Annie Dawid
Appearances
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
So they're all Americans and they come back to Delaware. But first, like the Delaware people don't want anything to do with it. And they already know that this is going to have the worst history of like anything that happens ever. up till that moment in American history. It's the largest death of American civilians in the 20th century. The count of the bodies has also been
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
very unclear because the GDF goes in there and they see 400 bodies approximately. So where's the other half of the Jonestown population? And everything is being reported like Guyana's flooded with international media and they're sending these reports everywhere and sending the pictures of all the bodies. But only 400 people apparently are lying there.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
And so back in the States, everybody with family there is like, are my people among that 400? Are mine among the people who escaped into the jungle? Well, that actually never happened. There were bodies who were piled on other bodies. And that's why they got it so wrong, sadly.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
Yeah, you can't take away that element. So Stephen and two or three of his adopted brothers are playing basketball and they're staying at the compound in Georgetown. And that message comes in. And Stephen, who's been speaking since then, you know, almost 50 years talking about it, You know, he was furious and there was no way he was going to kill anybody or kill himself.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
And sadly, this one woman who kind of ran the compound, she decides, yes, we have to die. And she kills her three children and herself in Georgetown.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
Yes. Her name is Hyacinth Thrush, and there's an autobiography that you can read about her experience in the People's Temple. So they had these bunk beds that were stacked really high, which is crazy for old people, but nevertheless... There were old people. So she's in this top bed, the third tier.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
And when the guards and everyone else goes to make sure everybody's out of the dorms, they don't see her. And she does. She sleeps through it. Another older man runs and hides in a ditch. Two younger African-American men manage to escape while it's happening. And earlier in the day, before anything happened,
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
A whole group, a family group, a bunch of kids and a few parents, they say, oh, we're going to have a picnic. I mean, this is completely unheard of, this sort of behavior. But because the congressman is there and the media are there, they figure they can get away with stuff they wouldn't normally get away with. And they walked out.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
Yeah, he's still alive. And he served time in prison in Guyana. And then when he's brought back to the States, he served some time in the States. And he was released, I think, in the early 2000s. He actually didn't kill anybody. He injured some people on the plane, but he didn't kill the congressman.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
He didn't kill anybody out on the airstrip because he was in the little plane and shot a couple of people in the little plane, but did not kill them. So it's another of the great ironies.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
Well, yeah, it was just everything got swallowed up by the jungle. And the Guyanese government, I mean, they were furious. And the way I see it is there's another brand of colonization where these foreigners come to their country. and make this horrible spectacle.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
And then for many decades after that, if you said Guyana, the next thing was, oh, isn't where all those crazy Americans killed themselves. So this brand new independent country comes to be known for this horrible tragedy.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
Yes, it is a very depressing story. I'm a realist and I like looking at reality. parts of American history that are forgotten and to bring to light what has been left in the shadows. And what has been left in the shadows is 917 people who died that day who were not Jim Jones. Almost all of the attention has been on the man, you know, more feeding his eagle after his death.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
Yes. They had done these drills before, suicide drills. Back in the States, they did at least one, and there was at least one in the jungle itself. So back in the States already, Jones had instituted these mock mass suicides, which he called White Nights. And people would drink a liquid, and he'd tell them it was poisoned. And then guess what? It wasn't poisoned. It was just a loyalty test.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
Now, there's disagreement about how often this happened. It happened at least once in Jonestown, where Jones, I believe, and a lot of people believe, he kind of staged an attack on the compound. a year earlier, and this had to do with that custody dispute over the boy who was supposedly Jones's son, and the parents wanted him back, and they had gone to the law, and they'd gone to Guyana.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
And so he staged this attack. He said they were under siege, and the only way they could get out of it was to die. And so they stayed up all night, and Jones is... They have a PA system there in the jungle where Jones can yell at them all the time. And if he's not yelling at them, they can play tapes of him.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
And so the shooters get back from the airstrip and they tell Jones, you know, mission accomplished. And the shooters have stopped one of the planes from leaving by shooting out the tires. So only the little plane takes off. And Larry Layton and the two pilots and one wounded person are on that plane.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
