The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

Because he genuinely did want to lift up the oppressed, Jones’s pace couldn’t slacken. Wherever he went, he saw human suffering. Sometimes his twin motivations—power and ministry—coexisted comfortably. What served one, served the other. More often, as Peoples Temple expanded, the admirable motive was sublimated in favor of Jones’s baser objective. Ultimately, personal ambition completely won out.

Jane Fonda came to a Peoples Temple service, along with her husband Tom Hayden, the political activist who’d helped found Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

In its early days in Mendocino County, Peoples Temple staged a controversial antiwar march down the main streets of Ukiah. Jones said then, “We’re here, so they’ve got to know who we are.” He wasn’t ready for his new city to know yet. In these first months in San Francisco, not a single Temple member joined WACO sit-ins in front of Redevelopment Agency bulldozers. San Francisco mayor Joseph Alioto faced constant, if essentially futile, criticism from blacks, gays, and other city disenfranchised, but Peoples Temple members sent him gifts of homemade candy and bought a bloc of seats at an Alioto fund-raiser.

Only in closed meetings did he rant for hours about outside enemies, and how everyone in the Temple was in constant danger, himself most of all. The threats Jones most commonly cited were nuclear war, the U.S. government in general, and the CIA and the FBI in particular. Sometimes he warned of other dangers, first asking the organist to play soft music while he shared alerts with Temple members through his gift of prophecy. These were much more basic than government plots and usually involved relatively mundane, daily activities.

Jim Jones slumped on the parking lot pavement, his yellow shirt suddenly splotched with red. He appeared to be limp, almost certainly dead based on the amount of gore, but

Amazing how brainwashed people would have to be to accept this.

To a far greater extent than even his closest intimate among Temple followers, Jones realized all the questionable things he’d done—what had Kinsolving discovered?

Temple members hadn’t marched or protested in San Francisco against the Fillmore District’s deliberate demolition or in support of any other public cause, but they were summoned into action for this.

Still, he didn’t intend to be surprised by the print media again. Jones established a new Temple department called Diversions, and told Terri Buford that she would run it. “ ‘Diversions’ meant that we would divert the press’s attention from Jim,” Terri Buford later explained.

Jones bragged during Planning Commission meetings that Buford and the rest of the Diversions team was so good at sniffing out scandal, they could provide him the means to destroy anyone he pleased. “He made it sound like we were terrorists or something, that no one was safe from us if we wanted to get them,” Buford says. “It got so that lots of people on the Planning Commission were afraid of me.

Temple recruitment efforts didn’t always go as smoothly.

As I read, I often wonder how I would have behaved if I'd been there. If a 1960s or 1970s adult version of me attended services, met members, maybe met Jim Jones. Would I have been convinced? As I am today, I'm really skeptical of "miracles" and turned off by strong egos. But some of his service work and even belief in his members (I believe you can do this even if you don't believe it yourself) might have hit me hard. And that sense that such a prominent person had time for me and knew about me and paid attention? Even today, that would have power. It's weirdly hard to say for sure what would happen.

Collett noticed a table in the hall stacked with copies of an article in a recent issue of Psychology Today: in “Violence and Political Power—The Meek Don’t Make it,” sociologist William Gibson concluded that “in the U.S. experience, a group that wants political clout and recognition is likely to do better when it is large, centrally organized, and ready to fight if push comes to shove.”

It was as though Jones could almost effortlessly reach out into the communities around him and pluck those individuals whose talents and experience perfectly qualified them to serve him and the Temple in different, critical ways.

Perhaps Jones felt too cocky.

Ya think?

Black people were integral to Jim Jones’s ambitions. Without black followers, and black causes to encourage and support, Jones might have ended up pastoring a tiny Methodist congregation in backwater Indiana, largely frustrated and entirely unknown. Racial injustice was a common theme in his sermons.

Yet despite this incessantly professed love and admiration for blacks, few held positions of actual authority in the Temple.

For years, no followers challenged the racial disparity among Temple leaders. But when it finally happened, the consequences were potentially dire.

We can shake people’s faith in the love of money and racism. We can shake their faith in it, dramatically and tremendously, if we will be willing to go to the gallows for what we believe. I don’t think we’re going to the gallows, but I’m ready. Aren’t you?”

Jones’s soft public words aside, the Gang of Eight defections left him determined to exert even more control over his followers. That kind of betrayal wouldn’t happen again.

