Jim Jones

Jim Jones

James Warren "Jim" Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was the founder and the leader of the Peoples Temple, best known for the cult murder/suicide in 1978 of 909 of its members in Jonestown, Guyana, and the murder of five individuals at a nearby airstrip. Over 300 children were murdered at Jonestown, almost all of them by cyanide poisoning.[3] Jones died from a gunshot wound to the head.

Jones was born in Indiana and started the Temple there in the 1950s. He later moved the Temple to California in the mid-1960s, and gained notoriety with the move of the Temple's headquarters to San Francisco in the early 1970s.

The incident in Guyana ranks among the largest mass suicides in history, though most likely it involved forced suicide and/or murder, and was the single greatest loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act until the events of September 11, 2001. Among the dead was Leo Ryan, who remains the only member of Congress killed in the line of duty in U.S. history

- Jim Jones was born in a rural area of Randolph County, Indiana, near its border with Ohio,[5] to James Thurman Jones (May 31, 1887 – May 29, 1951), a World War I veteran, and Lynetta Putnam (April 16, 1902 – December 11, 1977). Lynetta reportedly believed she had given birth to a messiah.[6][7] He was of Irish and Welsh descent.[8] Jones later claimed partial Cherokee ancestry through his mother, though according to his maternal second cousin Barbara Shaffer, this is likely untrue.[8][note 1] Economic difficulties during the Great Depression necessitated that Jones' family move to nearby Lynn, Indiana in 1934, where he grew up in a shack without plumbing.[3][9]

Jones was a voracious reader as a child and studied Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi and Adolf Hitler carefully,[10] noting each of their strengths and weaknesses.[10] Jones also developed an intense interest in religion, primarily because he found making friends difficult.[8] Childhood acquaintances later recalled Jones as being a "really weird kid" who was "obsessed with religion ... obsessed with death". They alleged that he frequently held funerals for small animals on his parents' property and had stabbed a cat to death.[11]

Jim Jones and a childhood friend both claimed that Jones' father, who was an alcoholic, was associated with the Ku Klux Klan.[9] Jones himself, however, came to sympathize with the country's repressed African-American community due to his own experiences as a social outcast. Jones later 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' black friends into the house. After Jones' parents separated, Jones moved with his mother to Richmond, Indiana.[12] He graduated from Richmond High School early and with honors in December 1948.[13]

Jones married nurse Marceline Baldwin in 1949, and moved to Bloomington, Indiana.[14] He attended Indiana University at Bloomington, where a speech by Eleanor Roosevelt about the plight of African-Americans impressed him.[14] In 1951, Jones moved to Indianapolis, where he attended night school at Butler University, earning a degree in secondary education in 1961.

- In 1951, Jones began attending Communist Party meetings and rallies in Indianapolis.[16] He became flustered with harassment he received during the McCarthy Hearings,[16] particularly regarding an event 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.[17] He also became frustrated with ostracism of open communists in the United States, especially during the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.[18] This frustration, among other things, provoked a seminal moment for Jones in which he asked himself, "how can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church."[16][17]

Jones was surprised when a Methodist superintendent helped him to get a start in the church even though he knew Jones to be a communist and Jones did not meet him through the Communist Party.[18] In 1952, Jones became a student pastor in Sommerset Southside Methodist Church, but claims he left that church because its leaders barred him from integrating blacks into his congregation.[16] Around this time, Jones witnessed a faith-healing service at the Seventh Day Baptist Church.[16] He observed that it attracted people and their money and concluded that, with financial resources from such healings, he could help accomplish his social goals.[16]

Jones organized a mammoth religious convention to take place June 11 through June 15, 1956, in a cavernous Indianapolis hall called Cadle Tabernacle. To draw the crowds, Jim needed a religious headliner, and so he arranged to share the pulpit with Rev. William M. Branham, a healing evangelist and religious author as highly revered by some as Oral Roberts and Billy Graham.[7]

Jones then began his own church, which changed names until it became the Peoples Temple Christian Church Full Gospel.[16] The People's Temple was initially made as an inter-racial mission.

Jones moved away from the Communist Party when CPUSA members became critical of some of the policies of former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

- In 1960, Indianapolis Democratic Mayor Charles Boswell appointed Jones director of the Human Rights Commission.[19] Jones ignored Boswell's advice to keep a low profile, finding new outlets for his views on local radio and television programs.[19] When the mayor and other commissioners asked Jones to curtail his public actions, he resisted and was wildly cheered at a meeting of the NAACP and Urban League when he yelled for his audience to be more militant, and climaxed with "Let my people go!"[20]

During this time, Jones also helped to integrate churches, restaurants, the telephone company, the police department, a theater, an amusement park, and the Methodist Hospital.[16] After swastikas were painted on the homes of two African American families, Jones personally walked the neighborhood comforting African Americans and counseling white families not to move, in order to prevent white flight.[21] He also set up stings to catch restaurants refusing to serve African American customers[21] and wrote to American Nazi leaders then leaked their responses to the media.[22] When Jones was accidentally placed in the black ward of a hospital after a collapse in 1961, he refused to be moved and began to make the beds, and empty the bed pans of black patients. Political pressures resulting from Jones' actions caused hospital officials to desegregate the wards.[23]

Jones received considerable criticism in Indiana for his integrationist views.[16] White-owned businesses and locals were critical of him.[21] 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' house after a threatening phone call.[22] Other incidents occurred, though some suspect that Jones himself may have been involved in at least some of them.

- Jim and Marceline Jones adopted several children of at least partial non-Caucasian ancestry; he referred to the clan as his "rainbow family,"[24] and stated: "Integration is a more personal thing with me now. It's a question of my son's future."[25] Jones portrayed the Temple overall as a "rainbow family."

The couple adopted three children of Korean-American ancestry: Lew, Suzanne and Stephanie. Jones had been encouraging Temple members to adopt orphans from war ravaged Korea.[26] Jones had long been critical of the United States' opposition to communist leader Kim Il-Sung's 1950 invasion of South Korea, calling it the "war of liberation" and stating that "the south is a living example of all that socialism in the north has overcome."[27] In 1954, he and his wife also adopted Agnes Jones, who was partly of Native American descent.[16][25] Agnes was 11 at the time of her adoption.[28] Suzanne Jones was adopted at the age of six in 1959.[28] In June 1959, the couple had their only biological child, Stephan Gandhi Jones.[16]

Two years later, in 1961, the Joneses became the first white couple in Indiana to adopt a black child, James Warren Jones, Jr.[29]

The couple also adopted another son, who was white, named Tim.[16] Tim Jones, whose birth mother was a member of the Peoples Temple, was originally named Timothy Glen Tupper

- After a 1961 Temple speech about nuclear apocalypse, and a January 1962 Esquire magazine article listing Belo Horizonte, Brazil as a safe place in a nuclear war, Jones traveled with his family to the city with the idea of setting up a new Temple location.[30] On his way to Brazil, Jones made his first trip into Guyana, then still a British colony.[31]

After arriving in Belo Horizonte, the Joneses rented a modest three bedroom home.[32] Jones studied the local economy and receptiveness of racial minorities to his message, though language remained a barrier.[33] Jones 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.[34] Ultimately, the lack of resources in the locale caused the Joneses to move to Rio de Janeiro in mid-1963.[35] There, they worked with the poor in Rio's slums.[35] Jones also explored local Brazilian syncretic religions.[36]

Jones was plagued by guilt for leaving behind the Indiana civil rights struggle and possibly losing what he had struggled to build there.[35] When Jones' associate preachers in Indiana told him that the Temple was about to collapse without him, Jones returned.

- When Jones returned from Brazil in 1965, he told his Indiana congregation that the world would be engulfed in a nuclear war on July 15, 1967 that would then create a new socialist Eden on earth, and that the Temple had to move to Northern California for safety.[16][38] Accordingly, the Temple began moving to Redwood Valley, California, near the city of Ukiah.[16]

While Jones always spoke of the social gospel's virtues, before the late 1960s Jones chose to conceal that his gospel was actually communism.[16] By the late 1960s, Jones began at least partially openly revealing the details of his "Apostolic Socialism" concept in Temple sermons.[16] Jones also taught that, "those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought to enlightenment — socialism."[39] Jones 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."[40]

By the early 1970s, Jones began deriding traditional 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.[16] Jones authored a booklet titled "The Letter Killeth," criticizing the King James Bible.[41] Jones also began preaching that he was the reincarnation of Mahatma Gandhi (murdered in 1948) and Father Divine (died in 1965), as well as Jesus of Nazareth, Gotama Buddha and Vladimir Lenin. Former Temple member Hue Fortson, Jr. quoted Jones 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."[11]

In a 1976 phone conversation with John Maher, Jones alternately stated that he was an agnostic and an atheist.[2] Despite the Temple's fear that the IRS was investigating its religious tax exemption, Marceline Jones admitted in a 1977 New York Times interview that Jones was trying to promote Marxism in the United States by mobilizing people through religion, citing Mao Zedong as his inspiration.[38] She stated that, "Jim used religion to try to get some people out of the opiate of religion," and had slammed the Bible on the table yelling "I've got to destroy this paper idol!"[38] In one sermon, Jones said that, "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!"

- Within five years of the Temple's move to California, it went through 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. He eventually moved the headquarters for the Temple to San Francisco, a major center for radical protest movements at the time. The move led to Jones and the Temple becoming politically influential in San Francisco politics, culminating in the Temple's instrumental role in the mayoral election victory of George Moscone in 1975. Moscone subsequently appointed Jones as the chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission.[42]

Unlike most supposed cult leaders, Jones was able to gain public support and contact with prominent politicians in the local and national level. For example, Jones 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.[43][44] First Lady Rosalynn Carter also personally met with Jones on multiple occasions; corresponded with him about Cuba; and spoke with him at the grand opening of the San Francisco Democratic Party Headquarters, where Jones garnered louder applause than Mrs. Carter.[43][45][46]

In September 1977, 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.[47] At that dinner, Brown touted Jones as "what you should see every day when you look in the mirror in the early morning hours... a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein... Chairman Mao."[48] Harvey Milk, who spoke at political rallies at the Temple,[49] wrote to Jones after a visit to the Temple: "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."[50][51]

In his San Francisco apartment, Jones hosted San Francisco radical political figures, including Davis, for discussions.[52] He spoke with friend and San Francisco Sun-Reporter publisher Carlton Goodlett 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 Soviet Union.[53] After his criticisms led to increased tensions with the Nation of Islam, Jones spoke at a huge rally healing the rift between the two groups in the Los Angeles Convention Center that was attended by many of Jones' closest political acquaintances.[54]

While Jones forged media alliances with key columnists and others at the San Francisco Chronicle and other media outlets,[55] the move to San Francisco also brought increasing media scrutiny. After Chronicle reporter Marshall Kilduff encountered resistance to publishing an exposé, he brought his story to New West magazine.[56] 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 of the contents of Kilduff's New West article to be imminently published, which included allegations by former Temple members they were physically, emotionally, and sexually abused.[46][57] Jones named the settlement "Jonestown" after himself.

- Jones had first started building Jonestown, formally known as the "Peoples Temple Agricultural Project", several years before the New West article was published. Jonestown was promoted as a means to create both a "socialist paradise" and a "sanctuary" from the media scrutiny in San Francisco.[58] Jones purported to establish Jonestown as a benevolent model communist community stating, "I believe we’re the purest communists there are."[59] In that regard, like the restrictive emigration policies of the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea and other communist states, Jones did not permit members to leave Jonestown.[60]

Religious scholar Mary McCormick Maaga argues that Jones' 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 rank and file members.[61] In spite of the allegations prior to Jones' departure to Jonestown, the leader was still respected by some for setting up a racially mixed church which helped the disadvantaged; 68 percent of Jonestown's residents were black.[62] Jonestown was where Jones began his belief in what he called "Translation," where he and his followers would all die together and move to another planet and live blissfully.

Jim Jones claimed that he was the biological father of John Victor Stoen, although the birth certificate listed Grace and Tim Stoen as the parents of the child.[64] The Temple repeatedly claimed that Jones fathered the child when, in 1971, Tim Stoen had requested that Jones have sex with Grace to keep her from defecting.[65] After Grace Stoen later defected in 1976 and began divorce proceedings against Tim in 1977, in order to avoid potentially giving up the boy in a custody dispute with Grace, Jones ordered Tim to take John to Guyana in February 1977.[66]

After Tim Stoen defected from the Temple in June 1977, the Temple kept John Stoen in Jonestown.[67] The custody dispute over John would become a linchpin of several battles between the Temple and the Concerned Relatives, a group of Temple defectors who began a media campaign accusing Jones and his organization of abuse.[68]

Jim Jones also fathered a son, Jim Jon (Kimo), with Carolyn Louise Moore Layton, a Temple member.

- While most of Jones' political allies broke ties after his departure,[70] some did not. As a show of support, Brown spoke out against enemies at a rally at the Peoples Temple, which was also attended by Milk and then-Assemblyman Art Agnos.[71] On February 19, 1978, Milk wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter defending Jones "as a man of the highest character," and claimed that Temple defectors were trying to "damage Rev. Jones' reputation" with "apparent bold-faced lies".[72] Moscone's office issued a press release saying that Jones had broken no laws.[73]

In the autumn of 1977, Tim Stoen and other Temple defectors with relatives in Jonestown formed a "Concerned Relatives" group.[74] Stoen traveled to Washington, D.C. in January 1978 to visit with State Department officials and members of Congress, and wrote a "white paper" to Congress detailing his grievances against Jones and the Temple.[75] Stoen's efforts aroused the curiosity of California congressman Leo Ryan, who wrote a letter on Stoen's behalf to Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham.[76]

On April 11, 1978, the Concerned Relatives distributed a packet of documents, including letters and affidavits, that they titled an "Accusation of Human Rights Violations by Rev. James Warren Jones" to the Peoples Temple, members of the press, and members of Congress.[77] In June 1978, escaped Temple member Deborah Layton provided the group with a further affidavit detailing alleged crimes by the Peoples Temple and substandard living conditions in Jonestown.[78]

Facing increasing scrutiny, in the summer of 1978, Jones also hired noted JFK assassination conspiracy theorists Mark Lane and Donald Freed to help make the case of a "grand conspiracy" by intelligence agencies against the Peoples Temple. Jones told Lane he wanted to "pull an Eldridge Cleaver", referring to a fugitive Black Panther who was able to return to the United States after repairing his reputation.

In November 1978, Ryan led a fact-finding mission to Jonestown to investigate allegations of human rights abuses.[80] His delegation included relatives of Temple members, an NBC camera crew, and reporters for various newspapers.[81] The group arrived in the Guyanese capital of Georgetown on November 15.[80] Two days later, they traveled by airplane to Port Kaituma, then were transported to the Jonestown encampment on a dump truck.[82]

The delegation left hurriedly the afternoon of November 18 after Temple member Don Sly attacked Ryan with a knife.[83] The attack was thwarted, bringing the visit to an abrupt end.[83] Congressman Ryan and his people succeeded in taking with them fifteen People's Temple members who had expressed a wish to leave.[84] At that time, Jones made no attempt to prevent their departure

