty years a leader in the South Georgia Methodist Conference, serving pastorates in south and central Georgia.

        Will’s father died when he was quite young, and as the only son still at home he was very close to his mother, who adored him.  Letters to him later in his life indicate her devotion and her dependence on him.  He attended Macon schools and graduated from Mercer University there in 1902, majoring in English and Greek. He became principal of Shellman Institute for a short while before earning his master’s degree at Mercer in 1904, and teaching English and Greek there for a year or two.