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

A Paradise on Earth: Part 3 - In the Spotlight

Guyana is as remote a place as any you can find in the Western Hemisphere.  Overlooked by multinational corporations, foreign governments, and tourists alike, Guyana would prove an ideal refuge for an embattled Jim Jones and his followers. 

Jones had made a brief visit to the then-British Guiana in the early 1960s during his search for a doomsday-safe refuge for Peoples Temple.  Jones had spoken of undertaking a mission in an undeveloped country.  Around 1973, he tasked his advisers to form a contingency plan in case the Temple had to leave the United States.  Guyana was chosen as the destination.

Guyana, which gained independence in 1966, fulfilled a number of criteria for such a refuge.  The limited accessibility of much of its interior was one.  An Anglophone population was another.  The political leanings of the country’s leader, Forbes Burnham, jibed with Jones’ “Apostolic Socialism.”  Guyana was willing to relax its immigration and customs laws to attract settlers.  Finally, Burnham’s government saw Jonestown as a deterrent to Venezuelan claims to western Guyana.

Peoples Temple and Burnham’s government agreed on a long-term lease for a five square mile tract near Port Kaituma.  The cost was $37,000, or about $10 per acre.  The first Temple members arrived in 1974.  The first years of the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, as Jonestown was officially known, yielded mixed results.  Clearing the dense jungle took time.  The soil was poor.  But they made a go of it and within a year the small group of settlers had cobbled together a tidy, mostly self-sufficient home for themselves.

Jonestown must have been a paradise on earth to the Temple members in California.  Jim Jones took periodic breaks from his very full schedule to visit Guyana, making films hyping the settlement for his flock.  (Among the smiling testimonials from the settlers, one film shows Jones showing off the settlement’s food cache including, among the staple items, Kool Aid.)  However pleasant life in Jonestown may have appeared at the time, there was much else to keep everyone occupied; Edith Roller’s early journal entries in 1975 mention the project only in passing.  Their pastor, on the other hand, had good reason to think about a new life in the tropics.

As it happened, Jones’ delusions of persecution were not totally unfounded.   A few of his followers as early as Ukiah had become alarmed at the pastor’s abusive streak and left.  But defecting from Peoples Temple was no small feat, even in California.  Eight young members, dubbed the “Gang of Eight” by an enraged Jones, left in 1973 ratcheting suspicions of potential future betrayers of the cause.  Members were expected to monitor each other’s words and deeds for the slightest hint of weakness.

Among the defectors the case of the Mertle family is the most noted, since it accompanied early journalistic inquiries into the Temple.  Elmer and Deanna Mertle, perhaps unsurprisingly, were part of the Temple’s public relations machine.  Elmer was the Temple’s photographer, while Deanna was its publisher.  As with so many of the Temple’s adherents, the Mertles had signed over their house, business, and savings to the church.  Their faith in Jim Jones would have its limits, however.

After a particularly vicious paddling of 70 strokes in front of the congregation, the Mertles’ daughter Linda revealed the seriousness of her injuries to her classmates when she dressed down for gym the following day.  (No mention is made of this being brought to the attention of Linda’s teachers.)  Elmer and Deanna had seen enough and left Peoples Temple with their children.  Because they had granted power of attorney to Jim Jones, Elmer and Deanna legally changed their names.  As Al and Jeannie Mills, they would figure prominently in the Temple controversy before and after Jonestown.

The first reporter to expose the inner workings of Peoples Temple, even before the Mertle defection, was Lester Kinsolving.  Kinsolving was hardly one to criticize organized religion itself; he was an ordained Episcopal priest and remains a darling of the Religious Right.  But the rumors surrounding the Temple tended to be ignored given Rev. Jim’s stature in local politics.  Kinsolving sensed the provocativeness of the story should the rumors prove true.  In 1972, well before Jones would descend upon San Francisco, he published an eight-part series of articles in the San Francisco Examiner.  Kinsolving questioned the more out-there aspects of the Temple’s peculiar theology, such as Jones’ claims to divinity and his faith healings.   His financial dealings and unusual closeness to Mendocino County officials were also given a closer look.

The Temple’s response was swift and furious.  A flood of angry letters and phone calls inundated the Examiner and Kinsolving’s final four articles were never run.  One detailed the suspicious death of Maxine Harpe in 1970.  Harpe was discovered hanging in the garage of a Temple communal home in Ukiah.  A county social worker and Peoples Temple member named Jim Randolph had been staying with Harpe and had recently accepted a $2400 check endorsed by her from the sale of her house.  Harpe’s heirs tried to recover the money, but were stymied by Mendocino County ADA Tim Stoen (more about whom later) and the county sheriff.   Another unrun installment concerned allegations Jones made against an African-American pastor that he had propositioned underaged girls.  Still another detailed the violence meted to Temple members.

The furor over Kinsolving’s articles was short-lived.  Jones moved to the big city and made it big.  But the cloud over Peoples Temple never dissipated completely. 

As Jones’ star burned brightest in 1976 and 1977, the forces which would lead to his destruction, and that of 909 others, were gathering swiftly.  The talk surrounding Temple practices and the increasingly vocal Concerned Relatives group, which claimed it was a malevolent cult, begged media coverage.  Marshall Kilduff of the San Francisco Chronicle and Phil Tracy of the Village Voice began researching the Temple.  The Chronicle, nervous after the backlash against Lester Kinsolving’s aborted series in the Examiner, declined to publish the article Kilduff and Tracy submitted. 

New West magazine would print what the Chron would not.  The night before the issue featuring the Kilduff and Tracy piece came out, New West editor Rosalie Wright phoned Jones and read him the article.  The following day, August 1, 1977, the new edition hit the newsstands and went out to the subscribers.

