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
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