The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple

Jim Jones was undeniably a man of great gifts and one who, for much of his life and ministry, achieved admirable results on behalf of the downtrodden.
--Jeff Guinn, The Road to Jonestown (Simon & Schuster, 2017)

 One of the few worthwhile things in Terror in the Jungle, the recent "documentary" on Sundance --among the endlessly repeated genuine footage and cheesy reenactments -- was journalist Jeff Guinn's knowledgeable research on Jonestown and Jim Jones, who started out as a pastor in Indianapolis and ended up dead in Guyana with 909 members of his congregation, including many children.  In his book Guinn follows Jones from his childhood in Indiana, his singled-minded devotion to integrating much of Indianapolis,to his eventual move to establish independent churches in California.  Jones's shift from socialist to demagogue --fueled by power, drugs and sex -- seems to have been a slow process, moving from a cover as a pastor promoting socialism to one who punished his congregants physically and stored millions of dollars in secret bank accounts. Not long after Jones was given a testimonial dinner --guests included the mayor of San Francisco and Eldridge Cleaver -- an article in New West by Phil Tracy and Marshall Kilduf revealed all the abuse and skullduggery going on at Peoples Temple and Jones and his followers fled to their new outpost in the remote jungle of Guyana. When Congressman Leo Ryan went to Jonestown in Guyana to investigate complaints from relatives of those in the compound he was killed and Jones ordered mass suicide; those who resisted (how many is not known) were compelled to drink the Kool-Aid (actually a cheaper knockoff. Flavor-Aid) laced with cyanide, a poison that kills by slow suffocation.

As Guinn points out, Jones was an unusual demagogue, appealing to people with an idea of sharing equally.  He started out with ideals and lost them to power, in a haze of sex and drugs. Some were forced to drink the Kool-Aid but most apparently did it voluntarily:  they called Jim Jones Father and thought he knew best.