Jim Jones would not be available for comment. 

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

A Paradise on Earth: Part 2 - "I'll Be Your God"

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

A Paradise on Earth: Part 1 - Tragedy

They all seemed happy.

They all seemed happy in the photos and film footage.  The images give the impression that Jonestown was the earthly paradise Peoples Temple propaganda made it out to be. 

The reality, as we know, was different.  The murder-suicide of 909 people at Jonestown in November 1978 led to the unmasking of what Peoples Temple had become in its final years and the true character of its charismatic pastor, Jim Jones.  The congregation had fled from its base in San Francisco to Guyana the previous year as media revelations surfaced of Jones’ erratic behavior and abuse within the church. 

The day of the massacre Temple gunmen had killed Congressman Leo Ryan, several members of his party, as well as a few Temple defectors attempting to leave Jonestown at a nearby airstrip.  Ryan had been on an official visit to investigate allegations made by relatives of Temple members.  The prospect of losing even a handful of members and possible legal action against him back home pushed Jones over the edge.  After Ryan’s murder Jones told his followers that they faced attack from the Guyanese and U.S. militaries and that there was only one way out.  Those who did not willingly drink the cyanide-laced grape punch were forcibly given the poison.

Followed days later by the assassinations of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, an uneasy pall fell upon those of us living in Northern California.  I was twelve and just becoming aware of the wider world.  I did not fully understand what had happened, only that I felt troubled whenever the story came up on the TV news or in conversation among the adults. 

It certainly was an odd time.  David Talbot captures the zeitgeist in The Season of the Witch, parts of which cover Peoples Temple’s time in the Bay Area and the Moscone mayoralty.  Reading Talbot brings back the same feelings of forty years ago.  Like most people outside San Francisco, I’d never heard of Peoples Temple until after the suicides.  Thinking back on it, though, I’m a little surprised I hadn’t.

Certain aspects of my childhood were a trifle unconventional.  My parents were still together then and even though we lived in a small town with conservative values they experimented with religion.  We kids were not reared in any particular faith outside a nominal adherence to Protestant Christianity.  Nevertheless, our mom and dad searched fruitlessly for a spiritual home.  Perhaps they were grasping for something to save their failing marriage; I don’t know and it really doesn’t matter at this remove. 

For a while we sampled a variety of churches, most outside the mainstream.  My sisters and I were subjected to an evangelical Baptist Sunday School for a few weeks.  We looked into the Seventh Day Adventists and Christian Science.  Mom renewed ties with some of her Mormon relatives with a mind toward conversion.  Dad pursued an interest in faith healing for a spell.  Mom dragged him to seances and “channelings.”  She eventually settled on a cherrypicked mishmash of New Age ideas as her professed belief.  I’m not sure where Dad ended up.  I sleep in Sunday mornings.

Histories of Peoples Temple in the 1970s list several satellite congregations in addition to its homebases in San Francisco and Los Angeles.  One purportedly was in the city nearest our home.  Jim Jones’ charisma and the Temple’s emphasis on such woo as miracle cures through laying on of hands should have made it a natural choice for my parents.  Nevertheless, we never attended and it was never mentioned by my folks until the Temple became headline news.

The only reference to this satellite church near my childhood home was a passing reference by Jones in a radio interview.  A search of city directories yields no clues.  Jones was given to hyperbole; perhaps the congregation was just in his mind.

The real tragedy of Peoples Temple, aside from the obvious, is that it was a truly positive force in the lives of its members.  The prevailing discourse surrounding the Temple emphasizes Jones’ mental unraveling and his abusive behavior.  Something clearly had gone awry in those last years.  But if we look at the Temple’s pursuit of racial harmony and social justice and its devotion to its congregants’ material welfare in sickness and old age, it compares very favorably not only to other New Religious Movements but to established churches as well.

I once made this claim in a paper I presented at an academic conference.  The panel discussant’s comments were generally favorable and she offered up the customary suggestions for improvement.  The subsequent audience Q&A was not as friendly.  “How can you say anything good about a man who killed his followers?” and so forth.  You can’t win ‘em all.  I’ve had worse presentations.  I still think I’m right.

Peoples Temple’s legacy is enshrined in offhanded cultural references like “drinking the Kool Aid.”  I’m uncomfortably amused by the name of San Francisco rock band The Brian Jonestown Massacre.  Serious depictions fixate on the mass suicide in the jungle to the exclusion of a deeper look at the events and forces leading up to it.  The reason we don’t discuss the implications of the Temple’s fate is that it hits too close to home.

As a society we are seized by bouts of irrationality.  Remember the evil clown sightings around public schools and playgrounds a couple of years ago?  The news media covered the story without a smidgen of skepticism, fueling the hysteria.  How about the fears over Satanists during the 1980s and 90s?  People went to prison because prosecutors and juries bought into fantastical stories.  Drivers looking at rather than through their windshields in the early 1960s were convinced that the tiny pitting in the glass was caused by atomic fallout instead of normal wear and tear.  Women in Mattoon, Illinois, during the Second World War suffered fainting spells said to have been caused by an unknown man spraying a mysterious gas through their open windows at night.

We’re unnerved by the ways cults hook and hold on to their adherents because deep down we recognize our own credulity.  Peoples Temple is commonly remembered as a cult, even though it was formally part of the mainstream Disciples of Christ.  In its time, the Temple must have been an unsettling presence in the midst of changing mores.

The trajectory of Peoples Temple from a small midwestern church to a West Coast political force to a utopian agricultural settlement in the wilds of South America was an unlikely one, even with the weird vicissitudes of American life.  The ensuing tragedy bears an occasional retelling that goes beyond the customary shrugs and clichés. 

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar