Utopian nightmare

(11-08) 04:00 PDT JONESTOWN, GUYANA -- "My father was a fraud." - Stephan Gandhi Jones, son of Jim Jones

A lone palm tree stands where Jim Jones exhorted his followers to die for him, but the jungle encroaches even as time shrouds memories of Jones, his Peoples Temple and his followers' quest for a better world.

Jonestown was to have been a Utopian dream, free of racism, a haven for justice.

Yet on Nov. 18, 1978, in Guyana, it became the scene of unspeakable horror as Jones led his Bay Area flock into the worst mass murder/suicide in modern history. In a cataclysmic episode, more than 900 people, most of them children or elderly, drank or were forced to drink cyanide-spiked fruit punch at the behest of Jones, a once-charismatic monomaniac who had curried favor with San Francisco's left-leaning political elite.

Others, children among them, died in murder-suicides in a Georgetown hotel room. Jones himself, by then drug-addicted and mentally ill, died of a bullet to the head by an unknown hand.

It was the end of Peoples Temple, but just the beginning of the darkness: Nine days later, with San Francisco still reeling in disbelief, the nightmare of Jonestown was punctuated by the City Hall assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

In the days and years immediately following these events, national attention turned to the dangers of cults and San Francisco politics turned to the center. Supervisor Dianne Feinstein became the mayor who would lead The City out of darkness and ultimately leave San Francisco for the U.S. Senate.

Dangers of extremism <

Feinstein says the incidents showed the dangers of extremism.

"The long-term lesson is politics in San Francisco is a very sensitive art. People do not respond to political muscle .‚.‚. I don't think San Francisco does well when the political pendulum goes to either end."

Willie Brown, at that time an assemblyman and today mayor of San Francisco, is loathe to discuss Jones or Jonestown.

"That's not something I want to talk about. It's too painful," Brown says. "Everybody knows the lessons about cults and dying. What's the need to talk about it? (Jim Jones) was a cultist, not recognized by me or anybody else."

Twenty years later, do Jonestown and the Peoples Temple make sense? And have any lessons been learned?

Many say the primary impressions of Jonestown are the madness of Jim Jones and the mounds of bodies.

Little attention has been paid to the real people who died at Jonestown and why they were there. Peoples Temple did not start as a cult, some say, and most of those who died were decent people hoping to improve the human condition.

And, say others, too little attention has been paid to the fact that the needs that attracted people to Peoples Temple and the forces that helped turn it from a social movement into a paranoid and abusive cult still exist.

If there is a fundamental lesson in Jonestown, it's that

"the menace of cults still lingers; it's as real today as it was 20 years ago," says Jackie Speier, a survivor of the Port Kaituma, Guyana, ambush that killed her boss, Rep. Leo Ryan, Examiner photographer Greg Robinson, NBC correspondent Don Harris, NBC cameraman Bob Brown and temple defector Patricia Parks. "No one should ever be so arrogant as to believe it couldn't happen again," Speier says.

Timothy Stoen, a former San Francisco assistant district attorney who played a pivotal role in the life and death of Peoples Temple, says there is a thin line between legitimate religious and social organizations and dangerous cults.

"The fact is there probably will be some future Wacos if not future Peoples Temples," Stoen says, referring to the fiery end of David Koresh's Branch Davidian cult that claimed 81 lives in Texas in 1993.

"There are people out there all over the place who would like to be another Jim Jones."

James Warren Jones was born May 13, 1931, in a tattered town called Crete in Indiana. He was different from the beginning - a Holy Roller preacher as a child, selling spider monkeys on the streets of Indianapolis to buy food as a young student and modeling himself after Father Divine, whose Peace Mission drew a cult following at the time. In a credo that would refine and warp itself until the end, he developed a set of professed beliefs, sometimes called "apostolic socialism," that ignored God while deifying social justice and worshiping the salvific power of socialism.

He became a student minister at an Indiana Methodist church in 1952. He left the Methodists because the church wouldn't desegregate, and in the 1950s founded the movement that would take various names as it evolved into Peoples Temple. In 1965, Jones and his wife, Marceline, brought the nascent temple and a handful of the faithful to California, the promised land for alternative religions.

A church in Redwood Valley <

The Joneses and their rainbow family of adopted children and about 70 followers set up in the sylvan Redwood Valley near Ukiah where relations between them and the laid-back locals were uneasy but generally peaceful.

