Thirty years after the mass suicide: The Rehabilitation Of Jim Jones

City Journal:

On November 18, 1978, a knife-wielding henchman of Jim Jones tried and failed to assassinate Congressman Leo Ryan, who was visiting Jonestown, Guyana, at the behest of concerned constituents—people who had left Peoples Temple, Jones’s organization, and relatives of people still within. Later that day, at an airstrip outside the agricultural commune, Jones’s gunmen finished the job, killing the California congressman, NBC reporter Don Harris, NBC cameraman Bob Brown, San Francisco Examiner photographer Greg Robinson, and disenchanted cultist Patty Parks. Back at Jonestown, Jones then ordered his followers to join him in committing “revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world,” which they did. As with the nineteenth-century utopian experiments New Harmony, Brook Farm, and Oneida, the beautiful idea hadn’t failed; the world had.

But in its ghastly outcome, Jonestown was unlike past utopian communities entrenched in the American tradition of building “a city upon a hill.” It belonged more to the totalitarian socialism of the twentieth century. Peoples Temple attorney Charles Garry’s proclamation to journalists after visiting Jonestown—“I have seen paradise”—recalled the reactions of Lincoln Steffens, John Reed, and W. E. B. Du Bois upon making pilgrimages to the Soviet Union. And like the attempts to build paradise in Russia, Cambodia, and North Korea, Jonestown ultimately became not a heaven on earth but a hell. Just four cultists inside Jonestown when the “white night” began escaped their assigned fates; 909 perished. Code words delivered by shortwave radio even prompted a mother in faraway Georgetown, Guyana, to murder her three children and herself. Four months later, Jones’s spokesman, Mike Prokes, called a press conference in which he expressed allegiance to the aims of Peoples Temple and promptly killed himself. Jim Jones holds sway even from the grave…

Jones’s seductive rhetoric attacking racism, capitalism, and homophobia, which helped delude his supporters, has deluded Moore as well. In the Jonestown aftermath, the Left quickly distanced itself from Peoples Temple to save face; 30 years later, Moore highlights the Temple’s role within the American Left to revive the Temple’s reputation. If not exactly an attempt at innocence-by-association, this is at least an effort to use Jones’s associations with prominent Democrats and radicals to highlight what Moore sees as the Temple’s overlooked redeeming aspects.

Indeed, Jim Jones was a power player in Bay Area politics and thereby a player in national Democratic Party politics. Local politicians and activists benefited from the slave labor that he could provide on little notice to people political rallies and hand out campaign literature. In gratitude, Moscone appointed him chairman of San Francisco’s housing authority and Willie Brown likened Jones, a man who would eventually kill more African-Americans than any Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, to Martin Luther King, Jr. First lady Rosalyn Carter and her husband’s running mate, Walter Mondale, both met with the cult leader. Jones even appropriated the title of Huey Newton’s book, Revolutionary Suicide, to describe the extermination of his flock (which included several of Newton’s relatives). Once Jonestown’s residents had performed this “revolutionary suicide,” the wills left behind bequeathed all to the Soviet Union.

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