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

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

Climate Change

Going through this morning’s campus mail, I found a hand-addressed envelope among the usual clutch of publisher’s circulars and club announcements.

This is unusual.  I rarely get personal mail through the college.  The missive was formally addressed to “Mr. Unassuming Scholar” at my college’s main campus where I’d taught during summer session.  That explained the delay between the day it was mailed and my receiving it at the satellite campus where I normally work.  I surmised it was from one of the students in that class, but there was no return address.

I’d hoped it was good news about the sender’s transfer to a prestigious four-year uni, or an award or scholarship won.  No such luck.  Instead, the envelope’s only contents were a clipping from the Wall Street Journal.  It was an editorial by David Gerlenter published last week.  Its heading: “The Real Reason They Hate Trump.” 

Evidently the sender considered me to be one of the titular they.  The gist of the article is that those in the “Left” (i.e., mainstream centrist Democrats who oppose the president’s policies) do not have any program aside from attacking him.  More to the point, “they” hate Donald Trump because he’s a larger than life version of the average American.   The sender highlighted what he (presumably it was a he) believed were the most important passages in case I missed it in my liberal cluelessness. 

In a week which witnessed such horrors as the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh and the mailing of pipe bombs to Democratic politicians and the murder of two African Americans by a white supremacist in Louisville, receiving a clipping from an anonymous critic is beneath trivial.  But in one sense it’s all of a piece, reflections of the sea change in an already poisonous social climate which existed well before the 2016 election.  Incivility has become an accepted social norm.  We choose our “enemies” and proceed to dehumanize them.  For a few of the less balanced among us, it is a short leap to violence.

Most of what we experience is petty nastiness from the people we disagree with or have chosen to dislike us for who we are.  Unreasonableness festers on both sides of the divide.  Among some of my colleagues, political discussions that don’t categorically vilify Trump are met with knee-jerk hostility.  Early on in the Mueller investigation, a friend asked when (not if, when) the president would be impeached.  I said that as far as I could tell The Donald’s misdeeds did not rise to treason or bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors.  Her expression hardened, her eyes narrowed slightly, and she asked in a strained voice why I was taking his side.  I wasn’t defending him by any means; I was simply reading the tea leaves of the news and offering an opinion of what was politically feasible. 

The Gerlenter article gets one thing right in that Democratic leaders have been tone deaf when discussing the very working people the party has historically championed.  Barack Obama saying that they needed to let go of religion and guns and Hillary Clinton describing Trump supporters as “deplorables” are the most cited examples of this.  Such attitudes percolate through affluent liberal social circles, an implicit criticism which is as much of working class culture and tastes as it is of their political preferences.

This trend cuts both ways, and again it’s often a matter of style.  While affluent liberals take a condescending approach, some of the symbolic blows struck by the Trump crowd verge on the childish.  Sometimes it’s merely offensive bumper stickers and T-shirt slogans.  Other times it’s less benign such as the practice of diesel pickup owners disabling emissions controls so as to produce sootier exhaust while passing Priuses, a pastime called “rolling coal.”  Sometimes it takes a dark turn in the form of racist, anti-immigrant, or homophobic websites and social media posts.

The White House’s protestations that the president is not responsible for the uptick in hate crimes are factually correct on their face, but it is a disingenuous argument nonetheless.  Donald Trump has benefited enormously from the bottled-up anger of poor whites.  Gerlenter’s thesis that Trump is what half of America sees in the mirror as their idealized self is spot on.  As another commenter said (and I don’t remember who), Donald Trump is a poor American’s idea of a rich person.  He’s the product of mass frustration over the perceived loss of an American dream. 

What’s left unsaid, or more accurately unacknowledged, is that even in the era of our nation’s “greatness” many of those sporting MAGA hats still would not have thrived.  The myth of equality in America is that it’s myth.  Always has been.  Consequently, the only thing propping up the self-image of many Trump supporters is the prospect of preserving white male dominance. 

Conservatism is all about hierarchy, and the only arena in which working class whites historically benefited from hierarchy was through racial and gender dominance.  That’s what’s driving the PC backlash; it’s an assertion of the supposed right of straight white men to dominate.  Trump’s antics with women, his xenophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric, his insensitivity to the rights of others, his bluster, his substitution of his own judgments for the actual expertise of others, and his gaudy, shameless persona are all a figment of their collective id. 

As for the assertion that liberals are devoid of solutions or a viable political program, I pretty much agree.  For three decades the Democrats have merely tread water; instead of offering an alternative to the Republican program it instead swung to the right so as to hold on to any kind of base.  Like my unnamed correspondent who sent the clipping, like Mr. Gerlenter, I can plainly see that the Democratic Party is adrift and rudderless.  That said, my unnamed correspondent misjudges my political stance.  I am not a liberal.  I am a progressive.

Republican candidates have muddied the ideological waters in the run-up to next week’s election by tarring centrist Democrats as dangerous radicals.  Whereas I once inwardly bristled when a professor in graduate school described the public of being politically unsophisticated, I’m beginning to think she was on to something. 

What were simple ideological descriptors have become epithetic projectiles.  Most progressives are not dangerous radicals, and the typical liberal certainly is not.  And yet half the voting public is being gradually convinced this is the case if they aren’t there already.  And although the mainstream Dems are short of new ideas, my fellow progressives, particularly those who espouse the idea of participatory democracy, are not only forging new ideas but organizing on the street as well.   Maybe their efforts will ultimately stem the tide of political climate change for the better…if they’re given half a chance.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar