Daniel J. Flynn - Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco

Attracting the mighty and powerful: portions of the flyer promoting the Peoples Temple benefit dinner, December 2, 1978

Peoples Temple ephemera and publications; MS 4124; California Historical Society

T he advertisement billed the December 2 benefit gala as A Struggle Against Oppression. Scheduled speakers included rising Assemblyman Willie Brown as the master of ceremonies and funnyman Dick Gregory as the keynote. Supervisor Harvey Milk and other movers and shakers of an oft moved and shaken city crammed their big names into a small font on the flyer. For the bargain of $25and tax deductible at thatinfluence seekers could seek to influence the mighty of a great American city. In addition to mingling with such power brokers as Brown and Milk, they could corner Sheriff Eugene Brown, physician and newspaper publisher Carlton Goodlett, and Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver at San Franciscos Hyatt Regency. And doing well meant doing good. The dinners proceeds subsidized the Peoples Temple Medical Program.

The Hyatt ballroom remained empty on December 2, 1978. Two weeks earlier, the small staff of the Peoples Temple Medical Program had mixed cyanide with Flavor Aid and administered the poisonous, sugary elixir to hundreds of people in faraway Guyana. The smiling seniors and racial rainbow of children touting the wholesomeness of the agricultural commune in the fundraisers promotional literature rotted in piles in the steamy South American jungle. On an airstrip in nearby Port Kaituma, five people, including Congressman Leo Ryan, lay dead, gunned down by Peoples Temple assassins. Others, including future congresswoman Jackie Speier, State Department official Richard Dwyer, and San Francisco Examiner reporter Tim Reiterman, nursed bullet wounds. In Guyanas capital city, a former Harvey Milk campaign volunteer slashed her childrens throats.

The Reverend Jim Jones, the darling of the San Francisco political establishment, orchestrated the murders and suicides of 918 people on November 18, 1978. The man-made cataclysm represented the largest such loss of civilian life in American history until 9/11 and the largest mass suicide of the modern age. Nothing before or after struck Americans as so bizarre.

The event shocked the world. But the small world surrounding Peoples Temple predicted itloudly and repeatedly.

In the chaotic aftermath of the carnage, the Temples aggressive communism and evangelical atheism got lost in translation from the Guyanese jungle to bustling urban newsrooms looking to get the story first rather than right.

A New York Times article alleged that Mr. Jones had preached a blend of fundamentalist Christianity and social activism.

Not everyone accepted the initial narrative. One fundamentalist minister, in a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe , objected to a California News Service article that termed Joness flock a fundamentalist congregation.

Pravda and the Globe s fundamentalist correspondentstrange bedfellowswere right. The supposed religious fanatics of Jonestown had hosted a Soviet delegation, taught Russian to residents in preparation for a mass pilgrimage to the place Jim Jones dubbed the groups spiritual motherland, and willed millions of dollars to the Soviet Union.

The initial rush of information confused falsehood for fact to such an extent that many gleaned an impression of the Temple diametrically opposed to reality. Jonestown, a jungle citadel of evangelical atheism and militant socialism, strangely became a cautionary tale about the dangers of evangelical Christianity.

The Nation offered one of the few reality checks. The temple was as much a left-wing political crusade as a church, the weekly offered. In the course of the 1970s, its social program grew steadily more disaffected from what Jim Jones came to regard as a Fascist America and drifted rapidly toward outspoken Communist sympathies.

Distortions endure. The cover of Rebecca Moores 2009 book Understanding Jonestown and Peoples Temple , a follow-up to A Sympathetic History of Jonestown and In Defense of Peoples Temple , shows pictures of a white teacher patiently instructing black children, jubilant multiracial chefs preparing a dinner, an elderly man receiving medical care, and an industrious boy spinning a pottery wheel. Moore insists that the communes reality was not completely at odds with the faade it presented to the world.

If anything, Julia Scheeres maintains in 2011s A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown , the people who moved to Jonestown should be remembered as noble idealists. They wanted to create a better, more equitable, society. They wanted their kids to be free of violence and racism. They rejected sexist gender roles. They believed in a dream.

Most people who live in a nightmare do.

The beliefs of Jim Jones and Peoples Templepolitical, spiritual, and otherwiseultimately proved a terrible embarrassment to allies; their actions, more so. Politicians, journalists, and others distanced themselves from the Temple.

The situation was far different when Jones was alive. During Peoples Temples heyday, Huey Newton, Jane Fonda, and Angela Davis heaped praise on the clergyman. A Los Angeles newspaper named Jones Humanitarian of the Year. The prominent interfaith organization Religion in American Life named him one of the nations one hundred outstanding clergymen, feting him at New Yorks Waldorf Astoria. The president of CBS talked to Jones about producing a TV documentary on Peoples Temple.

Peoples Temple offered the political class votes and volunteers. In return, the Temple received legitimacy. Jones held court with future first lady Rosalynn Carter; two vice presidents, Nelson Rockefeller and Walter Mondale; Governor Jerry Brown and Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally of California; and many other political figures. Willie Brown compared Jones to Albert Einstein and Martin Luther King Jr. Local media speculated that Jones could abandon the pulpit for the best office in City Hall.