Jones quickly relocated his church to the bigger and more lucrative markets of San Francisco and Los Angeles. He moved Peoples Temple into an abandoned synagogue in The City's Fillmore district.

While attracting a growing congregation of urban blacks, he used his considerable intellectual and acting skills to bring onto his bandwagon many of San Francisco's leading politicians.

Current Mayor Brown was one of Jones' biggest cheerleaders, hailing him as a blend of Martin Luther King, Einstein and Mao. Then-Lt. Gov. Mervyn Dymally was another. Mayor Moscone was still another, naming Jones to head his Housing Commission and, some said, owing his razor-thin election to the few hundred illegal voters Jones allegedly produced.

America in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and particularly its radical-chic nation-state of San Francisco, were ideally suited for the rise of a charismatic power-seeker such as Jones. The civil rights movement was still alive and the emerging politics of the day exalted the quest for social justice and equality - exactly the things older religious blacks, idealistic young whites and other seekers were hearing from Jones' pulpit.

But the politics of the day also fed the paranoia in Jones. He believed the government was conspiring to continue the war in Vietnam and spy on such groups as the Black Panthers. The government was not to be trusted.

The government also was working covertly against Jones and the temple, seeking to short-circuit the drive for a better society. Jones believed all this and so, to an almost universal extent, did the Temple congregation.

So Jones moved the temple and 1,000 or so followers to Guyana's outback, winning a 25-year lease on 3,852 acres in the Orinoco River basin near the disputed border with Venezuela.

A small group of temple pioneers moved in 1974 to what was to become Jonestown, far from the hostile attacks of media, government and others. The lease from the Guyana government required the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project to "cultivate and beneficially occupy" at least one-fifth of the land by 1976.

Temple members raised livestock and grew pineapple, cassava, eddoes and other tropical fruits and vegetables. Charles Garry, Peoples Temple's San Francisco lawyer, called it a paradise.

Trouble in paradise<

But there was trouble in paradise. The camp never became agriculturally self-sustaining and the swift tropical diseases of the jungle ran rampant. At the end, only a third of the residents were able-bodied. Worse, critics said, it was a prison camp - people were not allowed to leave. Abusive practices such as beatings and forced sex, long-rumored but little-reported at the San Francisco church, escalated. Jones' deteriorating mental stability made him increasingly erratic and he demanded utter, unquestioning loyalty.

Agencies from the State Department and the CIA to the Internal Revenue Service and the Postal Service were investigating or taking legal action against Peoples Temple for mail fraud, wresting Social Security checks from members, arms and narcotics trafficking, and other crimes, real or imagined.

Aiding and abetting the conspiracy in the eyes of Jones and his followers were the few temple defectors and families of members who were getting attention from the hostile North American media.

Against this background, Jones, who was white, and his predominantly white inner circle had faithful followers practice mass suicide in a series of "white nights." Such a drastic end was the only possible response to the vast and growing outside threat, Jones preached. The people believed him.

Congressman's visit<

The final act began to unfold when Ryan, a respected Democratic congressman from San Mateo County with a taste for headlines, led a delegation of newsmen and a group of family members called the Concerned Relatives to Jonestown to investigate allegations of thought control, imprisonment, drug- and gun-running.

Ryan was knifed - superficially - during the visit. When he was ready to leave, several Jonestown residents asked to leave with him, an action that apparently triggered the subsequent massacre of Ryan, Robinson and the others at Port Kaituma.

The incredible scene of mass death quickly followed at Jonestown.

"We died because you would not let us live," wrote temple insider Annie Moore in her suicide note.

Among those who survived was Jim Jones' son, Stephan, who was away with the camp's basketball team. It was left to the younger Jones, who had broken with his father and since has denounced him repeatedly, to declare Jim Jones' most durable epitaph. In a recent ABC television visit to Jonestown, Stephan Jones said simply, "My father was a fraud."

Jones was a madman, some feel the people of Jonestown have been unfairly characterized as mindless zombies.

"The people who died in Jonestown were sweet, altruistic people. One of the tragedies of Jonestown is that people haven't paid attention to that," says Timothy Stoen, whose son, John Victor, died at Jonestown. Stoen played the pivotal role in a custody battle with Jones that helped precipitate the murder-suicides. Among Ryan's reasons for going to Guyana was the custody fight.

