Jim Jones

• 1. Introduction

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  Jim Jones was an American preacher who founded the Peoples Temple. On the 18th of November 1978, 912 people died at his jungle commune in Jonestown, Guyana. Among them were 304 children. Jones called the event "revolutionary suicide," a term coined by Huey P. Newton. Jonestown reshaped how the public thinks about cults. Yet in the final days of the 1976 campaign, vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale met privately with Jones on his campaign plane. Jones was then known as a civil rights activist and a valued political ally. How did a poor child from rural Indiana end up on that plane? What did thousands of followers see in him? And why did hundreds follow him into a remote jungle, from which some were not allowed to leave?

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• 2. A Boy From Lynn

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  Jim Jones was born on the 13th of May 1931 in Crete, Indiana, to James Thurman Jones and Lynetta Putnam. His father was a disabled veteran of the First World War, left with severe breathing trouble after a chemical weapons attack. A military pension could not support the family, so he sometimes took road repair jobs around the neighborhood. In 1934, deep in the Great Depression, the family was evicted after missing mortgage payments. Relatives bought a shack in the nearby town of Lynn, where the boy grew up without plumbing or electricity. Food was scarce, and the family sometimes foraged in the surrounding forest and fields.

  Biographers describe Lynetta as having "no natural maternal instincts." When Jones started school, his extended family threatened to stop helping unless she took a job outside the home. His father, meanwhile, was repeatedly hospitalized. With both parents so often absent, the boy wandered the streets of Lynn, sometimes naked. Women in town fed him, clothed him, and gave him small gifts.

  One of those women was Myrtle Kennedy, wife of the pastor at the Nazarene church. She gave Jones a Bible, urged him to study it, and taught him the church's holiness code. He went on to attend services at most of the churches in Lynn and was baptized in several of them. Even as a child he wanted to preach, and he practiced in private. His mother was alarmed to catch him imitating the pastor of the Apostolic Pentecostal church.

  Neighbors felt sympathy for the boy but thought him strange, fixated on religion and death. He visited a casket manufacturer in Lynn and held mock funerals for roadkill he had collected. When other children would not attend, he conducted the services alone. He also claimed he could fly. After he jumped off a roof to prove it, he broke his arm, yet he kept making the claim.

  At the community library, Jones became a voracious reader of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, and Mahatma Gandhi. He later told his wife that Mao Zedong was his hero. As World War II began, he became fascinated with the Nazi Party's pageantry, its cohesion, and Hitler's total power. He ordered neighborhood children to goosestep and beat those who disobeyed. Looking back, he said, "I was ready to kill by the end of the third grade." He described a school performance where every other child had a parent in the audience: "I'm standing there, alone. Always was alone."

  In 1945 his parents separated, and Jones moved with his mother to Richmond, Indiana. He graduated from Richmond High School in December 1948, early and with honors. He carried his Bible almost everywhere, wore his Sunday clothes every day, and scolded classmates for drinking beer, smoking, and dancing. Because he hated losing, he coached teams of younger children instead of playing sports. A baseball game in Richmond, where Black spectators were mistreated, sharpened his hatred of racism. His father belonged to the Indiana Ku Klux Klan, and the two stopped speaking after the father barred one of Jones's Black friends from the house.

  In 1946 Jones took a job as an orderly at Richmond's Reid Hospital, where he began dating a nurse-in-training named Marceline Mae Baldwin. In November 1948 he enrolled at Indiana University Bloomington, intending to become a doctor, but he soon changed course. A speech by Eleanor Roosevelt about the plight of African Americans moved him, and he began voicing support for communism. He married Marceline on the 12th of June 1949. She was Methodist, and he privately pressed her toward atheism. He also abused her emotionally and psychologically. One recurring cruelty was to tell her that a close friend or relative had died, comfort her, and then admit the story was false.

  In 1951 the couple moved to Indianapolis, where Jones took night classes at Butler University. He would not finish his degree in secondary education until 1961. That same year, at age 20, he began attending gatherings of the Communist Party USA. Government harassment followed in 1952. Jones said FBI agents even confronted his mother in front of her co-workers. Recalling that period, he said he had asked himself, "How can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church."

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• 3. Borrowed Gospel

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  In the summer of 1952, the Sommerset Southside Methodist Church in Indianapolis hired Jones as student pastor to its children. A Methodist district superintendent helped him get started, even though the superintendent knew Jones was a communist. Jones launched a playground project open to children of every race. In early 1954 the Methodists dismissed him, ostensibly for stealing church funds. Jones later claimed instead that church leaders had forbidden him from integrating his congregation.

  A Pentecostal Latter Rain convention in Columbus, Indiana, in 1953 gave him a new direction. There a woman prophesied that Jones was a prophet destined for a great ministry. Surprised but pleased, he rose to the podium and preached. He saw the Latter Rain movement as racially integrated and fast growing, and he persuaded Marceline to leave the Methodists with him. In 1953 he began preaching at the Laurel Street Tabernacle, an Assemblies of God church in Indianapolis, and he held healing revivals there until 1955.

  That year, the Assemblies of God assigned a new pastor to Laurel Street who enforced the denomination's ban on healing revivals. Jones left and started a church called Wings of Healing, which would later be renamed Peoples Temple. Only twenty members followed him, and money was so tight that he sold pet monkeys to raise funds. He needed publicity, and he found it in William Branham, a healing evangelist who was a leader of the global Healing Revival.

  Jones held his first joint meetings with Branham in June 1955. In 1956, Joseph Mattsson-Boze, a leader of the Latter Rain movement, ordained him as a minister of the Independent Assemblies of God. Jones then organized a healing convention at Indianapolis's Cadle Tabernacle, running from the 11th to the 15th of June 1956, and he persuaded Branham to share the pulpit. Branham was known for telling strangers their name, their address, and the reason they had come for prayer. Jones studied the method and began performing the same feats. Their first joint campaign drew 11,000 people, and Branham publicly endorsed Jones's ministry. A newspaper reported that regular attendance at Peoples Temple swelled to 1,000, with Jones recruiting especially well among African American attendees.

  Branham also supplied doctrine. The Latter Rain movement taught that certain people could become manifestations of God with supernatural gifts, called the Manifested Sons of God. Jones adapted the idea to his own utopian vision and eventually to himself. By the late 1960s he was teaching that he embodied "Christ the Revolution." Like Branham, he would later claim to be the prophet Elijah returned and warn that the world's end was near. The two men broke after a bitter quarrel in which Jones prophesied Branham's death.

  Father Divine, the African American leader of the International Peace Mission movement, was the second model. Pentecostal ministers often mocked him for claiming divinity. In 1956 Jones visited the Peace Mission in Philadelphia, saying he wanted to give his fellow ministers an unbiased report. In practice he copied Divine's ideas on communal living and his outreach, including a soup kitchen and free groceries and clothing for the needy. He visited again in 1958 and boasted to his congregation that he wanted to succeed Divine. In 1971, after Divine's death, Jones led followers to his shrine and told Divine's widow he was Divine's reincarnation. She called him the devil in disguise and demanded that he leave. The visit won him only twelve recruits.

  By 1960, Jones was drifting away from Pentecostalism and wanted a denomination that would tolerate all his beliefs. Peoples Temple joined the Disciples of Christ, which had its headquarters in Indianapolis. A church official named Archie Ijames assured him that his politics would be accepted, and the Disciples ordained him in 1964. Allegations of abuse reached Disciples leaders in both 1974 and 1977, and investigators found no evidence of wrongdoing. Peoples Temple gave the denomination $1.1 million between 1966 and 1977. The Disciples described it as "an exemplary Christian ministry overcoming human differences and dedicated to human services."

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• 4. Integration and Family

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  In 1960, Indianapolis Mayor Charles Boswell appointed Jones director of the city's human rights commission. The mayor advised him to keep a low profile, and Jones ignored the advice. He used the post to win time on local radio and television, and he refused requests to tone down his public actions. At a gathering of the NAACP and the Urban League, he urged the audience to be more militant and ended with "Let my people go!" The crowd cheered him wildly.

  As commission director, Jones helped integrate churches, restaurants, the telephone company, the Indianapolis Police Department, a theater, an amusement park, and a hospital. He set up sting operations to catch restaurants that refused to serve Black customers. He also wrote to American Nazi Party leaders and gave their replies to the press. When swastikas appeared on the homes of two Black families, he walked the neighborhood to comfort the residents and urged white neighbors not to move away.

