Background and career
James Warren Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was an American cult leader, preacher, and mass murderer who founded and led the Peoples Temple between 1955 and 1978. Jones and the members of his inner circle planned and orchestrated a mass murder–suicide that resulted in the deaths of over 900 people (approximately 396 children). He described the action as "revolutionary suicide", a term coined by Huey P. Newton. The people went to their deaths at the remote jungle commune which they had developed at Jonestown, Guyana, which was operated like a mini-totalitarian police state under official permission and a formal land lease from the Government of Guyana. U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan, who had been visiting to investigate reports of human rights abuses and people wanting to leave, was also assassinated before his plane departed. Jones blended Pentecostal religious authority with Marxist–Leninist rhetoric, with an emphasis on racial equality during the civil rights movement, which resulted in most of his followers (and later victims) being African American. As a child, Jones had developed an affinity for Pentecostalism and a desire to preach. He was ordained as a Christian minister in the Independent Assemblies of God, attracting his first group of followers while participating in the Pentecostal Latter Rain movement and the Healing Revival during the 1950s. Jones's initial popularity arose from his joint campaign appearances with the movement's prominent leaders William Branham and Joseph Mattsson-Boze, and their endorsement of his ministry. Jones founded the organization that became the Peoples Temple in Indianapolis in 1955. In 1956, he began to be influenced by Father Divine and the Peace Mission movement. Jones distinguished himself through civil rights activism, founding the Temple as a fully integrated congregation. In 1964, he joined and was ordained a minister by the Disciples of Christ; his attraction to the Disciples was largely due to the autonomy and tolerance they granted to differing views within their denomination. In 1965, Jones moved the Temple to California. The group established its headquarters in San Francisco, where he became deeply involved in political and charitable activity throughout the 1970s. Jones developed connections with prominent California politicians and was appointed as chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission in 1975. Beginning in the late 1960s, reports of abuse began to surface as Jones became increasingly vocal in his rejection of traditional Christianity; He began promoting a form of anti-capitalism that he called "Apostolic Socialism" and made claims of his own divinity. Jones became progressively more controlling of his followers in Peoples Temple, which had more than 3,000 members at its peak. His followers engaged in a communal lifestyle in which many turned over all their income and property to Jones and leaders of Peoples Temple, who directed all aspects of community life. Following a period of negative publicity and reports of abuse at Peoples Temple, Jones ordered the construction of the Jonestown commune in Guyana in 1974; he convinced or compelled hundreds of his followers to live there with him. He claimed that he was constructing a socialist paradise free from the oppression of the United States government. By 1978, reports surfaced of human rights abuses and accusations that people were being held in Jonestown against their will. U.S. Representative Leo Ryan led a delegation to the commune in November of that year to investigate these reports. While boarding a return flight with some former Temple members who wished to leave, Ryan and four others were murdered by gunmen from Jonestown. Jones then ordered a mass murder-suicide that claimed the lives of 912 commune members; most of the members died by drinking Flavor Aid laced with cyanide. Those who resisted were forcefully injected with cyanide.
Jim Jones was born on May 13, 1931, in the rural community of Crete, Indiana, to James Thurman Jones (October 21, 1887 – May 29, 1951) and Lynetta Putnam (April 16, 1902 – December 10, 1977). Jones was of Irish and Welsh descent; he and his mother both claimed to have some Cherokee ancestry, but there is no evidence of this. Jones' father was a disabled World War I veteran who suffered from severe breathing difficulties due to injuries sustained in a chemical weapons attack. He tried to augment his income by occasionally working on neighborhood road repair projects because his military pension was insufficient to support his family. His father's illness led to financial difficulties and intense marital problems. In 1934, during the Great Depression, the Jones family was evicted from their home for failure to make mortgage payments. Their relatives purchased a shack in the nearby town of Lynn in which Jones grew up without plumbing and electricity. The family attempted to earn an income through farming but met with failure when the father's health further deteriorated. They often lacked adequate food, relied on financial support from their extended family, and sometimes resorted to foraging in the nearby forest and fields to supplement their diet. According to multiple biographers, Jones' mother had "no natural maternal instincts" and frequently neglected her son. When Jones began school, his extended family threatened to cut off their financial assistance unless his mother got a job, forcing her to work outside her home. Meanwhile, Jones' father was hospitalized multiple times due to his illness. As a result, Jones' parents were frequently absent during his childhood. His aunts and uncles who lived close by gave him some supervision, but he often wandered the streets of the town, sometimes naked. Jones received some care from female residents of Lynn who frequently gave him food, clothing, and gifts.