"No single theory could possibly explain the many complex and related issues that led the members of the Peoples Temple to leave family, friends and church communities and take residence in the jungle of Jonestown," says Archie Smith Jr., professor of pastoral psychology at the Pacific School of Religion and Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. "Labeled by many as sick, dysfunctional or disadvantaged, (they) were seeking an alternative to the status quo, new and just ways of living and being in the world."

Mary Sawyer, an Iowa State University religion professor who worked for Dymally at the time, blames much of the image on sensationalized media coverage.

"Most of America quickly was persuaded that those who had followed Jim Jones to Guyana .‚.‚. had to have been naive and gullible people at best, and demented radicals at worst," Sawyer says in a treatise titled, "My Lord, What a Mourning - 20 Years since Jonestown."

"Amidst all the attention that was focused on Jim Jones, the people were accorded scarcely any respect as thinking, feeling, caring human beings. .‚.‚. The dehumanizing of the victims of Jonestown by the journalistic community was tantamount to the withholding of permission to grieve."

The Rev. Mary McCormick Maaga, a Jonestown scholar and a United Methodist pastor in Sergeantsville, N.J., has produced a new book, "Hearing the Voices of Jonestown."

"Not to underplay the tragedy and loss of life, but I hope we can now step one step back and look more at the community of people who were involved and ask ourselves what went wrong in a more sophisticated way," Maaga says.

Social, political organization <

"I think if we only talk about Jim Jones and his influence on the community, we don't get to ask the broader questions. .‚.‚. Remember, Peoples Temple in the middle years was primarily a social and political organization, not religious," Maaga says. "The members cared about caring for the elderly, the disenfranchised and so on. They were not just blindly following."

Using the turn-of-the-century German theologian Ernst Troeltsch's division of church, sect and cult, Maaga said the temple's sect was the 70 or so white members who followed Jones from Indianapolis to California, then to Guyana, adapting their ideology to his. The cult was the small group of young white Utopians who primarily formed the leadership. The church was by far the majority - the urban blacks with Christian backgrounds who wanted a better life for the world and themselves.

"But they all shared a belief in racial justice, redistribution of wealth and working to perfect society," Maaga says. "Somewhere along the line all that was lost.

"Peoples Temple at some point lost its ability to look self-critically at itself and to challenge the decisions of the leadership - not just Jim Jones. And Jones lost his ability to lead because of his drug addiction and mental illness."

It wasn't just Jones' deterioration that pushed Jonestown toward its doom, Maaga argues: Crop failures, disease and other factors helped.

Nor was Jones solely responsible for leading his flock to destruction, Maaga says:

"It took Marceline Jones, Carolyn Layton, Maria Katsaris, Harriett Tropp, Jim McElvane and the others in positions of responsibility and influence at Jonestown to embrace the idea of suicide for the rank-and-file members to have been willing to drink the poison. Jones had become too ravaged by drug addiction and paranoia to have planned the suicides on his own or to have inspired people to take their own lives through his encouragement alone."

Tragic change in direction <

Maaga says the lessons of Jonestown are to be learned by trying to figure out why the committed veered so tragically from their vision of a better world.

"I think things went right earlier in the movement," Maaga says, pointing to the temple's successful social programs in San Francisco.

"What we should be talking about is what went right and when did it go wrong," she said, suggesting the answers might prevent similar tragedies. "I don't think Peoples Temple was a singular example of a self-righteous religion gone horribly awry.

"What was important about it was what they (the members) were - as people - not just how they died."

Rebecca Moore, a University of North Dakota professor of religion and philosophy, lost her sisters Carolyn Layton and Annie Moore at Jonestown, as well as her nephew, Jim-Jon Prokes.

She says some of the still-unexplored questions are whether people in San Francisco could have prevented the tragedy by reining in Jones before he was all-powerful and crazy; what responsibility Willie Brown and others had before and after the catastrophe; and the role of the black church.

"At times I despair that we've learned nothing," Moore says. "By that I mean that people continue to demonize (Jones) and forget the others.

"As a society we fail to take seriously the very strong and powerful desire, or hunger, for community, a community of people working for social change. The people in Jonestown were trying to create a Utopian society, racial justice and social equality. Granted, there were internal contradictions, but they were one of the few groups intentionally addressing the problem of racism and trying concretely to do something about it."

