Hey, Thoughty 2 here. Jesus Christ, Nelson Mandela and Adolf Hitler;
aside from being costumes guaranteed to cause a stir at a fancy dress party, these historical
heavyweights all have something in common. They were all leaders of such passion,
conviction and charisma, that they could compel their followers to do things, both good and evil,
they would otherwise never have considered. Today’s story of madness, mock messiahs,
and mass murder focuses on someone who combined elements of all three. He was a
captivating preacher with the gift of the gab, a firebrand political leader who advocated radical
socialism and racial harmony, and a tyrant who used violence and death to achieve his aims.
Rising to prominence during the era of peace and love he eventually declared
himself to be the Messiah, but instead turned out to be a very naughty boy.
After brainwashing his thousands of followers into giving up their money and freedom,
he eventually cost them their lives by engineering what is to this day the
largest mass suicide in modern history. This is the twisted tale of Jim Jones,
a self-styled prophet who mixed spirituality with criminality and convinced his congregation he
would give them heaven on earth, but instead brought about his own personal apocalypse.
Jones was born into abject misery in rural Indiana in May 1931.
His father had been crippled in World War One and struggled to find work,
and his mother had all the maternal instincts of a frog with amnesia. The family were evicted during
the Great Depression of the 1930s, relocating into what was little more than a shack with no indoor
plumbing or electricity. Things got so bad they were forced to forage for food in nearby fields.
Jim was left to his own devices from a very young age, he frequently toddled
through town naked as an infant because there was no one around to dress him.
At some point in his childhood, he was given a Bible by the wife of a local pastor,
and it turned out to be a lightning bolt moment for the oft-nude infant. He studied the book
ceaselessly and began to attend multiple churches every week, getting baptised in several of them.
Religion and death fascinated Jones even then; he gave sermons to the local kids
and held mock funerals for roadkill. He also claimed to have special powers, on one occasion
swearing blind he could fly - a boast that was proven a lie shortly afterwards when he jumped
off a roof and broke his arm. When he wasn’t reading the Bible,
Jones was engrossed in works by the likes of Stalin, Mao, and Gandhi.
If it isn’t obvious already, he was far from your average kid. Instead of comic books and candy,
it was more… communism and cat funerals. When World War Two broke out, Jones’ new
Nazi fascination surprised no one. He commanded the neighbourhood children to
goose-step in time with him on pretend marches and beat them if they refused.
Between the roadkill funerals and the enforced fascism Jones had done little to endear himself to
his school friends and this pattern persisted into puberty. He went full-briefcase wanker by wearing
his Sunday church clothes to School and always carried a Bible, regularly lecturing his fellow
students about the dangers of the 3 Ds - drinking, dancing, and the biggest D of all - the devil.
Unless your idea of a good time was linking arms and reading Psalms, Jim Jones was definitely not
the guy to get stuck with at a house party. At college, he became increasingly politically
active and started attending Communist Party meetings. This was America in the ‘50s and
the Red Scare was in full effect; merely being suspected of sympathising with the Communists
could get you blacklisted by the government. Considering that Jones and his young wife
Marceline actually were commies, it’s no surprise they were regularly harassed by the FBI.
But these ideological intrusions only served to further radicalise the young couple.
In the early 50s, Jones worked as a pastor at several churches across Indianapolis, and in
1955 he founded the now-infamous People’s Temple - it was supposed to be a new religious movement
that combined Christianity with communism, but as we’ll soon discover, it rapidly devolved into
one of history’s deadliest doomsday cults. To gain more followers in those early years
Jones organised faith healing conventions during which he would call upon the big man upstairs
to do a spot of divine doctoring, healing various ailments among the
attendees. It worked too - not the healing, obviously - the getting more followers bit.
Despite his earlier admiration for a certain tiny-moustached German, Jones went on to become
an advocate for racial harmony, and in 1960 the Mayor of Indianapolis made him director of the
local human rights commission. For all the evil that was to come later in Jones’ life, he actually
did a lot of good in the role. This was still a time of stark division, with one set of rules
for the city’s white residents, and another for everyone else. Jones worked tirelessly to break
down those barriers, desegregating everything from the police department to the phone company.
Jim’s desire for a more tolerant world was evident in his personal life too;
he and Marceline adopted six children of various ethnicities to create what
he questionably called his ‘rainbow family.’ But while outwardly he appeared to be a paragon
of virtue, Jones was growing increasingly paranoid. In 1961 he told his congregation
he’d had visions that a nuclear strike would soon destroy Indianapolis.
Convinced America’s end was nigh, Jones travelled to Brazil in 1962 to search
for a new home for the People's Temple. He settled in Rio de Janeiro, working in
the city’s slums, but the Brazilian break didn’t last long. Jones was unable to find a suitable
HQ for his fledgling cult, and back home in Indianapolis, which against all odds hadn’t
been wiped off the map in a hail of nukes, Jones’ fickle followers were drifting away.
Diminished attendance brought financial issues, and Jones was forced to sell several of the
People’s Temple assets, including the actual temple. Awkward. In 1965 he left Indianapolis
behind for good, moving his family and remaining flock to Redwood Valley in California.
Once settled in The Golden State, things started to get very dark very quickly. Jones continued
to preach that the apocalypse was coming but now claimed to be the messiah sent to save the world.
Despite fancying himself a divine incarnation, his actions said otherwise; he began taking
copious amounts of drugs, and his control over his remaining followers grew far more oppressive.
