28-08-2015, 02:46 PM
V. A CALIFORNIA CONCENTRATION CAMP
About a hundred miles north of San Francisco lies a patchwork quilt of small horse farms and rolling vineyards known as Mendocino County. The county is known, internationally, for its production of fine wine grapes and nationally for its production of high-quality marijuana: the county's leading cash crop. Most of the region's sparse population is concentrated in the cultivated flat lands between the Coastal and Mayacamas mountain ranges in an area the native Pomo Indians named "Deep Valley" or Ukiah. Ukiah, the county seat, was a sleepy rural community of 10,000 in 1965 when the Reverend Jim Jones and his followers arrived in the heat of midsummer. The Peoples Temple would remain headquartered in the Ukiah area for the next nine years, during which time they would infiltrate every aspect of county government, sway political elections, purchase a sizable portion of the real estate and businesses and, in short, become the ultimate power in Mendocino County; the only safe place in the United States.
The Temple's advance team had primed the local press for the pilgrims' arrival. George Hunter, the managing editor of the Ukiah Daily Journal and his reporter wife Kathy were offered gifts intended to produce the favorable press coverage necessary if the Caucasian locals were to tolerate what would be their only Black neighbors. Kathy Hunter wrote the front page article that introduced the Peoples Temple to Ukiah in the July 26, 1965 edition of the Ukiah Daily Journal
Represented in the group and indicative of the substantial background of the membership are nurses, teachers, a pilot, a traffic engineer, an electronics man, salespeople and private businessmen. One of the newcomers has already purchased an apartment house, another has bought a Ukiah motel, and still another is negotiating the purchase of a rest home here.
Far from being a closed, tightly knit group living in a communal existence, members of the church live their own lives as part of the community as a whole, held together only by their belief that all men-- white, black, yellow, or red--are one brotherhood.[62]
As early as February of 1965, the Temple's advance team had initiated negotiations to purchase the Evangelical Free Church on the corner of Bush and Henry streets in Ukiah. Jones would hold services in the building until November of 1965 when he withdrew his offer to purchase what was the only available church in town. The Temple reportedly broke off negotiations when their Indiana corporations lost their licenses because they failed to file the required annual reports. Actually, they had formed a new corporation, "The Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ of Redwood Valley" that could have easily purchased the church. The stated purpose of the new corporation, chartered on November 26, 1965, was to "further the word of God" but apparently not at the Evangelical Free Church building. Jones abandoned his first California headquarters after occupying it for five months, presumably rent-free.
Jones next acquired the free use of a classroom at the Ridgewood Range, a religious colony located about ten miles north of Ukiah. The Peoples Temple met in that classroom for about two years until late 1967 when the Christ's Church of the Golden Rule, who owned the building, ordered the Temple off their property, reportedly fearing that Jones was trying to take over their church. The Temple then met in a 4-H exhibition barn at the Mendocino County Fairgrounds until early 1968 when Jones moved the services to the house he had purchased for his family in Redwood Valley, a remote village about seven miles outside Ukiah. The group first met in Jones' two-car garage under conditions so crowded as to discourage outsiders from dropping in on Temple services. Ukiah is primarily middle-class conservative Caucasians. Even though the locals could have provided sizable contributions, Jones did not recruit or even want their membership as they had no place in the experiment. There were Caucasian management personnel but few, if any, were from Mendocino County. Just about all of Jones' White lieutenants were hand-picked from Indiana and other parts of California. The only Blacks in Ukiah were those who Jones had brought from Indiana. Their numbers would increase as Jones succeeded in recruiting Blacks from the Oakland ghettos to relocate in Ukiah, live in Temple-owned housing, sign up for welfare with a Temple aide in the county office and provide the labor, the money and the subjects for the experiment being planned. Temple aide Edith Parks described the period when Jones was turning away the locals who were sampling the services of his new church in a letter to Virginia Morningstar, dated April 26, 1968 which began "burn this." Thankfully, she did not.
... All work at something. They have to, rent is $90-$125 for small houses and groceries are so high. Most of them pay 25 percent tithes. It will take care of them all later some way. Jim is turning them away from church. 85 for Easter. 35 last Sunday. People are awakening and are worried but he says it is too risky! He sends them back to their own churches and tells them to pray and work where they are. There isn't time to re-educate new ones, even those who have been taught far ahead of our "type" of religion.
A few have even been allowed to come and they jumped in with both feet. You don't have to teach them anything. They know & they know who he is & what he is here for. He knows every thought, act or deed. In the message Sunday he said everything that is to happen in the future has been seen & met for all who will meet conditions they must. He knows just what will happen to each one, even how they will die ...
It will happen yet, right here, too. If only I could write it all but the American people have already been conditioned to go the way they are going and acting, so they will think we need the laws t at will be put through Congress, each one taking away more of our rights! Just watch who is for them! Reagan is a full-fledged fascist.[63]
Edith Parks' letter was indicative of the prevailing attitude of the Temple's Caucasian aides. She was more political than religious and strangely cryptic in her communications. Why was it "too risky" to allow just anyone to join? Why was there not enough "time to re-educate new ones?" Had the life expectancy of the Peoples Temple been set as early as 1968? Probably. By describing those who were allowed to join as knowing the truth about Jones and his mission, she reveals the extent of her own knowledge. Note her use of the third person "they". "They" must work. "They" pay tithes. Jones knew how "they" would die. Edith Parks and her family had joined the Peoples Temple in its early stages in Indianapolis and would play an important role in the final hours of Jonestown. Even though she was a lifetime member, she did not include herself in the ranks of the Black congregation. This "us and them" attitude, though contrary to the Temple's public doctrine of racial integration, was the true relationship between the Caucasian hierarchy and the Black Parishioners.
Temple membership doubled to three hundred in the first three years in Ukiah but by 1968 they still had no permanent headquarters other than the cramped quarters of Jones' two-car garage. The church in town would first appear the logical solution but, even though it was affordable and accommodating, Jones let the deal fall through as the property was too public. Anyone in town might wander in off the streets. Likewise the exhibition barn at the fairgrounds was much too public. The Ridgewood Range provided the private classroom setting Jones needed to indoctrinate his Caucasian lieutenants but it would not serve as the Black church they were planning.
So it was with three hundred people in his garage that Jones set out to build his first California church in the summer of 1968. The first step was to submit a building permit to construct a forty-one foot swimming pool next to his Redwood Valley home. Immediately upon completion of the pool, a second permit was issued to build a roof over the pool with the stated purpose of creating a youth center. When the roof was finished in October, Jones applied for and received a third permit to enclose the structure as a church. Possibly the only church in America built over a swimming pool. The word "church" is really not appropriate. There were no crosses or statues or pictures of deities or saints. The redwood structure was rustic and modern and not at all like a church. Only a star-shaped stained glass window, which was more Satanic than Christian, gave the impression that this was a house of worship. The rural setting of Jones' estate provided the privacy required to conduct his business in secret and stands as an example of the Temple's introverted personality. It was a closed group that did not attempt to recruit or even mingle with the locals. Though the location of the Redwood Valley Temple is understandably desirable, the roundabout method of construction used to build a church over a swimming pool is without apparent reason. The indoor pool was used for recreation, quasi-baptisms and occasionally punishment, but its role as the focal point of the Redwood Valley Temple has never been fully understood.
As in Indiana, Jones used the threat of an unseen enemy to bind his congregation together and, in this case, provide a logical reason for his plans to fence and fortify the Temple compound. In May of 1968, he placed a half-page ad in the UDJ to answer allegations and threats he said were generated by the local John Birch Society after he had led his people in a march to protest the Vietnam War. Since the Ku Klux Klan was not active in Northern California, Jones selected the John Birch Society as representative of the White supremacists who opposed the alleged socialistic politics of the Temple. Actually, Jones was close friends with Walter Heady, the society's local president. Heady often visited the Temple and was even allowed to address the congregation and present films. Jones often consulted Heady on political matters and the two men would maintain communication for years to come. Kathy Hunter, reporter, wife of the editor and co-owner of the Ukiah Daily Journal, reciprocated for the half-page ad by penning an article which appeared in the paper's June 3, 1968 edition under the headline, "Local Group Suffers Terror in the Night."