Larry Layton did shoot on the plane and then the gun malfunctioned and then somebody got it away from him. So he's no longer an active shooter when he's on the plane. So all the people on the flatbed get back. They tell Jones, OK, it's done. And then Jones needs to tell his congregation that this is it. There's nothing they can do except to die because the Guyanese forces will be coming for them.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
And he says, OK. You know, our children will be taken and our seniors will be taken and we can't let that happen. So we're going to do revolutionary suicide. Now, important point of terminology is that he stole that term from the Black Panthers. And in the Black Panther literature, revolutionary suicide means you keep fighting until they get you.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
It does not mean you take poison and lie down and die.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
You know, it's another kind of white people taking black people's language and perverting it.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
But he keeps using that term and then it gets parroted by his disciples. And so what's really important to recognize, though, is that Jim Jones is not the sole perpetrator of this deed. He has all of his henchmen who stay there with the guns. Right. Okay, they don't put their guns away when they get back to Jonestown from the airstrip. The poison has been prepared in advance.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
He's had a committee, like you were saying last time, about all these committees running things. He's had a committee about what's the best way for everybody to die, preferably with the least amount of pain. And what is most... horrible is that it's the doctor who has prepared the poison.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
He did all the study and there's the tranquilizers as well as the cyanide and some other stuff that's supposed to make it more palatable, especially for the children. And so... Everybody's there at the pavilion. He's on the loudspeaker. And as has often been the case through all of People's Temple's history, there's tape recording going on. And so that's why we know about things that happen.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
There's a tape going. He's trying to convince them, OK, the congressman's been killed and, you know, I could turn in the people, but everybody is me. And, you know, nobody's different from anyone else here. So we all have to die.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
It's called Flavor-Aid, and one survivor just calls it ghetto Kool-Aid. You know, it's like a knockoff of the Kool-Aid brand.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
Well, so the cyanide is the poison. You've probably read about how cyanide has the smell of almonds. And so that's a kind of weird... Side effect. So it smells good, but actually it tastes terrible. I mean, they tried to make it so it would taste good. So there's cyanide, there's valium. And then I think there's one other kind of tranquilizing element in the brew.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
No. OK, so the vat is set up and there are cups. There's also at the table all these pre-prepared syringes that have been set up by the nurses with the poison for infants, infant doses and child doses. There's other syringes for injections. that are prepared for people who are refusing to take it. And there are people who refuse. So it's really orchestrated.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
And it's orchestrated by all of Jones's top lieutenants, you could say.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
Yeah, it's going to take a few hours. And before they start the poisoning... He gives his people some chance to talk back to him, right, because he's the socialist and it has to be a group decision. And at this point, all these people, they're exhausted, they're malnourished, they've had not enough sleep. And a lot of them are just ready because he's been preparing them for a long time.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
But there's also a big contingent, though, the more silent contingent who don't want to die, who don't think death is the answer. And one very brave woman starts saying, we shouldn't do this. There's no reason why all of us should die. And her name is Christine Miller. And I dedicated my book to her. And interestingly, when you listen to the tape, you know, he keeps letting her speak.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
And she's saying, well, can we go someplace else? Because he's talked about going to Cuba, like the whole group could go to Cuba or the whole group could go to the Soviet Union. She's rational and responsible, talking to him about other alternatives. I think it should be an individual choice. And. Eventually, the other people shout her down.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
And Jim McIlvaney, who is top guy under Jones, he's saying, you're only here because Jim Jones gave you this possibility. And when he talks against her, then everybody else starts yelling out, like, shut up. And we don't know what happens to Christine if she takes the poison willingly. There were approximately 70 people they found who had injections in the back.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
Other people were threatened by the men with the guns. And so that's how they ended up taking it. So it takes a long time if it takes 45 minutes to die from this for an adult from this mixture. And there's 900 plus people. It's going on and on and getting dark.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
Yeah, he says, mother, don't do this. So he could have been saying that to Marceline, or he could have been talking to all of the mothers who were saying, I don't want to kill my child. So we don't know. We'll never know if that was Marceline herself. Marceline does die of the poison, however. So she took it eventually or was injected.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
Some of the people who escaped, there's a couple of people who escaped while it was happening. And eventually they hear some gunshots. And it turns out somebody has shot. There were some dogs there. who were pets, shot the dogs. And they also had Mr. Mug, the chimpanzee, who had been, you know, over the years, like the mascot, practically, of Jonestown and the People's Temple.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
