Lessons Unlearned

John Walker Lindh is a free man, sort of.

You remember John Walker Lindh?  The so-called American Taliban.  The California native turned Islamic militant captured in Afghanistan a few weeks after 9/11.  Yes, him.  He was let out of federal prison this week on supervised release 17 years into a 20-year sentence for numerous charges to which he pled guilty in 2002.

Like everyone else, I hadn’t thought of Lindh for a very long time.  Once he went to prison, the legal case against him was settled and so there was no reason for the media to pursue his story further.

John Walker Lindh’s moment in the spotlight was brief and confusing.  His name was initially reported to be simply “John Walker.”  We learned he was the son of Marin County navel-gazers whose religious seeking led him to fall into the rabbit hole of Islamic fundamentalism.  He had waged war on America, and a courageous CIA officer had lost his life as a consequence. 

Counternarratives fail to thrive in times of crisis.  There were fragments from which John Walker Lindh’s account could be elided.  There was the disturbing image of a naked Lindh blindfolded and duct-taped to a litter.  It was reported at the time that he had been held incommunicado aboard a U.S. Navy vessel for several weeks.  He was questioned by the FBI without benefit of counsel.  Little to none of that registered with the public at the time, however.

It did not register with me, either.  There is a whole new generation coming up who did not witness the September 11^th attacks.  For them, they will be as meaningful as Pearl Harbor and the JFK assassination were for me as a child; important certainly, but events carrying no emotional freight.  But personally, the shock of that Tuesday morning reverberates almost two decades later.

The fall of 2001 was a surreal time.  There was the horror of large-scale terrorism visited upon us, live on TV.  The biggest news story over the summer had been the disappearance of Washington intern Chandra Levy and the revelation of her affair with congressman Gary Condit, which somehow made our collective complacency even more astounding.   Weeks dragged on, the destruction of the Twin Towers replayed endlessly on cable news.

Then, in early October, I logged on to the internet (on a dial-up connection, naturally) and learned we had begun bombing Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan.  Finally!  Something was being done.   We’d get bin Laden and his murderous crew and our thirst for justice would be slaked at last.  Within weeks, NATO forces routed the Taliban.

As we would find to our chagrin, the Taliban would prove quite resilient.  But as November came to a close, just after we had solemnly observed the first Thanksgiving of the War on Terror, the Taliban’s resolve in the face of what we thought was certain defeat became very clear.

The Northern Alliance and U.S. special operations forces had secured the surrender of Taliban forces in northern Afghanistan.  A number of prisoners were temporarily held in a fortress at Qala-i-Jangi, just outside Mazar-i-Sharif.  Seeking information on al-Qaeda activity, CIA officers Mike Spann and Dawson Tyson questioned a number of them.

One prisoner said there was an English-speaking man among them.  Facing certain questioning, Lindh was advised by his comrades to claim he was Irish rather than American.  When he was brought to Spann, however, it was readily clear Lindh was from the good ol’ U.S. of A.  News footage of the interrogation showed a visibly irate Spann haranguing his haggard and dazed prisoner.  At one point Tyson, seeking to further intimidate Lindh, turned to Spann and said they should just leave him to his fate, to rot in an Afghan prison.  Some time thereafter, Lindh was presumably returned to the prisoner population.

Later that night, a pre-planned uprising erupted at Qala-i-Jangi.  The prisoners overcame and expelled their Northern Alliance captors at the start of what would become a weeklong siege of the prison.  John Walker Lindh was among the prisoners, but his true role is open to question.  Lindh, understandably wanting to minimize his culpability, claimed he took refuge in a basement after being shot in the leg.  The U.S. government said he was an active participant. 

Lindh would have been in a world of hurt in any case once he fell into U.S. custody.  The mere fact he had joined the jihadists was damaging.  But there was an aggravating factor: Mike Spann had been killed in the early hours of the uprising, the first American to die in the War in Afghanistan. 

Mr. Spann was interred with honors at Arlington.  Mr. Lindh faced the consequences of Mr. Spann’s death, among other things.

The charges against John Walker Lindh were sobering, ten counts altogether.  Most were paired conspiracy and commission counts (e.g., Conspiracy to supply services to the Taliban / Supplying services to the Taliban).  Lindh was unquestionably guilty of nearly all, and so he pled in federal court so as to avoid a harsher sentence.  A little more than year after his capture in Afghanistan, Lindh entered federal prison and faded from public memory.

It would be helpful if Lindh would be permitted to tell his story.  It’s doubtful we will hear it anytime soon.  The Justice Department says that the federal Son of Sam law precludes him from giving his side, at least for pay.  He might need it; from what the media have reported the restrictions on Lindh for the next three years would make it difficult to obtain paying work.  But there is one discrepancy between Lindh’s claims and one of the charges which has me puzzled.  Perhaps the most serious charge Lindh faced in 2002 was conspiracy to murder U.S. citizens.  Lindh, through his family, denies he ever wanted to fight or kill Americans.   

It’s possible Lindh was an innocent abroad.  In his search for Islamic community, he was led into the Taliban’s arms.  It is unlikely he or anyone else in the Taliban rank and file had any advance knowledge of 9/11 though he almost certainly had to have known of the Taliban’s links to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.  But after the attacks, desertion or avoiding an armed confrontation with American forces became a dim prospect.

This begs the question why.  What would lead an American youth from an affluent background down such a path in the first place?  Regrettably, few of us are interested in knowing.  Empathy is not a virtue in our society.  Individuals who are square pegs get scant understanding from those who fit neatly into round holes.  

Then again, disaffection with the American way is nothing new.  During the Vietnam conflict, the New Left journal Ramparts once published a cover proclaiming, “Alienation is When Your Country is at War, and You Want the Other Side to Win.”  Our culture uncritically embraces American exceptionalism which in turn blinds us to the suffering our foreign policies bring to millions around the world.  For the small number of people at home who pay attention, however, such suffering affects them acutely.  An even smaller subset of them conclude that the only way to end the suffering is resistance.

Was John Walker Lindh one of these resisters?  Some of his statements seem to support this theory.  Is he still motivated by such sentiments?  Reports from prison, if true, would cast doubt on his reformation.  Lindh is said to sympathize with Islamic State.  He cannot obtain a passport or leave the country during his supervised release, though he acquired Irish citizenship through descent during his imprisonment and could settle in Ireland once the restrictions on him are lifted.  From there, his travels would be less visible to U.S. authorities and would arguably be even less so should he renounce his U.S. citizenship.