A telephone rings in the middle of the night, but when it is answered the only sound is someone's breathing on the other end--then the click of a receiver. Or it rings and, in a measured voice--all the more chilling because of its utter lack of emotion--comes the threat:
'Get out of town if you don't want to get blown out of your classroom window.' Besides his duties to his parish and his many community services, Jones also teaches in Anderson Valley and Ukiah.[64]
Temple members continually complained to the authorities about night riders who shot out windows and threw dead dogs onto the Temple grounds. All the attacks were staged. The dogs were among the unfortunate strays gathered by the Temple's animal shelter. Not content with the public's acceptance of persecution, Jones arranged two attempts on his life during his 1968 campaign to publicly justify his ever increasing militarism.
Bill Bush was a professional hair dresser who had recently moved to Ukiah to open a beauty shop with his partner Jim Barnes. Bush also donated his services at the Mendocino State Mental Hospital where he worked with many members of the Peoples Temple. He lived with his common law wife Beverly and their son Billy in the first floor apartment of a duplex house. His partner, Jim Barnes lived upstairs with his children and Temple member Jerry Livingston. According to the accepted story, Livingston seduced Bush's wife who, along with young Billy, was spending most of her time at the Peoples Temple. There is speculation that Livingston had actually seduced Jim Barnes but, in any event, one Sunday morning Bill Bush arrived at the Temple's front steps, mad as hell at the loss of his lover. He demanded that Jones allow him to see his son. Jones frustrated Bush at first by refusing to answer, then teased him to the point where Bush lost his temper and a scuffle ensued. Don Sly, the Temple's swimming Instructor and knife expert, intervened and produced a knife he claimed to have wrestled from Bush. Ten years later Don Sly would once again be called upon to stage a phony knife attack, this time against Congressman Ryan.
Even though Bush was probably innocent, the following morning he was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon after the police had received dozens of depositions from Temple members attesting to what they termed was attempted murder. The crime was front-page news in the Ukiah Daily Journal but as soon as the alleged threat against Jones had been established, he dropped all charges and Bush was released after paying a misdemeanor fine.
Another staged death threat occurred during one of the Temple's evening services when Jones stepped out into the parking lot for a breath of fresh air. There were several witnesses standing nearby when a shot rang out. Jones grabbed his stomach, blood spurted from between his fingers and he fell to the pavement. Only bodyguard Jack Beam was allowed to attend to the fallen leader who lay so still as to suggest to those in view that he was dead. All at once Jones rose to his feet and presumably back from the dead. "I'm not ready. I'm not ready," he proclaimed to the bewildered witnesses. A few minutes later he returned inside to address a tumultuous congregation. He wore a clean shirt and waved the bloody one, challenging anyone to analyze the blood he claimed was his. It probably was. It was common practice for Temple nurses to draw real human blood to use in their fake faith healings. The next day, the bloody shirt was put on display in a glass case installed near the podium as a constant reminder of both the unseen enemy and Jones' supernatural powers. The Temple's special effects department had prepared the blood-filled plastic bag that hung like a long necklace under his shirt. When the unidentified gunman fired the shot from his hiding place, Jones simply slapped the bag to break it and release the blood.
Throughout his career, all the phony death threats against Jones were contrived to strengthen his hold on the congregation and to give public the impression that he was either persecuted or paranoid, which would help to explain the otherwise unexplainable end he had planned for the Peoples Temple. The two assaults in the summer of 1968 also served to explain to the locals why Jones was fortifying the Temple compound. A chain-link fence, complete with barbed wire, was installed around the perimeter and a guard tower built by the front gate. Armed guards patrolled the fence with German shepherds twenty-four hours a day. Mrs. Vera Rupe was one of the first neighbors to notice the security guards who made no attempt to conceal their weapons as they paced the fence or drilled in the parking lot. She and her husband filed a complaint with the police charging the Temple with possession of illegal submachine guns and harassment. They claimed the guards spied on them with binoculars and the searchlights on the tower kept them awake at night. Jones had powerful allies in the sheriff's office who not only ignored the complaint, but issued no less than six concealed weapon permits to Temple guards. The armed guards, barbed wire, searchlights and attack dogs made the compound look like a concentration camp and in many respects it was. The fortifications were intended not only to keep people out but also to keep people in.
Through his connections in government Jones arranged to be appointed to several positions of power in Mendocino. He first approached the superintendent of the Anderson Valley School District located in Boonville some fifty miles southwest of Redwood Valley. A deal was struck in which Jones would enroll sixteen Temple children in the school district in exchange for a position teaching social studies to sixth graders in Boonville. The district received thousands more in state aid and Jones received a paying job that was more important to his plans than has been previously recognized. The meager salary Jones received from his teaching job could not have justified the cost of transporting sixteen children one hundred miles a day. He had several other reasons for teaching in Boonville. The Temple students were inner-city Blacks whose presence in the Ukiah School District was unique and disruptive. Jones defused a potentially difficult situation in his own back yard by transporting the Blacks fifty miles away in what might be the ultimate in forced busing. Mike Cartmell was the Caucasian leader of the displaced students and his instructions were to make certain that the Temple students did not socialize with the exclusively White Boonville children. It was segregation and not integration that would keep the peace in Boonville. Jones taught there for about two years until June of 1969 when he resigned and withdrew the Temple children. One report claims that he had a homosexual relationship with one of his students during this period. Jones counseled the boy after having been apparently responsible for his parents' divorce. The two would spend weekends in San Francisco where Jones demanded a minister's discount on the hotel room he registered under "The Rev. Jim Jones and Son." Though there were no eyewitnesses to such activities, what really matters here is not how Jones recruited his sixth graders but that he was recruiting them. The timetable was perfect. Some eight years later, as Jones was moving his Temple to South America, his sixth graders had just graduated from Santa Rosa Junior college. They went on to join the ranks of the guards and medical staff of the experiment.
Sixth graders are of particular interest to the CIA for it is at this level of education that the federal government studies every student in the country in the only mandatory national examination: the I.Q. test. Many argue its validity but nevertheless the federal government has required the I.Q. test for decades. It was originally developed in the early nineteen hundreds as a means [TAR not true?] to evaluate the mental capacity of immigrants from southern Europe. The U.S.government was afraid that Italians would dilute the human stock of America and so they developed this entrance exam to exclude what they perceived as the mentally deficient. Unlike most tests that measure one's ability to regurgitate information, the I.Q. test measures one's potential to learn. It is a logical progression, designed to evaluate not what a person knows, but his ability to ascertain and solve problem situations common to all languages and cultures. At home point in time the federal government required school systems to administer the test to sixth graders and forward the forms to Washington where they are now computer corrected. The students and even their schools are often denied access to the test results. The I.Q. test is not given to further the education of the student or to help the schools. The I.Q. test is given to further the interests of the agencies of the federal government, like the CIA, whose business it is to track the talented.
A hundred miles was a long way to travel each day; could there have been a specific attraction in Boonville? Boonville is the only community in the United States to have developed its own language. Years earlier, this remote town had invented "Boontling" a truly American language that served to bind the community together as well as confuse and deceive outsiders. Boonville has a national reputation for keeping to itself yet the Rev. Jim Jones broke the barriers and even recruited from its ranks. Perhaps it was he who was being tested under difficult circumstances; a test he apparently passed. In the end, Jones did retain the services of some of his sixth grade class. Some came to Jones because the CIA had assigned them. Some came because they were duped and some came because they were brainwashed in a painstakingly slow process that began in the sixth grade.
Jones used the same scenario to get a job teaching American history and government in Ukiah's fledgling adult education program. The evening classes were closed to all but the Temple hierarchy and remains as an example of how Jones used an existing system to his own ends. He would have taught his class anyway. With the arrangement, he received the free use of a classroom and even a salary for his efforts. Rather than draw from the CIA's labor pool, Jones would maintain ultimate security and actually create some of the operatives that would aid him in the experiment.
In 1967, Superior Court Judge Robert Winslow appointed Jones foreman of the Mendocino County Grand Jury. The following year, he was appointed to the Juvenile Justice Commission, an advisory board to the courts. Between the two positions he had the ability to bring charges for or against anyone in the county, especially considering his close relationship with Assistant District Attorney Tim Stoen.