And he gets shot, too. When the sun rises in the morning and finally the Guyanese Defense Force arrives to investigate what has happened, because they knew about what happened at the airstrip,
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
but they don't know what happened at Jonestown, so they go from the airstrip where they help all the wounded, because there's a lot of people who were wounded, and then they drive the seven miles out to Jonestown, and it's totally quiet. It's like an incomprehensible sight, all of these bodies. They eventually find two human beings who have been killed by gunshots in the head.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
And one of them is Annie Moore, who is like Jones's private nurse. And the other one is Jim Jones himself. At any rate, Jim Jones did not die of the poison. He did not drink this horrible liquid, which made you suffer for 45 minutes. And so we don't know if he said, Annie, will you please kill me? And that she did so and then killed herself. Or they both killed themselves with the same gun.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
There was one gun. And eventually all these American military come to get the bodies. And in the beginning, the American State Department's like, we don't want these bodies. You know, can't you just build a mass pet and bury them there? That's what they say. to the president of Guyana. And he says, no, we will not do that. You need to come get your American dead.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
These are American people killing Americans. So this is your problem. So for the next several days, these units from the first, they come from a base in Panama and then some other bases. And they're people who are used to dealing with bodies, but not with 900 plus bodies. of civilians, you know, they're used to dealing with the war dead.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
And so it's a horrible, horrible few days for these airmen in particular.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
It was more like a third. A lot of these bodies could not be identified. They didn't do enough examinations. There was a Guyanese coroner who wanted to do them. But he's not going to be able to do 900 bodies. I think he looked at approximately 100 of them, which is already a lot of bodies. The identification issue is a total mess.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
I'm not saying there was some fantastic way they could have fixed it, given the circumstances. But that's a whole other element of the Jonestown story is what happens to those bodies.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Death of a Cult
Yeah. But so all the bodies are shipped back to Dover Air Force Base. And, you know, eventually some are claimed by families. But you have to remember, a lot of the people were poor and getting a body shipped to you from Delaware to California is beyond the means of a lot of people. And they did some, you know, there was a whole nother thing about kind of the jurisdiction over these bodies.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Yes, he offers himself. The messianic thing is not unusual. The throwing in the political messiah with the religious messiah, that's unusual. So yeah, he's Jesus, he's Buddha. He's Marx. No, Lenin. He preferred Lenin to Marx. So the whole political dimension added to the religious dimension is what makes him unusual, I would say. But the messianic thing is the cult leader, or however you say it,
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
that term, you know, only I can fix it. And that's, you know, all the cult leaders say that. So in San Francisco, they're kind of thriving. And by this time, this is important not to leave out, he starts taking speed because he wants to do more things, you know, and sleeping gets in the way of doing more things. So you could say his drug addiction starts kind of, again, in the service of
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
I mean, they certainly see his behavior, and he starts wearing the glasses, right, to cover his red eyes.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
But he says, the light in my eyes is so intense, I have to protect you from it, and that's why I wear these glasses.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
So in Ukiah, he starts sleeping around, and... The story is that Marceline has a bad back and she can't engage in the wifely duties of sex. And he says all this to his congregation. So he's not hiding his infidelity. So there he gets together with one of his married disciples and they end up having a child, but they disguise the child's paternity
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
She goes away for her pregnancy and divorces her husband, is married, you know, in quotes, to another husband in the church, and then comes back with this child, this boy. Depending on where you are in the church hierarchy, you know that, and you know that this is Jim's child's
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Or you just believe the story and one of his inner circle white women has a child with her husband and he has the husband's name, the boy does.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Okay, so there are early defectors. So in 73, the group of eight, which is how they come to be called, There's a group of four men and four women, four white and four black, who have gone to college sent by the people's temple. I mean, finance. Their education is being financed. And so guess what? College education starts affording them some critical thinking.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
And these eight people decide they don't like where this is going. They don't like the hero worship. of Jones to the exclusion of everything else. And they write this long letter and they leave. Now, there were a lot of family networks in the church. And so some of them leave family in the church. So they're family defectors. And Jones is like all cult leaders.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
