Jim Jones: The Peoples Temple (Part I)

James Warren Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was an American civil rights preacher, faith healer and cult leader who conspired with his inner circle to direct a mass murder-suicide of his followers in his jungle commune at Jonestown, Guyana. He launched the Peoples Temple in Indiana during the 1950s. Rev. Jones was ordained in 1957 by the Independent Assemblies of God and in 1964 by the Disciples of Christ.  He moved his congregation to California in 1965 and gained notoriety with its activities in San Francisco in the 1970s. He then left the United States, bringing many members to a Guyana jungle commune.

In 1978, media reports surfaced of human rights abuses in the Peoples Temple in Jonestown. U.S. Representative Leo Ryan led a delegation to the commune to investigate. Ryan and others were murdered by gunfire while boarding a return flight with some former cult members who had wished to leave. Jones then ordered and likely coerced a mass suicide and mass murder of 918 commune members, 304 of them children, almost all by cyanide-poisoned Flavor Aid.

Early life

Jones was born on May 13, 1931, in a rural area of Crete, Indiana to James Thurman Jones (1887–1951), a World War I veteran, and Lynetta Putnam (1902–1977).  Jones was of Irish and Welsh descent; he later claimed partial Cherokee ancestry through his mother, but his maternal second cousin said this was untrue.  Economic difficulties during the Great Depression led the family to Lynn, Indiana in 1934, where Jones grew up in a shack without plumbing.

Jones was a voracious reader who studied Stalin, Marx, Mao, Gandhi, and Hitler, carefully noting the strengths and weaknesses of each.  He also developed an intense interest in religion. One writer suggests this was primarily because he found it difficult to make friends. Childhood acquaintances recalled him as a "really weird kid" who was obsessed with religion and death. They alleged that he frequently held funerals for small animals on his parents' property and that he had stabbed a cat to death.

Jones and a childhood friend both claimed his father was associated with the Ku Klux Klan, which had gained a stronghold in Depression-era Indiana.  Jones recounted how he and his father clashed on the issue of race, and how he did not speak with his father for "many, many years" after he refused to allow one of Jones's black friends into the house. Jones's parents separated, and Jones moved with his mother to Richmond, Indiana.  In December 1948, he graduated from Richmond High School early with honors.

Jones married Nurse Marceline Baldwin (1927–1978) in 1949, and they moved to Bloomington, Indiana. She died with him in Jonestown.  He attended Indiana University Bloomington, where he was impressed with a speech by Eleanor Roosevelt about the plight of African-Americans.   In 1951, the couple moved to Indianapolis. Jones attended Indiana University for two years and then took night classes at Butler University, earning a degree in secondary education in 1961—ten years after enrolling.

Founding of the Peoples Temple

Indiana beginnings

In 1951, twenty-year-old Jones began attending gatherings of the Communist Party USA in Indianapolis.  He became flustered with harassment during the McCarthy Hearings, particularly regarding an event that he attended with his mother focusing on Paul Robeson, after which she was harassed by the FBI in front of her co-workers for attending.  He also became frustrated with the persecution of open and accused communists in the United States, especially during the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.  Jones said he asked himself, "How can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church."

Jones was surprised when a Methodist district superintendent helped him get a start in the church, even though he knew Jones to be a communist.  In 1952, he became a student pastor at the Sommerset Southside Methodist Church, but later claimed he left the church because its leaders barred him from integrating blacks into his congregation.  Around this time, Jones witnessed a faith-healing service at a Seventh Day Baptist Church.  He observed that it attracted people and their money and he concluded that he could accomplish his social goals with financial resources from such services.

Jones organized a mammoth religious convention to take place June 11–15, 1956 in Cadle Tabernacle. He needed a well-known religious figure to draw crowds, so he arranged to share the pulpit with Rev. William M. Branham, a healing evangelist and religious author who was as highly revered as Oral Roberts.  Jones was able to launch his own church following the convention, which had various names until it became the Peoples Temple Christian Church Full Gospel.   The Peoples Temple was initially an interracial mission.

Jones was known to regularly study Adolf Hitler and Father Divine to learn how to manipulate members of the cult. Divine told Jones personally to "find an enemy" and "to make sure they know who the enemy is" as it will unify those in the group and make them subservient to him.

Racial integrationist

The New York Times reported that in 1953, "declaring that he was outraged at what he perceived as racial discrimination in his white congregation, Mr. Jones established his own church and pointedly opened it to all ethnic groups. To raise money, he imported monkeys and sold them door to door as pets."

In 1960, Indianapolis Mayor Charles Boswell appointed Jones director of the local Human Rights Commission.  Jones ignored Boswell's advice to keep a low profile, however, finding new outlets for his views on local radio and television programs.  The mayor and other commissioners asked him to curtail his public actions, but he resisted. He was wildly cheered at a meeting of the NAACP and Urban League when he yelled for his audience to be more militant and then climaxed with, "Let my people go!"