Then again, maybe Lindh’s idealism has waned sufficiently for him to retreat into obscurity.  Let’s hope that’s the case.  But until we address the conditions that produce young people like John Walker Lindh, we will see more of them.

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar

A Paradise on Earth: Part 8 - Those Who Do Not Remember the Past...

Tragedies in America are ephemeral.  The information barrage brought by the 24/7 news cycle and social media gives little time to process before the next round of horrors manifests itself.

The demise of Peoples Temple happened in a simpler time, which is to say that the news media reported stories piecemeal as they collected and analyzed facts rather than breaking them in real time accompanied by anxiety-inducing speculation.  And so it was that the Jonestown story evolved over weeks, even in San Francisco as the city simultaneously coped with the assassinations of George Moscone and Harvey Milk.

We like things simple.  In the popular mind, Peoples Temple was a cult whose fanatical leader led its members to their death.  Initial media depictions reinforced this.  A couple of years after Jonestown, the TV movie Guyana Tragedy offered a lurid depiction of Jim Jones and his Svengali-like hold on his followers.  The best thing about the film was Powers Boothe’s fine performance as Jones, but its historical veracity is flimsy.  Most of the published histories of Peoples Temple—Raven by Tim Reiterman, Our Father Who Art in Hell by James Reston, and A Thousand Lives by Julia Scheeres, to name but a few—tend to emphasize the cult-like nature of the Temple’s final years.

Shiva Naipaul offered an analysis drawing upon and reinforcing cultural perceptions of 1970s California in his work Journey to Nowhere (published as Black & White outside the U.S.)  Trinidadian-born Briton Naipaul (brother to V. S. Naipaul) begins his book with the last leg of his journey from London to Georgetown via Port of Spain immediately after the Jonestown disaster.  According to Naipaul, Guyana’s socialist leadership had created such severe shortages of everyday consumer goods that the passengers stole soap and toilet paper from the airplane’s lavatories before landing.  He strongly implies that Guyana would have been better off under continued British rule rather than suffer the inept governance of Forbes Burnham.  (Naipaul seems to have suffered what Frantz Fanon termed the colonized mind; a West Indian of East Indian extraction he was nonetheless an apologist for British cultural hegemony.)

Ensconced with other reporters at the Pegasus Hotel, Naipaul’s captious eye looked askance at the banalities of Christmas decorations, festive music, and his colleagues’ idle gossip around the swimming pool.  The daily press briefings yielded little information, and Naipaul decided to investigate the cultural milieu that produced Peoples Temple.  He was off to California.

Naipaul engaged in field research of a sort which brought him in contact with West Coast devotees of New Age beliefs, alternative religions, and other adherents of what remained of the 1960s counterculture.  He also delved into the question of what made a place like Guyana attractive to someone like Jim Jones.

Guyanese prime minister Forbes Burnham, who led the country from independence until his death in 1985, was perhaps typical of the first generation of postcolonial leaders.  His socialist ideology dovetailed well with the revolutionary orientation of Peoples Temple.  Carrying it out was challenging.  British Guiana had been an undeveloped backwater of the Empire.  Even today, Guyana lacks a skilled workforce and adequate physical infrastructure.  Agriculture, logging, and mining remain the leading industries.

Guyana’s racial politics might also have appealed to Jones.  The indigenous Amerindians mainly inhabited rural areas and were underrepresented in the political process.  However, there were deep divides between those of Afro-Caribbean ancestry who were particularly impoverished and the more prosperous South and East Asian merchant class.  Burnham’s party outmaneuvered that of his rival Cheddi Jagan before independence.  He achieved this partly with covert American help; the CIA ironically wanted to avoid a Guyana led by Jagan because Jagan had been a self-avowed Marxist earlier in his career.

Once in charge, Burnham’s politics veered leftward.  Burnham had an affinity with outsiders on the fringes of their own societies.  Peoples Temple wasn’t the only religious sect that settled in Guyana.  Another group of American emigrés was the House of Israel, led by one Rabbi David Hill (whose birth certificate was issued in the name of Edward Washington).  Still another group was the black nationalist organization The East, which sought expatriation from the U.S. and, like Jones, saw Guyana as the ideal place.  Self-proclaimed Trinidadian revolutionary Michael X, who had been a minor celebrity in Swinging London, sought refuge in Guyana after it was found out he had killed a rival and his girlfriend and buried their bodies his back yard. 

Forbes Burnham’s revolutionary solidarity did not extend to harboring common murderers.  Attempting to flee arrest in Georgetown, Michael X impulsively hiked into the dense forest, got lost, and wound up being apprehended at a remote police post.  He was extradited to Trinidad, tried, found guilty, and hanged in 1975.  (V. S. Naipaul would ponder the significance of the Michael X case in the essay “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad,” having already based a character on him in his 1975 novel Guerillas, portraying him as a figment of his own rhetoric and the prevailing zeitgeist.)

Returning to Shiva Naipaul’s attempt to link Peoples Temple with the West Coast counterculture, I believe such ties are tenuous.  The largest segment of its membership was African American and older.  For most of the Temple’s history, they made up most of the congregation.  The move to California did coincide with the rise of the counterculture.  There, it began to attract younger, idealistic whites who were brought in by Jones’ commitment to civil rights.  Toward the end, in San Francisco, the congregation took in individuals who were alienated by the failed promises of the 1960s.

The kind of revolutionary agitation Jim Jones favored had fallen out of favor by the late 1970s.  Peoples Temple bucked the trends of the Me Decade and the mainstream culture’s inward turn toward hedonism.  Its adherents were a self-sacrificing sort who needed a spiritual succor the prevailing cultural trends could not offer.  The downside was this self-sacrifice was taken to its chillingly inevitable conclusion.  This conclusion was justified, sadly, by Jones’ misinterpretation of Huey Newton’s concept of “revolutionary suicide.”  Newton did not advocate actual suicide; he meant that it may be necessary on occasion for revolutionaries to give their lives in the fight against oppression.  Jones probably knew of this distinction, but at the end it made no difference for the residents of Jonestown.