Jones devised an effective method of ensuring their loyalty. Blank pieces of paper were distributed—some remember Carolyn Layton handing them out—and the P.C. members were instructed to sign their names at the bottom. If any of them angered Jones, he was free to fill in whatever “confession” he liked over their signatures, then display it to the rest of the Temple membership or even the police. Everyone complied. Tim Carter remembers, “It was like a loyalty test. That was the way we looked at it.” The signed pages were kept carefully filed, ready for use if Jones deemed it necessary.

Collateral, of a sort. But it doesn't even require actual dirt. Evil genius.

Previously, Jones mostly observed at P.C. meetings. Now he did much of the talking, most of it on some nights, though seldom about Temple programs and goals. Instead, Jones moaned about all the responsibilities placed on him, or else boasted about his sexual prowess, particularly how the women he favored with his attentions enjoyed unequaled carnal bliss. For Jones, this bragging was an effective way to remind everyone of his complete mastery.

As Jones’s determination to thwart potential betrayal increased, so did the Temple’s commitment to disciplining its members.

Letting Jones blow off steam, even in such questionable ways, was preferable to the risk of him becoming overwhelmed by constant stress and breaking down. So they praised him for everything he did, and agreed with all he said. Jones fed off that; almost forty years later in a speech at Bucknell University, Stephan Jones said, “My father’s image of himself resided completely in his perception of other people’s perception of him . . . if you’re surrounded by a lot of people, who . . . regardless of what they’re thinking, are showing you that you’re okay and not only are you okay, but you’re the cat’s meow, you’re not going to get better.” And Jones didn’t.

A lot of Jones's power is in making it virtually impossible for people to impose boundaries in their relationship with him. Everything he does has the effect of making him above boundaries and immune from them.

Those who felt differently questioned their own reactions.

“We individual Temple members had no real authority, but we weren’t mindless robots,” Tim Carter says. “We willingly gave up some freedom for the greater goal. If you got upset with something, with Jones, you still felt respect for others in the Temple and you’d think, ‘If this is wrong, these other very intelligent, very decent people wouldn’t be here, so, therefore, I must be wrong.’ ”

Most found it difficult to get away. The problems involved in defecting began with money.

Jones actively discouraged contact with outsiders, especially kin who had not chosen to join the Temple. Many members had already been estranged from parents or siblings even before they decided to follow Jones.

This and money is where cults start to look like abusive couples on a grand scale. What made JJ a cult leader, rather than "just" a domestic abuser.

To quit the church was to risk being fired.

Adult members employed full-time by the Temple itself often had no conception of how to look for work in the outside world.

“If you’re gonna die, you might as well die for the cause. I mean, you might as well die a noble death than die a coward’s death, really . . . do something to make it a better world for other people, you know. If we can just hold on for a few more years [in the Temple] . . . then everybody graduates.”

“crisis mode,”

And that, at least, was no exaggeration. Though it would be almost six more months before Jones specified the location, he frequently identified it by another name that struck an especially deep chord with his older African American members: The Promised Land.

Jim Jones had keenly studied traditional black religion in America, and eventually his own preaching assimilated one of its recurring themes: sometime, somehow, true believers would throw off their shackles—formerly the real, jangling chains of slavery, afterward poverty and racism—and be guided to a place where true equality and brotherhood exist. The Promised Land was an important motif in the African American church.

There was another critical reason that the Promised Land theme appealed to Jones. Outside influence was pernicious. The Gang of Eight spent more time on campus and in classrooms than they did surrounded by Temple membership. They got ideas that way. If potential traitors were isolated on some farming community far away from anywhere else, allegiance to the Temple—to Jim Jones—would be their only realistic option.

“Guyana, South America, was the most suitable place,”

Jonestown.

In retrospect, it all happened very fast, the wearying struggles of the Pioneers notwithstanding. Jones first broached the Promised Land in the spring of 1973, visited Guyana that December, had tentative lease agreements in place and work crews onsite by March. From the Temple perspective, the whole process took only about a year.

Jim Jones had been satisfying his sexual urges with different partners from among Temple membership, most often women and occasionally men serving on the Planning Committee. Occasionally, he took lovers from the general membership, at least once committing statutory rape with a girl in her early teens. When pregnancies resulted, Jones expected the women to get abortions. Grace Stoen had been the exception.