During this time, Jones also helped to racially integrate churches, restaurants, the telephone company, the Indianapolis police department, a theater, an amusement park, and the Indiana University Health Methodist Hospital.  Swastikas were painted on the homes of two black families, and Jones walked through the neighborhood comforting local black people and counseling white families not to move.  He set up sting operations to catch restaurants refusing to serve black customers and wrote to American Nazi leaders and then passed their responses to the media.  He was accidentally placed in the black ward of a hospital after a collapse in 1961, and he refused to be moved; he began to make the beds and empty the bedpans of black patients. Political pressures resulting from Jones's actions caused hospital officials to desegregate the wards.

Jones received considerable criticism in Indiana for his integrationist views.  White-owned businesses and locals were critical of him.  A swastika was placed on the Temple, a stick of dynamite was left in a Temple coal pile, and a dead cat was thrown at Jones's house after a threatening phone call.  Other incidents occurred, but one could theorize that Jones himself was involved in at least some of them.

"Rainbow Family"

Jones and his wife adopted several non-white children; he referred to the household as his "rainbow family", and stated: "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".

The couple adopted three Korean-American children named Lew, Suzanne, and Stephanie, and he encouraged Temple members to adopt orphans from war-ravaged Korea.  He also was 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 1954, he and his wife also adopted Agnes, who was part American Indian.  Suzanne was adopted at age six in 1959.  In June 1959 the couple had their only biological child, whom they named Stephan Gandhi.  In 1961, they became the first white couple in Indiana to adopt a black child. They also adopted a son who was white named Tim.  Tim's birth mother was a member of the Peoples Temple, and he was originally named Timothy Glen Tupper.

Travel to Brazil

Jones traveled with his family to Belo Horizonte, Brazil with the idea of setting up a new Temple location, after preaching at the Temple about the fears of a nuclear holocaust and reading an article in the January 1962 issue of Esquire Magazine which listed the city as a safe place in nuclear war.  On his way to Brazil, he made his first trip to Guyana, a British colony at the time.

The family rented a modest three-bedroom home in Belo Horizonte.  Jones studied the local economy and receptiveness of racial minorities to his message, although language remained a barrier.  He also explored local Brazilian syncretistic religions.  He was careful not to portray himself as a communist in a foreign territory and spoke of an apostolic communal lifestyle rather than of Castro or Marx.  Ultimately, the lack of resources in the locale led them to move to Rio de Janeiro in mid-1963 where they worked with the poor in the slums.

Jones became plagued by guilt for leaving behind the Indiana civil rights struggle and possibly losing what he had tried to build there. His associate preachers in Indiana told him the Temple was about to collapse without him, so he returned.

Move to California

Jones returned from Brazil in December 1963 and told his Indiana congregation the world would be engulfed by nuclear war on July 15, 1967, leading to a new socialist Eden on Earth, and that the Temple had to move to Northern California for safety. Accordingly, the Temple began moving to Redwood Valley, California, near the city of Ukiah.

According to religious studies professor Catherine Wessinger, Jones always spoke of the social gospel's virtues, but he chose to conceal that his gospel was actually communism until the late 1960s.  By that time, he began partially revealing the details of his "Apostolic Socialism" concept in Temple sermons.  He also taught that "those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought to enlightenment—socialism".  He often mixed these ideas, such as preaching that, "If you're born in capitalist America, racist America, fascist America, then you're born in sin. But if you're born in socialism, you're not born in sin."

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.  He wrote a booklet titled "The Letter Killeth", criticizing the King James Bible.  Jones also began preaching that he was the reincarnation of Gandhi, Father Divine, Jesus, Gautama Buddha, and Vladimir Lenin. Former Temple member Hue Fortson, Jr. quoted him as saying, "What you need to believe in is what you can see ... If you see me as your friend, I'll be your friend. As you see me as your father, I'll be your father, for those of you that don't have a father ... If you see me as your savior; I'll be your savior. If you see me as your God, I'll be your God."

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 as his inspiration.  She stated: "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 one sermon, Jones said, "You're gonna help yourself, or you'll get no help! There's only one hope of glory; that's within you! Nobody's gonna come out of the sky! There's no heaven up there! We'll have to make heaven down here!"

Focus on San Francisco

Within five years of moving to California, the Temple experienced a period of exponential growth and opened branches in cities including San Fernando, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. By the early 1970s, Jones began shifting his focus to major cities because of limited expansion opportunities in Ukiah, California. He eventually moved the Temple's headquarters to San Francisco, which was a major center for radical protest movements and both Jones and the Temple became influential in San Francisco politics, culminating in the Temple's instrumental role in George Moscone's mayoral victory in 1975. Moscone subsequently appointed Jones as the chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission.

Jones was able to gain contact with prominent politicians at the local and national level. For example, he and Moscone met privately with vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale on his campaign plane days before the 1976 election, leading Mondale to publicly praise the Temple.  First Lady Rosalynn Carter also met with Jones on multiple occasions, corresponded with him about Cuba, and spoke with him at the grand opening of the San Francisco headquarters—where he received louder applause than she did.

