Jonestown
A senseless slaughter...again...because this guy said so...
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James Warren Jones was born in Crete, Indiana, on 13 May 1931. He committed suicide on 18 November 1978 in Jonestown, Guyana. That’s all the obit Jones deserves.
But, of course, there’s more to this story.
Jones had it rougher than many in rural Indiana. Jones' father, a WWI veteran gassed in the war, couldn't work. Supposedly, his mother lacked maternal instincts. Well-meaning neighbors and relatives were more present in his life than his parents. He grew up in shacks without indoor plumbing or electricity. But, very early, a neighbor introduced Jones to the Nazarene Church, and he resolved to become a preacher.
Jones became obsessed with religion and death at an early age.
He was also interested in social doctrines, and as a voracious reader he studied Marx, Hitler, Gandhi, Mao, and Stalin, as well as the Bible. Extremely and excessively profane, the Nazi Party fascinated him, imitating their goosestep and shouting “Heil Hitler” at German PWs passing by during WWII. He later said he was ready to kill as early as 3rd Grade. That said, he didn’t adopt any particularly radical political views as a young man, though he would chastise peers for drinking and smoking, insisting that they read the Bible with him. One biographer suggested that Jones’ obsession with religion was because of his strong desire to have a family. He hated losing and coached rather than take part in sports. He worked at a hospital for a time, where he met his wife. Theirs was a tortured relationship (literally) because Jones enjoyed testing her loyalty to the point of cruelty. Extremely anti-racist (in the traditional sense) he fell out with his estranged Klan-member father and became a communist in 1951, and resolved to bring communism to the Methodist Church by becoming a pastor.
See where this is going?
In 1952, Jones became a student pastor to children in Indianapolis, but the church fired him in 1954, supposedly for stealing funds. He and his wife then moved on to the Pentecostal Church during the Latter Rain and Healing Revival movements. While preaching at an Assembly of God church, the AoG, which objected to the Latter Rain movement, changed pastors at Jones’ church. Jones left that one and formed his own church, Wings of Healing, which would later become known as the People’s Temple Christian Church Full Gospel, or just the People’s Temple. Identifying with the Independent Assemblies of God, Jones was teaching a Christ the Revolution message by the late 1960s. But by this time the People’s Temple had joined the Disciples of Christ denomination, where the church would stay until its end in the Guyana rain forest.
But people saw Jones as fairly mainstream.
Jones finished a BA degree in secondary education in 1962, and appointed the director of a human rights commission in Indianapolis, where he integrated restaurants, hotels, hospitals, and the police departments in Indiana, which in the 1920s had been at the core of the Klan revival. He and his wife adopted several non-white children, calling himself the patriarch of a “rainbow family.”
As early as 1961, Jones was concerned with nuclear annihilation.
He resolved to move his church to South America, believing it was safer from nuclear attack than anywhere else. Living in Brazil briefly while his church in Indiana kept sending him money, Jones returned to find his creation in disarray. Finding more money, moving to California and preaching apostolic socialism, Jones always seemed to be one step ahead of whatever demon had been pursuing him all his life…
Then he started calling himself God.
Jones rejected the Bible (except the Book of Revelations), called traditional Christianity “fly-away religion,” and told his congregation “I am come as God Socialist.” It’s hard to say if he really believed all of this, but his followers appeared to. Still, that specter of nuclear war wiping out America frightened him…but so did the reality of the Internal Revenue Service, which started asking questions about his church’s tax-exempt status.
Still, he was well-respected by nearly everyone.
The cream of mainstream society feted Jones, including California Governor Jerry Brown, VP Walter Mondale, and First Lady Rosalynn Carter. But in March 1977, it all started coming apart. An article in New West Magazine included former Temple members’ reports of physical, emotional and sexual abuse, pointing their fingers straight at Jones. Ever paranoid, Jones and hundreds of followers fled California for Guyana in March 1977. Hundreds more followed over the next few months as Jones sold off his US assets. Initially successful as a small agricultural colony of about 200, there simply wasn’t enough in Jonestown to support more than a thousand people.
And the problems they left in the US would not go away.
There were custody issues with several minors who fled with parents or without them. Many politicians broke with him; Congress investigated the abuses and harsh conditions in Jonestown. Jones talked to the Soviet Union about relocating his commune there. Jonestown’s communards survived on rice and beans and not much more, while Jones and a few select others dined on steak and lobster. Jones conducted “White Night” panic drills in the event of a raid, sometimes simulating mass suicide. His demons convinced Jones the CIA would attack his commune, and the drills often spoke of “revolutionary acts of suicide.”
On 17 November 1978, Congressman Leo Ryan (D-California), a news crew, and several US Embassy officials visited Jonestown.
After a dinner in the Congressman’s honor, Ryan and the others left Jonestown with fifteen Temple members who just wanted to go. Jones let them go. At the Port Kaituma airstrip, several of Jones’ followers opened fire on Ryan’s party, killing five (including Ryan) while the rest escaped into the surrounding jungle. The gunmen reported to Jones that they had failed to kill everyone. Jones concluded (rightly, most likely) that the end of his Temple and his freedom was nigh. Shouting slogans into the loudspeakers, Jones ordered 909 of his followers (including 256 children) to either drink poisoned beverages (after feeding it to the children) or find another way to commit their “revolutionary acts of suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.” Jones himself died of a gunshot wound to the head, either self-inflicted or by a survivor (there were 85, including the basketball team which was on the road at the time).
It was the greatest loss of American civilian lives until 9/11.
Forty-six years later, we have to wonder not “why” but “how?” The “why” was obvious to anyone who wanted to look beyond the facade of Jones’ charisma and see what he was actually saying. He showed everyone every day that he was not just unhinged, but homicidally suicidal. Yet, many rich and famous saw him as a voice of the people. Oh, he was…just not of any sane people.
The Liberty Bell Files: J. Edgar’s Demons
While Liberty Bell Files doesn’t talk about Jonestown or anything like it, it talks about some downright nutty outfits and about the paranoia of one of Jones’s early admirers, J. Edgar Hoover (really).
The Special Projects Division of the FBI that works the Liberty Bell Files is entirely made up…maybe. Most of the files that this mythical outfit works on are, too. Some are not…maybe. We’ll let you figure out which is which. Available from your favorite bookseller or from me if you want an autograph.
Coming Up…
Six Ways to Rewrite History VI
Bigger Than History: Grant and Lee in Context
And Finally...
On 16 November:
1632: Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, is killed at the battle of Lützen in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. A military reformer with insight, Gustav’s compact, handy battalions dominated the Swedish phase of the Thirty Year’s War, defeating Spain’s bulky tercios.
1904: John Fleming patents the vacuum tube in England. While working for the Marconi company, his “thermionic valve,” also known as an “oscillation valve,” rectified radio signals in receivers, a vast improvement over crystals used in early radios that were subject to bumping and vibration on ships.
And today is NATIONAL CHECK YOUR WIPERS DAY. As we get into winter, especially around the Great Lakes, it’s a superb idea to look at those wipers before the next ice storm, which could be any day now.