Myrtle Kennedy, the wife of the Nazarene Church's pastor, developed an attachment to Jones. She gave Jones a Bible, encouraged him to study it, and taught him to follow the holiness code of the Nazarene Church. As Jones grew older, he attended services at most of the churches in Lynn, was baptized in several of them, and often went to multiple churches each week. Even as a child, Jones aspired to become a preacher, and began to practice preaching in private. His mother was disturbed when she caught him imitating the pastor of the local Apostolic Pentecostal Church and attempted unsuccessfully to prevent him from attending the church's services. Although they had sympathy for Jones, his neighbors reported that he was an unusual child who was obsessed with religion and death. Jones regularly visited a casket manufacturer in Lynn and held mock funerals for roadkill that he collected. One neighbor stated that Jones killed a cat with a knife for a funeral. When he could not get other children to attend his funerals, he would perform the services alone. Jones claimed to have exceptional abilities, such as the capacity to fly. When he leaped off a roof to demonstrate his abilities, he fell and broke his arm but persisted in his claims. He sometimes put other children into life-threatening situations and told them that he was guided by the Angel of Death. According to claims he made as an adult, Jones committed countless pranks in the churches he attended as a child. He claimed that he stole the Pentecostal minister's Bible and covered Acts 2:38 with cow manure. He also asserted that he had once substituted a cup of his urine for the holy water at a Catholic church. One Jones biographer suggested that he developed his unusual proclivities because making friends was difficult for him. Although his neighbors regarded his religious practices as his strangest characteristic, they also reported that he misbehaved more seriously. He frequently stole candy from town merchants, leaving his mother required to pay for his thefts. Like his mother, who frequently swore in public and found amusement in people being offended at a woman cursing, Jones used offensive profanity, commonly greeting people with, "Good morning, you son of a bitch" or "Hello, you dirty bastard". His mother usually beat him with a leather belt to punish his misbehavior.
Jones developed an intense interest in social doctrines and became a voracious reader, studying Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, and Mahatma Gandhi. He told his wife that Mao Zedong was his hero. He spent hours in the community library and brought books home to read. Jones did not espouse any radical political views in his youth, but as World War II started, he became interested in the Nazi Party. He was fascinated by its pomp, their cohesion, and Hitler's total power. The members of his neighborhood found it disconcerting that he extolled Nazi Germany. Jones acted as a dictator over the other children, ordering them to goosestep together and beating those who disobeyed. One childhood friend recalled Jones shouting "Heil Hitler!" and giving the Nazi salute to German prisoners of war who were traveling to a detention facility. Commenting on his childhood, Jones stated:I was ready to kill by the end of the third grade. I mean, I was so aggressive and hostile, I was ready to kill. Nobody gave me love, any understanding. In those days a parent was supposed to go with a child to school functions. There was some kind of school performance, and everybody's parent was there but mine. I'm standing there, alone. Always was alone. Tim Reiterman, a journalist and biographer of Jones, wrote that Jones's attraction to religion was strongly influenced by his desire for a family. Jones went to see the Kennedy family in 1942 when they spent the summer in Richmond, Indiana. They took part in services four times a week while attending a summer religious convention at a nearby Pentecostal church. When Jones returned to Lynn in the fall, he upset his neighborhood by explaining sexual reproduction in detail to young children. Jones's mother was urged to control his behavior by many individuals in Lynn, but she refused. Many parents decided to keep their kids away from Jones as a result of the issue. He had established himself as an outcast among his friends by the time he started high school and was progressively despised by the locals.