In May of 1967, Jones formed the Legal Services Foundation of Mendocino County, a nonprofit group offering free legal services to the needy, most of whom were his followers who needed the services of an attorney to petition the courts for welfare support, to transfer property, or to settle a divorce or child custody case. In August, Marceline Jones resigned her seat on the foundation's board of directors to make way for her husband to be appointed vice president. Also in August, the foundation acquired the free use of an office in Ukiah and their first directing attorney, the former Assistant District Attorney Tim Stoen. Tim Stoen always played an important role in the Peoples Temple as Jones' second-in-command and the Temple's legal counsel. Some say he remains so to this day, but must believe Stoen's claims that he defected from the Temple in 1976. However, back in April of 1969, Tim Stoen was on a mission for Jim Jones when he left the Legal Services Foundation to accept a position with the Legal Aid Society of Alameda County where he was assigned to the West Oakland Black ghetto. Stoen counseled Blacks who were on welfare and in trouble with the law; the perfect demographic for the experiment. Many were offered a fresh start in the country atmosphere of Redwood Valley. A Temple aide in the Mendocino County Welfare Department would register the recipient who would sign over his check to the Peoples Temple in exchange for the housing, food and camaraderie he enjoyed under its care. His time was then free to work as a volunteer in whatever project the Temple had undertaken. The test persons themselves would provide the money and the labor for the experiment in which they would die.
There was always something to do in the political department. Temple members wrote letters in support of or in opposition to nearly every political issue of the day in the local, state and national arenas. Temple aides had infiltrated every county government office. Many of the elected officials owed their positions to Jones who controlled sixteen percent of the votes in Mendocino.
The Temple paid cash for the only shopping center in Redwood Valley and opened "Valley Enterprises" where propaganda was created and printed for public relations, recruitment and donations. The center also housed the Temple's bus garage as Jones had purchased eleven used Greyhound buses to transport his people. "More Things" on State Street in Ukiah was another Temple business that sold the personal Temple possessions members who donated, not only of the Temple household articles and jewelry, but also their labor as sales clerks. "Relics and Things" was opened in 1976 on School and Henry Streets as a last-ditch effort to divest the congregation of any personal wealth before transporting them off to Guyana.
Patty Cartmell the head of Jones' intelligence operations founded the "Ukiah Answering Service;" operations, home-operated business that employed seven Temple members to monitor the phone messages of the county's professionals and the radio communications of the sheriff's department. It was one of Cartmell's more overt intelligence operations. The Temple also operated a number of convalescent homes and a forty acre foster care ranch for boys that added many Social Security and welfare checks to its income. Over fifty of the Temple's seniors were convinced to cash in their life-insurance policies and donate the money to the Temple. Aides sold photographs Jones as talismans. According to Birdie Marable, "I made $80 to $100 a meeting." The mailings from Valley Enterprises were generating about 800 per day in donations mailed to the Temple. At least thirty-two expensive real estate properties were donated, the Temple, greatly adding to its wealth. One such San Francisco apartment house was in turn sold for $127,000. Jessie Boyd, an elderly Black member, gave twenty-five percent of her meager income to the Temple and still she was forced to bake and contribute seven or eight cakes a week. Later she recalled,
I bought all the fixings myself, and the church would take it over to the Safeway or Albertson's and sell each one for five dollars. I can't tell you how much I may have given in little bits of cash.[65]
Other elderly women sewed quilts that the Temple sold for about fifty dollars each. Temple children, unskilled and underage, were taken to San Francisco and dropped off on a busy corner to beg for donations. At the end of the day, a bus would pick up the kids and the money canisters for the ride back to Redwood Valley. To avoid punishment, the child had to provide at least five dollars for every hour spent on the streets. The money, in small and large increments, continued to flow into the Temple at many times the rate necessary to offset its six hundred thousand dollar annual budget. Tim Stoen was concerned that bank or government officials might become suspicious and investigate the origin of such large sums of cash so he advised Jones to open no less than fifteen bank accounts to evenly distribute the wealth. He was quoted as saying,
"I told him to move the money around. It was stacking up and was going to cause big trouble."[66]
Members who worked in the private or public sector outside the Temple were required to donate between five and fifteen percent of their income. Jones raised this figure to twenty-five percent to help pay for a stockpile of food, medicine, weapons and ammunition he said they would need to survive the winter of the post-nuclear war he predicted was close at hand. He told the congregation that he had located the perfect site for their bomb shelter; a cave in the hills a few miles away. Perhaps some expressed skepticism about its existence but, in any event, Jones led a contingent of his followers to inspect the site. After a long walk, the group came upon a depression in the earth, surrounded by a fence and warning signs. At the center of the depression was a small hole in the ground, just large enough for a man to enter. An aide was lowered down into the hole but after one hundred and fifty feet of rope, he never found the bottom of what was apparently a bottomless pit. Jones still insisted that all would be safe in the cave but he neglected to tell his Black congregation the local lore about the grotto. It seems that many years earlier, a Black man had reportedly raped a White woman in a nearby stagecoach station and a group of White vigilants threw the accused down the hole to his certain death. Ever since that day, the cave was known to the locals as the "Nigger Hole." Jim Jones had an unusual sense of humor.
In exchange for their donations of money and labor, the Temple provided its members with at least the bare essentials of food and housing. Members lived in Temple communes that were no more than overcrowded tenement houses. Each was charged rent that when totaled and weighed against expenses, netted the Temple an additional eight to ten thousand dollars a month. The Temple also operated dormitories at Santa Rosa Junior college where as many as twenty-five Caucasian members were packed into a cardboard-partitioned, single family house. Student board at Santa Rosa added another twenty-eight thousand dollars to the coffer every year.
Feeding his flock was a monumental task that Jones lessened by milking government poverty programs. Each member applied for and received government food rations thanks in no small part to the Temple aides who had infiltrated such government funded programs. The surplus powdered milk incident is a prime example.
On March 5, 1971, Mrs. Eunice Mock, supervisor of the Mendocino County surplus commodities program, and a colleague were driving along a county road near Redwood Valley when they spotted two open pick-up trucks loaded with between fifty and eighty cases of USDA powdered milk. Mrs. Mock was the sole distributor of such commodities in Mendocino County and, since she had no knowledge of such a substantial order, she suspected fraud and followed the trucks until they pulled over to the side of the road. One of the truck drivers, Temple member James Bogue, approached Mock's car to ask why she was following them. When she asked about the cases of milk that were clearly stamped "USDA", Bogue said that it was for the poor and none of her business. She copied down the license numbers and drove off to file a complaint with the authorities who discovered that one of the trucks was registered to the Peoples Temple. When confronted, Bogue said that the milk was not from Mendocino but was intended for the county's poor and that he was "incensed with the idea that the church was involved." His rebuttal did not satisfy the Department of Agriculture that dispatched two fraud investigators to speak with Jones in Redwood Valley. Jones denied that the truck was owned by the Temple. He also denied any knowledge of the milk in question and avoided further questioning by grabbing his chest as if in pain and retiring to his parsonage where he phoned Tim Stoen for help. Stoen was in the middle of an important county Board of Supervisors meeting but left abruptly when he received the message. He arrived at the Temple and immediately questioned the rights of the investigators and defended Bogue, Jones and the Temple.
Reports vary slightly from one account to the next but apparently both the investigators and the Board of Supervisors questioned the priorities of the Assistant District Attorney who said that his church came first and the county second. He proved his point by having County Supervisor Al Barbero Phone San Francisco Supervisor Dianne Feinstein to enlist her help in stopping the investigation. Feinstein was called because the powdered milk had originated in a San Francisco warehouse operated by the Community Health Alliance, a nonprofit, government-funded organization headed by Temple member Peter Holmes. Obviously, Holmes had been using his position to steal food from the government to feed the Peoples Temple; a practice that would have continued had it not been for the chance encounter with Mrs. Mock. As it was, the Temple returned the milk to San Francisco and the USDA continued its investigation for several weeks after which the Department of Health seized control of the warehouse and Peter Holmes resigned. No charges were ever filed. Neither the theft nor the Temple's involvement was ever reported in the news.
Aside from the donations it received from the outside and the tithes it received from its members inside, the Temple was financed almost exclusively by agencies of the federal government through tax-funded jobs, poverty programs and giveaways. Many members were employed at the Mendocino State Mental Hospital or in the school system or the welfare office, all under the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Under the Department of Justice, there were Temple members in law enforcement, in the grand jury and the district attorney's office. Black members contributed their government checks from the Social Security Administration and the welfare division of HEW. The USDA provided food and the California Highway Patrol provided inexpensive, high- powered police cruisers that Jones purchased at auction and issued to his aides as company cars. Though they removed the CHP emblem from the car doors, they neglected, possibly intentionally, to repaint the familiar "black and whites."