But Peoples Temple’s spiritual core was not anchored in the delusions and hypocrisies of Jim Jones, but in the hearts of its members.  Annie Moore, one of Jonestown’s nurses and a member of the inner circle, left a last note before dying.  One must be careful when weighing the words and deeds of Jones’ intimates; Annie Moore may have been idealistic, but she was arguably a mass murderer for her role in concocting the poison.  Nevertheless, her parting note was particularly heartfelt, even plaintive.  She praised the Temple for its inclusiveness and for accepting those society rejected, and echoed Jones’ belief that they could no longer go on in this world: “We died because you would not let us live in peace.”

Jonestown did not exactly live up to the rainbows and unicorns picture Annie portrayed in the note, but was it the hell on earth its critics claimed?  I tend to think not.  Again, we need to look away from Jim Jones and at the society which formed around him.  Peoples Temple brought out the best in many of its adherents.  As an intentional community, in the Midwest, in California, and in the rainforest, it functioned better and longer than any number of contemporaneous attempts at utopia.  The Temple afforded spiritual comfort, its leader’s probable atheism aside, a belief in building a better world, and material security.  In the end, it was mutual devotion to their ideals and to each other that bound them together.

On one level, Peoples Temple reflects certain truths about us.  We Americans are a seeking people, to the point of excessive credulity.  There is something which draws us to the irrational.  Recent media reports point to Millennials’ rising interest in the occult, for instance.  A widespread distrust of science and a populist woo which produces phenomena like the anti-vaxxer movement are indicative of a collective suspension of disbelief toward even the most dubious claims.  Knowing this, it’s not unreasonable to ask whether a broadly-based religious movement centered around a charismatic leader such as Jim Jones could emerge today.

Probably not.  Peoples Temple was a product of its time and places (plural intended).  It’s hard to imagine a similar experiment emerging today when the idea of social justice is frequently ridiculed and the most visible religious tendency in America is a politicized evangelical Christianity fixated on exclusion and punishment.  Heightened racial distrust would also inhibit the appeal and growth of such a church.  Our excessive individualism and self-absorption would also work against it.  Its tragic end notwithstanding, the lives and deeds of Peoples Temple present a favorable contrast to the barren social landscape we presently inhabit.

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar

A Paradise on Earth: Part 7 - The Reckoning

The sight which greeted the first people to enter Jonestown on the morning of November 19, 1978, beggared description.  The TV news images that went out later that day were horrifying and were unlike anything else the American public had ever seen up until that point.  The emotional impact for those seeing it first and in person must have been beyond overwhelming.

Encountering the Jonestown horrors was the culmination of two days’ turmoil in Guyana, in the jungle and in Georgetown.   Congressman Leo Ryan lay dead at the Port Kaituma airstrip, cut down by Peoples Temple gunmen.  Several others, including NBC News cameraman Bob Brown, were also dead.  The survivors, including Ryan aide Jackie Speier, were badly wounded. 

After Jim Jones had declared that it was time to commit “revolutionary suicide,” a handful of Jonestown residents managed to evade security and go into the surrounding forest while a small party excused themselves earlier in the day to go on a picnic.  Others, including Tim Carter and Mike Prokes, were sent away on Temple business.  Lawyers Charles Garry and Mark Lane, bitter rivals, managed to set aside their differences as they too waited out Jonestown’s demise huddled in the undergrowth on its fringes.  Hyacinth Thrash, some stories go, slept through the whole thing.

In Georgetown, Stephan Jones, convinced his father had had a mental breakdown, ignored his mother’s pleas to return to Jonestown opting to stay on with the Temple basketball team.  Sharon Amos, a devoted follower to the end, took her own life and those of her children at the Temple’s capital residence.

The first priority was evacuating the injured survivors.  For Guyanese and U.S. authorities, this was the easy part.  By contrast. processing the remains of the deceased was a near-insurmountable task.  Decency dictates that individual human remains be treated respectfully.  When people die one at a time, this is practicable.  In a mass casualty scenario with almost a thousand dead in a remote location in a tropical climate, this is impossible.

Even as the authorities arrived in Jonestown scant hours after the deaths the stink of decomposition permeated the atmosphere.  The aggregate weight of the bodies was probably between 70 and 75 tons.  Guyanese law mandated autopsies in the event of unnatural death; this was logistically overwhelming even in a developed country.  The Guyanese chief pathologist, Leslie Mootoo, got this requirement waived so that the remains could be expeditiously repatriated.  However, causes of death had to be determined.  U.S. officials ultimately chose seven individuals for examination.

The body of Jim Jones was of course one of the seven.  The autopsy of so few victims naturally upset loved ones back home who wanted answers.  Rebecca Moore, professor of religious studies at San Diego State University and expert on Peoples Temple, has written of their emotional trauma.  Dr. Moore’s interest is personal; her sisters Carolyn Moore Layton and Annie Moore died at Jonestown, as did her nephew Kimo Prokes.  The sisters’ remains were among the seven. 

The medical examiners’ conclusions were ambiguous.  The bodies, already in poor condition when found, had been embalmed in Georgetown before being sent to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.  This hindered complete findings of cause.  A few things were known.  All but Jones had taken cyanide.  Jones had died of a gunshot to the head, as had Annie Moore even though she also had a lethal concentration of cyanide in her system.  Who administered the gunshots to whom was unclear.  Extrapolating the autopsies along with the evidence at the scene led to a conclusion of mass poisoning.

Back in San Francisco, the early reports from South America were ominous and confusing.  The city’s remaining Temple contingent got word by shortwave radio of Leo Ryan’s murder and the tumble of events afterwards.  Associate pastor Hue Fortson, whom Jones had sent back to California shorty before Ryan’s visit, has remarked upon the devastating impact of the first reports in interviews.  As information filtered to the local and national news media, even the wildest rumors surrounding Jonestown paled in comparison to the revelations coming out of Guyana in the ensuing days and weeks.

The resulting story was one-sided.  It is difficult to defend a mass murder / suicide, but there were few voices from active Temple members in California in the media discourse in the closing weeks of 1978.  By contrast, the Concerned Relatives were taking a victory lap.   The deaths of a congressman and a few bystanders and those of 909 settlers were bad, but we told you so.  It was inevitable.  They drank the Kool Aid.