He's very, very hurt when people turn on him. He does not like to be rejected. I also want to add that they have All this time, they have lots of good works. Besides soup kitchens, they have a drug rehabilitation program. And that has also drawn in a bunch of people off the streets. And ironically, they're very effective with their drug rehabilitation program.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
But there are things I would call greatly abusive practices that have started developing by this time. So And again, this is not uncommon in cults where you have kind of forced confessions in public of things you did wrong. You know, I shouldn't have taken that expensive food out of the refrigerator. I was lusting after so-and-so. And so they start having these collective public punishments.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
It's called being called on the floor. And So Jim Jones is sitting up on the stage with some other people and you get called up and then you have to confess to whatever you did. And this is also growing a big community of informers, which is another classic kind of cult behavior. And they start doing physical punishment in that way.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
So some of it's like you get a whack, you know, sort of like corporal punishment in school in the old days, you get a whack on your butt, but it escalates. And they have this piece of wood that's called the Board of Education. And you start getting whacked as much as 20, 30, 50, 70 times if you're really bad.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
And so some of those people at that time, people who had been really high up in the administration, like this one couple, Their daughter gets really beaten in one of those episodes and they decide, can't do this anymore. And they are really some high level people. So they leave as well.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
At this time, there's been some newspaper coverage, you know, by newspaper reporters who are skeptical of all this, the great works of the great Jim Jones and the mayor praising him and his presence on the housing board. Like he'd bring crowds of people, his worshipers to the housing board meetings. And that's kind of unusual for a housing board. So that attracts attention.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
I should also add this interesting thing
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
aside which is that for a certain time they are supportive of reporters and first amendment issues and so they kind of go picket in various for you know they're also supportive of the black panthers and angela davis is a supporter of the people's temple and they'll go and demonstrate for progressive causes which at one time included reporters but that love of reporters
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
ends up dying pretty quickly. So what happens in 77, after this one reporter, or it's a team of reporters, they've been trying to get people to go on the record criticizing Jones. And up until then, people won't go on the record because they're afraid that Jones and his henchmen will come after them because he's threatened that.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
You can't speak against the temple or something bad will happen to you. And so... In 77, so now that's four years after the Gang of Eight, the first big defectors. And so some of those people, and then some of these new people, like this couple whose child was badly beaten, they say, all right, we're going to go on the record now.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Jim Jones is, you know, he has his hands in everything, politically and otherwise, and he knows about this article. And so we're talking now, we're getting into the summer of 1977. And so... If you just look back in time a little bit, summer 77, the end of the People's Temple is November 78. Jones is very paranoid.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
He doesn't want this article to be published because he feels like that's going to be the end of him. And he is paranoid. I mean, there's the kind of paranoia which is drug-induced and not real. And then there's also the real paranoia, which is people are investigating the church and they don't like what they see.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
In 74, the People's Temple bought this land in Guyana, the former British Guyana, which is newly independent. And they want foreign investment to help them. They're a poor country. So Jones buys this land, or leases, actually, this land in the northwest part of the state near the Venezuelan border. And that border is contested. between Guyana and Venezuela.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
So Guyana wants people to inhabit that part of the country, you know, which is very, very sparsely populated. So they start what's called the Jonestown Agricultural Project in 74. And eventually there's like a hundred workers there. They call them the Jonestown pioneers who go, they clear the jungle, they build this community. I mean, it's pure jungle. It's
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
a 24-hour boat ride from the capital of Georgetown. It's really isolated. And these builders are incredible. And they work 18-hour days building this community from scratch. And so this utopian impulse, that's very American. It was also the beginning of white America, of whites leaving England and Holland because of religious persecution.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
So I really find a lot of the American utopian impulse in people's temples. So they're building that.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Yeah, true. So 74 is the start of it. Now we're 77. It's the summer. This article is starting to, you know, Jones's understanding he can't stop it from being published. So he says, I got to get out of here because he'll be prosecuted for something. He doesn't want to deal with that. And so the mass immigration to Guyana starts in the summer of 77. The article comes out in August.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