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.  Harvey Milk spoke to audiences during political rallies held at the Temple, and he wrote to Jones after one such visit: "Rev Jim, It may take me many a day to come back down from the high that I reach today. 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."

Jones hosted local political figures at his San Francisco apartment for discussions, including Davis.  He spoke with the 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.  His criticisms led to increased tensions with the Nation of Islam, so Jones spoke at a huge rally in the Los Angeles Convention Center that was attended by many of his closest political acquaintances, hoping to close the rift between the two groups.

Jones also forged alliances with key columnists and others at the San Francisco Chronicle and other press outlets, although the move to San Francisco also brought increasing media scrutiny. Chronicle reporter Marshall Kilduff encountered resistance to publishing an exposé, so he brought his story to New West magazine.  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 Kilduff's article, which included allegations by former Temple members that they were physically, emotionally, and sexually abused.  Jones named the settlement "Jonestown" after himself.

Jonestown's formation and operation

Peoples Temple Agricultural Project ("Jonestown", Guyana)

Jones had started building Jonestown (formally known as the "Peoples Temple Agricultural Project") several years before the New West article was published. It was promoted as a means to create both a "socialist paradise" and a "sanctuary" from the media scrutiny in San Francisco.  Jones purported to establish it as a model communist community, adding that the Temple comprised "the purest communists there are."  He did not, however, permit members to leave Jonestown.

Religious scholar Mary McCormick Maaga argues that Jones's authority decreased after he moved to the isolated commune because he was not needed for recruitment and he could not hide his drug addiction from the rank and file members.  In spite of the allegations prior to Jones's departure, he was still respected by some for setting up a racially mixed church which helped the disadvantaged; 68 percent of Jonestown residents were black.  Jones started to propagate his belief in what he termed "Translation" once they were in Jonestown, where he and his followers would all die together and move to another planet and live blissfully.

New children

Jones claimed he was the biological father of John Victor Stoen, although the birth certificate listed Temple attorney Timothy Stoen and his wife Grace as the parents of the child.  The Temple repeatedly claimed that Jones fathered the child in 1971 when Stoen had requested that Jones have sex with Grace to keep her from defecting.  Grace left the Temple in 1976 and began divorce proceedings the following year. Jones ordered Tim to take the boy to Guyana in February 1977 in order to avoid a custody dispute with Grace.  After Tim himself defected in June 1977, the Temple kept John Stoen in Jonestown.  He also fathered Jim Jon (Kimo) with Temple member Carolyn Louise Moore Layton.

Pressure and waning political support

In the autumn of 1977, Tim Stoen and others who had left the Temple formed a "Concerned Relatives" group because they had family members in Jonestown.  Stoen traveled to Washington, D.C. in January 1978 to visit with State Department officials and members of Congress, and he wrote a white paper detailing his grievances against Jones and the Temple.  His efforts aroused the curiosity of California Congressman Leo Ryan, who wrote a letter on Stoen's behalf to Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham.  The Concerned Relatives also began a legal battle with the Temple over the custody of Stoen's son John.

Most of Jones's political allies broke ties after his departure, though some did not. Willie Brown spoke out against enemies at a rally that was attended by Harvey Milk and Assemblyman Art Agnos.  On February 19, 1978, Milk wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter defending Jones as "a man of the highest character", and he claimed that escaped Temple members were trying to "damage Rev. Jones's reputation" with "apparent bold-faced lies".  Moscone's office issued a press release saying Jones had broken no laws.

On April 11, 1978, the Concerned Relatives distributed a packet of documents, letters, and affidavits to the Peoples Temple, members of the press, and members of Congress which they titled an "Accusation of Human Rights Violations by Rev. James Warren Jones".  In June 1978, escaped Temple member Deborah Layton provided the group with a further affidavit detailing crimes by the Temple and sub-standard living conditions in Jonestown.

Jones was facing increasing scrutiny in the summer of 1978 when he hired JFK assassination conspiracy theorists Mark Lane and Donald Freed to help make the case of a "grand conspiracy" against the Temple by U.S. intelligence agencies. Jones told Lane he wanted to "pull an Eldridge Cleaver", referring to a fugitive member of the Black Panthers who was able to return to the U.S. after repairing his reputation.

Visit by Congressman Ryan and mass suicide at Jonestown

In November 1978, Leo Ryan led a fact-finding mission to Jonestown to investigate allegations of human rights abuses.  His delegation included relatives of Temple members, an NBC camera crew, and reporters for various newspapers.  The group arrived in the Guyanese capital of Georgetown on November 15.  Two days later, they traveled by airplane to Port Kaituma and then were transported to the Jonestown encampment in a limousine. Jones hosted a reception for the delegation that evening at the central pavilion in Jonestown.

The delegation left hurriedly the afternoon of November 18 after Temple member, Don Sly attacked Ryan with a knife, though the attack was thwarted.  Ryan and his delegation managed to take along 15 Temple members who had expressed a wish to leave and Jones made no attempt to prevent their departure at that time.