Attorneys Garry and Lane made their media appearances where they praised the efforts of attorneys Garry and Lane on behalf of Peoples Temple, and wasn’t it a tragedy so many died?  Few of the Temple leadership survived the tragedy and so there really wasn’t any effective rebuttal to the narrative that the people in Jonestown were mere sheep.

The Jonestown disaster was punctuated a few months later in a budget motel room in Modesto, California.  Mike Prokes had been a local television reporter in the sleepy San Joaquin Valley town before meeting a charismatic preacher named Jim Jones.  The public relations man and Planning Commission member was sent out of Jonestown with the settlement’s monetary assets on November 18^th, with instructions to hand them over to the Soviet embassy in Georgetown.  As recriminations hung in the air in the early months of 1979, Prokes called a press conference.

The invitation had eight takers.  Mike Prokes read them a prepared statement urging further examination of the so-called “death tape” in addition to the hundreds of other recordings of Jim Jones as a partial explanation for what happened.  He accused the State Department of setting the events leading to the mass suicide into motion by not objecting to Leo Ryan’s visit because Jones sought to move his people to the Soviet Union.  He emphasized the ideals of Peoples Temple and asked that the dead be remembered favorably for them.

After reading the statement, Prokes excused himself to the bathroom.  He then shot himself in the head.  He was found with a note emphasizing that he took his life not out of despair but in an effort to refocus the discussion away from the thought terminating cliché of Peoples Temple as a death cult.  Charles Garry got a note of his own from Prokes, as did Herb Caen at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Mike Prokes’ end in a shabby little room was anticlimactic, a tree falling in the forest with no aural witnesses.  The narrative was established early and for the long term.  The world had made up its mind about Peoples Temple.

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar

A Paradise on Earth: Part 6 - Exeunt

“I believe that the balance of the evidence about using cyanide indicates it is best not used.”

Derek Humphry, Final Exit

Cyanide is a chemical asphyxiant.  It interferes with the bloodstream’s ability to carry oxygen from the lungs.  It acts very quickly, with the symptoms of a lethal cyanide poisoning occurring within several minutes if ingested and death taking place minutes to maybe a couple of hours after that.  Inhaling cyanide gas yields quicker results.

One debated question is whether the poisoned individual suffers.  One source has it that there really isn’t any suffering, that buildup of carbon dioxide in the blood brings on rapid unconsciousness and the end comes peacefully.

That’s one perspective.  Anecdotal accounts say differently.  Several states used hydrogen cyanide gas to carry out executions before the advent of lethal injection.  Nevada was the first to adopt lethal gas in the 1920s.  It was touted as more humane than hanging.  The condemned would simply drift off to a permanent sleep.

The reality was another matter.  Nevada’s first gas chamber execution involved a Chinese immigrant named Gee Jon, who was convicted of killing a member of a rival tong.  Gee Jon did not take it well, understandably.  While the witnesses did not report any undue suffering on the prisoner’s part, there were a few hiccups in the execution protocol. 

About four pounds of liquid cyanide were pumped in, but it was a chilly day and much of the poison pooled on the chamber floor.  A few witnesses said at one point they smelled bitter almonds, a telltale sign of a leak, which caused the viewing room to be evacuated until it could be ascertained there was in fact no leak.  The coroner refused to autopsy Gee Jong for fear he would be poisoned upon opening up the corpse.  Nevertheless, the Gee Jong execution was deemed a success and other states soon followed the Silver State’s lead.

The lore of the gas chamber contains a number of hair-raising stories.  The condemned would go into convulsions.  Blood would trickle from the nostrils.  The mouth would foam.  Very unpleasant to watch.

Executions in California’s death chamber were their own source of legend.  Barbara Graham, convicted with two accomplices of murdering an elderly woman, was advised by the corrections officer strapping her into the chair to wait until the cyanide eggs dropped into the hydrochloric acid, then take a deep breath.  Unconsciousness would come quickly, she was assured.  Graham’s response: “How the hell would you know?” 

Caryl Chessman, condemned for kidnapping under California’s Little Lindbergh law, had fought his death sentence in the courts for over a decade, becoming an international cause célèbre in the process.  Chessman could only delay the inevitable, however, and he was determined to extend his life by an additional minute if that’s what it came down to.  Once the gas was released, he held his breath as long as possible before succumbing to the need to exhale and inhale.  Chessman’s end was predictably agonizing.

Ingesting cyanide is a somewhat slower death, but it is 100% effective.  At the end of the Second World War, a number of top Nazis committed suicide this way.  Hermann Goering cheated the hangman at Nuremburg just hours before his scheduled execution, using a cyanide capsule he had smuggled into his prison cell.

Cyanide would be the chosen means of death by Jim Jones and camp physician Larry Schacht for the residents of Jonestown.  Although Schacht had not researched lethal poisons until sometime in early 1978, Jones had long used the specter of suicide by poison as a loyalty test of his inner circle.  The so-called “White Nights” in Jonestown were rehearsals for the inevitable.  The means simply had to be worked out.

The murder of Congressman Leo Ryan and several members of his party spelled the end of Peoples Temple and its leader.  When Jonestown’s residents gathered at the pavilion one last time, they learned of the congressman’s fate and their own as well.  The “medicine” was ready for them.

The lethal cocktail was potassium cyanide, diphenhydramine hydrochloride, and, according to a few sources, Thorazine.  The drugs were mixed in with vats of grape Flavor-Aid.  As a layman researching the story, I find the choice of ingredients puzzling.  Cyanide works fast, so why the need of the other two medications?  I’ve never taken Thorazine, but it stands to reason that it would take an hour or two to reach full effect.  I have taken diphenhydramine lots of times—it’s the active ingredient of over-the-counter medications such as Benadryl and Unisom.  As a sleep aid, it takes a couple of hours to work.  But Dr. Schacht had his reasons, I suppose.

Why did the people of Jonestown acquiesce?  There were guards around the pavilion, to be sure, armed with rifles and crossbows.  Still, if a number of people made a break for it most would have had a chance.  Groupthink is one explanation.  But there were arguments voiced against suicide.  Christine Miller, who had joined Peoples Temple in Los Angeles and had a reputation for outspokenness, openly challenged Jim Jones’ decision in front of everyone. 

Christine Miller was both typical and an outlier among Temple adherents.  The daughter of Texas sharecroppers, she made her way to Southern California and worked as a civil servant.  When she joined Peoples Temple, Christine had made a comfortable life for herself.  She wanted to do more and the Temple afforded ample opportunities to help others.  Like many Temple members, she had donated most of her assets to the church.  Although she went along with most of Jones’ dictates Christine Miller was one of the relatively few individuals allowed to dispute Jim Jones, albeit within reason. 

Christine emigrated to Guyana on her own, unlike most of Jonestown’s settlers.  She soon regretted this decision, believing Jonestown was a failing experiment and telling Jones she would be more useful back home.  Despite it all, she remained.

At the pavilion, Jones asked if there were any dissenting opinions to the “revolutionary suicide” he proposed.  Christine Miller stepped up to the mike.  The ensuing exchange, caught on the so-called “death tape,” is remarkable.  Christine questioned the morality of killing children.  She pointed out that where there is life, there is hope (a theme from Jones’ sermons.)  She asked whether immigrating to Russia was still an option.

Jones replied it was too late for Russia and that suicide was the only means of allaying the pain of life.  The exchange was fairly civil at first, with Jones saying he respected Christine and her opinions.  Background voices seem to show that a few people in the crowd were sympathetic to her at first.  But as the dialogue went on, others loudly objected to Christine’s words with some comparing her to the defectors who had just left with Leo Ryan. 

Finally, Jim McElvane intervened.  McElvane was a recent arrival at Jonestown also from the Los Angeles congregation, but he was a member of the Temple’s security team and a trusted confidante to Jones.  McElvane peremptorily cut Christine Miller off, telling her she owed her life to Jim Jones and to stop her needless arguing.

The matter was settled.  People queued behind the poison vats, drinking their death from paper cups.  Small children had the brew injected with oral syringes.  Those who resisted were quickly subdued and given the poison by hypodermic.  The process was supervised by Marceline Jones and the camp nurses, Annie Moore among them. 

Not everyone was subjected to the poison.  Lawyers Charles Garry and Mark Felt were told to leave and retreated into the tree line until it was safe to venture out.  Financial secretary Maria Katsaris gave suitcases of cash to brothers Tim and Mike Carter and Mike Prokes for delivery to the Soviet embassy in Georgetown, along with letters transferring rights to the Temple’s offshore bank accounts.  Katsaris also furnished them with revolvers.  She instructed them that they were not to be taken alive.  The suitcases were very heavy and the men did not get far.  They abandoned the suitcases, took part of the cash from them, and walked along the railroad tracks to Port Kaituma where they were taken into custody by the police.

A few got away by subterfuge.  Stanley Clayton, a young survivor of Oakland’s streets, bluffed his way past security on the pretext of an official errand.  Clayton had witnessed the death throes of the first people who drank the poison and wanted no part of it.  He, too, hid at the edge of the surrounding jungle.  Odell Rhodes got away in a similar fashion.  Grover Davis missed the call to the pavilion and hid in a ditch once the suicides began.  Several others, nine adults and children, had left earlier in the day, before Ryan’s assassination, to go on a “picnic” as part of a prearranged escape plan. 

Hyacinth Thrash survived by default.  Depending on the source, she either slept through the suicides and awoke the next morning to find a field of dead bodies lying face down around the pavilion or she heard the commotion and hid until it was over.  Either way, she survived.  Mrs. Thrash would live on for nearly twenty more years.

Jonestown was not the only venue for Temple suicides.  Sharon Amos headed the Peoples Temple contingent in Georgetown.  Informed of Leo Ryan’s death and Rev. Jim’s decision by radio, she was instructed to kill the Temple’s “enemies” in the capital and to then take their own lives.  She settled for cutting the throats of her two youngest children.  Afterward, Sharon and her eldest daughter Liane Harris simultaneously slashed each other’s throats.

Staying at the Georgetown house were Stephan Jones and the Jonestown basketball team, who were in town to play an exhibition game.  Marceline Jones urged her son to return to Jonestown as Leo Ryan’s visit approached but Stephan refused.  Stephan recognized that his father was becoming increasingly unhinged and had resolved to stay away.  Frustrated, he left with his teammates in their van the afternoon of Ryan’s assassination and missed the carnage.

Back at the Jonestown pavilion, it became quiet as darkness approached.  Jim Jones’ taped death rant ended.  He would be either the last or second to last to die.  He did not drink the cyanide but died from a gunshot to the head.  Lying nearby was nurse Annie Moore.  According to the autopsy of her badly decomposed body, there was a lethal amount of cyanide in her tissues but she had also suffered a gunshot to the head.  One explanation is that Jones shot himself; another is that Moore shot him then herself. 

But why the poison and the gun?  Either would have been sufficient on its own.  One explanation is that she wanted to be certain of dying.  After all, should she fail there would be a lot of explaining to do having fatally poisoned nearly a thousand people.  Maybe she trusted the cyanide to do the job but chose to hasten things as the symptoms set in.  It’s academic in any case.

As morning fell upon Jonestown on November 19, 1978, police and Guyana Defence Force soldiers entered the settlement.  It was all over.  The world outside was left to wonder and speculate.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

A Paradise on Earth: Part 5 - Endgame

Jim Jones had a complicated personal life. 

He was raised in a time in which the nuclear family of dad, mom, and kids was the norm to the exclusion of any other arrangement.  But Jones built his life and reputation around challenging the status quo.  He and his wife Marceline adopted several non-white children whom they raised alongside their one child together.  Rev. Jim was a white minister who led a multiracial congregation in the postwar Midwest.  He was an iconoclast in a professional milieu that treasured metaphorical icons.

It would be Jones’ tangled love life and parental ties real or concocted that would do him in and Peoples Temple along with it.  By the time the congregation had settled in Jonestown, Jim Jones had involved himself in a confusing tangle of relationships.  Jones had the pick of his followers.  He proclaimed himself the only true heterosexual whilst everyone else were repressed homosexuals.  (Associate pastor Hue Fortson has said that Jones’ sexual dominance grew to the point where the men were even forbidden to pee standing up.)  As far back as Ukiah Jones was sexually involved with numerous Temple members, several of whom are listed in the Gang of Eight’s letter listing the reasons they were leaving the church.

The parentage of several Peoples Temple’s young children was in doubt.  Jones routinely had Temple members sign affidavits attesting to dubious claims.  One of these concerned little John Victor Stoen.  The boy’s probable father was Timothy Stoen, who with his wife Grace were members of Jones’ inner circle.  However, Jones had Stoen sign a paper saying Jones was in fact the biological father.  Conversely, Jim Jon Prokes, Jones’ biological son with Carolyn Moore Layton, another close aide, was named after the Temple’s PR man Mike Prokes. 

