Eldest son of Francis Addison Cody Jr. 175/25, James attended Hamilton College in Clinton, NY, graduating in June, 1908 with a Bachelor's in Latin and Science. He pledged for Sigma Phi and played on the football team. Poet Ezra Pound was an upperclassman.

Hamilton began in 1793 as the Hamilton-Oneida Academy, a seminary founded by Rev. Samuel Kirkland, a Presbyterian minister, as part of his missionary work with the Oneida tribe. The seminary admitted both white and Oneida boys. Kirkland named it in honor of the revolutionary patriot, Alexander Hamilton, who was a member of the first Board of Trustees of the Hamilton-Oneida Academy.

The Academy became Hamilton College in 1812, making it the third oldest college in New York after Columbia and Union, when it expanded to a four-year college curriculum. By the end of the century, its colorful ninth President M. Woolsey Stryker distanced Hamilton from the Presbyterian Church and sought to make it a more secular institution. In 1978, the all-male Hamilton College merged with its sister school, Kirkland College. Now, guided by the motto “Know Thyself,” the College emphasizes intellectual growth, flexibility, and collaboration in a residential academic community.