  In 1961 Jones collapsed and was hospitalized. The hospital accidentally placed him in its Black ward, and he refused to be moved. He even made beds and emptied bedpans for the Black patients around him. Political pressure from the episode led hospital officials to desegregate their wards. White supremacists targeted Peoples Temple in response. A swastika was placed on the church, a stick of dynamite was left in its coal pile, and a dead cat was thrown at Jones's house after a threatening phone call. The publicity still drew a larger congregation, and by the end of 1961 one account credited Jones with almost entirely changing Indianapolis.

  Jones also built what he called a "rainbow family." In 1954 he and Marceline adopted their first child, Agnes, who was part Native American. In 1959 they adopted three Korean-American children named Lew, Stephanie, and Suzanne. Stephanie died in a car accident that May, at age 5. The following month, Marceline gave birth to their only biological child, Stephan Gandhi. In 1961 they became the first white couple in Indiana to adopt a Black child, whom they named Jim Jones Jr. They also adopted a white boy named Timothy Glen Tupper, whose birth mother belonged to the Temple. Jones explained, "Integration is a more personal thing with me now. It's a question of my son's future." He later fathered another son, Jim Jon, known as Kimo, with Temple member Carolyn Layton.

  The same year brought a darker turn. In 1961 Jones warned his congregation of visions in which a nuclear attack devastated Indianapolis. Marceline confided to friends that her husband was growing paranoid and fearful.

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• 5. Apostolic Socialism

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  In January 1962, Jones read an Esquire magazine article claiming that South America was the safest place to escape a nuclear war. He traveled to scout locations, stopping first in Georgetown, Guyana, then a British colony, where he held revival meetings. His family then rented a modest three-bedroom house in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Language proved a barrier, and he spoke of an apostolic communal life rather than Marxism. In mid-1963 the family moved to Rio de Janeiro to work among the poor in the favelas.

  Back in Indiana, Peoples Temple was crumbling. Attendance fell below 100 during Jones's year away, and the church went into debt sending him money. In late 1963 Archie Ijames warned that the Temple was about to collapse and threatened to resign. Jones returned that December to a bitterly divided congregation. He sold the church building and moved to a smaller one. He then told his flock that nuclear war would engulf the world on the 15th of July 1967 and that the Temple must move to Northern California for safety. Possibly he hoped to distract members from the church's troubles.

  In July 1965 the move began, to Redwood Valley near Ukiah, California. About 140 of the most loyal followers went. Assistant pastor Russell Winberg resisted, warned that Jones was abandoning Christianity, and took over the Indianapolis church. In California, Jones taught history and government at an adult education school in Ukiah, lecturing on the benefits of Marxism and planting loyal Temple members in his classes. He recruited 50 people in the first few months. In 1968 the California congregation was admitted to the Disciples of Christ, and Jones invoked famous Disciples such as Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover to boost the Temple's standing. By 1969 membership had reached 300.

  Jones called his creed Apostolic Socialism. It blended Branham's teachings, Father Divine's economic socialism, and his own communist worldview. He hid its communist side until the late 1960s, then introduced it gradually. By the early 1970s he was mocking mainstream Christianity as "fly away religion" and calling its God a "Sky God" who was "no God at all." He told his congregation, "I am come as God Socialist." He baptized converts "in the holy name of Socialism," and he taught that being born in capitalist America meant being born in sin. He claimed divinity only inside the Temple, since he feared losing tax-exempt status and the support of political leaders. Biographer Jeff Guinn wrote, "It is impossible to know whether Jones gradually came to think he was God's earthly vessel, or whether he came to that convenient conclusion to enhance his authority over his followers."

  A Planning Commission of Jones's lieutenants soon directed every part of Temple life. Members handed over all their assets in exchange for free room and board, and those with outside jobs turned over their pay. Jones's control reached into sex lives and marriages, and some members were pressured into abortions. He demanded sexual favors from women in the church and raped several men. Rebels faced reduced food, harsher work, public humiliation, and sometimes beatings. As membership grew, he formed an armed security group. After moving to California he also began using illicit drugs, and his paranoia grew. He warned that an enemy was out to destroy the Temple, an enemy he identified over time as the Klan, Nazis, vigilantes, and finally the American government.

