The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

Jim was thirty the first time that he ever showed gumption in any form. When America entered World War I, he enlisted in the army and was sent to fight on the front lines in France. There he was caught in a German gas attack; the insidious vapors burned deep in his lungs. Jim was shipped home, a shadow of his former self. It was difficult for him to catch a full breath, and his respiratory system continued deteriorating for the rest of his life. Jim’s voice was reduced to a raspy croak.

Jim Jones’s father’s cause for disability

Then, while working with a road crew around Evansville, he met an outgoing woman named Lynette, though she also called herself Lynetta. She was either fifteen or seventeen years younger than Jim.

How Lynetta and Jim met

She gave birth in the Crete farmhouse on May 13, 1931, to James Warren Jones.

And so, while he was still in high school, Jimmy would sometimes get up on Saturday mornings, put on his best clothes, and take the bus seventeen miles to Richmond. Then he’d walk from the bus station to the poor part of town by the railroad tracks. Black indigents congregated there. Jimmy would find someplace to stand and then start preaching, always about everyone being equal in God’s eyes, how it was wrong to look down on anybody, especially for the color of their skin. The white kid promised black down-and-outers that if they stayed strong, better times were coming. His exact words are lost, but old-timers in Richmond remember hearing about it.

In June 1950, Ronnie was being housed by a foster family when he suffered abdominal pain and had trouble standing straight.

When he recovered, Ronnie was farmed out to another foster family. But Marceline and Jim stayed in touch, and a year later surprised Ronnie and the rest of the Baldwins by inviting the boy to come live with them.

To Somerset members, Jones was a student pastor there to assist full-time ministers; boat-rocking was not permitted. Jones could talk all he liked about new ecumenical community centers for neighborhood children, but there is no record beyond the Palladium-Item’s mention that such a project existed beyond Jones’s own imagination.

Ronnie Baldwin had lived with the Joneses for more than a year. Jones and Marceline doted on the boy, and believed their affection was returned in equal measure. They made plans to formally adopt Ronnie, but didn’t consult the youngster until after they had legal documents drawn up and ready for him to accept and his mother to sign. But grateful as he was for the kindness shown by them, Ronnie wouldn’t agree. He still wanted, at some point, to be permanently reunited with his mother and brothers. Marceline was hurt, but Jones was outraged. He ranted at Ronnie for an entire night, warning him that his birth mother was an unrepentant whore—Ronnie would immediately regret giving up the love and security that he and Marceline provided. The boy still refused. Jones seemed to believe that once he did anything for someone, from that moment forward the person belonged to him, with no right to disagree about anything or ever leave.

Yet most had no idea just how hard he worked on their behalf. It cost money to rent the storefront, and the meager offerings Jones collected on Sundays from his impoverished followers weren’t enough. Marceline’s salary from her full-time job barely covered essentials for Jones’s immediate family. So Jones worked, too, selling spider monkeys door-to-door for $29 each. He imported them from a firm in South America, and in April 1954 the Indianapolis Star ran a story about his refusal to accept a shipment of monkeys because they were ill. Beyond that, he held other part-time jobs, anything to bring in a few extra dollars for the Community Unity cause. He slept when he could.

Jones began miraculously removing cancers. A strict protocol was observed. Jones would name the afflicted person, then designate someone else to escort him or her to the bathroom. Both were in on the act. When they were in the restroom, Jones promised, he’d invoke his power from the pulpit. The afflicted one would “pass” the cancerous mass, which was retrieved by the other person. After a few minutes, they would return to the main room, with the assistant Jones had designated brandishing a bloody, foul-smelling lump clutched in a white cloth or napkin. Jones would declare that here was the cancer—look at it, but not too closely, because it was terribly infectious. The assistant would take away the disgusting mass for disposal as Jones grandly proclaimed the healing accomplished, and the person who was healed shouted praise. Jones’s accomplices, then and later, were aware that the cancer was actually chicken offal, allowed to rot a bit before use.

“White flight,” middle-class America’s mid-1950s abandonment of the inner cities for suburbs to escape growing numbers of minorities,

Community Unity celebrated its new home with a name change. Briefly, the church was known as Wings of Deliverance. But the word “Temple” was carved in stone outside the building, and so Jones decided that the name of his church would reflect both its philosophy and the carving: Peoples Temple, not People’s, because the apostrophe symbolized ownership. After all, one of the key Temple goals was to discourage obsession with material possessions.

When, for the first time, some black neighborhood streets were included in bond improvement packages, or some of the poorest schools in Indianapolis got bond-funded playground equipment, Jim Jones of Peoples Temple received much of the credit and his wife got none. Marceline didn’t mind. What mattered to her was that, finally, the Joneses were a team.

Haldeman gradually realized that Jones intended not only to emulate Divine’s ministry, but also to inherit his followers after the old man died. That would be tricky—Divine preached about his own immortality. But, according to Divine himself, the spirit of the first Mother Divine willingly transferred to the body of a younger woman. Perhaps Jones could use that scenario and one day present himself to Peace Mission members as Father Divine reappearing in new flesh.

It was Marceline who first proposed a “rainbow family.” Why not adopt multiple children of different races? She and Jim would love the children, of course, and try to be the best possible parents, but there would be the added benefit of the Jones family being a constant, unmistakable example of racial harmony. Her husband was enthusiastic. A black baby was the obvious choice, but never in Indiana history had a white couple adopted an African American infant. The Joneses would investigate that, but decided to begin with an Asian child. Since there were none available in their home state, the Joneses traveled to California, where they met and adopted two Korean orphans, a four-year-old girl they named Stephanie and a two-year-old boy renamed Lew.

The church continued involving its children in all sorts of wholesome activities, and in May 1959 there was a weekend outing to the zoo in Cincinnati. Jones led the group, which included his children but not their mother, who was in her final weeks of pregnancy and stayed home to rest. It was a rainy weekend. Thunderstorms lashed the region, but the Temple trip to Cincinnati went on as planned. They carpooled in a variety of vehicles. Everyone had a fine, if wet, time, and on the way home Stephanie Jones rode with one of the congregants. On the way, they were hit squarely by a drunk driver—Stephanie died instantly.

Three weeks later, Marceline gave birth to a baby boy. His parents named him Stephan, spelling it with “an” rather than the traditional “en” to honor his dead sister.

While her husband and children were away on the Cincinnati trip, Marceline rested in bed. On the rainy night of the accident, she was too tired to wait for them. She fell asleep, only to be awakened by Stephanie outside on the porch, calling, “Mommy, let me in.” Marceline got up, brought the girl inside, and asked, “Where’s your father?” Stephanie replied, “Oh-boke needs a mommy and daddy.” Marceline didn’t understand, and, too weary to pursue the conversation, put the child to bed and went back to sleep herself. Jim Jones spent that terrible night identifying his daughter’s body and arranging for her remains to be transported back to Indianapolis. He dreaded breaking the news to Marceline. When he arrived home at dawn, he woke his wife and gently explained that Stephanie had died in a car crash. Marceline insisted that couldn’t be true. Stephanie had come home in the middle of the night—she was asleep in her room. When Jones took her to look there, the bed was still made and there was no sign of Stephanie. Marceline described her vision, including Stephanie’s comment about “Oh-boke.” After the heartbreaking funeral, and after Stephan was born, the Joneses couldn’t forget about “Oh-boke.” They contacted the adoption agency in California, and learned that Stephanie had a six-year-old sister named Oboki. The child was still in a Korean orphanage. Jones and Marceline both accepted her vision as a sign, and adopted the girl. They renamed her Suzanne.

In 1961, they defied Indiana tradition and adopted a black infant. Tellingly, they named the child James Warren Jones Jr.

For more than a decade, there had been increasingly widespread claims that the federal government was falling under the control of communist sympathizers. Many believed that communists orchestrated the civil rights movement in an attempt to undermine America’s core of white citizens.

Jones also took steps to reassure the Indianapolis power elite that he was not a dangerous radical, that, in fact, he represented a reasonable approach to change. The so-called Black Muslims of the Nation of Islam were headquartered in nearby Chicago, and considered menacing even by most liberal whites. Jones called on them there, offering an opportunity to work together to achieve integration. The offer was rejected; Jones made that widely known because it exactly suited his purposes. Here was proof that Jim Jones wasn’t in league with dangerous blacks who spurned him. He championed the safe ones.

White savior complex?

The American Nazi Party

Sorry, the what now??

No integrationist in Indianapolis had ever been attacked, until Jim Jones began calling police to report attempted assaults. The earliest of these were minor, rocks thrown at his house, and in one instance the perpetrators were even caught. They turned out to be black teenagers breaking windows at random—Jones hadn’t been selected as a specific target. He was still offended and told them that he was the last one they should be harassing, since he was trying to do so much for their people.

Relocating to a foreign land would also increase Jones’s daily control of his followers, since they would be isolated from relatives and nonmember friends who might lure them away from Temple attendance and activities.

It was while he was in Rio that Jones later claimed he engaged in a surprising act to raise money for a particularly impoverished orphanage. As Jones told the story to his followers—and he repeated it many times over the ensuing years—he caught the eye of the wife of a prominent diplomat, who offered to donate $5,000 to the orphanage if Jones would have sex with her. Jones claimed that many women, captivated by his attractiveness and charisma, had approached him before, and he’d always declined. But this time was different—the money would help feed and clothe children in desperate need. Jones was perplexed. Trading sex for money was the equivalent of prostitution. Yet refusal would be selfish, placing more value on his personal moral code than on the orphans. After much thought, he approached Marceline and asked for her permission to sleep with the woman. Marceline put aside a natural sense of possessiveness and agreed that he should. As Jones told the story, because he was an exceptional lover, the diplomat’s wife enjoyed considerable physical ecstasy. She then honored her part of the bargain, and the orphanage received the money. Jones declared that his sacrifice exemplified true dedication to socialism.

Upon his return to the Temple pulpit, Jones curtly dismissed the concept of a “Sky God” who promised eternal life in exchange for belief but ignored the sick and suffering. The real Christ or God, Jones preached, existed as a mind or spirit that could choose a host body, becoming an Earth God capable of bestowing immediate blessings on the living. Jones usually stopped just short of declaring himself to be God. But from that time forward, he led his congregation toward that conclusion.

It was common in the mid-1960s for many disillusioned young Americans to leave big cities for rural communities, where, presumably, there was less corruption and racism: “Getting back to the land” was the popular phrase. These seekers wanted to find some means of positive participation to turn America into the right kind of country, one dedicated to racial and economic equality and avoidance of war. Mendocino County, far enough away from San Francisco to provide a sense of geographic distance, attracted more than its share of them. They found work in county factories and hospitals, but most immediately felt the same sense of ideological isolation as Garry Lambrev. Jones and his followers identified and reached out to them, picking the most idealistic. The more frustrated they felt with local closed-mindedness, the better. Once these newcomers were recruited, they in turn helped attract the few like-minded locals to the Temple, in particular co-workers at hospitals and social service agencies.

How Peoples Temple recruited

In August 1966, he announced that Peoples Temple was about to enter “an accident cycle.”

When Jones finally appeared, there were testimonials to his grace and power. Each person was gently asked to limit remarks to three minutes, because so many wanted to praise Father Jim. After that, Jones might announce a miracle or two, generally something that couldn’t be disproven: someone had been fated to die in a car wreck the next morning, but because he’d come to Peoples Temple that day and believed all he’d heard there, he’d be spared. This was a plant, who’d rise up in tears to thank Jones for saving his life. Visitors taking that kind of pronouncement for hokum were often astonished when Jones next directly addressed them, by name and often describing something in their lives—an ill, elderly relative, a car that kept breaking down—that seemed impossible for him to know anything about. Few realized that the chatty Temple members visiting with them prior to the service, usually Patty Cartmell and others experienced in assisting Jones’s public performances, scrawled notes with information they’d learned and passed these along to him before he came out to preach.

Jones sensed that Carolyn’s relationship with her husband was shaky, but she’d been raised in a minister’s home and was unlikely to commit immediate adultery at Jones’s request. Making the initial approach himself was risky. What if she was offended, what if the rest of Jones’s followers, the ones who believed him to be morally pure, a god above human carnality, learned that Father was trying to cheat on Mother? So Jones chose an intermediary. Patty Cartmell took Carolyn aside and explained that Jim had a serious personal problem. Marceline was crippled, psychologically as well as physically. She really belonged in an institution, but Jim was too soft-hearted. Yet, to maintain his amazing spiritual gifts, Jim had to have critical emotional support and physical release, which Marceline was unable to provide.

The Temple process for breaking addiction to drugs was simple. When clients first arrived, they were quarantined in a special house designated for that purpose. There were no doses of methadone to gradually wean them free. Instead, they immediately went without drugs—“cold turkey.” Temple counselors were present at all times, and when the shrieking, vomiting, cramping, and other immediate aspects of the rigorously enforced cleansing process were complete, individuals would move to homes of Temple members. They remained part of those households while they continued rehabilitating. Eventually convalescents either returned to their own homes or else were absorbed into the Temple community—those who did were helped to find jobs and become self-supporting. Among the youthful addicts who entered the Temple program, only a few dropped out. Everyone successfully completing the process and emerging drug-free was evidence of the Temple’s commitment to productive community involvement that benefited everyone. This was the sort of example that the Temple wanted to offer.

Jones begrudged even an hour of a member’s time spent on anything not directly related to the Temple. Going to a movie or to dinner at a café or restaurant was prohibited; the time and money involved was better invested in furthering the cause. Social interaction with outsiders was frowned upon. Chatting with neighbors, having after-work drinks with day job co-workers, might result in members inadvertently revealing something that could be used against the Temple.

Use of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs was forbidden. A single beer, a quick smoke, a toke on a joint—all these things, Jones insisted, weakened the will as well as the body. He also discouraged romantic relationships; devotion to a lover might outweigh commitment to the Temple. Couples who joined the church were allowed to remain that way, but time together was severely limited by Temple chores and duties.

Jones also couldn’t prevent occasional tragedies involving members, even if one of the tenets of Peoples Temple was that a benefit of joining was coming under Father’s protection. He regularly announced “danger cycles” during which everyone should be especially cautious. If anything bad happened to a member during one of these, it only fulfilled Jones’s prophecy. If nothing did, then he was responsible due to his timely warning. Sometimes he announced specific acts everyone must undertake to avoid potential problems. Car wrecks would not happen to members who walked around their vehicles two times before getting in and starting the engine. Jones would press a photo of himself into the hand of a follower, and inform him or her that something awful had been going to happen—crippling or even death in an accident of some sort—but by possessing the picture, the follower was saved.

The Temple visitors stayed a second day, during which Jones spent time talking with Mother Divine and apparently was dissatisfied. That night there was another gathering for dinner, a barbecue this time, and Jones spoke again. This time his tone was critical. There were things about the Peace Mission that were wrong, all its luxurious trappings in particular. Father Divine had “conferred his mantle” on Jim Jones. “His spirit has come to rest in my body,” and now all Peace Mission members must follow him. Mother Divine took offense and ordered Jones and his people to leave at once. They did, stopping first at the Peace Mission apartments to collect their personal belongings. Perhaps a dozen Peace Mission members who’d spent time talking with the visitors from Peoples Temple left with them. A Temple event in Washington, D.C., was already on the schedule, so they stopped there and Jones put on his usual performance. The drive back to Mendocino County was tense. When they arrived, Jones gathered the followers who’d made the trip and explained that what had happened at Woodmont was not his fault. Mother Divine had been enthusiastic about merging their ministries under Jones’s leadership, so much so that, after maneuvering so they were alone, she tore open her blouse and insisted that they have sex. Jones refused—“She flaunted her sagging breasts in my face but I wasn’t tempted.” This was why she had ordered him and his followers to leave Woodmont.

Why Peoples Temple and the Peace Mission din't merge

In the summer of 1972, when he felt that enough Peace Mission members might be wavering, Jones sent them a new, lengthy letter, with the headline “THIS MAY BE YOUR LAST CHANCE FOR LIFE!” Ostensibly written by Temple members rather than their leader, the letter announced that the “spirit that was operative in the body called Father Divine is now calling his Children . . . to come share with Him the abundance of what His great love has provided for all the Children here in Redwood Valley. . . . Father has returned in the hundred-fold degree. His work and his mission [are] being continued in the ministry of Jim Jones.” Peoples Temple’s “modern, air-conditioned Greyhound-type buses” would be ready to make pickups at Franklin High in Philadelphia at 6 p.m. on July 16. Everyone wishing to move to Redwood Valley should contact the Temple at one of two numbers provided to make reservations. Those who lacked personal transportation to the high school could be picked up at their homes. The rest of the letter reiterated Jones’s great gifts, and enumerated the latest miracles he’d performed: he’d caused a storm to stop in Canada, raised thirty people from the dead, and “as in the days of Jesus . . . walked on the waters of the Pacific.” On the appointed day and time, the Temple buses were at Franklin High in Philadelphia. Only a few Peace Mission defectors showed up. Most were old, and, despite the immortality they had been promised, passed away in California at a rapid rate. About a ...

Jones' second try to usurp Father Divine

But sometime around 1971 he began abusing drugs on a regular basis—amphetamines and tranquilizers, pills and liquids to provide significant boosts of energy, or else slow down his racing imagination and allow him to rest.

The abuse to his system was evident in certain ways, but some, like a frequent sharp temper, weren’t readily identifiable as drug-related—Father had always been impatient. A more obvious side effect was red, watery eyes, and Jones, who had sometimes worn dark glasses, now began wearing them everywhere. He claimed this was because his inner powers were so great that holy energy often glowed from his eyes—followers looking directly into them might be scorched. The most harmful side effect was Jones’s heightened sense of paranoia, a typical side effect of amphetamine abuse.

As pastor of Peoples Temple, Jones insisted on being familiar with all aspects of his followers’ sex lives, and telling them who they should and shouldn’t sleep with. He generally stopped short of forbidding anyone to have sex.

Most, though not all, of the time Jones confined himself to adults. There were winsome underage girls in the Temple, and Jones had sex with at least one of them, a fourteen-year-old whose family found out and left the Temple, though without making the reason public out of respect for the cause. Jones sent emissaries to persuade them to return, but without success.

Jones also crossed another sexual line. A young man recently recruited to the Temple, and immediately raised to a position of considerable responsibility due to Jones’s recognition of his organizational skills, was stunned after one service when his new leader mentioned casually, “I’ll fuck you in the ass if you want.” When he stammered, “No, thanks,” Jones grinned and said, “Well, if you ever want to, I can.”

Jones had occasional sex with male followers. Never as often as he did with women, but on a regular enough basis that younger men leaders were warned by some of Jones’s previous male partners, “If ...

Jones was clearly bisexual, though he chose not to openly admit it. For a long time, he discouraged gay relationships among his followers. Garry Lambrev, who made several abortive breaks with the Temple, left for good after Jones refused to allow him even the possibility of having a long-term male partner. “He said that if I had to have [gay] sex, I should go to some bar in San Francisco and have a one-night stand,” Lambrev said. “I wanted something more than that, and Jim wouldn’t allow it.”

He was openly challenged only once. Juanell Smart, a black woman married to David Wise, a white assistant Temple minister, noticed a constant among Jones’s conquests and confronted him: “Jim, why do you only sleep with whites and never with blacks?” Jones snapped back that whites needed to be more dedicated to the Temple’s cause, and to its rejection of bourgeois attitudes; sex with Jones helped them retain an appropriate, socialist attitude. Blacks didn’t have that problem, so there was no reason for him to have sex with them.

