Peoples Temple

James Warren Jones was a Christian-Communist cult leader, preacher and self-professed faith healer who conspired with his inner circle to direct a mass murder-suicide of himself and his followers within his "new Jerusalem" commune at Jonestown, Guyana on November 18, 1978. Through Liberation Theology he launched the People’s Temple in Indiana during the 1950s.

Jim Jones

James Warren Jones was an American preacher, political activist, and mass murderer. He led the Peoples Temple, a new religious movement, between 1955 and 1978. Beginning in the late 1960s, reports of abuse began to surface as Jones became increasingly vocal in his rejection of traditional Christianity and began promoting a form of communism he called "Apostolic Socialism" and making claims of his own divinity.

Jones was of Irish and Welsh descent; he and his mother both claimed to also have some Cherokee ancestry, but there is no evidence of this. Jones's father was a disabled World War I veteran who suffered from severe breathing difficulties due to injuries which he sustained in a chemical weapons attack. The history of the Peoples Temple Christian Church begins in the American Midwest in the 1950’s. Jim Jones was born into what he described as a “lily white town where Negroes were not allowed to remain after sundown.”.

Commenting on his childhood, Jones stated:

Jones developed an intense interest in religion and social doctrines. He became a voracious reader who studied Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong and Mahatma Gandhi.

“Jones would tell his future wife Marceline that Mao Tse-tung was his hero.”

Rev. Jim Jones received the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award in January 1977. Jones and his wife were avid race mixers having adopted several non-white children, referring to the household as his “rainbow family,” and stating: “Integration is a more personal thing with me now. It’s a question of my son’s future.” He also portrayed the Temple as a “rainbow family.”.

Jones hosted local political figures, including Angela Davis, at his San Francisco apartment for discussions. He spoke with publisher Carlton Goodlett about his remorse over not being able to travel to socialist countries such as China and the Soviet Union, speculating that he could be Chief Dairyman of the U.S.S.R Jones established the Peoples Temple as a model communist community, adding that the Temple comprised “the purest communists there are”; but Jones did not permit members to leave the settlement.

Jones encouraged Temple members to race mix by adopting orphans from war-ravaged Korea. He was also critical of U.S. opposition to communist leader Kim Il-sung’s 1950 invasion of South Korea, calling it the “war of liberation” and stating that South Korea “is a living example of all that socialism in the north has overcome.”. In March 1978, Jones went to a meeting in the North Korean embassy of Guyana and on over a dozen occasions he and his family met with the North Korean ambassador and other officials in Georgetown, Guyana, and he and the North Koreans exchanged propaganda materials. Jones would indoctrinate his members with North Korean propaganda and extol Kim Il Sung.

In Brazil Jones was careful not to portray himself as a communist in a foreign territory and so spoke of an apostolic communal lifestyle rather than of Castro or Marx. By the early 1970s, Jones began deriding Christianity as “fly away religion,” rejecting the Bible as being a tool to oppress women and non-whites, and denouncing a “Sky God” who was no God at all. Jones also began preaching that he was the reincarnation of Gandhi, Father Divine, Jesus, Gautama Buddha, and Vladimir Lenin.

In a 1976 phone conversation with John Maher, Jones alternately said he was an agnostic and an atheist. Marceline Jones admitted in a 1977 New York Times interview that Jones was trying to promote Marxism in the U.S. by mobilizing people through religion, citing Mao Zedong as his inspiration: “Jim used religion to try to get some people out of the opiate of religion.” He had slammed the Bible on the table, yelling “I’ve got to destroy this paper idol!”.

In September 1976, California assemblyman Willie Brown served as master of ceremonies at a large testimonial dinner for Jones attended by Governor Jerry Brown and Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally. At that dinner, Brown touted Jones as “what you should see every day when you look in the mirror” and said he was a combination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong). Harvey Milk spoke to audiences during political rallies held at the Temple, and he wrote to Jones after one such visit:

Jones spoke with publisher Carlton Goodlett of the San Francisco Sun-Reporter about his remorse over not being able to travel to socialist countries such as the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union, speculating that he could be Chief Dairyman of the U.S.S.R. In the summer of 1977, Jones and several hundred Temple members abruptly decided to move to the Temple’s compound in Guyana after they learned the contents of a newspaper article written by Chronicle reporter Marshall Kilduff, his exposé story appearing in the New West magazine included allegations by former Temple members that they were physically, emotionally, and sexually abused. Jones named the settlement “Jonestown” after himself.

909 inhabitants of Jonestown, 304 of them children, died of apparent cyanide poisoning, mostly in and around the settlement’s main pavilion. Some time after the slaughter, the FBI later recovered a 45-minute audio recording of the suicide in progress. On that tape, Jones tells Temple members that the Soviet Union, with whom the Temple had been negotiating a potential exodus for months, would not take them after the airstrip murders. Jones professed conspiracy theories of intelligence organizations allegedly conspiring against the Temple that men would “parachute in here on us,” “shoot some of our innocent babies,” and “they’ll torture our children, they’ll torture some of our people here, they’ll torture our seniors.”.

One family who left the Peoples Temple, the Mertles, reported that when they first joined they were first treated with great love by Jones and his followers, but this gave way to discipline for minor infractions which started as denouncing and humiliation of the person in front of the entire congregation and then spankings with wooden paddles in front of the congregation. These would end with the punished person saying, “Thank you Father” and Jones would praise how much better they had become (Kilduff & Tracy).

These beatings escalated in their severity. One day, one of their daughters, Linda Mertle, was disciplined for hugging and kissing a female friend who was reputed to be a lesbian, and was swatted on the buttocks 75 times (Kilduff & Tracy). Elmer and Deanna Mertle subsequently left the Peoples Temple and changed their names to Al and Jeanne Mills to void the power of attorney had given Jones. Jones also controlled people by making them write false confessions of crimes and indecent acts and having people give the church their money and property.

Jim Jones would also trick his followers into believing that he had healing powers. Wayne Pietila and Jim and Terri Cobb reported that a people purportedly ill with cancer would be taken into a restroom with Jones and his wife and they would come out apparently healed with the cancer cupped in a napkin. One time, Terri managed to get a look at a bag full of the cancers, and reported, “It was full of napkins and small bits of meat, individually wrapped. They looked like chicken gizzards. I was shocked” (Kilduff & Tracy). He also faked multiple assassination attempts on himself as a demonstration of his ability to heal himself and as a demonstration that the Peoples Temple and Jones had dangerous enemies. Jones made frequent addresses to Temple members regarding Jonestown’s safety, including statements that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were conspiring with “capitalist pigs” to destroy the settlement and harm its inhabitants. After work, when purported emergencies arose, the Temple sometimes conducted what Jones referred to as “White Nights”.

During such events, Jones would sometimes give the Jonestown members four options: attempt to flee to the Soviet Union, commit “revolutionary suicide”, stay in Jonestown and fight the purported attackers, or flee into the jungle. The fear of being held in contempt of the orders caused Jones to set up a false sniper attack upon himself and begin his first series of White Nights, called the "Six Day Siege." During the Siege, Jones spoke to Temple members about attacks from outsiders and had them surround Jonestown with guns and machetes. The fiery rallies took an almost surreal tone as black activists Angela Davis and Huey Newton communicated via radio-telephone to the Jonestown crowd, urging them to hold strong against the "conspiracy." Jones made radio broadcasts stating "we will die unless we are granted freedom from harassment and asylum." Ptolemy Reid finally assured Marceline Jones that the Guyana Defence Force would not invade Jonestown. On at least two occasions during White Nights, after a "revolutionary suicide" vote was reached, a simulated mass suicide was rehearsed. Peoples Temple defector Deborah Layton described the event in anaffidavit:

Three high-ranking Temple survivors claimed they were given an assignment and thereby escaped death. Tim Carter and his brother Mike, aged 30 and 20, and Mike Prokes, 31, were given luggage containing $550,000 in U.S. currency, $130,000 in Guyanese currency, and an envelope, which they were told to deliver to the Soviet embassy in Georgetown. The envelope contained two passports and three instructional letters, the first of which was to Timofeyev, stating:

The letters included listed accounts with balances totalling in excess of $7.3 million to be transferred to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Prokes and the Carter brothers soon ditched most of the money and were apprehended heading for a Temple boat at Port Kaituma. The brothers were given the task before the suicides began, and soon abandoned it when they realized what was about to happen; Tim Carter desperately tried to search for his wife and son, discovering his son in time to witness him being poisoned, and his wife killing herself in despair. At this point, Carter had a nervous breakdown, and was pulled away from the village by his equally distraught brother.