Throughout his career, Jones received millions of dollars from the federal government, millions he used to finance the experiment in Jonestown. In the end, even the tractor that transported the assassins to the site of congressman Ryan's murder was "U.S. government surplus." Had Jones only mastered the system and taken advantage of its bureaucratic inefficiencies, or did he have inside help? A phone call from the Washington D.C. headquarters of a government agency to its state or local office, asking them to cooperate with the Peoples Temple, would have been sufficient for Jones to perpetrate the massive fraud. To this day, no federal agency has ever expressed any remorse or responsibility for financing Jonestown or even any embarrassment at having been duped into doing so.
April 4, 1968 was a turning point. The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. created a void in the Black leadership; a void Jim Jones rushed to fill. As stated, there were few, if any, Blacks in Mendocino County so Jones looked south to the ghettos of Oakland and San Francisco for his victims. Tim Stoen and other trusted aides had already been planted in key government positions in the Bay Area when Jones set out to recruit the Black subjects for the experiment. He held services in San Francisco and Oakland inner-city school auditoriums, churches, meeting halls and theaters attracting as many Black welfare recipients as possible. From the outside, Jones' rainbow family and multiracial Peoples Temple appeared to be the cutting edge of the integration movement but, from the inside, both the old and new Black recruits were segregated from the Caucasian leadership. This obvious inequality would be recognized and recorded only once when, a few years later in 1976, eight Black members would send a letter of resignation to Jim Jones, in which they complained,
You said that the revolutionary focal point at present is in black people.... There is no potential in the white population according to you. Yet, where is the black leadership, where is the black staff and black attitude? Black people are being tapped for money, practically nothing else. How can there be sound trust from black people if there's only white nit-picking staff, hungrily taking advantage to castrate black men? Staff creates so much guilt that it breaks the black spirit of revolution (if the blacks have any). There's no revolutionary teaching taught the way it used to be. At one time you told us to read, yet now staff comes in to steal books from those who have them. All the staff concerns itself with is sex, sex, sex. What about socialism? How does 99 1/2 percent of People's Temple manage to know zero about socialism?[67]
Sex was just about the only reward that Jones and his aides received for their efforts. Caucasian aides enjoyed a higher standard of living than did the Black congregation but the Temple never paid in cash, only services and a prolific sex life was the favored remuneration. Sex was a common topic of Temple services as Jones was continually bragging about his superhuman abilities. His female aides gave absurd testimony as to the pleasures of Jones' "divine penis," but his sexual exploits were not confined to women as he had homosexual relationships with many of his male assistants who were then blackmailed into slavery. Jones was so promiscuous as to require an appointment secretary just to schedule his affairs. Patty Cartmell and later Carolyn Layton, who Jones jokingly referred to as his "fucking secretary," would telephone a member to ask, "Father hates to do this but he has this tremendous urge and could you please...?" All of the chosen were Caucasian.
Despite its interracial image, mixed marriages were not permitted in the Temple and there is no evidence to even suggest that Jones or his White aides ever had sex with a black member. There is not a single case of a mulatto child being born to a Temple member.
All sexual relationships had to first be approved by the Temple's Relationship Committee, giving Jones additional control over the congregation that was often denied sex, even between married couples. Members who stepped out of line were often humiliated by requiring them to elaborate on their sexual experiences or strip naked and copulate in front of the entire congregation. Steve Addison, who was accused of having sex without prior approval was once called to the podium and ordered to perform cunnilingus on an overweight woman in the midst of her menstrual period. As Addison dropped to his knees to accept his punishment, Jones shouted, "Piss! Piss!" and the woman urinated in his face. "Throw up! Throw up!" he yelled, and the woman forced her fingers down her throat until she vomited on his head.
Sex was also used to reward and blackmail politicians both in California and later in Guyana where Jones would provide a number of Temple women to government officials who were then shown photographs of their encounter and reminded that if they refused to co-operate with the Temple their public careers would be ruined.
Jones claimed to be the only true heterosexual in the Temple and often called for a show of hands of all homosexuals. If a member did not raise his hand, he would be ridiculed for dishonesty. If he did raise his hand, he ran the risk of being singled out for praise. The subject was impossible to avoid. Many members were forced to sign confessions attesting to homosexuality or child molesting that were later used to blackmail the signatory.
The Peoples Temple was not a religion. Jim Jones did not believe in God who he said was powerless to effect any change on the earth. He claimed the Bible was "dotted through and through with fabrications, inconsistencies and incongruities which insult the normal intelligence of readers." He would throw the Bible on the floor, step on it, tear out the pages and talk about using them for toilet paper. Once he burned a Bible during a service just to show that there would be no reprisal from the "Impotent Sky God." He called it the "Black Book" which may be the only time in his public career that Jones used the word "black" in a derogatory manner as he went so far as to change "blackmail" to "whitemail and "black market" to "white market" so as not to offend his congregation. Temple services had many of the trappings of a church, there was organ music and gospel singing but that is about as far as it went. Jones' sermons were mainly political, taking stories from the newspaper to prove his point that the Blacks were losing their rights as citizens. The Peoples Temple was not a church, but a social experiment disguised as a church.
In 1970, Jones' old friend Prime Minister Forbes Burnham left the British Commonwealth, established diplomatic relations with Cuba and so lost all U.S. aid. It was a critical year for Guyana and the prime minister called for help from his old CIA buddy. Jones first flew to Cuba, where he met with Fidel Castro after which he continued on to Georgetown, Guyana for his meeting with Burnham. What was accomplished on this trip is uncertain.
Jones was not the only Temple member who traveled. His fleet of eleven used Greyhound buses carried the congregation on weekly trips to San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles where in a single weekend the Temple might receive as much as twenty thousand dollars in donations. As a show of strength, Jones always took his Redwood Valley congregation on such tours. The buses were said to have been overcrowded, with people riding in the overhead storage racks and down below in the baggage compartment. Members complained that the air conditioners and toilets did not work and that they were driven too long without food or rest. Jones had a special bus with air conditioning, a working bath and a private, bulletproof compartment. Each summer, members were given the opportunity to take a cross-country vacation and many boarded the Temple buses bound for national parks, monuments and other points of interest; sites never seen by these inner-city Blacks. The Temple's advance team arranged to rent auditoriums and leaf-letted the major cities to herald the group's arrival. Jones put on his usual show with its many collections all across the country.
Such a trip was expected to net one to two hundred thousand dollars. The 1973 cross country trip was the most noteworthy. The buses stopped in Washington, D.C. where the Temple called on congressmen and succeeded in getting a description of the Peoples Temple entered in the congressional hearings. But the highlight of the trip was the publicity Jones received when his Temple buses unloaded hundreds of members on the steps of the Capitol to pick up the litter around the grounds. The Washington Post recorded the publicity stunt in their editorial page, dated August 18, 1973 in which was written,
The hands-down winners of any-body's tourist-of-the-year award have got to be the 660 wonderful members of the Peoples Temple... this spirited group of travelers fanned out from their 13 buses and spent about an hour cleaning up the [Capitol] grounds.
In addition to the summer vacations and the revival tours, the Temple buses also carried members to the voting polls and anywhere else Jones wanted to demonstrate his power. When a group of reporters in Fresno were tried for refusing to divulge their sources, Jones sent hundreds to rally in support of the "Fresno Four" as he called them. It was ironic that this manipulator of the media would defend the freedom of the press, but irony was his trademark. In 1976, the buses arrived at San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge where members disembarked to stage a demonstration in support of the proposed anti-suicide fences. Over the years, about six hundred people have jumped to their death from the bridge, two-thirds the number who would commit mass suicide in Jonestown; the same people who donated their energies in a public demonstration acknowledging the government's responsibility to help avert suicide.
In spite of all of his questionable and outright illegal activities in private, Jones enjoyed respectable reputation in public. In 1975 he was chosen one of "The 100 Outstanding Clergyman in America" by the Foundation for Religion in American Life. In 1976, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner named him "Humanitarian of the Year" but the most impressive title came in January of 1977, when Jones was given the "Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award." He must have had a good laugh about that.