So he's already gone when the article is published in the Bay Area.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Guyana is chosen for more than one reason. One is it's a socialist country under President Forbes Burnham, who is a Marxist himself. So that looks really good. On paper, they end up being corrupt like every other particular government who ends up running the show in a lot of these post-colonial governments.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
There's a large Black population in Guyana, former slaves, and mixing with Indians who had been brought over as indentured servants. which is actually kind of the larger population number-wise. And there's also Native American people there, the Amer Indians. So that's the one big reason. And the other big reason is that they speak English.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Eventually. Yes. But they are not expecting 900 people to show up all at once, which is more or less what happens in the summer camp. Of 77.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Well, they have water. Water doesn't end up being a problem, but it's not right for growing just about anything. Like there's a cassava will grow there. They have all these huge plans to, yes, to be self-supporting, and that never, ever happens. And then a lot of their experiments fail. The weather is very intense in the equatorial jungle, and there's constant rains and flooding.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
And so, yeah, it's not a good place to try and be self-sufficient. And of course... They're not farmers, so they're learning everything. So it's a tough sell, but they're determined to make it work. So there's a lot of overcrowding when all those people arrive. And then by the time the article comes out, there's hardly anyone left to interview in San Francisco because they're in Guyana.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
There are a skeleton staff at the temple, because their job is to keep shipping everything to Guyana to make it function. So that's a huge responsibility and very important. So when we talk about survivors from Jonestown, some of those survivors of Jonestown are the people who never went to Jonestown because they stayed in San Francisco and they were doing the work.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
And one of my characters in my book is one of those people. And she is heartbroken. I mean, she's heartbroken when everybody dies, but she's also heartbroken she never got to go there. And that was a kind of common feeling amongst survivors. They lost their entire community at once, and they wish that they had been part of it, even though it was so awful, the end of it, it was still their family.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
So he keeps saying there's 1,200 people. I keep running into that number, 1,200. But on the day of the massacre, 918 people die. So there were not 1200 people in Jonestown on that day. Now, another group of survivors were in Georgetown, which is the capital of Guyana. And people were constantly going to Georgetown to do things like go to the dentist.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Okay. Jim Jones was born to a kind of poor white family in Indiana and grew up in as a kind of outcast in a small town. He was an only child. His father was a World War I veteran who had been damaged by mustard gas and didn't work and drank too much. His mother, unusually for the times, worked and she was a union woman. And while I find that very admirable, it was a point of
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Like there were a bunch of people at the dentist that day. There was a basketball team who was playing the Guyanese team They were in Georgetown that day. They had a Georgetown headquarters for dealing with the government. So there were people who were there all the time and dealing with customs and all the shipments, because everything that got shipped
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
would be shipped to the airport in Georgetown. So there's another large contingent of survivors there. So I don't know if you added all that up, if you'd get to 1,200.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Quite a bureaucracy in running the People's Temple. Lots of committees. as I have said already, it was mostly white women who were doing the running of everything. And part of Jim Jones's genius was that he understood that women had all this energy and wanted to work. And this is just kind of the early women's movement where a lot of women are very frustrated that they can't put their
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
their smarts and their energy into play. And he sees that as a great opportunity and nails it. So you've got this, the structure has been described as like a wheel with lots of spokes and Joneses at the hub. And so everybody's reporting to him. He has like an individual relationship with everyone. Yeah, they have committees.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
I mean, they're very, you know, in some ways, when you look at these documents, they're like very Soviet. They have lots of reports. from committees about, and then they have an agriculture committee and they have what they call the piggery where they're, you know, they're raising pigs to eat.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
And then they also start a little kind of like they build, they make handcrafts, the old people, especially. And then they sell them in Georgetown. That's another source of income.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Yeah, it becomes more severe. But, you know, the major difference... And it's enormous between what happens in the States and what happens in Guyana is that when you're in the States, you could walk out on the street. In Ukiah, you could go put your thumb out on Highway 101 and be gone. And you could not leave the jungle. There was no easy way to leave the jungle.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
And so if people tried to escape, and there were some, Then they were very severely punished. And so there was more physical punishment. There was a kind of a sense deprivation area. And they called it the box where you could be sent for a short time or a long time. And eventually they start drugging people. So it's a kind of chemical punishment. They have the largest store of, Is it Depakote?