The only medical doctor to initially examine the scene at Jonestown was Mootoo, who visually examined over 200 bodies and later told a Guyanese coroner’s jury to have seen needle marks on at least 70. However, no determination was made whether those injections initiated the introduction of poison or whether they were so-called “relief” injections to quicken death and reduce suffering from convulsions from those who had previously taken poison orally.

Mootoo and American pathologist Lynn Crook determined that cyanide was present in some bodies, while analysis of the contents of the vat revealed several tranquillizers as well as potassium cyanide and potassium chloride. Plastic cups, Flavour Aid packets, and syringes, some with needles and some without, littered the area where the bodies were found.

Found near Marceline Jones’ body was a typewritten note, dated November 18, 1978, signed by Marceline and witnessed by Moore and Maria Katsaris, stating:

On October 2, 1978, Feodor Timofeyev, a Soviet citizen, visited Jonestown for two days and gave a speech. Jones stated before the speech, “For many years, we have let our sympathies be quite publicly known, that the United States government was not our mother, but that the Soviet Union was our spiritual motherland.”

Timofeyev opened the speech stating that the Soviet Union would like to send “our deepest and the most sincere greetings to the people of this first socialist and communist community of the United States of America, in Guyana and in the world”. Both speeches were met by cheers and applause from the crowd in Jonestown. Following the visit, Temple members met almost weekly with Timofeyev to discuss a potential Soviet exodus.

Although Jonestown contained no dedicated prison and no form of capital punishment, various forms of punishment were used against members considered to have serious disciplinary problems. Methods included imprisonment in a 6 × 4 × 3-foot (1.8 × 1.2 × 0.9m) plywood box and forcing children to spend a night at the bottom of a well, sometimes upside-down. This “torture hole”, along with beatings, became the subject of rumour among local Guyanese. For some members who attempted to escape, drugs such as Thorazine, sodium pentathol, chloral hydrate, Demerol, and Valium were administered in an “extended care unit”. Armed guards patrolled the area day and night to enforce Jonestown’s rules.

In the early evening of November 18, at the Temple’s headquarters in Georgetown, Temple member Sharon Amos received a radio communication from Jonestown instructing the members at the headquarters to take revenge on the Temple’s enemies and then commit revolutionary suicide. Later, after police arrived at the headquarters, Sharon escorted her children, Liane (21), Christa (11), and Martin (10), into a bathroom. Wielding a kitchen knife, Sharon first killed Christa, and then Martin. Then, Liane assisted Sharon in killing herself with the knife, after which Liane killed herself with the knife.

After the Jonestown Massacre, those who had praised him before as a partner in social justice, “liberation”, or whatnot, were quick to distance themselves from him, not just on a personal level, but also to deny his ideology. Comedian Mort Sahl, for instance, cooked up a fine “no true Scotsman” fallacy with, “The exercise in Guyana was a fascist exercise, no matter what the label on the can. Socialists don’t do that” (Irvine). The legendary Walter Cronkite (a man who hid his really left-wing politics well for a time) retconned him, holding that he was a “power-hungry fascist” when in truth he hadn’t been fond of fascists since his teenage years and The New York Times labeled his philosophy “fundamentalist Christianity” (Dreher).

Although Jonestown is often thought of as mass suicide, it can more accurately be thought of as mass murder. Those who did so “willingly” did so under brainwashing and many did so unwillingly, at gunpoint. And it cannot be said that any of the 276 children (including John Victor Stoen) chose to end their lives.