About a hundred miles north of San Francisco lies a patchwork quilt of small horse farms and rolling vineyards known as Mendocino County. The county is known, internationally, for its production of fine wine grapes and nationally for its production of high-quality marijuana: the county's leading cash crop. Most of the region's sparse population is concentrated in the cultivated flat lands between the Coastal and Mayacamas mountain ranges in an area the native Pomo Indians named "Deep Valley" or Ukiah. Ukiah, the county seat, was a sleepy rural community of 10,000 in 1965 when the Reverend Jim Jones and his followers arrived in the heat of midsummer. The Peoples Temple would remain headquartered in the Ukiah area for the next nine years, during which time they would infiltrate every aspect of county government, sway political elections, purchase a sizable portion of the real estate and businesses and, in short, become the ultimate power in Mendocino County; the only safe place in the United States.
The Temple's advance team had primed the local press for the pilgrims' arrival. George Hunter, the managing editor of the Ukiah Daily Journal and his reporter wife Kathy were offered gifts intended to produce the favorable press coverage necessary if the Caucasian locals were to tolerate what would be their only Black neighbors. Kathy Hunter wrote the front page article that introduced the Peoples Temple to Ukiah in the July 26, 1965 edition of the Ukiah Daily Journal
Represented in the group and indicative of the substantial background of the membership are nurses, teachers, a pilot, a traffic engineer, an electronics man, salespeople and private businessmen. One of the newcomers has already purchased an apartment house, another has bought a Ukiah motel, and still another is negotiating the purchase of a rest home here.
Far from being a closed, tightly knit group living in a communal existence, members of the church live their own lives as part of the community as a whole, held together only by their belief that all men-- white, black, yellow, or red--are one brotherhood.[62]
As early as February of 1965, the Temple's advance team had initiated negotiations to purchase the Evangelical Free Church on the corner of Bush and Henry streets in Ukiah. Jones would hold services in the building until November of 1965 when he withdrew his offer to purchase what was the only available church in town. The Temple reportedly broke off negotiations when their Indiana corporations lost their licenses because they failed to file the required annual reports. Actually, they had formed a new corporation, "The Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ of Redwood Valley" that could have easily purchased the church. The stated purpose of the new corporation, chartered on November 26, 1965, was to "further the word of God" but apparently not at the Evangelical Free Church building. Jones abandoned his first California headquarters after occupying it for five months, presumably rent-free.
Jones next acquired the free use of a classroom at the Ridgewood Range, a religious colony located about ten miles north of Ukiah. The Peoples Temple met in that classroom for about two years until late 1967 when the Christ's Church of the Golden Rule, who owned the building, ordered the Temple off their property, reportedly fearing that Jones was trying to take over their church. The Temple then met in a 4-H exhibition barn at the Mendocino County Fairgrounds until early 1968 when Jones moved the services to the house he had purchased for his family in Redwood Valley, a remote village about seven miles outside Ukiah. The group first met in Jones' two-car garage under conditions so crowded as to discourage outsiders from dropping in on Temple services. Ukiah is primarily middle-class conservative Caucasians. Even though the locals could have provided sizable contributions, Jones did not recruit or even want their membership as they had no place in the experiment. There were Caucasian management personnel but few, if any, were from Mendocino County. Just about all of Jones' White lieutenants were hand-picked from Indiana and other parts of California. The only Blacks in Ukiah were those who Jones had brought from Indiana. Their numbers would increase as Jones succeeded in recruiting Blacks from the Oakland ghettos to relocate in Ukiah, live in Temple-owned housing, sign up for welfare with a Temple aide in the county office and provide the labor, the money and the subjects for the experiment being planned. Temple aide Edith Parks described the period when Jones was turning away the locals who were sampling the services of his new church in a letter to Virginia Morningstar, dated April 26, 1968 which began "burn this." Thankfully, she did not.
... All work at something. They have to, rent is $90-$125 for small houses and groceries are so high. Most of them pay 25 percent tithes. It will take care of them all later some way. Jim is turning them away from church. 85 for Easter. 35 last Sunday. People are awakening and are worried but he says it is too risky! He sends them back to their own churches and tells them to pray and work where they are. There isn't time to re-educate new ones, even those who have been taught far ahead of our "type" of religion.
A few have even been allowed to come and they jumped in with both feet. You don't have to teach them anything. They know & they know who he is & what he is here for. He knows every thought, act or deed. In the message Sunday he said everything that is to happen in the future has been seen & met for all who will meet conditions they must. He knows just what will happen to each one, even how they will die ...
It will happen yet, right here, too. If only I could write it all but the American people have already been conditioned to go the way they are going and acting, so they will think we need the laws t at will be put through Congress, each one taking away more of our rights! Just watch who is for them! Reagan is a full-fledged fascist.[63]
Edith Parks' letter was indicative of the prevailing attitude of the Temple's Caucasian aides. She was more political than religious and strangely cryptic in her communications. Why was it "too risky" to allow just anyone to join? Why was there not enough "time to re-educate new ones?" Had the life expectancy of the Peoples Temple been set as early as 1968? Probably. By describing those who were allowed to join as knowing the truth about Jones and his mission, she reveals the extent of her own knowledge. Note her use of the third person "they". "They" must work. "They" pay tithes. Jones knew how "they" would die. Edith Parks and her family had joined the Peoples Temple in its early stages in Indianapolis and would play an important role in the final hours of Jonestown. Even though she was a lifetime member, she did not include herself in the ranks of the Black congregation. This "us and them" attitude, though contrary to the Temple's public doctrine of racial integration, was the true relationship between the Caucasian hierarchy and the Black Parishioners.
Temple membership doubled to three hundred in the first three years in Ukiah but by 1968 they still had no permanent headquarters other than the cramped quarters of Jones' two-car garage. The church in town would first appear the logical solution but, even though it was affordable and accommodating, Jones let the deal fall through as the property was too public. Anyone in town might wander in off the streets. Likewise the exhibition barn at the fairgrounds was much too public. The Ridgewood Range provided the private classroom setting Jones needed to indoctrinate his Caucasian lieutenants but it would not serve as the Black church they were planning.
So it was with three hundred people in his garage that Jones set out to build his first California church in the summer of 1968. The first step was to submit a building permit to construct a forty-one foot swimming pool next to his Redwood Valley home. Immediately upon completion of the pool, a second permit was issued to build a roof over the pool with the stated purpose of creating a youth center. When the roof was finished in October, Jones applied for and received a third permit to enclose the structure as a church. Possibly the only church in America built over a swimming pool. The word "church" is really not appropriate. There were no crosses or statues or pictures of deities or saints. The redwood structure was rustic and modern and not at all like a church. Only a star-shaped stained glass window, which was more Satanic than Christian, gave the impression that this was a house of worship. The rural setting of Jones' estate provided the privacy required to conduct his business in secret and stands as an example of the Temple's introverted personality. It was a closed group that did not attempt to recruit or even mingle with the locals. Though the location of the Redwood Valley Temple is understandably desirable, the roundabout method of construction used to build a church over a swimming pool is without apparent reason. The indoor pool was used for recreation, quasi-baptisms and occasionally punishment, but its role as the focal point of the Redwood Valley Temple has never been fully understood.
As in Indiana, Jones used the threat of an unseen enemy to bind his congregation together and, in this case, provide a logical reason for his plans to fence and fortify the Temple compound. In May of 1968, he placed a half-page ad in the UDJ to answer allegations and threats he said were generated by the local John Birch Society after he had led his people in a march to protest the Vietnam War. Since the Ku Klux Klan was not active in Northern California, Jones selected the John Birch Society as representative of the White supremacists who opposed the alleged socialistic politics of the Temple. Actually, Jones was close friends with Walter Heady, the society's local president. Heady often visited the Temple and was even allowed to address the congregation and present films. Jones often consulted Heady on political matters and the two men would maintain communication for years to come. Kathy Hunter, reporter, wife of the editor and co-owner of the Ukiah Daily Journal, reciprocated for the half-page ad by penning an article which appeared in the paper's June 3, 1968 edition under the headline, "Local Group Suffers Terror in the Night."