Identity was sometimes a slippery thing in Peoples Temple, particularly among the children and the Temple’s later adherents.  Some individuals had one or more monikers, nicknames, or had chosen a name preferable to that given them by their folks.  Jim Jon Prokes was called Kimo, for instance.  Cudjoe’s captain and security team member Don Sly took the name Ujara.  It was hardly a surprise, then, that outsiders were confused by who was whom (or was with whom). 

Grace and Tim Stoen were not confused.  Grace had been responsible for the Temple’s finances and Tim had been its legal counsel in addition to serving as one of Rev. Jim’s associate pastors.  Grace had defected from Peoples Temple in the summer of 1976 with another Temple member having become dismayed by Jones’ increasingly erratic ways.  Tim was placed under surveillance and left soon after.  Although their marriage was over Grace and Tim wanted their son back, their statement of Jones’ paternity aside. 

By this point John Victor was with Jim Jones in Guyana, nearly 5,000 miles from California.  But the Stoens were not alone.  The Concerned Relatives organization which had collected around Al and Jeannie Mills (formerly Elmer and Deanna Mertle, early defectors) was growing in prominence and getting a lot of media coverage in the Bay Area.  After Jones’ flight to Guyana many of the local and state politicians who had praised him fell silent. 

One Bay Area politician who never seemed to have fallen sway to Jim Jones’ charm offensive was Rep. Leo Ryan.  Representing a district in San Mateo County, south of the city, Ryan was a different sort of politico.  A former schoolteacher, Ryan had worked his way up the ladder as a mayor and state legislator.  Once, in the latter capacity, Ryan spent several days living in Folsom Prison to investigate conditions.  Ryan has been described as a charismatic man who would not shrink from a challenge.

Even before his contacts with the Concerned Relatives, Peoples Temple had aroused Leo Ryan’s curiosity.  Ryan was acquainted with the father of a would-be Temple defector named Bob Houston.  Bob’s body was found near train tracks in the fall of 1976.   It was one of several suspicious deaths of Temple members or associates in California dating from the end of the 1960s onward.

The allegations put forth by the Concerned Relatives naturally concerned Ryan.  The problem was jurisdiction.  The Stoen custody case could only be pressed if the Guyanese courts chose to accept it.  The alleged Social Security fraud committed by Peoples Temple needed substantiation, and the evidence strongly suggested that the Jonestown residents who had assigned their benefits to Peoples Temple had done so willingly.  The trip Ryan scheduled for November 1978 was thus a Hail Mary play.  He and the Concerned Relatives could go to Guyana, but Jim Jones would decide whether they would set foot in Jonestown.

The visit did not begin auspiciously.  The party was lodged at the Hotel Pegasus in Georgetown while negotiations with Jones dragged on.  One reporter was briefly detained by Guyanese immigration officials.  Although Ryan was traveling in an official capacity as chair of a House subcommittee whose ambit included the welfare of U.S. citizens abroad, he received scant cooperation from the Guyanese government.  At home things had progressed just as awkwardly; the State Department afforded little assistance.

At one point, Ryan tried the direct approach and went to the Peoples Temple headquarters in Georgetown.  A tense meeting between Ryan and Jones’ representative Sharon Amos led nowhere.  A standoff of sorts ensued as Ryan kept up pressure on Jones and the Guyanese over the next few days.

Rev. Jim for his part had lawyered up with the best.  Both Charles Garry and Mark Lane had shown up to rep him.  Garry was a prominent attorney who championed progressive causes.  Lane did as well, but was probably best known for his conspiracy theories surrounding the John F. Kennedy assassination and his best-selling tomes on the subject. 

Both attorneys assiduously courted publicity, which is undoubtedly why Jones brought them in.  Both had outsized egos and clashed repeatedly during Ryan’s visit, to the possible detriment of their client.  If a letter written by camp nurse Annie Moore around this time is any indication, Lane played heavily to Jones’ paranoia over conspiracies.  Garry was displeased by Lane’s self-serving press conferences.  At one point, Lane had hinted in a letter to Ryan that Jones would apply for asylum in the Soviet Union, further provoking Garry’s ire.

Ryan played hardball.  Having flatly told Garry and Lane that he would not be prevented from visiting Jonestown the attorneys then advised Jones it would be best to drop his opposition to Ryan’s presence.  A flight was arranged for Ryan, his staff, selected Concerned Relatives, and a group of print and TV reporters.  A Guyanese official and a State Department representative also came along.

Even after the party arrived at the Port Kaituma airstrip, it took further negotiation to get them admitted to Jonestown.  Once there, however, Ryan was treated to the best Jonestown could offer.  Thanks to the TV news crew accompanying Ryan’s group, we know that first evening was a joyous gathering with food and music and dancing at the Jonestown pavilion.  Asked to address the group, Ryan said that whatever others might say Jonestown was the best thing that had ever happened to them.  The loud applause and the happy expressions on the audience’s faces were genuine. 

The next morning, however, the cracks in the façade became evident.  Jackie Speier, a Ryan aide who now holds his congressional seat, has said there was a sense of unease among the visitors as they lay sleepless during the previous night.  As everyone gathered on the pavilion that morning, Vernon Gosney tried to slip a note into the hands of a newsman he mistook for one of Ryan’s staff.  Gosney and another resident wanted out of Jonestown and the congressman’s visit presented an opportunity.  The note fell to the floor, which was seen by a boy who yelled that a note had been passed. 

It fell apart from there.  Ryan naturally wanted to know if Gosney and his friend Monica Bagby were serious, and more importantly did anyone else wish to leave.  It so happened others did want to leave.  It wasn’t a large number, but it was enough to tip Rev. Jim over the edge.  As Jackie Speier questioned the residents who wanted to go, Jones gave the reporters an emotional, rambling monologue accusing the Temple’s enemies of spreading lies. 

Ryan asked Jones if the party could stay in Jonestown another night; Jones said no.  It was probably a good thing; as Ryan tried to reason with upset family members of the departees Ryan was assaulted with a knife by Don Ujara Sly.  Sly was quickly pulled away and Ryan suffered only scratches but the incident was an omen.