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Not Depakote. I get the names of these drugs confused. You know, one of those zombifying kind of drugs that takes away your will. They start using that towards the end as well. So that people who were resistant would stop being so resistant. So that is, you know, to me, that's pretty evil.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
That's a good question. So there's a group that forms called the Concerned Relatives. back in San Francisco. And the concerned relatives are people who still have family in Jonestown or people who have left the church. Well, like that couple I mentioned whose daughter was beaten, they have other family who didn't leave with them.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
And so there are still people from their family who are in the temple. And What happens when they're in Guyana is there's very little unmonitored communication. So letters can go back and forth, but they are checked by the leaders. And so people, you can tell when the letter you get from your son isn't really his voice. You know, it's been doctored.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
And so there's the communication that's come, you know, and all they're saying is, oh, everything is fantastic here. Everything is wonderful. And so that's part of the suspicion. There's no phone calls. You can't call. Of course, it's pre-internet. They only have a ham radio out there. And that is very, very limited. It's not like you can go get on the ham radio to talk to your family.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
ridicule for classmates of Jim Jones. So he was kind of a weirdo. His father was not looking after him. So he was on his own most of the time. His family was not religious, but in his loneliness, he ended up catching the attention of a neighbor woman who started taking him to her church, which was Pentecostal. So that was the beginning of his life, kind of finding a home in churches.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
No, because finally, the abuses are in the headlines. So then, the newspapers, the Chronicle and the Examiner, the two daily papers in San Francisco, you know, they start running articles and then the government gets involved and they start investigating. And like that couple, they had had all this real estate. That was what they did for a living.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
They managed properties and they had signed over, I don't know, 20 properties to the people's temple and they want to get them back. And another, Really key issue is that Jones has a child with another woman, and that child is also in Jonestown. And the parents, the mother, and then her husband, who had been like a really big, big wig. He's that lawyer who had been with the temple for a long time.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Is supposedly the father like it's not they never did blood tests, so it's not clear. But anyway, they want their kid back. And so they're going to the courts and they want to make a custody case.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Okay. So he ends up there with an entourage, including media, including government, which is the American embassy people. who have been theoretically keeping an eye on Jonestown for a couple of years now, where they'll go out from time to time to make sure things are okay. And of course, they let Jonestown know ahead of time. So, you know, the visits are announced, which is an important factor.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
He did this growing up. And at a certain point, he ended up still a teenager working as a hospital aide at a hospital in Richmond, Indiana. which was a very segregated city. So we're talking the 1940s here. And as a kind of outcast himself, I think he felt a kind of resonance with African-American citizens who were constantly kicked to the curb. And and he saw that in the hospital as well.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
So there's some of them that are there. And then there's the two lawyers who are sort of competing lawyers, both working for Jim Jones. They're on the plane too. And then they end up with four of the concerned relatives. And because of the size of the plane, those numbers are limited. And many more people have come down to Guyana, but they can't get on the plane.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
They want to go see their family, but they end up staying back in Georgetown. So there's only four of the concerned relatives on the plane. And Jones doesn't want them to come, but basically his lawyers say, you really should let them come because if you don't, it'll be worse. There'll be worse media. So on the 17th,
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
you know, like they have this big banquet and entertainment and everybody's been coached to be on their best behavior and say how wonderful it is. And they do have a good day out there and this amazing performance, which is on video, you can see it, where you would think these people are really happy here. They've always had a band and a choir, which is really terrific. And so
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
you know, objectively speaking, great singers. And it seems wonderful. And their plan is to spend some more time the next day. And Congressman Ryan has said, you know, if anybody wants to leave, they can come back with me. That doesn't happen. But it turns out somebody passes a piece of paper to one of the reporters and it says, we want to leave. And there's two names on it.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
So that happens on Friday the 17th. And the congressman stays over in the compound that night, but all the others go back to Port Kytuma where the airstrip is. And so it seems like everything's gone really well. But then when the reporters come back the next day and the interviewer from NBC is interviewing Jones. He says, I got this piece of paper yesterday and it says, you know, I want to leave.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