A telephone rings in the middle of the night, but when it is answered the only sound is someone's breathing on the other end--then the click of a receiver. Or it rings and, in a measured voice--all the more chilling because of its utter lack of emotion--comes the threat:
'Get out of town if you don't want to get blown out of your classroom window.' Besides his duties to his parish and his many community services, Jones also teaches in Anderson Valley and Ukiah.[64]
Temple members continually complained to the authorities about night riders who shot out windows and threw dead dogs onto the Temple grounds. All the attacks were staged. The dogs were among the unfortunate strays gathered by the Temple's animal shelter. Not content with the public's acceptance of persecution, Jones arranged two attempts on his life during his 1968 campaign to publicly justify his ever increasing militarism.
Bill Bush was a professional hair dresser who had recently moved to Ukiah to open a beauty shop with his partner Jim Barnes. Bush also donated his services at the Mendocino State Mental Hospital where he worked with many members of the Peoples Temple. He lived with his common law wife Beverly and their son Billy in the first floor apartment of a duplex house. His partner, Jim Barnes lived upstairs with his children and Temple member Jerry Livingston. According to the accepted story, Livingston seduced Bush's wife who, along with young Billy, was spending most of her time at the Peoples Temple. There is speculation that Livingston had actually seduced Jim Barnes but, in any event, one Sunday morning Bill Bush arrived at the Temple's front steps, mad as hell at the loss of his lover. He demanded that Jones allow him to see his son. Jones frustrated Bush at first by refusing to answer, then teased him to the point where Bush lost his temper and a scuffle ensued. Don Sly, the Temple's swimming Instructor and knife expert, intervened and produced a knife he claimed to have wrestled from Bush. Ten years later Don Sly would once again be called upon to stage a phony knife attack, this time against Congressman Ryan.
Even though Bush was probably innocent, the following morning he was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon after the police had received dozens of depositions from Temple members attesting to what they termed was attempted murder. The crime was front-page news in the Ukiah Daily Journal but as soon as the alleged threat against Jones had been established, he dropped all charges and Bush was released after paying a misdemeanor fine.
Another staged death threat occurred during one of the Temple's evening services when Jones stepped out into the parking lot for a breath of fresh air. There were several witnesses standing nearby when a shot rang out. Jones grabbed his stomach, blood spurted from between his fingers and he fell to the pavement. Only bodyguard Jack Beam was allowed to attend to the fallen leader who lay so still as to suggest to those in view that he was dead. All at once Jones rose to his feet and presumably back from the dead. "I'm not ready. I'm not ready," he proclaimed to the bewildered witnesses. A few minutes later he returned inside to address a tumultuous congregation. He wore a clean shirt and waved the bloody one, challenging anyone to analyze the blood he claimed was his. It probably was. It was common practice for Temple nurses to draw real human blood to use in their fake faith healings. The next day, the bloody shirt was put on display in a glass case installed near the podium as a constant reminder of both the unseen enemy and Jones' supernatural powers. The Temple's special effects department had prepared the blood-filled plastic bag that hung like a long necklace under his shirt. When the unidentified gunman fired the shot from his hiding place, Jones simply slapped the bag to break it and release the blood.
Throughout his career, all the phony death threats against Jones were contrived to strengthen his hold on the congregation and to give public the impression that he was either persecuted or paranoid, which would help to explain the otherwise unexplainable end he had planned for the Peoples Temple. The two assaults in the summer of 1968 also served to explain to the locals why Jones was fortifying the Temple compound. A chain-link fence, complete with barbed wire, was installed around the perimeter and a guard tower built by the front gate. Armed guards patrolled the fence with German shepherds twenty-four hours a day. Mrs. Vera Rupe was one of the first neighbors to notice the security guards who made no attempt to conceal their weapons as they paced the fence or drilled in the parking lot. She and her husband filed a complaint with the police charging the Temple with possession of illegal submachine guns and harassment. They claimed the guards spied on them with binoculars and the searchlights on the tower kept them awake at night. Jones had powerful allies in the sheriff's office who not only ignored the complaint, but issued no less than six concealed weapon permits to Temple guards. The armed guards, barbed wire, searchlights and attack dogs made the compound look like a concentration camp and in many respects it was. The fortifications were intended not only to keep people out but also to keep people in.
Through his connections in government Jones arranged to be appointed to several positions of power in Mendocino. He first approached the superintendent of the Anderson Valley School District located in Boonville some fifty miles southwest of Redwood Valley. A deal was struck in which Jones would enroll sixteen Temple children in the school district in exchange for a position teaching social studies to sixth graders in Boonville. The district received thousands more in state aid and Jones received a paying job that was more important to his plans than has been previously recognized. The meager salary Jones received from his teaching job could not have justified the cost of transporting sixteen children one hundred miles a day. He had several other reasons for teaching in Boonville. The Temple students were inner-city Blacks whose presence in the Ukiah School District was unique and disruptive. Jones defused a potentially difficult situation in his own back yard by transporting the Blacks fifty miles away in what might be the ultimate in forced busing. Mike Cartmell was the Caucasian leader of the displaced students and his instructions were to make certain that the Temple students did not socialize with the exclusively White Boonville children. It was segregation and not integration that would keep the peace in Boonville. Jones taught there for about two years until June of 1969 when he resigned and withdrew the Temple children. One report claims that he had a homosexual relationship with one of his students during this period. Jones counseled the boy after having been apparently responsible for his parents' divorce. The two would spend weekends in San Francisco where Jones demanded a minister's discount on the hotel room he registered under "The Rev. Jim Jones and Son." Though there were no eyewitnesses to such activities, what really matters here is not how Jones recruited his sixth graders but that he was recruiting them. The timetable was perfect. Some eight years later, as Jones was moving his Temple to South America, his sixth graders had just graduated from Santa Rosa Junior college. They went on to join the ranks of the guards and medical staff of the experiment.
Sixth graders are of particular interest to the CIA for it is at this level of education that the federal government studies every student in the country in the only mandatory national examination: the I.Q. test. Many argue its validity but nevertheless the federal government has required the I.Q. test for decades. It was originally developed in the early nineteen hundreds as a means [TAR not true?] to evaluate the mental capacity of immigrants from southern Europe. The U.S.government was afraid that Italians would dilute the human stock of America and so they developed this entrance exam to exclude what they perceived as the mentally deficient. Unlike most tests that measure one's ability to regurgitate information, the I.Q. test measures one's potential to learn. It is a logical progression, designed to evaluate not what a person knows, but his ability to ascertain and solve problem situations common to all languages and cultures. At home point in time the federal government required school systems to administer the test to sixth graders and forward the forms to Washington where they are now computer corrected. The students and even their schools are often denied access to the test results. The I.Q. test is not given to further the education of the student or to help the schools. The I.Q. test is given to further the interests of the agencies of the federal government, like the CIA, whose business it is to track the talented.
A hundred miles was a long way to travel each day; could there have been a specific attraction in Boonville? Boonville is the only community in the United States to have developed its own language. Years earlier, this remote town had invented "Boontling" a truly American language that served to bind the community together as well as confuse and deceive outsiders. Boonville has a national reputation for keeping to itself yet the Rev. Jim Jones broke the barriers and even recruited from its ranks. Perhaps it was he who was being tested under difficult circumstances; a test he apparently passed. In the end, Jones did retain the services of some of his sixth grade class. Some came to Jones because the CIA had assigned them. Some came because they were duped and some came because they were brainwashed in a painstakingly slow process that began in the sixth grade.
Jones used the same scenario to get a job teaching American history and government in Ukiah's fledgling adult education program. The evening classes were closed to all but the Temple hierarchy and remains as an example of how Jones used an existing system to his own ends. He would have taught his class anyway. With the arrangement, he received the free use of a classroom and even a salary for his efforts. Rather than draw from the CIA's labor pool, Jones would maintain ultimate security and actually create some of the operatives that would aid him in the experiment.
In 1967, Superior Court Judge Robert Winslow appointed Jones foreman of the Mendocino County Grand Jury. The following year, he was appointed to the Juvenile Justice Commission, an advisory board to the courts. Between the two positions he had the ability to bring charges for or against anyone in the county, especially considering his close relationship with Assistant District Attorney Tim Stoen.