Ryan, his party, and the departing Temple members left for the airstrip in a tractor-pulled trailer.  It was now late afternoon.  There were two Guyana Airways planes waiting, a Cessna and a Twin Otter.  The Cessna had been sent as Ryan’s party had gotten larger with the defectors.  Both were small aircraft, but they were sufficient.  The surviving defectors later reported a sense of mounting unease and anxiety as minutes passed.  Defectors who shared their fears with Ryan were met with a reassurance that they were covered by a Congressional "shield of protection.” 

Jim Jones recognized no such protection.  As the Cessna started its engines, another tractor pulling a flatbed trailer approached the airstrip.  NBC cameraman Bob Brown trained his camera on the approaching vehicle.

Meanwhile, as the Cessna taxied into takeoff position, an alleged defector, Larry Layton, pulled a gun and began shooting at his fellow passengers.  He managed to wound Vern Gosley and Monica Bagby, the residents who first approached Ryan about leaving Jonestown, before Dale Parks wrested the weapon from Layton.  The Cessna hastily took off for Georgetown for what had to have been a very tense flight. 

The tractor got closer.  A number of armed men on the trailer leveled their rifles and shot into the group of passengers boarding the Twin Otter.  Bob Brown continued recording for several seconds before he was cut down.  Reporters Don Harris and Greg Robinson were also felled.  Jackie Speier, journalists Tim Reiterman and Steve Sung, and State Department official Richard Dwyer were among the wounded.  Leo Ryan was dead, struck by approximately twenty rounds.  To make sure, one of the shooters gave Ryan the coup de grace.  The wounded were left on the airstrip as the shooters left.

Back at Jonestown, Jim Jones gathered everyone at the pavilion.  He had had a vision, a prophecy that Congressman Ryan would die in a plane crash.  Peoples Temple now faced a threat worse than death.  Tomorrow, the Guyanese Defence Force and U.S. troops would descend upon their jungle utopia.  It was now time to take “the medicine.”

Jones had approached the camp physician, Larry Schacht, about the most effective way to commit mass suicide months earlier.  Dr. Schacht was an interesting product of Peoples Temple in a collection of interesting characters.  He grew up near Houston in a leftist Jewish family at the height of the 1950s Red Scare.  Overshadowed somewhat by an accomplished older brother Larry slipped through society’s cracks, as did many youth who came of age in the late Sixties.  He drifted, his mind clouded by a methamphetamine addiction. 

Like many of his contemporaries, Larry found his way to California.  Arriving in Redwood Valley, he found his way to Jim Jones.  Larry got clean.  He got his equivalency diploma and started taking classes at Santa Rosa Junior College, where a number of Temple adherents studied nursing and other healthcare disciplines.  Pastor Jones had decreed that Larry Schacht was destined to become a doctor.  And so Larry went on to complete medical school.

Schacht was several weeks into an internship at San Francisco General Hospital when he was told it was time for him to emigrate to Jonestown.  He did not give notice.  He didn’t even to bother to clean out his locker. 

It appears Larry Schacht’s medical skills were below par, based on observations of those who worked with him at the camp clinic.  His social skills were also poor.  He was a bit “off.”  Nurse Annie Moore wrote to Jones that Schacht was hitting on her; she evidently found him repulsive.  Schacht colluded with Jones in an unusual publicity stunt.  Schacht reached out to a group of doctors who were part of a ham radio network to ask them to talk him through a difficult labor and delivery involving a Jonestown resident.  The mom-to-be was purely fictional, but the fabricated feat did get Jonestown some positive media attention back in the States.

From what we know, it’s no surprise that Schacht tackled the mass suicide project with enthusiasm.  After some research and animal experimentation, he settled on cyanide poisoning. 

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

A Paradise on Earth: Part 4 - Exodus

They arrived gradually, then all at once.

For its first two years or so, Jonestown’s permanent party consisted of around fifty people.  Jim Jones spoke of moving Peoples Temple to Guyana but set no firm date for a mass migration.  There were steps taken here and there, such as the Temple’s acceptance into the Guyanese Council of Churches.  But Jones’ heyday as a San Francisco mover and shaker forestalled any precipitous move to South America.

As 1976 gave way to 1977, however, a close observer could have discerned something was afoot.  The San Francisco passport office saw a distinct uptick in new applications, many from elderly citizens who had never before traveled outside the United States.  Both the Ukiah and Los Angeles churches were put up for sale, though the weekend preaching and fundraising trips to Southern California continued. 

The migration was long planned but the suddenness of the departure was likely not.  The New West exposé sped it up.  An individual expatriation involves jumping through numerous bureaucratic hoops; that of nearly a thousand is a logistical headache.  Yet Peoples Temple pulled it off in a relatively short time.

Edith Roller’s journals describe the deliberateness of the departure.  Jim Jones’ abrupt leave-taking merited scant attention there.  Perhaps it was because Edith and her fellow congregants anticipated seeing him shortly at their new home.  Edith’s writings for the second half of 1977 contain the usual daily activities as she mulls over when to take early retirement from her job and weighing the benefits of leaving for Guyana after her 62^nd birthday (when she would qualify for Social Security).  As with Edith, so with the rest of the expatriates.  They needed to give notice at work, sell their houses or break leases, close bank and other financial accounts, undergo medical checkups and immunizations, and so forth. 

It’s evident the majority of the departures were willing.  Jonestown had been held out as a tranquil refuge from the corruption of fascist America.  Many in Peoples Temple eagerly anticipated the move.  Getting there, at least by the time Edith Roller arrived in early 1978, was a well-organized process.  The Temple made the arrangements, organized the migrants by day of departure, and packed such household goods as they were permitted.  They flew from San Francisco to New York-JFK on the United redeye, caught a connecting flight to Georgetown via Port of Spain, and were received by Peoples Temple staff on arrival. 

After clearing immigration and customs, the new settlers were temporarily housed at the Temple’s Georgetown headquarters to await transportation.  In Edith Roller’s case, there was time to see the few sights Georgetown afforded such as the Botanical Gardens and zoo.  The party would then head northwest along the coast crowded on the Temple trawler and supply boat Cudjoe to Port Kaituma.  (Edith, in her matter-of-fact account, nevertheless makes the voyage seem idyllic.) 

