I still remember the day it arrived. We had a subscription to Time magazine back then, and once a week a new edition came to our house.
I was 12 or 13 I think. While I was old enough that I took some interest in politics and world affairs, I typically found Time a little dry. But that cover held me. It was the woman's legs, just beginning to swell up, a few feet behind that baleful tub of Kool Aid. I couldn't stop looking at it.
What it showed was a snapshot from what was later known as the Jonestown Massacre. At the behest of James Warren Jones, the people in this photo (and many, many others) committed, or had inflicted on them, an act of 'Revolutionary Suicide*.' By the time thunderstruck Guyanese authorities made it to the scene of the compound, 909 people were swelling and rotting in the tropical sun.
So today's awful human being is the Reverend Jones, and he stands in for something of a rogues gallery of nasty religious and cult leaders that the United States has periodically given rise to. So those of you wondering if Charlie Manson would be on this list, well, he's not. Nor David Koresh, or Marshall Applewhite. I would argue that Father Coughlin, Cardinal Law, and Reverend Phelps are also runners up for the category of 'deeply malevolent religious leader.'
But none of them hold a candle to Jones. He was profoundly messed up, deeply weird, paranoid and murderous. Here is his story.
He was a weird kid. His dad was one of those WWI vets who was destroyed by the gas; he could never breathe right and was disabled. His mom was, apparently, entirely bereft of the usual complement of maternal feeling. Jones grew up neglected and poor. But he was also a really weird kid. He was obsessed with death, ritual, and religion. He held elaborate funerals for roadkill. He sometimes claimed he was a vessel for the angel of death.
He read heavily, and developed unsavory political crushes. Marx, Gandhi, Stalin and Hitler dominated his early reading, Hitler most seriously. I can't imagine the weird roadkill-burying kid made himself too many friends, goose-stepping around and greeting all and sundry with a jaunty 'Heil Hitler!' in 1942 Indiana, but he wasn't ever really good at the friends thing, seemingly. Something that probably contributed later to his hunger for followers.
As he matured, two themes seem to dominate his actions. The first is his churchiness. He started out somewhat Christian, but his spiritual views grew increasingly heterodox with the passage of time, starting out Methodist (the Methodists are on a bad roll here), working his way through Pentecostalism, until he went his own weird way with his ministry: The People's Temple Full Gospel Christian Church, shortened over time to the People's Temple.
The second theme that dominated his thinking--and made it hard to be involved with mainline religion in 1950s America--was his infatuation with Communism. Infatuated hell--he was full-on besotted by Communism, and not that weak-tea Leninism either, Jones loved the full-on, no holds barred Maoism that gave us the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. More on that later. And Jones, like Chivington, was redeemed somewhat by a profound commitment to civil rights; he did much to speed integration in Indianapolis. Props where due, the guy did some legitimately great work here, often at personal risk. He made enemies of the Klan and the American Nazi Party; usually this means you are on the side of the angels. On this one issue, he was.
By the early 1960s, Jones was getting even weirder and more paranoid. He thought nuclear war was imminent--not an unreasonable idea, in the days leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis--and began looking for a place to move his ministry where they might survive a US-Soviet Nuclear war.
He settled on Guyana, although not immediately. Instead he relocated to California. It is about this time that Jones parts company entirely with the last vestiges of Christianity, professing a doctrine called 'Apostolic Socialism'--God is in fact, none other than Jim Jones himself, conveniently at hand to lead the elect to the communist promised land. This kind of thing being modestly popular in 1970s Norcal, his--I'm going to switch over from 'ministry' to 'cult' here--cult was 300 strong by 1969, rising to 2500 by 1973.
Apostolic socialism is a hell of a doctrine. Being born in a capitalist society is tantamount to original sin, America is an unredeemable Babylon, the bible itself is racist and corrupt, he baptized his followers in the 'holy name of socialism' enjoining them to go forth and spread the doctrine of 'apostolic social justice.'
For a while things went pretty well, as this sort of thing was catnip for some elements of the counterculture. But problems were beginning to emerge.
First of all, the drugs. Drugs exacerbated Jones' paranoia, manifesting in a desire to control every element of his follower's lives. Abuses followed. Jones established an armed security team to maintain order**. He forced his followers, male and female, to have sex with him. Dissenters were beaten.
But in public things were still going well, very well in fact. Willie Brown, Jerry Brown, and Harvey Milk were patrons. Jones met with Rosalyn Carter, and Walter Mondale, who lavishly praised the People's Temple, and their good work on civil rights and integration.
But despite the patronage, and the good publicity, word was still getting out. There were occasional troubling reports in the press, particularly after Jones was arrested for lewd conduct by the LAPD in 1973***. The people's Temple began preparing for a mass relocation. He was unable to obtain permission to relocate to the Soviet Union or China, which he claimed in an interview were his first choices. In 1974, land was purchased in Guyana.
Within a couple of years, Jones had obliged over 1,000 of his followers to join him at Jonestown, which he described as the purest Communist community in the world. His followers worked 12 hours a day, six days a week, with evenings reserved for lectures on Communism, Soviet propaganda films, radio addresses by Mao or Kim Il Sung or Castro, and other such edifying fare. Although his health was failing, Jones persisted in sexually abusing a fairly wide swathe of his followers. A handful managed to escape; these and the concerned family members of some of the other cultists who had been incommunicado for months, ultimately resulted in Congressman Ryan's fact-finding mission in 1978.
Jones grew ever more paranoid. He had armed guards around the perimeter of the camp, like a prison. He formulated the doctrine of Revolutionary Suicide--the idea that all his followers might have to die by their own hands to forestall intervention by American authorities. During the 'White Nights', a series of drills over many weeks, they blocked out the contours of the eventual atrocity, down to the poisoned Kool-Aid.
Jones was obliged to let Congressman Ryan's party interview many of his followers. He feigned compliance, even allowing 15 to leave with the congressman's party. He had his security squad ambush the Congressman's party at the airfield--killing many (including Congressman Ryan himself)--but not all. The jig was up.
Jones had a huge galvanized wash tub filled with grape Flavor Aid. It was also filled with Cyanide, and a bunch of sedatives. When I first saw the vat on the cover of time, I could smell the fake grape Kool-Aid, I could imagine the flies, drawn by the sweetness, dying in the poison. It's nightmarish. I have, in fact, dreamed about it. The expression 'he/she drank the Kool Aid' has its origin in this grim tub.
Jones enjoined his followers to commit 'revolutionary suicide'. Many did. Those that balked were injected with cyanide, or shot by the guards. Jones had no patience for these. He is on tape--there is audio tape capturing the whole proceeding--saying, "Stop these hysterics. This is not the way for people who are socialists or communists to die. No way for us to die. We must die with some dignity."
And die they did, 909 of them, 276 of which were children. Jones managed an impressive 181 Rippers. Saucy Jack is proving to be an amateur.
The Guyanese authorities acted quickly once they found out, but the tropical heat made the scene something out of a nightmare. The US military arranged an airlift to repatriate the bodies. Jones made special arrangements so that the financial reserves of the People's Temple--7.3 million in sweet sweet 1970s dollars, a not inconsiderable sum--be transferred to the Soviet embassy, to further the realization of apostolic socialism in its natural test-bed.
So why Jones? First of all, 'cult-leader' is a pretty important archetype of evil, so we needed one. And Jones is really illustrative of something I hate--the love some people have for dominating and manipulating and imposing their will on other people. From guys like Putin on down to the officious HOA enforcer, there is a particular sort of human who likes to control others, bend them to a purpose. That impulse is pernicious, and you rarely see it go so obviously and grievously wrong as it did in the Guyanese jungle in Nov 1978. And his weird little Animal Farm makes him repellent, and the images of Jonestown are burned into my memory. And to top it off, the guy was a counter-culture Commie, a group which could do with a bit more opprobrium in my book.
Up next: Axis Sally. And I'll try to be a bit quicker with this one!
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*Revolutionary Suicide is an idea that seems to call out to a particular strain of person. See https://freebeacon.com/campus/revolutionary-suicide-ucla-psychiatrists-cheer-self-immolation-in-leaked-audio/ for a recent example of that term resurfacing...
**These guys remind me of the dogs from Animal farm. All communist societies, even fairly small ones, get some version of these murder enforcers early on, it seems to be hard encoded in the Communist DNA.
***Pro-tip for would-be public masturbators: If you are feeling the urge in a theatre restroom, make sure the guy egging you on is not an undercover vice detective. It complicates matters considerably.
I think this is where I first learned what a cult was. But I don't remember that cover, and I definitely didn't know the details. Thanks for filling in the (exceedingly grim) blanks.