In May of 1967, Jones formed the Legal Services Foundation of Mendocino County, a nonprofit group offering free legal services to the needy, most of whom were his followers who needed the services of an attorney to petition the courts for welfare support, to transfer property, or to settle a divorce or child custody case. In August, Marceline Jones resigned her seat on the foundation's board of directors to make way for her husband to be appointed vice president. Also in August, the foundation acquired the free use of an office in Ukiah and their first directing attorney, the former Assistant District Attorney Tim Stoen. Tim Stoen always played an important role in the Peoples Temple as Jones' second-in-command and the Temple's legal counsel. Some say he remains so to this day, but must believe Stoen's claims that he defected from the Temple in 1976. However, back in April of 1969, Tim Stoen was on a mission for Jim Jones when he left the Legal Services Foundation to accept a position with the Legal Aid Society of Alameda County where he was assigned to the West Oakland Black ghetto. Stoen counseled Blacks who were on welfare and in trouble with the law; the perfect demographic for the experiment. Many were offered a fresh start in the country atmosphere of Redwood Valley. A Temple aide in the Mendocino County Welfare Department would register the recipient who would sign over his check to the Peoples Temple in exchange for the housing, food and camaraderie he enjoyed under its care. His time was then free to work as a volunteer in whatever project the Temple had undertaken. The test persons themselves would provide the money and the labor for the experiment in which they would die.
There was always something to do in the political department. Temple members wrote letters in support of or in opposition to nearly every political issue of the day in the local, state and national arenas. Temple aides had infiltrated every county government office. Many of the elected officials owed their positions to Jones who controlled sixteen percent of the votes in Mendocino.
The Temple paid cash for the only shopping center in Redwood Valley and opened "Valley Enterprises" where propaganda was created and printed for public relations, recruitment and donations. The center also housed the Temple's bus garage as Jones had purchased eleven used Greyhound buses to transport his people. "More Things" on State Street in Ukiah was another Temple business that sold the personal Temple possessions members who donated, not only of the Temple household articles and jewelry, but also their labor as sales clerks. "Relics and Things" was opened in 1976 on School and Henry Streets as a last-ditch effort to divest the congregation of any personal wealth before transporting them off to Guyana.
Patty Cartmell the head of Jones' intelligence operations founded the "Ukiah Answering Service;" operations, home-operated business that employed seven Temple members to monitor the phone messages of the county's professionals and the radio communications of the sheriff's department. It was one of Cartmell's more overt intelligence operations. The Temple also operated a number of convalescent homes and a forty acre foster care ranch for boys that added many Social Security and welfare checks to its income. Over fifty of the Temple's seniors were convinced to cash in their life-insurance policies and donate the money to the Temple. Aides sold photographs Jones as talismans. According to Birdie Marable, "I made $80 to $100 a meeting." The mailings from Valley Enterprises were generating about 800 per day in donations mailed to the Temple. At least thirty-two expensive real estate properties were donated, the Temple, greatly adding to its wealth. One such San Francisco apartment house was in turn sold for $127,000. Jessie Boyd, an elderly Black member, gave twenty-five percent of her meager income to the Temple and still she was forced to bake and contribute seven or eight cakes a week. Later she recalled,
I bought all the fixings myself, and the church would take it over to the Safeway or Albertson's and sell each one for five dollars. I can't tell you how much I may have given in little bits of cash.[65]
Other elderly women sewed quilts that the Temple sold for about fifty dollars each. Temple children, unskilled and underage, were taken to San Francisco and dropped off on a busy corner to beg for donations. At the end of the day, a bus would pick up the kids and the money canisters for the ride back to Redwood Valley. To avoid punishment, the child had to provide at least five dollars for every hour spent on the streets. The money, in small and large increments, continued to flow into the Temple at many times the rate necessary to offset its six hundred thousand dollar annual budget. Tim Stoen was concerned that bank or government officials might become suspicious and investigate the origin of such large sums of cash so he advised Jones to open no less than fifteen bank accounts to evenly distribute the wealth. He was quoted as saying,
"I told him to move the money around. It was stacking up and was going to cause big trouble."[66]
Members who worked in the private or public sector outside the Temple were required to donate between five and fifteen percent of their income. Jones raised this figure to twenty-five percent to help pay for a stockpile of food, medicine, weapons and ammunition he said they would need to survive the winter of the post-nuclear war he predicted was close at hand. He told the congregation that he had located the perfect site for their bomb shelter; a cave in the hills a few miles away. Perhaps some expressed skepticism about its existence but, in any event, Jones led a contingent of his followers to inspect the site. After a long walk, the group came upon a depression in the earth, surrounded by a fence and warning signs. At the center of the depression was a small hole in the ground, just large enough for a man to enter. An aide was lowered down into the hole but after one hundred and fifty feet of rope, he never found the bottom of what was apparently a bottomless pit. Jones still insisted that all would be safe in the cave but he neglected to tell his Black congregation the local lore about the grotto. It seems that many years earlier, a Black man had reportedly raped a White woman in a nearby stagecoach station and a group of White vigilants threw the accused down the hole to his certain death. Ever since that day, the cave was known to the locals as the "Nigger Hole." Jim Jones had an unusual sense of humor.
In exchange for their donations of money and labor, the Temple provided its members with at least the bare essentials of food and housing. Members lived in Temple communes that were no more than overcrowded tenement houses. Each was charged rent that when totaled and weighed against expenses, netted the Temple an additional eight to ten thousand dollars a month. The Temple also operated dormitories at Santa Rosa Junior college where as many as twenty-five Caucasian members were packed into a cardboard-partitioned, single family house. Student board at Santa Rosa added another twenty-eight thousand dollars to the coffer every year.
Feeding his flock was a monumental task that Jones lessened by milking government poverty programs. Each member applied for and received government food rations thanks in no small part to the Temple aides who had infiltrated such government funded programs. The surplus powdered milk incident is a prime example.
On March 5, 1971, Mrs. Eunice Mock, supervisor of the Mendocino County surplus commodities program, and a colleague were driving along a county road near Redwood Valley when they spotted two open pick-up trucks loaded with between fifty and eighty cases of USDA powdered milk. Mrs. Mock was the sole distributor of such commodities in Mendocino County and, since she had no knowledge of such a substantial order, she suspected fraud and followed the trucks until they pulled over to the side of the road. One of the truck drivers, Temple member James Bogue, approached Mock's car to ask why she was following them. When she asked about the cases of milk that were clearly stamped "USDA", Bogue said that it was for the poor and none of her business. She copied down the license numbers and drove off to file a complaint with the authorities who discovered that one of the trucks was registered to the Peoples Temple. When confronted, Bogue said that the milk was not from Mendocino but was intended for the county's poor and that he was "incensed with the idea that the church was involved." His rebuttal did not satisfy the Department of Agriculture that dispatched two fraud investigators to speak with Jones in Redwood Valley. Jones denied that the truck was owned by the Temple. He also denied any knowledge of the milk in question and avoided further questioning by grabbing his chest as if in pain and retiring to his parsonage where he phoned Tim Stoen for help. Stoen was in the middle of an important county Board of Supervisors meeting but left abruptly when he received the message. He arrived at the Temple and immediately questioned the rights of the investigators and defended Bogue, Jones and the Temple.
Reports vary slightly from one account to the next but apparently both the investigators and the Board of Supervisors questioned the priorities of the Assistant District Attorney who said that his church came first and the county second. He proved his point by having County Supervisor Al Barbero Phone San Francisco Supervisor Dianne Feinstein to enlist her help in stopping the investigation. Feinstein was called because the powdered milk had originated in a San Francisco warehouse operated by the Community Health Alliance, a nonprofit, government-funded organization headed by Temple member Peter Holmes. Obviously, Holmes had been using his position to steal food from the government to feed the Peoples Temple; a practice that would have continued had it not been for the chance encounter with Mrs. Mock. As it was, the Temple returned the milk to San Francisco and the USDA continued its investigation for several weeks after which the Department of Health seized control of the warehouse and Peter Holmes resigned. No charges were ever filed. Neither the theft nor the Temple's involvement was ever reported in the news.
Aside from the donations it received from the outside and the tithes it received from its members inside, the Temple was financed almost exclusively by agencies of the federal government through tax-funded jobs, poverty programs and giveaways. Many members were employed at the Mendocino State Mental Hospital or in the school system or the welfare office, all under the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Under the Department of Justice, there were Temple members in law enforcement, in the grand jury and the district attorney's office. Black members contributed their government checks from the Social Security Administration and the welfare division of HEW. The USDA provided food and the California Highway Patrol provided inexpensive, high- powered police cruisers that Jones purchased at auction and issued to his aides as company cars. Though they removed the CHP emblem from the car doors, they neglected, possibly intentionally, to repaint the familiar "black and whites."
