Jonestown: 13 Things You Should Know About Cult Massacre

[RoadRomeo]

Until the September 11th attacks, the tragedy in Jonestown on November 18th, 1978 represented the largest number of American civilian casualties in a single non-natural event. It is unfathomable now, as it was then, that more than 900 Americans – members of a San Francisco-based religious group called the Peoples Temple – died after drinking poison at the urging of their leader, the Reverend Jim Jones, in a secluded South American jungle settlement. Photographs taken after the carnage forever document the sheer enormity of the event: the bodies of hundreds of people, including children, lying face down in the grass. Nearly 40 years later, the infamous and horrific event continues to fascinate us through numerous books, articles and documentaries.

 

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The story of Jonestown begins with Jones, a white minister who preached unconventional socialist and progressive ideas to a predominantly African-American congregation, called the Peoples Temple. At the height of its popularity during the 1970s, the Temple had a membership estimated in the thousands and was courted by local politicians in San Francisco, including Harvey Milk. But by 1977, Jones had grown paranoid from the media scrutiny over the Temple’s suspicious activities, so he and his numerous followers moved to an agricultural settlement (a.k.a. Jonestown) in Guyana, the remote country east of Venezuela.

 

 

 

Concern over the welfare of those in the jungle encampment prompted U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan to visit Jonestown in November 1978. After checking out the settlement, Ryan was shot to death along with four other people by Temple gunmen at an airstrip. Following those murders, Jones commanded his followers to drink cyanide-laced punch, starting with the children first. In all, there were over 900 who died in Jonestown, including Jim Jones, who was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head. There is speculation that he may have taken his own life, or that his nurse Annie Moore fatally shot him before she killed herself in the same manner.

Decades later, survivors of Jonestown still remember being part of a church/organization that they devoted a good portion of their lives to. “The people were incredible,” says Jean Clancey, who worked on the Temple newspaper. “People who were capable of committing themselves to something outside of their own self-interests.” Adds Laura Johnston Kohl, another former Temple member, “We – all of us – were doing the right things but in the wrong place with the wrong leader.”

Today, the legacy of Jonestown has been reduced to the popular expression of “drinking the Kool-Aid.” But the history of Jones and the Peoples Temple is much bigger than that somewhat inaccurate catchphrase. Here are 13 little-known facts about Jonestown.

Jim Jones’ Cruelty and Madness Were Rooted in His Childhood

People have wondered how Jim Jones, a man who preached racial and social equality, turned evil. But as Tim Reiterman explained in Raven, Jones’ dark qualities – his need to control people, his deceit, and his anger toward people who betray or abandon him – could be traced to his childhood in Indiana. A loner during his youth, Jim would entertain his playmates in the loft of his family’s barn and made them his captive audience (one time, he even locked up his young friends in the barn). He performed experiments on animals and conducted funerals for them.

“I thought Jimmy was a really weird kid,” Jones’ childhood friend Chuck Wilmore recalled in the 2006 documentary Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple. “He was obsessed with religion; he was obsessed with death. A friend of mine told me that he saw Jimmy kill a cat with a knife.” According to Jeff Guinn’s book, The Road to Jonestown, Jones also had an early fascination with Adolf Hitler. “When Hitler committed suicide in April 1945, thwarting enemies who sought to capture and humiliate him, Jimmy was impressed,” he wrote.

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