Jim Jones' wife, Marceline, was found poisoned at the pavilion.[103] On the final morning of Ryan's visit, Marceline had taken reporters on a tour of Jonestown.[104]

Surviving sons

Stephan, Jim Jr., and Tim Jones did not take part in the mass suicide because they were playing with the Peoples Temple basketball team against the Guyanese national team in Georgetown.[16][102] At the time of events in Jonestown, Stephan and Tim were both nineteen and Jim Jones Jr. was eighteen.[105] Tim's biological family, the Tuppers, which consisted of his three biological sisters,[106][107][108] biological brother,[109] and biological mother,[110] all died at Jonestown. Three days before the tragedy, Stephan Jones refused, over the radio, to comply with an order by his father to return the team to Jonestown for Ryan's visit.[111]

During the events at Jonestown, Stephan, Tim, and Jim Jones Jr. drove to the American Embassy in Guyana in an attempt to receive help. The Guyanese soldiers guarding the embassy refused to let them in after hearing about the shootings at the Port Kaituma airstrip.[112] Later, the three returned to the Temple's headquarters in Georgetown to find the bodies of Sharon Amos and her three children.[112] Guyanese soldiers kept the Jones brothers under house arrest for five days, interrogating them about the deaths in Georgetown.[112] Stephan Jones was accused of being involved in the Georgetown deaths, and was placed in a Guyanese prison for three months.[112] Tim Jones and Johnny Cobb, another member of the Peoples Temple basketball team, were asked to go to Jonestown and help identify the bodies of people who had died.[112] After returning to the United States, Jim Jones Jr. was placed under police surveillance for several months while he lived with his older sister, Suzanne, who had previously turned against the Temple.

- When Jonestown was first being established, Stephan Jones had originally avoided two attempts by his father to relocate to the settlement. He eventually moved to Jonestown after a third and final attempt. He has since said that he gave into his father's wishes to move to Jonestown because of his mother.[113] Stephan Jones is now a businessman, and married with three daughters. He appeared in the documentary Jonestown: Paradise Lost which aired on the History Channel and Discovery Channel. He stated he will not watch the documentary and has never grieved for his father.[114] One year later, he appeared in the documentary Witness to Jonestown where he responds to rare footage shot inside the People's Temple.[115] Jim Jones Jr., who lost his wife and unborn child at Jonestown, returned to San Francisco. He remarried and has three sons from this marriage,[102] including Rob Jones, a high-school basketball star who went on to play for the University of San Diego before transferring to Saint Mary's College of California.

- Lew and Agnes Jones both died at Jonestown. Agnes Jones was thirty-five years old at the time of her death.[117] Her husband[118] and four children[119][120][121][122] all died at Jonestown. Lew Jones, who was twenty-one years old at the time of his death, died alongside his wife Terry and son Chaeoke.[123][124][125] Stephanie Jones had died at age five in a car accident.[16]

Suzanne Jones married Mike Cartmell; both turned against the Temple and were not in Jonestown on November 18, 1978. After this decision to abandon the Temple, Jones referred to Suzanne openly as "my goddamned, no good for nothing daughter" and stated that she was not to be trusted.[126] In a signed note found at the time of her death, Marceline Jones directed that the Jones' funds were to be given to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and specified: "I especially request that none of these are allowed to get into the hands of my adopted daughter, Suzanne Jones Cartmell."[127][128] Cartmell had two children and died of colon cancer in November 2006.

- Specific references to Tim Stoen, the father of John Stoen, including the logistics of possibly murdering him, are made on the Temple's final "death tape," as well as a discussion over whether the Temple should include John Stoen among those committing "revolutionary suicide."[92] At Jonestown, John Stoen was found poisoned in Jim Jones' cabin.[68]

Both Jim Jon (Kimo) and his mother, Carolyn Louise Moore Layton, died during the events at Jonestown