Throughout his career, Jones received millions of dollars from the federal government, millions he used to finance the experiment in Jonestown. In the end, even the tractor that transported the assassins to the site of congressman Ryan's murder was "U.S. government surplus." Had Jones only mastered the system and taken advantage of its bureaucratic inefficiencies, or did he have inside help? A phone call from the Washington D.C. headquarters of a government agency to its state or local office, asking them to cooperate with the Peoples Temple, would have been sufficient for Jones to perpetrate the massive fraud. To this day, no federal agency has ever expressed any remorse or responsibility for financing Jonestown or even any embarrassment at having been duped into doing so.
April 4, 1968 was a turning point. The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. created a void in the Black leadership; a void Jim Jones rushed to fill. As stated, there were few, if any, Blacks in Mendocino County so Jones looked south to the ghettos of Oakland and San Francisco for his victims. Tim Stoen and other trusted aides had already been planted in key government positions in the Bay Area when Jones set out to recruit the Black subjects for the experiment. He held services in San Francisco and Oakland inner-city school auditoriums, churches, meeting halls and theaters attracting as many Black welfare recipients as possible. From the outside, Jones' rainbow family and multiracial Peoples Temple appeared to be the cutting edge of the integration movement but, from the inside, both the old and new Black recruits were segregated from the Caucasian leadership. This obvious inequality would be recognized and recorded only once when, a few years later in 1976, eight Black members would send a letter of resignation to Jim Jones, in which they complained,
You said that the revolutionary focal point at present is in black people.... There is no potential in the white population according to you. Yet, where is the black leadership, where is the black staff and black attitude? Black people are being tapped for money, practically nothing else. How can there be sound trust from black people if there's only white nit-picking staff, hungrily taking advantage to castrate black men? Staff creates so much guilt that it breaks the black spirit of revolution (if the blacks have any). There's no revolutionary teaching taught the way it used to be. At one time you told us to read, yet now staff comes in to steal books from those who have them. All the staff concerns itself with is sex, sex, sex. What about socialism? How does 99 1/2 percent of People's Temple manage to know zero about socialism?[67]
Sex was just about the only reward that Jones and his aides received for their efforts. Caucasian aides enjoyed a higher standard of living than did the Black congregation but the Temple never paid in cash, only services and a prolific sex life was the favored remuneration. Sex was a common topic of Temple services as Jones was continually bragging about his superhuman abilities. His female aides gave absurd testimony as to the pleasures of Jones' "divine penis," but his sexual exploits were not confined to women as he had homosexual relationships with many of his male assistants who were then blackmailed into slavery. Jones was so promiscuous as to require an appointment secretary just to schedule his affairs. Patty Cartmell and later Carolyn Layton, who Jones jokingly referred to as his "fucking secretary," would telephone a member to ask, "Father hates to do this but he has this tremendous urge and could you please...?" All of the chosen were Caucasian.
Despite its interracial image, mixed marriages were not permitted in the Temple and there is no evidence to even suggest that Jones or his White aides ever had sex with a black member. There is not a single case of a mulatto child being born to a Temple member.
All sexual relationships had to first be approved by the Temple's Relationship Committee, giving Jones additional control over the congregation that was often denied sex, even between married couples. Members who stepped out of line were often humiliated by requiring them to elaborate on their sexual experiences or strip naked and copulate in front of the entire congregation. Steve Addison, who was accused of having sex without prior approval was once called to the podium and ordered to perform cunnilingus on an overweight woman in the midst of her menstrual period. As Addison dropped to his knees to accept his punishment, Jones shouted, "Piss! Piss!" and the woman urinated in his face. "Throw up! Throw up!" he yelled, and the woman forced her fingers down her throat until she vomited on his head.
Sex was also used to reward and blackmail politicians both in California and later in Guyana where Jones would provide a number of Temple women to government officials who were then shown photographs of their encounter and reminded that if they refused to co-operate with the Temple their public careers would be ruined.
Jones claimed to be the only true heterosexual in the Temple and often called for a show of hands of all homosexuals. If a member did not raise his hand, he would be ridiculed for dishonesty. If he did raise his hand, he ran the risk of being singled out for praise. The subject was impossible to avoid. Many members were forced to sign confessions attesting to homosexuality or child molesting that were later used to blackmail the signatory.
The Peoples Temple was not a religion. Jim Jones did not believe in God who he said was powerless to effect any change on the earth. He claimed the Bible was "dotted through and through with fabrications, inconsistencies and incongruities which insult the normal intelligence of readers." He would throw the Bible on the floor, step on it, tear out the pages and talk about using them for toilet paper. Once he burned a Bible during a service just to show that there would be no reprisal from the "Impotent Sky God." He called it the "Black Book" which may be the only time in his public career that Jones used the word "black" in a derogatory manner as he went so far as to change "blackmail" to "whitemail and "black market" to "white market" so as not to offend his congregation. Temple services had many of the trappings of a church, there was organ music and gospel singing but that is about as far as it went. Jones' sermons were mainly political, taking stories from the newspaper to prove his point that the Blacks were losing their rights as citizens. The Peoples Temple was not a church, but a social experiment disguised as a church.
In 1970, Jones' old friend Prime Minister Forbes Burnham left the British Commonwealth, established diplomatic relations with Cuba and so lost all U.S. aid. It was a critical year for Guyana and the prime minister called for help from his old CIA buddy. Jones first flew to Cuba, where he met with Fidel Castro after which he continued on to Georgetown, Guyana for his meeting with Burnham. What was accomplished on this trip is uncertain.
Jones was not the only Temple member who traveled. His fleet of eleven used Greyhound buses carried the congregation on weekly trips to San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles where in a single weekend the Temple might receive as much as twenty thousand dollars in donations. As a show of strength, Jones always took his Redwood Valley congregation on such tours. The buses were said to have been overcrowded, with people riding in the overhead storage racks and down below in the baggage compartment. Members complained that the air conditioners and toilets did not work and that they were driven too long without food or rest. Jones had a special bus with air conditioning, a working bath and a private, bulletproof compartment. Each summer, members were given the opportunity to take a cross-country vacation and many boarded the Temple buses bound for national parks, monuments and other points of interest; sites never seen by these inner-city Blacks. The Temple's advance team arranged to rent auditoriums and leaf-letted the major cities to herald the group's arrival. Jones put on his usual show with its many collections all across the country.
Such a trip was expected to net one to two hundred thousand dollars. The 1973 cross country trip was the most noteworthy. The buses stopped in Washington, D.C. where the Temple called on congressmen and succeeded in getting a description of the Peoples Temple entered in the congressional hearings. But the highlight of the trip was the publicity Jones received when his Temple buses unloaded hundreds of members on the steps of the Capitol to pick up the litter around the grounds. The Washington Post recorded the publicity stunt in their editorial page, dated August 18, 1973 in which was written,
The hands-down winners of any-body's tourist-of-the-year award have got to be the 660 wonderful members of the Peoples Temple... this spirited group of travelers fanned out from their 13 buses and spent about an hour cleaning up the [Capitol] grounds.
In addition to the summer vacations and the revival tours, the Temple buses also carried members to the voting polls and anywhere else Jones wanted to demonstrate his power. When a group of reporters in Fresno were tried for refusing to divulge their sources, Jones sent hundreds to rally in support of the "Fresno Four" as he called them. It was ironic that this manipulator of the media would defend the freedom of the press, but irony was his trademark. In 1976, the buses arrived at San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge where members disembarked to stage a demonstration in support of the proposed anti-suicide fences. Over the years, about six hundred people have jumped to their death from the bridge, two-thirds the number who would commit mass suicide in Jonestown; the same people who donated their energies in a public demonstration acknowledging the government's responsibility to help avert suicide.
In spite of all of his questionable and outright illegal activities in private, Jones enjoyed respectable reputation in public. In 1975 he was chosen one of "The 100 Outstanding Clergyman in America" by the Foundation for Religion in American Life. In 1976, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner named him "Humanitarian of the Year" but the most impressive title came in January of 1977, when Jones was given the "Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award." He must have had a good laugh about that.