The Reverend James Warren Jones was an unusual
product of his time and place.
Jim’s childhood in Depression-era Indiana was
lonely. He was poor. He was socially isolated. His father, gassed in the First World War,
was too disabled to work. The father was
a drunk and a member of the Ku Klux Klan, which had a large presence in
Indiana. His mother, Lynetta, was the
breadwinner and absent much of the time.
Young Jim read extensively and fostered a preoccupation with death and
religion. Jim would play preacher with
his few friends and held funerals for dead pets.
The fascination with religion persisted into
adulthood. Jim studied education at
Butler University and worked as a hospital orderly, meeting his wife Marceline
on the job. Ordained as a Methodist
minister after graduation, he was underwhelmed by his first congregation and
felt stifled by its lack of diversity.
Diversity was not a thing in the postwar
Midwest. Jones, who openly espoused
Communism at the height of the 1950s Red Scare, found himself at odds with the
church. Attending a faith healing and
noticing that the congregants were generous with donations, Jones saw a means
for realizing his social vision. Staging
a series of revival meetings was Jones’ springboard to starting his own church.
Initially called Wings of Deliverance, the
Peoples Temple attracted blacks and whites alike. Incorporating the evangelical style of the black
church, Jones also sought whites who normally would gravitate to mainstream
congregations. Jones used the Temple as
a political springboard. He was
appointed to Indianapolis’ Human Rights Commission. He used his growing public profile to push
for racial integration and suffered the inevitable backlash.
Jones’ commitment to racial equality extended to
his own family, adopting a black son and three Asian children in addition to
his and Marcy’s own boy. The accidental
death of daughter Stephanie created a media spectacle when Jones searched for an
unsegregated cemetery in which to bury her.
Her headstone was marked with the oddly jarring caption, “Our Korean
Daughter.”
Around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis,
Jones became worried about surviving the manmade Armageddon he thought
inevitable. He spent time in Hawaii and
Brazil and paid a short visit to Guyana on his way back to Indianapolis. Having read in Esquire that northwestern California would be one of the few places
in America to be unaffected by a nuclear war, and catching hell in Indianapolis
for his integrationist stance, Jones abruptly uprooted his congregation, packed
them into buses, and drove west to Ukiah.
The Temple’s move to its new home brought some
changes, with the congregation gaining affluent white adherents. California had no shortage of spiritual
seekers. Rev. Jim continued his social
activism, serving as a substitute teacher and leading adult education
classes. If Peoples Temple had a golden
age, its years in Redwood Valley were probably it. The Temple’s social service network matured
then, affording cradle-to-grave care for its members.
Such care came at a cost, however. Temple members, who had once been required to
tithe, now found themselves signing over their assets. They turned over the bulk of their wages
every payday in exchange for a small cash allowance. Free time was given over to worship services,
volunteer activities within the Temple, and service on the congregation’s myriad
committees. Members would boast to each
other over how much time they put in and how little sleep they got. Peoples Temple became a socially isolated
group in thrall to its leader.
It isn’t clear when the abuses began. There is little evidence that the public paddlings
and forced boxing matches went on in Indianapolis. The same goes for Rev. Jim’s pansexual promiscuity
among his flock. Jones is said to have
shown a sadistic streak early on, abusing childhood playmates and roughly
treating patients as a hospital orderly.
In 1974 Elmer and Deanna Mertle made their exit under death threats after
their daughter had been severely paddled.
Few others had the courage to leave.
Meanwhile, Jones’ theology began to take new
shape. Staged faith healings and
socialist rhetoric had always been part of the program. (A video of a service in Ukiah has the
congregation singing a “hymn” to the tune of “The Internationale.”) Having melded the spiritual and the political,
Rev. Jim now began to shape a church without God. He denounced the King James Bible, and
implied that he himself was godlike.