In middle school, Jones continued to stand out from his peers. Jones went by the nickname "Jimmy" during his youth, and almost always carried his Bible with him. Jones was a good student who enjoyed debating with his teachers. He also had the habit of refusing to respond to anyone who spoke to him first and only engaged in conversations when he started them. In contrast to his peers, Jones was known to dress in his Sunday church clothes every day of the week. His religious views alienated him from other young people. He frequently confronted them for drinking beer, smoking, and dancing. At times, he would even interrupt other young people's events and insist that they read the Bible with him. Jones did not enjoy participating in sports because he detested losing, so he coached teams for younger children instead. Jones was disturbed by the treatment of the African Americans who were in attendance at a baseball game he attended in Richmond, Indiana. The events at that baseball game brought discrimination against African Americans to Jones's attention and influenced his strong aversion to racism. Jones's father belonged to the Indiana branch of the Ku Klux Klan, which enjoyed considerable support in Indiana during the Great Depression. Jones described how he and his father had a disagreement about race and added that they had not spoken for "many, many years" as a result of his father's forbidding one of Jones's black friends from entering his home. Jones's parents separated in 1945 and they eventually divorced. Jones moved to Richmond, Indiana with his mother, where he graduated from Richmond High School in December 1948 early and with honors. Jones and his mother lost the financial support of their relatives following the divorce. To support himself, Jones began working as an orderly at Richmond's Reid Hospital in 1946. Jones was well-regarded by the senior management, but staff members later recalled that Jones exhibited disturbing behavior towards some patients and co-workers. Jones began dating a nurse-in-training named Marceline Mae Baldwin while he was working at Reid Hospital. Jones moved to Bloomington, Indiana in November 1948, where he attended Indiana University Bloomington with the intention of becoming a doctor, but changed his mind shortly thereafter. During his time at University, Jones was impressed by a speech that Eleanor Roosevelt delivered about the plight of African-Americans, and he began to espouse support for communism and other radical political views for the first time. Jones and Baldwin continued their relationship while he attended college, and the couple married on June 12, 1949. Their first home was in Bloomington, where Marceline worked in a nearby hospital while Jones attended college. Marceline was Methodist, and she and Jones immediately fell into arguments about church. Jones's strong opposition to the Methodist church's racial segregationist practices was an early strain on their marriage, and throughout the duration of their relationship, Jones frequently emotionally and psychologically abused Marceline. Jones insisted on attending Bloomington's Full Gospel Tabernacle, but eventually compromised and began attending a local Methodist church on most Sunday mornings. Despite attending churches every week, Jones privately pressed his wife to accept atheism. Through the years, Jones's marriage was affected by his insecurity. He often felt the need to test Marceline's love and loyalty, and at times he used sadistic methods to do so. One recurring tactic he used was to tell her that one of her close friends or family members had suddenly died, and then comfort her over the loss, before finally admitting to her the story was untrue. After attending Indiana University for two years, the couple relocated to Indianapolis in 1951. Jones took night classes at Butler University to continue his education, finally earning a degree in secondary education in 1961. In 1951, the 20-year-old Jones began attending gatherings of the Communist Party USA in Indianapolis. Jones and his family faced harassment from government authorities for their affiliation with the Communist Party during 1952. Jones later asserted that in one event, his mother was harassed by FBI agents in front of her co-workers because she had attended a communist meeting with her son. Jones became frustrated with the persecution of communists in the U.S. Reflecting back on his participation in the Communist Party, Jones said that he asked himself, "How can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church."
In early 1952, Jones announced to his wife and her family that he would become a Methodist minister, believing the church was ready to "put real socialism into practice." Jones was surprised when a Methodist district superintendent helped him get a start in the church, even though he knew Jones to be a communist. In the summer of 1952, Jones was hired as student pastor to the children at the Sommerset Southside Methodist Church, where he launched a project to create a playground that would be open to children of all races. Jones continued to visit and speak at Pentecostal churches while serving as Methodist student pastor. In early 1954 Jones was dismissed from his position in the Methodist Church, ostensibly for stealing church funds, though he later claimed he left the church because its leaders forbade him from integrating African-Americans into his congregation. Around this time in 1953, Jones visited a Pentecostal Latter Rain convention in Columbus, Indiana, where a woman prophesied that Jones was a prophet with a great ministry. Jones was surprised by the endorsement, but gladly accepted the call to preach and rose to the podium to deliver a message to the crowd. Pentecostalism was in the midst of the Healing Revival and Latter Rain movements during the 1950s.