New members of the People’s Temple were forced to transfer all their assets to the church, and
those who held day jobs gave their entire salaries to their new God. Jones controlled every aspect
of their lives - he set food rations, approved sexual partners, and determined who could marry.
As for his own ‘needs’ - he took what he wanted, even if what he wanted happened
to be married to another member of the Temple. Jones set up an armed security unit to enforce
his will and those who went against him were subjected to increasingly severe punishments,
including reduced food rations, public humiliation, and physical violence.
As horrifying as this was, Jone had only just begun. But no matter how outrageously he behaved
privately, in public, his stardom continued to rise. This was the age of the hippie, a time
of making love not war and as the smell of joss sticks floated across California, Jones’ message
of socialism and equality struck a chord. By 1970 the People’s Temple had opened a
branch in L.A. and moved their headquarters to the flower-power capital of the west coast,
San Francisco. Membership grew steadily and Jones and his disciples would brazenly
seek new recruits from rival churches. Involvement in San Francisco politics allowed
Jones to befriend numerous city politicians, and he courted the press, using an extensive network
of contacts to guarantee good publicity for him and his cult... I mean church.
Despite the PR offensive, word was beginning to get out that the People’s Temple wasn’t quite
the centre of virtue it seemed. As rumours of exploitation and abuse began to spread,
Jones decided it was probably a good idea to move his flock far away from the eyes of
the media and beyond the reach of the police. His destination of choice was, of all places,
Guyana. The former British colony had a recently-installed socialist government,
and for Jones, it was the perfect place to reshape the world in his image.
You might think convincing a bunch of Americans to up sticks and relocate to the jungle to be ruled
over by an abusive megalomaniac would be a hard sell, but people do some pretty weird things when
they believe their immortal soul is at stake. All told, around a thousand faithful made the move.
Cult-based colonies don’t build themselves even if they are founded by the actual messiah, so Jones
soon put his loyal disciples to work toiling in the fields twelve hours a day, six days a week.
As a reward for all this hard labour, the people of Jonestown were given food
rations that would have had your average supermodel reaching for the snack drawer..
Nobody was allowed to leave and anyone who spoke out about the appalling conditions
would be sent to the ‘medical unit,’ where they were dosed with mind-altering
drugs transforming them into walking zombies. Jones himself continued to pop a plethora of pills
and potions, all of which made his paranoia soar to new heights. He was convinced that numerous
enemies were out to destroy the church, so along with their back-breaking manual labour and lack
of food, the People’s Temple congregation were subjected to military-style drills,
including simulated attacks on the community. Guards hidden in the forest would fire on the
commune whilst Jones chanted nonsense over loudspeakers dotted around the place while his
terrified followers took up weapons and stood ready to repel their fictitious invaders.
By November of 1978 abuse in Jonestown had become so widespread that the U.S. government
sent a team led by California Congressman Leo Ryan to investigate. The delegation included
newspaper reporters, a TV crew and relatives of some Jonestown inmates - I mean residents.
Jones took the intrusion in his stride, holding a small party for the outsiders. However, the facade
of normalcy quickly crumbled. Many residents concluded that Jones was not the messiah after all
and saw the delegation as an opportunity to escape. But when Jones’ more fanatical
followers got wind of what was happening, one of them lost his shit and tried to stab
the Congressman. Unsurprisingly the delegation decided it was time to get the hell out of there,
taking fifteen congregation members with them.
But after hightailing it to a small airstrip a few miles outside of Jonestown they were
intercepted by Jones’ personal militia. Armed men stormed the runway with all guns blazing,
and by the time the bullets stopped flying Ryan and 4 of his team were dead.
Horrific though that was, far worse was about to take place back in Jonestown.
Jones knew that even by his own outlandish standards, this was it; you can’t gun down a
politician and expect to be left to play God in the Jungle. There would be no quiet relocation
this time. The US authorities would come after him like a seagull after a bag of chips. So he took a
drastic measure. Something that’s still hard to hear about even today, almost 50 years later.
He rounded up his most trusted lieutenants and had them prepare a huge vat of the
soft drink flavor-aid, lacing it with a cocktail of drugs. Jones knew he’d lost,
but if he was going down, he was going to take everyone else with him.
Just in case you’re still on the fence about what kind of guy Jim Jones was (I mean,
you probably aren’t - but just in case), I can tell you he decreed that the congregation’s
children should be the first to drink the poison. Jones’ own wife Marceline stepped
in at this point in an attempt to stop the madness, but guards held her back. As the
children began to die with their parents watching on, Marceline managed to break free, but it was
already too late. Distraught, she grabbed a cup of poison and was dead minutes later.
In Jones’ own words, it was a ‘revolutionary suicide’ - a protest against the evils of the
world. For many members of the People’s Temple it wasn’t even suicide, let alone
revolutionary. Jones had done his brainwashing well - the few survivors claimed that most sat
patiently waiting for their turn to die, but a small minority refused to drink. Never one to take
no for an answer, Jones had his goons pin them down and inject cyanide into their bloodstreams.
In the space of just 45 minutes, a staggering 909 people were dead, 276 children among them. Jones
was found with his followers, a bullet hole in his head. Whether he committed suicide or was murdered
by one of his flock, nobody knows for sure. Either way, the People’s Temple was no more.
In the years since the massacre, there have been many cult leaders who’ve preyed on the
good intentions and misguided faith of their followers to line their own pockets and fulfil
their own warped fantasies. But for sheer force of personality, size of ambition and eventually
scale of devastation, few have come close to the sunglasses-wearing second-coming that
was the Reverend Jim Jones. Thank God for that. Thanks for watching.