What do you say to that Jones? And it's a pretty combative interview. You can also see that on video and that's, that's the beginning of the end, because now that it's public, that there are some people who want to leave, then other people start coming forward and saying, I want to leave too. And I want to leave too. And they're almost all white.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
There's only one Black person who says she wants to leave, which is interesting. And in that group, now there's only approximately 16 people who say they want to leave, which is really a tiny, tiny percentage of 1,000 people. But to Jones, like I was saying before, being rejected... is absolutely the worst thing. And he's in terrible physical shape, mental shape. He's a drug addict.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
And you can also tell when he's talking to the reporter, he's so drugged out. You can see, you can hear it in his voice and she's slurring, you know, so that for Jones, that's the turning point is, is the understanding that there are going to be people who are going to go home with the congressman.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
before Congressman Ryan leaves Jonestown for the airport, one of Jones's followers comes at him with a knife. And I think it was quite staged because Jones's lawyer pulls the guy off of him. And actually, the congressman is not hurt. There's some blood on his shirt, though, from actually the guy with the knife. And I think is instigated with this knife attack.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
So now the Congressman really wants to get out of there as his support staff wants him to get out of there too. And so Jones asked him before he gets on the truck, has this changed everything? Like almost the leading question. I want this to have changed everything. Did it work? And Congressman Ryan says, well, it hasn't changed everything, but it's changed some things.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Well, so Layton, yeah, he's the plant to do that. And everyone on the truck is saying, you can't let him come. He's not a defector. But the congressman's like, I can't tell somebody not to come, you know, and everybody will be searched before they get on the plane, which happens, but he gets his gun in there anyway.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
And then there has to be two planes because there are so many people, they can't go back on the one plane. So they've had to call back to Georgetown and get another plane sent. And so all of them are at the airstrip, which is a tiny, pretty tiny airstrip. And there's these two planes, one like a 17 passenger and one a much smaller one.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
So there he met the nurse, Marceline Baldwin, who was a minister's daughter. I think they were both very inexperienced in the ways of love and romance, and they got married very quickly. Marceline was very altruistic, and Jim Jones was very altruistic. And so He was going to school and also deciding that a minister was what he needed to be.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
So Jones has learned ahead of time that there's gonna be two planes. So Larry Layton won't be able to kill everybody by taking the one plane down. So he sends to the airstrip and this is seven miles of dirt road, which is always muddy. He sends a group of his security guys
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
who are called the Red Brigade, and they have rifles and other kinds of guns, and he sends them to the airstrip to take care of the rest of them.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
And she, as a minister's daughter, was completely supportive of that. And they started their first churches in the 1950s in Indiana. And there was more than one, which is why I say churches, and they changed names as well. There was Community Unity Church. and there was Wings of Deliverance, and eventually there was People's Temple.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Yes, exactly. They start adopting across racial lines, which also was not done in the 50s. So they were the first... white family to adopt an African-American child. And he was given the name Jim Jones Jr., which is interesting. They had one natural child, Stephen, and there were five or six adopted ones.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
So they were doing all these good works in Indiana, and she's still working as a full-time nurse. She was integral to the functioning of this church, both financial and otherwise. He was kind of the bad father that people looked up to for approval, and she was more the accepting mother. And eventually they went by those terms, father and mother.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Yes, exactly. And of course, it's not unusual for a religious man to be called father, as is done in the Catholic Church and other churches as well. But she also becomes Mother Marceline. And in some ways, in my research, I felt like she has developed this kind of saintly image, which is in a certain way just as dehumanizing as Jim Jones's monster image.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
You know, I've been trying to deconstruct those stereotypes with my work.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Yeah, I actually wouldn't call it new age because now as we start moving into the 70s, the political aspect is what rises to the surface and what ends up. So he starts out with like poor working class blacks and whites. In the early 60s, he decides he's going to move them to California, Northern California. And the reason for that is twofold.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
One is he feels Indiana's inhospitable to their mixed congregation. But the other is that like many people in the early 60s, there's a great fear of a nuclear bomb. And Esquire magazine runs this story. piece saying, these are the 10 best places in the world where you'll be safest if the bomb drops.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
So he chooses the Redwood Valley near Ukiah, California, Northern California, which is at the time pretty white itself and very rural. And so he says, okay, who's coming with me? And I think the numbers are about 110. people follow him, 40 families roughly. And they go in a caravan out to Northern California. And it's there that the church starts expanding. So that was 65.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
And so if you think about the context of what's going on in America, we have the rise of the anti-war movement. We have a lot of white college kids who want to change the world. So initially, it's kind of that segment that starts growing in the church. And a lot of his Black followers grow up in the Black church. And so he can really speak to them with his style of preaching.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
But to the college educated, that style of preaching is not anything they're used to. So he's developing, and I'm not saying it was insincere, he's developing the political part of the church, which is so egalitarian that he calls himself a socialist. And he says, that's what the world should be. It should be socialist, goods should be distributed equally.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
And so many young people, including a bunch of white-collar types like lawyers and teachers, are attracted to the church for that reason, not for... the Pentecostal preaching.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Yeah. So the healings he discovers bring a lot of people. Like he's a showman. He's a great showman. They end up going on these national tours where they have this fleet of Greyhound buses eventually that take all of them all over the country and they do these services, and the healings are, I suppose, an evangelistic kind of standby, if you're the right kind of preacher.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
So yeah, he heals people, supposedly, he brings people back from the dead, supposedly. And, and I guess he's very, very convincing. You know, I mean, as a As a natural born skeptic, I never would have believed it, but he manages to make it believable. And of course, he has this little inner core of workers who make these possible and do all kinds of nefarious things to make the healings look real.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
You know, like I would suppose it's more like a magic show.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Yes. I mean, so they get a They have their headquarters in San Francisco, and they also have a church in Los Angeles, and they go back and forth a lot.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
I guess I don't know about that language. I don't know if I'd use that language. I mean, he... I mean, Jones is a really shrewd guy, and he understands that his style of preaching is very attractive to African-Americans and that he can get lots more human beings where there are Black neighborhoods. And, you know, Ukiah doesn't have any, and San Francisco has plenty, and Los Angeles has plenty.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
So that's another reason for the move out of Ukiah. And in San Francisco still, Kind of in exchange for offering the support of the People's Temple to the candidate, Mayor Moscone, who wins and Harvey Mill gets his spot on the Board of Supervisors, Jones is rewarded with a political position of being head of the Housing Board in San Francisco.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Housing is a super important part of the political landscape.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Yes. I mean, he called himself a socialist, and I guess the technical term is apostolic socialism that he was preaching. So he got to keep the God part for the God-fearing, but he started moving away from that.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
And if you've read some of the anecdotes from that time, you probably remember that he at one point holds up this Bible to his huge congregation and says, there's no sky God who cares about you. And he throws the Bible on the ground and stamps on it. And he says, if there's a sky God, let him come get me for doing this. And that's pretty scandalous for especially the old people.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Yeah. Yeah. And so he manages that. You say they're mutually exclusive, but he brings them together in the people's temple and makes it work for a little while.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
Well, the communal living did not fail in San Francisco. That's not why they left. They have, you know, multiple, like you can call them urban communes. And part of that is how Temple accumulates wealth. they get their members. And this is also apparently a very common thing in a lot of evangelical churches.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
People give up all of their worldly goods and they give all the profits or in Jones's case, like the titles to their places of habitation, they give that over to the church. And so then they have communal living as part of the ethos of the church. And And they eat very frugally.
American History Hit
Jonestown: The Birth of Peoples Temple
And so People's Temple is gathering wealth as an organization, but the people are living like poor people and sharing living facilities and sharing meals. And they get an allowance of like a few bucks a week to live on. you know, to buy extras. Then when they run the collections at church services, like they're supposed to give some of that back to the church too. They're a few bucks a week.