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• 6. San Francisco Power

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  By 1970, Peoples Temple had opened branches in San Fernando, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Ukiah offered limited room to grow, and Jones turned to the big cities. He eventually moved the Temple's headquarters to San Francisco, a center of radical protest. By 1973 the Temple counted 2,570 members and 36,000 subscribers to its fundraising newsletter. At its peak it would have more than 3,000 members.

  A 1970 visit to San Francisco's Missionary Baptist Church showed how he grew the flock. Jones arrived with 150 followers and claimed to heal a man of cancer. His followers later admitted they had helped stage the miracle. He then attacked Baptist teachings and urged the congregation to join him, winning about 200 new members.

  Jones also moved into politics, and the Temple's numbers gave him leverage. Peoples Temple played a major role in George Moscone's 1975 election as mayor of San Francisco. Moscone rewarded Jones by naming him chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission. Jones hosted local politicians at his San Francisco apartment for discussions.

  In September 1976, Assemblyman Willie Brown served as master of ceremonies at a testimonial dinner for Jones. Governor Jerry Brown and Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally attended. Brown said Jones was what you should see every day when you look in the mirror, and he compared him to Martin Luther King Jr., Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Mao. Harvey Milk spoke at Temple rallies and wrote to Jones afterward: "I found something dear today. I found a sense of being that makes up for all the hours and energy placed in a fight. I found what you wanted me to find. I shall be back. For I can never leave."

  First Lady Rosalynn Carter met Jones several times and corresponded with him about Cuba. She spoke with him at the grand opening of the Temple's San Francisco headquarters, where he drew louder applause than she did. Allies at the San Francisco Chronicle and other press outlets gave him favorable coverage in his early California years. The first sour coverage arrived in October 1971, when reporters attended one of his healing services during a visit to his old church in Indianapolis.

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• 7. Hoaxes and Exposure

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  The Indiana State Psychology Board opened an investigation into Jones's healing practices in 1972, after the 1971 news report. A doctor involved accused him of "quackery" and challenged him to hand over tissue samples of the material he claimed fell from healed cancer patients. Jones had staged miracles since his campaigns with Branham. In one case he drugged Temple member Irene Mason, and a cast was put on her arm while she slept. She was told she had broken it in a fall, and at a later service Jones removed the cast and declared her healed. In other services, someone from his inner circle joined the prayer line, pretended to cough up a tumor, and produced a chicken gizzard.

  Jones's apparent clairvoyance was also staged. Associates called on potential recruits at home, posing as examiners with an unrelated purpose, and asked detailed questions. Jones then revealed the answers as supposed special revelations. Frightened by the investigation, he announced the end of his Indiana ministry and played down his healing claims to the authorities. In September 1972, Lester Kinsolving published a series in the San Francisco Examiner that reported Jones's claims of divinity and exposed the faked miracles.

  In 1973, a former follower named Ross Case began investigating the Temple with a group in Ukiah. They found a staged healing, the abusive treatment of one woman, and evidence that Jones had raped a male member. Case took his findings to local police, who took no action. Eight Temple members then left and made accusations of abuse against the Planning Commission and staff. Jones became convinced he was losing control. On the 13th of December 1973 he was arrested in Los Angeles on a lewd conduct charge involving an undercover vice officer. The charge was dismissed on the 20th of December, the court file was sealed, and the judge ordered the arrest records destroyed.

  By the fall of 1973, Jones and the Planning Commission had already drawn up an escape plan in case of a government raid. They chose Guyana, citing its recent revolution, its socialist government, and the welcome Jones had received there in 1963. In October the group voted unanimously to build an agricultural commune there. Jones told a newspaper he would have preferred China or the Soviet Union and was sad that he could not go. By the summer of 1974 land and supplies had been bought, and Jones oversaw a power plant, cleared fields, and dormitories. The first settlers arrived in December 1974 in what would become Jonestown.

  Jones went back to the United States to fight the bad press, with little success. In 1977, Marshall Kilduff published a story in New West magazine, built on defectors' allegations of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Jones began pressing Temple members to move to Guyana with him.