Godlike or simply a superior human, Jim Jones was on a roll. At such moments, he habitually overstepped, and now was no exception.

Following his arrest, Jones began emphasizing a theme in his sermons and in Planning Commission meetings: everyone is homosexual.

“I love socialism, and I’d die to bring it about. But if I did, I’d take a thousand with me.” His followers surely assumed that he meant a thousand of the Temple’s enemies, but a few weeks later Jones sternly noted, “A good socialist does not fear death. It would be the greatest reward he could receive.” Loyal Temple members must not only be willing to dedicate their lives, but also their deaths, to the cause. Several times Jones specifically mentioned Masada, the mountaintop fortress in Israel where almost one thousand Jewish revolutionaries, women, and children committed suicide rather than surrender to a Roman army about to breach the walls. More than nineteen centuries later, their courage and sacrifice still resonated with all who refused to accept subjugation. Individual suicide was wasteful, but mass suicide that sent a message of defiance, and that encouraged future generations to fight oppression to the death, was admirable.

Terri Buford said that, in retrospect, she and the others missed the most important message: “Yes, we proved that we were willing to die, but what that night really proved was that [Jones] already had the intention or at least was considering the possibility that, at some point, he would kill us all.”

San Francisco was almost unique among American metropolises in that it had hybrid government, combining county and city offices.

Tim Carter remembers Moscone and Harvey Milk, who owned a camera store and was perhaps the city’s most prominent gay activist, attending various Temple programs.

Other local leaders also began attending the services. Harvey Milk was most prominent among them. Milk had lost an earlier attempt for a place on the board of supervisors, but a priority of the Moscone administration was to institute district rather than at-large elections, so the makeup of the board would more equitably reflect all city constituencies. That would apparently be the case in the next election, and Milk was positioning himself for another run. Jones was sufficiently enthusiastic about Milk’s chances to assign Tim Carter and a few others as Milk’s special contacts at the Temple, so that any request by him—the printing of campaign flyers, door-to-door volunteers—could be acted on. Carter, like almost everyone else in the Temple who got to know Milk, grew to like him immensely: “Before him, all I knew about gays were that some of them were bears and others were queens. But Harvey became a friend of mine, and I went to his house and spent time with him and his partner and realized that a gay couple was just that, a couple. See, that was something good about the Temple—if you were part of it, you always had the opportunity to grow as a person, to be around and learn to accept, to appreciate, all different kinds of people.”

Even better for members with radical sympathies were the visits and guest sermons by Angela Davis, linked with the Communist Party and Black Panthers, Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement, and Laura Allende, whose Marxist brother, Chilean president Salvador Allende, had been deposed and killed in a military coup rumored to have been underwritten by the United States It created a sense that the Temple members stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the most prominent activists. Jones encouraged that belief.

Jones had promised that the Temple would make history. Troubling aspects of his ministry aside—the rantings, the beatings, the histrionics—what Jones had pledged was really happening. The members of Peoples Temple were helping to bring about a new, better world. For those Jones followers who needed it, here was confirmation.

Throughout his life, Jones was never able to accept any form of shared possession—it was always his children, his Temple, his followers, and his money, everything to be controlled by him as he pleased without regard for others.

Temple bookkeeper Terri Buford estimated that the Temple’s foreign accounts totaled about $8 million. In fact, the total was around $30 million.

Jim Jones already felt certain that he and his church were under constant government surveillance, but he was simultaneously convinced of his invincibility. He was too smart, too special, to be brought down by enemies. Jones encouraged the planning of grandiose schemes that would allow the Temple either to strike back at powerful governmental foes or, if sufficiently threatened, make some grand revolutionary statement that might intimidate enemies or at least stand as a historic, defiant gesture. The concept of mass suicide, a Masada, had already been raised within the Planning Commission and in closed Temple meetings. Jones had additional ideas.

One plot was perhaps the most horrific of all. “[Jones wanted] Maria Katsaris to go to flight school in San Francisco and learn to fly,” Terri Buford says. “She’d get a plane and put a couple hundred Temple members on it and crash the plane, as a symbol we would rather die than corrupt ourselves by submitting to the American government. She said that she’d do it, she just didn’t want to go to flight school. This was never going to be like 9/11, crashing into a building and killing innocent people. We were always going to be the only ones who died. [Jones] was always ready to kill us. That whole group suicide [idea] didn’t start in Guyana.”