Once registered with the local police at Morawhanna, the settlers proceeded upriver to the Temple dock.  Jonestown was a further seven miles into the jungle; the last leg of the trip was travelled in an open trailer pulled by a farm tractor.

By the time of the exodus, the first settlers had managed to make Jonestown a going concern.  The fifty or so who lived there had succeeded in wresting life from the poor jungle soil.  Cassava, cutlass beans, and corn were staple crops.  Jonestown raised chickens and pigs.  The crew of the Cudjoe fished off the Guyanese coast.  There was limited trade with nearby Amerindian villages.  The settlement was Spartan but livable if photos are any indication. 

Jonestown was not prepared for the arrival of so many people over so short a time, however.  The demands of so many in such a remote location for food, shelter, and medical care overwhelmed the settlement’s nascent infrastructure.  The settlement had always relied upon purchases from Georgetown or supplies sent from abroad, and this reliance increased with the population.  As the months progressed, resource scarcity mounted.

Most of Jonestown’s new inhabitants were put to work in the fields or in one of the settlement’s other agricultural ventures.  The workday ran from dawn to dusk.  Sometimes there was lunch; toward the end two meals a day was common.  Health care was adequate but basic, with more complex cases or tests referred to clinics in Georgetown.  Housing was adequate as basic shelter from the elements.  Sanitation was better than might be expected; Edith Roller refers to a laundry and mentions daily showers. 

It’s possible the food situation might have improved with time as the new residents acclimated to fieldwork and additional cultivation produced more crops.  Life in Jonestown could have been bearable notwithstanding the hardships since its people had a shared sense of purpose.  The weak link in the bonds holding Jonestown together was its Father, the settlement’s leader Jim Jones.

There were warning signs going back more than a decade that Rev. Jim was becoming unbalanced.  The revival tent facet of Peoples Temple remained prominent throughout its history, but as it acquired affluent suburbanites in California Jones’ theology began to diverge sharply from fundamentalist teachings.  He denigrated the Bible as a dangerous bunch of fables and claimed godlike powers, somehow hanging on to the Temple’s traditionalist African American core membership despite such blaspheming.   Jones’ exhortations for unity in the face of a judgmental and hostile society inculcated a self-reliant isolation among the Temple’s adherents which may have counted for more than religious faith or the absence of such.

Jones’ belief in conspiracies against him and Peoples Temple began back in Indianapolis.  Like the opposition they would subsequently face in Ukiah and San Francisco, this wasn’t entirely a matter of his imagination running away with him.  The conservative establishment in 1950s Indiana did not cotton to a white preacher leading a mixed congregation.  Although the alleged vandalism of his church by white supremacists was probably staged, it did publicize the Temple’s unjust marginalization.  In a similar fashion, the allegations of fraud in California may have been the result of outsiders’ misunderstanding of the Temple’s robust social services program but they certainly made Jones believe he was being persecuted even though these early critics were voices in the wilderness as Jones and Peoples Temple were feted by the local worthies.

The California sojourn saw the strange excesses which would come to characterize Peoples Temple.  Denunciations at Maoist-style struggle sessions, public spankings of children and adults, and boxing matches were common in Redwood Valley and in San Francisco.  Jones became open and even boastful about his adulterous affairs with both women and men.  He distanced himself from the main body of the congregation, becoming secretive and reliant on the increasingly powerful Planning Commission.  He depended upon rounds of uppers and downers to get through the day.

In Guyana, Jim Jones was accountable to no one.  The Temple leadership dealt harshly with opposition.  Slacking or defiant workers were assigned to the Learning Crew for stints of corrective labor.  Slaps or outright beatings were meted out for small crimes.  (There is an account of Jones having a youth beaten for molesting a small child, which might have been an act of mercy considering the consequences had he been turned over to the Guyanese authorities.)  Incorrigibles were sent to The Box, a 6’ x 4’ covered hole in the ground.  Outright opposition could land you in the infirmary’s Special Care Unit. where you would spend your days in a Thorazine-induced haze.

Jonestown residents were subjected to epic monologues most nights in which Jim Jones would expound upon the horrors of the country they had escaped.  The U.S. government was becoming ever more oppressive, dialing back civil liberties and implementing a police reign of terror which would culminate in African Americans being herded into concentration camps for eventual extermination.  Other news would concern Peoples Temple’s socialist brethren in the Soviet Union, Cuba, and North Korea.  Another common topic was the Temple’s apostate defectors.  As the weeks and months stretched on, daily life for the people of Jonestown became a monotonous, sleep deprived round of work, chores, skimpy meals, and hours of Father’s evening harangues.

As 1978 progressed, a siege mentality had set in.  His closeness to Guyana’s nabobs notwithstanding, Jones began to insinuate that the Temple’s enemies in the States would collude with its Guyanese hosts to launch an extermination raid on Jonestown.  To avoid this horrible fate, Jonestown would experience unannounced suicide rehearsals Jones called White Nights.  Roused from sleep by a siren and Father’s voice booming through the PA system, people would queue up to drink poisoned fruit punch from metal vats only to be told afterwards by Jones it was only a drill and what they drank was just plain punch.  Jones had originated this stunt years earlier in California as a loyalty test for his Planning Commission.  Apparently, no one subjected to the White Nights grasped the ramifications or took them seriously or else (and this is very possibly true) they believed the threat was real and suicide was the best way out.

It wasn’t all darkness and dread, however.  There was a lot more happening in Jonestown than eking out a subsistence.  There were schools for kids of all ages, and for adults too.  (Edith Roller was one of the teachers.)  There were organized sports, including a winning basketball team.  Music was always an indispensable part of Peoples Temple’s ministry, and this continued in Guyana.  The renowned Peoples Temple choir, which had released an album of catchy tunes titled He’s Able in 1973, remained active.  There were acting and comedy troupes there to entertain.  Even on their last night, with congressman Leo Ryan in the audience and a clearly displeased Jim Jones presiding over the festivities, the joy expressed by the people at the performances on the pavilion was genuine. 

Leo Ryan’s presence, which left much of Jonestown seemingly unperturbed that evening, was a harbinger of all that which Jim Jones had prophesied.  The resulting endgame which would destroy Jonestown and Peoples Temple was irrevocably reaching its climax even as the singing and dancing went on.  The events of the next day were, at least as far as Jim Jones was concerned, foreordained.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar