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

After the Guns Fell Silent

The First World War ended a hundred years ago today.

November 11^th is commemorated each year in our country as Veterans Day.  Most of us treat it as just another welcome day off from work or school.  In spite of our cultural fetishization of veterans and the military, however, the origins of the holiday don’t receive much scrutiny.

In Europe, the legacy of the Great War looms large.  I visited London in the summer of 2014 during the commemoration of the war’s centenary and you couldn’t avoid it.  At home, it received sparse notice from a historically oblivious public.

The war and its aftermath have irrevocably changed the course of events in ways which reverberate into the present.  It doesn’t seem to matter much to us, though.  The President traveled all the way to France for the commemoration yet declined to attend a wreath-laying at the Aisne-Marne cemetery at the last minute due to rain.  He also decided not to attend the scheduled Peace Forum summit.  The optics of this in Europe and elsewhere will be undoubtedly negative.

Then again, Mr. Trump’s opt-out is understandable considering how the people back home view that war and the value they place on peace.  World War I took the lives of 53,000 Americans in combat deaths alone not to mention another 63,000 dead from illness but since it rates only a brief mention in the high school history lessons we slept through, it might as well have never happened.

It is not accurate to say that November 11, 1918 marked the end of the fighting.  That was just on the Western Front.  It dragged on for several more years in various theaters in Europe and the Middle East.  The Greeks and Turks and Arabs and Armenians and British and French and Italians all contended for the forlorn remains of the Ottoman Empire.  Russia was wracked by civil war.  Hungary and Bavaria endured first Red, then White Terror.  The Spartacist Uprising was brutally suppressed; Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were among the victims.  Marauding Freikorps threatened the nascent Weimar Republic.

Even at home things were far from calm.  The 1919 Red Scare, unlike most other periods of national hysteria over exaggerated threats, had some justification.  It also provoked the usual disproportionate official and public response.  The Palmer Raids (instigated after attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer’s house was bombed by unknown assailants) were one manifestation.  The mob killing of Wobbly and recently discharged soldier Wesley Everest was another, as were the mass deportations of socialists and anarchists (Emma Goldman being one of them). 

Unsurprisingly, there was an uptick in racial violence as well during 1919’s “Red Summer” in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Omaha, Knoxville, Charleston, South Carolina, Longview, Texas, and Phillips County, Arkansas.  The Red Scare’s repercussions were felt into the next decade, culminating with the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, and it would raise its head once more in the 1940s.

So, the end of the First World War was more preface than conclusion.  The unnecessarily punitive conditions placed on Germany fueled popular resentment, while the shortcomings of parliamentary democracy led to the rise of fascism there and elsewhere in Europe. Lurking in the background was the specter of nationalism.

Depending on your political proclivities, nationalism is either a fine thing or it’s deplorable.  The President is a self-proclaimed nationalist.  Many Americans are, though they misappropriate the word “patriot” to describe their nationalism instead.  Right or left, we’re partial to anything which makes a social statement while requiring a minimal investment of time and money.  Thus, wearing a flag lapel pin or slapping a yellow ribbon sticker on a car qualifies one as a patriot. 

The nationalism I am describing is the move toward ethnolinguistic identity which began in the Enlightenment’s aftermath and would challenge the authority of those dynasties ruling multiethnic states.  Such ideas do animate white supremacist and alt-right activism in this country, but probably doesn’t register as strongly with the rest of the American electorate.  It remains very strong in parts of Europe, particularly Central and Eastern Europe. 

This fact became manifest after the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.  I personally witnessed the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s and am still struck by the scope of destruction to both lives and property they brought.  Those conflicts were something of an anomaly, however.  The Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian peoples share a common tongue and racial heritage.  Their national identities are instead rooted in their respective historical religious faiths.  That was enough to plunge them into a war that took roughly 140,000 lives and displaced millions.

That conflict was itself informed by the mass population transfers following the Second World War in Eastern Europe.  A beaten Germany was shrunk to two-thirds of its 1914 territory and split into two mutually hostile states.  Eastern Germans were expelled from their homeland after it was annexed by Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union.  Poles were expelled from their homes in the east after their lands in turn were annexed to the Soviet Union (Poland was actually shifted westward from its 1939 footprint).  Italians were driven from Istria by the Yugoslavs.  The Soviets pushed the Finns out of Karelia.  And so forth.  We can chart the border changes and count the numbers of people involved.  The scale of the human suffering caused cannot be measured.

This is the legacy of the “forgotten” World War.  Few Americans know about it, or care.  This does not negate the profound value of the lesson the twentieth century nightmare can teach us, however.  We ignore it at our peril.

Enjoy your day off, everyone.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar