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