The media, Moore says, almost always dwells on the dead bodies and on Jones himself; the government has swept under the rug all understanding of Jonestown and of its own role. No official inquiry was held in the United States and the Guyanan investigation was almost laughably superficial.

Jonestown, Berkeley's Smith warns, "was not an anomaly. Rather, it was a product of the evolving ethos of our time, an ethos that tends to repress and trivialize the essentially religious impulse. The social and historical forces that gave rise to Jonestown 20 years ago operate today."

He believes black churches in particular have a responsibility to learn and teach the lessons. So does Iowa State's Mary Sawyer: "America's religious community - that vast potential reservoir of pastoral care - was unable to facilitate a proper grieving, either on the part of the families immediately affected or on the part of the nation, because they, too, did not know the people involved."

The churches, including white Protestant and Catholic churches that were so involved in the civil rights movement, failed as well, Sawyer says.

A central lesson unlearned <

"Perhaps the biggest heartache of all," Sawyer says,

"is that our country and our churches still have not sought an answer to the question of why the people joined this movement, and so still have not discerned the central lesson of Jonestown. Why, indeed, were white idealists and black Christians drawn to a movement that promised them sanctuary from America's failure to honor her promises of equality and justice?

"Churches, like the public, were so horrified they psychologically needed to distance themselves .‚.‚. to handle the reality of it. Most people know what Jonestown is but if you say Peoples Temple, people will have a blank look. They don't know there was a longstanding social change movement.

"And they're no more informed today than they were 20 years ago. I hope this anniversary will not be just a replay of Jim Jones as a crazy man but that there is some conscientious effort to make America understand. It takes two or three decades before people start asking the right questions. .‚.‚. There hasn't been that kind of soul-searching.

"It's important to do this. We have to have sense of the wounds that are still there."

"What should we be talking about?" asks Jackie Speier, who was elected to the California Assembly after the tragedy and on Tuesday was elected to the state Senate.

"We should be talking about the fact that the menace of cults still lingers. Cults are still around. They're all around us. Many continue to operate under the guise of being religious, under the guise of religiosity and the First Amendment, violating state and federal laws (while) the government again looks the other way."

Dr. Hardat Sukhdeo, a Guyana-born psychiatrist who treated Jonestown survivors, says the conditions that created Peoples Temple could create a similar movement.

People joined the temple because "they needed to have this type of togetherness and leadership and somebody to tell them what to do and when to do it," said Sukhdeo, of Rutgers University.

Sukhdeo sees the majority of temple members, mostly black, as largely alienated and at sea. The Peoples Temple was more of a place to improve their own lives than to achieve the societal do-goodism espoused by young whites who joined.

"They wanted something like the cult to say, "Yes, we know the truth. Yes, we have the answers.' They were lost, they were angry and they didn't feel they belonged to society."

Nothing has changed, he says: Groups such as Branch Davidian and Heaven's Gate prove that the attraction to cults remains.

A distrust of religion <

The Rev. Robert Warren Cromey, rector of San Francisco's Trinity Episcopal Church, says that a "sad part of Jonestown is it has sent a message of distrust of religion, particularly the small sect religions. .‚.‚. (There is) a sense of "if you're religious, this is what might happen to you.'

"But on the positive side, people are looking more critically before getting involved in religious programs, especially the more fringe type of things. Look at the kind of scrutiny now given to Hare Krishna, Scientology and the like. That's as it should be."

Timothy Stoen also warns of the dangers of cults.

"There are a lot of Jim Jones wannabes out there," said Stoen, who recently moved to Colorado Springs from Mendocino. ".‚.‚. You can't wish them away .‚.‚. (but) one hopefully can learn from (Peoples Temple) that these things can be lethal and there comes a point early on when you can do something about it."

The psychological isolation that leads people to seek groups like Peoples Temple still exists, he says, urging families of cultists to ask questions, challenge the groups and otherwise get involved.

"People just have to take an even-handed look that this is kind of a sign of our times - people need structure, community, etc. If mainline churches don't provide it, there'll be cults. Those cults will be there serving some sort of need."

Episcopal Church, lamented recently that the "sad part of Jonestown is it has sent a message of distrust of religion, particularly the small sect religions .‚.‚. But on the positive side, people are looking more critically before getting involved in .‚.‚. the more fringe type of things.<

This article appeared on page A - of the Examiner