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• 8. Jonestown

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  At the start of 1977, Jonestown held about 50 settlers and was not ready for a large influx. In May, Jones arrived with about 600 followers, and some 400 more came in the following months. Buildings had fallen into disrepair and weeds were creeping into the fields. Jones began moving the Temple's financial assets overseas, valued at over $10 million, and selling property in the United States. About 68 percent of Jonestown's residents were Black.

  The workday ran from roughly 6:30 in the morning to 6:00 in the evening, six days a week at first. Each evening residents gathered in the central pavilion for hours of activities, including classes in socialism. Jones compared this schedule to North Korea's pattern of eight hours of work and eight of study. He read news from Radio Moscow and Radio Havana that cast the United States as an imperialist villain and praised leaders such as Kim Il Sung and Joseph Stalin. Sermons also played on a loop over loudspeakers. According to escapee Teri Buford O'Shea, Jones told her, "Let's keep them poor and tired, because if they're poor they can't escape and if they're tired they can't make plans."

  A custody fight pulled outsiders in. Grace Stoen left the Temple in 1976 and left her son, John Victor Stoen, behind. Jones, who claimed to be the boy's father, had the child taken to Guyana in February 1977. After Timothy Stoen left in June 1977, Jones kept the boy at his own home. Stoen and other defectors formed a "Concerned Relatives" group in the autumn of 1977 on behalf of family members in Jonestown who were not permitted to return. Stoen's efforts in Washington caught the attention of California Congressman Leo Ryan, who wrote to Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham. On the 11th of April 1978 the group sent out an "Accusation of Human Rights Violations by Rev. James Warren Jones."

  In June 1978, Deborah Layton, who had escaped Jonestown, added an affidavit that described the food. Her account listed rice for breakfast, rice water soup for lunch, and rice and beans for dinner. She said Jones ate richer meals, often with meat, and shared them with a few chosen aides. Jones, now under heavy scrutiny, hired conspiracy theorists Mark Lane and Donald Freed to argue that U.S. intelligence agencies were plotting against the Temple. He also explored resettling in the Soviet Union. In October 1978 the Soviet consul to Guyana, Feodor Timofeyev, spent two days in Jonestown and thanked Jones personally.

  Fear of a raid led Jones to stage drills he called White Nights. He would shout "Alert, Alert, Alert" over the loudspeaker, and residents would gather at the pavilion surrounded by armed guards with guns and crossbows. Followers were told only afterward that the attack had been a drill. A September 1977 drill lasted six days and became known as the Six Day Siege. In 1978 Jones told the crowd that he was handing out poison for all to drink in an act of suicide. People sat weeping and waiting to die, until he said the punch was harmless. Layton recalled, "When the time came when we should have dropped dead, Rev. Jones explained that the poison was not real and that we had just been through a loyalty test."

  Congressman Ryan led a fact-finding mission to Jonestown in November 1978. His delegation included relatives of Temple members, an NBC camera crew, and several newspaper reporters. They reached Georgetown on the 15th of November and flew two days later to Port Kaituma. That night, at a reception in the pavilion, Temple member Vernon Gosney slipped a note to NBC reporter Don Harris asking for help leaving with Monica Bagby. On the 18th of November, Ryan narrowly avoided being stabbed by Temple member Don Sly. The delegation left hurriedly with 15 Temple members who wanted out, and Jones made no attempt to stop them then.

  At the Port Kaituma airstrip, Jonestown's armed Red Brigade opened fire on the party as it boarded two planes. The gunmen killed Ryan and four others near a Twin Otter. NBC cameraman Bob Brown filmed the first seconds of the shooting before he was killed. The other dead were Harris, San Francisco Examiner photographer Greg Robinson, and Temple member Patricia Parks. Inside a Cessna, Larry Layton, one of the supposed defectors, drew a weapon and fired on passengers.

  Later that day, Jones ordered a mass murder-suicide at Jonestown. Aides had already prepared a large metal tub of grape Flavor Aid laced with cyanide and other drugs. Most members died by drinking it, and those who resisted were forcibly injected with cyanide. Back at the airstrip, others had run into the jungle to survive, among them Jackie Speier, later a Congresswoman, and Tim Reiterman, whose reporting grew into a biography of Jones.

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