Jones looked to older non-mainstream religious groups
for inspiration. Father Divine was an
exemplar of what Jim Jones wanted to be, and Jones appropriated the patriarchal
title for himself. (Marceline in turn was
known as Mother.) Throughout the early
1960s Jones made several trips to visit Father Divine at the International
Peace Mission in Pennsylvania. (The
Temple would crisscross the country by bus, holding revivals. The first visits to Father Divine were likely
part of this peripatetic evangelism.) After
Father Divine’s death, Jones claimed his mantle. He was finally banished in 1971 after he tried
to take over the remnants of the Peace Mission and its assets.
Eventually Redwood Valley proved too small to
contain Jim Jones’ ambition. Peoples Temple
members routinely proselytized in San Francisco, and by 1972 it had established
a permanent presence. By mid-decade the
city had become the movement’s home base, with its headquarters on Geary Street
west of Van Ness. Jones wasted no time
raising his profile in San Francisco politics.
His first success was helping George Moscone
win election as mayor in 1975. Peoples
Temple got out the vote for Jimmy Carter the following year and for Harvey Milk
the year after that. Jones won a seat on
the city Housing Commission. The
California State Senate passed a resolution commending the Temple. Jones and his parishioners didn’t ignore
social justice issues, supporting LGBT rights and protesting the demolition of
International Hotel in Manilatown. The
I-Hotel fight was a symptom of the gentrifying redevelopment which uprooted
people of color in the city then which attracted both members and community
support for the Temple.
Jim Jones possessed a keen social intelligence
which served him well at first. He
studied powerful men’s weaknesses and played to them. (George Moscone was said to have a roving
eye, which allegedly fell upon several of the Temple’s women.) His aura of mystery and knack for getting publicity
added even more color to an already colorful era in San Francisco. Along with the attention came the rumors and
allegations, muted at first, but which would grow too loud for the news media
to ignore.
We can gain insight into Peoples Temple from
the daily jottings of one of its members, Edith Roller. Roller was a middle-aged woman, a miner’s
daughter from Colorado. She had worked variously
as a CIA employee in Asia and as a creative writing instructor at San Francisco
State. At the time of her journal,
Roller worked as a secretary at Bechtel Corporation where she moved among the
likes of Caspar Weinberger and George Shultz.
An atheist with a strong commitment to social justice, she was perhaps
typical of Peoples Temple’s white adherents during its final stage.
Roller kept her journal at Jim Jones’ behest. Its minutiae give us a fascinating look at
not only at life within the Temple but a snapshot of the recent past as well. Roller’s life was intentionally full. She would work at her office job eight hours
a day, selling the Temple’s newsletter on street corners on her lunch
hour. Services at the Temple most
evenings. Bus trips to the Los Angeles Temple
most weekends, staying at houses of members there.
What stands out in Edith Roller’s detailed writings
is her blasé acceptance of practices which would shock most of us. Not only did she note the beatings and boxing
matches, but she expressed disappointment when they were insufficiently violent. We do sense her perceptible discomfort as the
church encroached upon what remained of her private life until she was made to
give up her apartment and move into one of the Tenderloin SROs leased by the
Temple for communal living. There she
lived until the exodus to Guyana.
Life within Peoples Temple became an extension
of its leader’s mounting paranoia. The
center of power devolved upon a mostly white and largely female Planning Commission,
which had begun in Redwood Valley and expanded to nearly 100 members by the end. The Temple had its own private security
force. Members had to sign powers of
attorney giving Jones and the Temple full authority over their legal and
financial affairs. Spaces were bugged
within the Temple building and conversations monitored. Jones began abusing amphetamines, which fed
his growing paranoia.
As the fame of Jim Jones and his congregation
grew, so did outside interest in its practices.
A chain of events would be touched off which laid bare the worst abuses
within Peoples Temple. As suddenly as it
had burst upon the San Francisco political scene, it disappeared just as
suddenly. The end result would be
disastrous.
© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar
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