The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

retaining custody of John Victor, and the subsequent court battles with Tim and Grace Stoen, had helped precipitate this final crisis. But Jones preferred that the child die rather than be returned to his birth mother because then Grace and Tim Stoen would, in some sense, have won.

There is nothing humane about death by cyanide. As a means of suicide, its only advantage is absolute lethality if taken in sufficient dosage. Cyanide robs the body’s cells of the ability to absorb oxygen in the blood. Suffocation is sure—and slow. In The Poisoner’s Handbook, Deborah Blum writes, “The last minutes of a cyanide death are brutal, marked by convulsions, a desperate gasping for air, a rising bloody froth of vomit and saliva, and finally a blessed release into unconsciousness.”

“Gloria was standing right there next to him, she was going to go next, I saw that and I felt guilty that I wasn’t saving them. On that last day, it felt like walking through mental quicksand. I believe all of us were a little bit drugged ahead of time, maybe at that last meal. They used to tranquilize Gene Chaikin by putting drugs in cheese sandwiches, and that’s what we all had for lunch in Jonestown that day, cheese sandwiches.”

Jim Jones had wanted his grand gesture to make an impression on the entire world, and, to that extent, he succeeded. But the Jonestown deaths quickly became renowned not as a grandly defiant revolutionary gesture, but as the ultimate example of human gullibility.

one misconception evolved into part of the cultural lexicon. Initially, most news outlets correctly reported that the Jonestown settlers died by ingesting cyanide that was stirred into a vat of Flavor Aid, an inexpensive powdered drink. But some reports mentioned Kool-Aid. As a familiar brand, “Kool-Aid” proved more memorable to the public than “Flavor Aid.” “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid” became a jokey catchphrase for not foolishly following deranged leaders.

some of the Jonestown dead left messages explaining what they’d done. These provided convincing evidence that many went willingly to their deaths.

Filed documents far exceeded what investigators anticipated. In Jones’s cottage, in various Jonestown buildings, there were stacks of letters, invoices, index cards, and other records, so many that after the FBI declassified most of them, they totaled almost sixty thousand printed pages plus several hundred tapes of Jones’s sermons and radio broadcasts that, if transcribed, would potentially add another twenty to thirty thousand pages to the total. Each document had to be scrutinized, every tape listened to—it took the FBI uncountable man-hours, the mass of trivial information making it hard to ferret out anything substantial.

It seems certain that, at some level, Jones truly hated racial and economic inequality. As a teenager he preached against such evils in rough Richmond neighborhoods where he stood to gain nothing by it other than insults and beatings. In Indianapolis, Jones fought, often single-handedly, to bring about integration in a highly segregated city, and to a great extent succeeded. Under Jones’s leadership, Peoples Temple acted on the biblical precepts of feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. Temple addiction programs saved lives. Temple scholarship programs educated young men and women whose schooling would otherwise have been limited to the corrupting influence of the streets.

Yet he was also a demagogue who ultimately betrayed his followers whether he always intended to or not. In every society there are inequities, and in America the most obvious of these affect people of color and the poor. Demagogues recruit by uniting a disenchanted element against an enemy, then promising to use religion or politics or a combination of the two to bring about rightful change.

Those as gifted as Jones use actual rather than imagined injustices as their initial lure—the racism and economic disparity in America that Jones cited were, and still are, real—then exaggerate the threat until followers lose any sense of perspective. In Indiana, Jones and Peoples Temple opposed poverty, prejudice, and segregation. In San Francisco, he began warning of American concentration camps for blacks and a coming police state. By the time he and some nine hundred Temple members were in isolated Jonestown, where there were no opposing views to be heard, his warnings escalated to imminent slaughter by U.S. government agents, Guyanese soldiers, and mercenaries—and because they’d been led along in gradual progression, many of his followers believed enough to voluntarily lay down their lives at his command.