The Jones kids had horses and a variety of pets. Besides dogs, there was a chimpanzee named Mr. Muggs, who occupied a cage just outside their house in Redwood Valley. Temple members were told that Jones had saved Mr. Muggs from death in laboratory experiments, though some later came to believe the chimp was purchased by Jones from a pet store.

The chimp became the unofficial Temple mascot.

Mr. Muggs :(((

Stephan was more sensitive to it. He’d suffered for some time from his own illness, congenital narrowing of the urethra that required surgery and catheterization. Jones explained that he couldn’t use his own healing powers to banish the ailment because suffering through the affliction would help Stephan grow as a leader. The youngster was pleased that Jones and Marceline both spent time with him at the hospital—“[It] looked like we were a family again, like everything might be okay.” But it wasn’t. Stephan Jones was twelve when he swallowed fourteen Quaaludes from a bottle on his father’s dresser, hoping to seem sick enough afterward to be allowed to skip at least some of a Wednesday night Temple meeting. Marceline, a trained nurse, saved his life, rushing Stephan to Ukiah General Hospital where he received emergency treatment. She and Jones had to subsequently endure a hospital meeting with psychiatric staff that was a condition of Stephan’s release. The boy deliberately took heavy Quaalude doses twice more, leaving suicide notes both times. In an essay written decades later, he mused that he didn’t intend to actually kill himself, just get more attention. Once he had to be taken to the hospital again, this time to one in San Francisco since Jones didn’t want to risk any more local gossip. Stephan remembers that on this drive, his brothers took turns slapping him “with a little too much verve” to keep him awake. After the first incident, and even after the second and thir...

Sometime after the birth of John Victor Stoen, Marceline Jones returned to her home near the Temple church in Redwood Valley and informed her husband that she was leaving him. She had fallen in love with a psychologist she’d met through her work for the state. Marceline planned to divorce Jones, marry the new man in her life, who lived in Fort Benning, Georgia, and take the children with her. Perhaps she hoped that Jones would beg her to stay, or at least admit that his own selfish actions had irreconcilably ruined their marriage. Instead, Jones summoned the children to join him and Marceline immediately in a family meeting. Jones took the offensive, saying, “Mom wants to break up the family.” He declared that she was being selfish, putting her own desires ahead of what was best for everyone. This man, this doctor or whoever he was, wanted to take Mom—and them—to Fort Benning, away from all the things they had in Redwood Valley, the horses and the pets and their friends and all the fun. Revealing his parental sense of chauvinism—Suzanne was a girl, so her opinion didn’t matter—Jones demanded of Lew, Stephan, and Jimmy, “Do you want to go with your mother?” All three said, “We want to stay with you, Dad”—choosing the familiar over the unknown. Jones felt that he’d won. Then Marceline said she would leave, marry the psychologist, and take the children anyway. In front of their children, Jones thundered that if Marceline tried to take them, “You will be met by the avengers of...

“Catharsis meetings” had been part of the Temple tradition from its earliest days. Members who acted inappropriately were called out in front of their peers, confronted with their perceived misdeeds, and offered the opportunity to correct their behavior.

Jones preached, and his followers believed, that the U.S. criminal justice system was corrupt, as well as rife with racism. Local police were untrustworthy, too, and undoubtedly eager to have Temple members fall into their clutches. So Jones instituted a rule: “Don’t ever go to the authorities. . . . Don’t call police on a member, [especially] if they’re black. They may spend their lives in jail.” To discourage the kind of activities that would otherwise involve outside authorities—buying or selling drugs, stealing, committing assaults—whenever possible, the Planning Commission doled out private Temple punishment. Sentences were passed by the P.C., always with the approval of Jones. These often involved beatings, sometimes with a board, other times with a rubber hose. The belief was that it was better for the Temple to deal harshly but fairly with its own rather than abandon members to the malignant control of cops and judges.