From Resistance to Terror: The Open Secret of Jonestown

(Editor’s note: This article was originally published as a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Secrecy (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2022).)

None of the dozens of books and hundreds of articles written about Peoples Temple provides an in-depth assessment of the important role that secrecy played in the group and in the events leading up to the mass murder/suicides of Jonestown in 1978. It is fair to say, however, that the group functioned very much as a secret society, despite its public presentation as a church in the United States and as an agricultural project in Guyana. Its pastor appeared to be a progressive Christian minister, but behind closed doors Jim Jones preached a message that seemed to subordinate Christian teaching to his own version of socialism in San Francisco, and of atheism once the group moved abroad. A number of controversial, perhaps even criminal, activities remained unknown to outsiders until disaffected former members contributed to an exposé that brought them to light. Although the biggest secret of all had been communicated well in advance on several occasions — the plan for mass death — its realization still came as a surprise.

Theoretical analyses of secrecy have focused primarily on the function of keeping secrets rather than on the subject of the secrets themselves. Secrecy has been examined both as a kind of communication event (Bellman 1981) and as a means to power and control (Shils 1996 [1956]; Rourke 1957; Marx 1974). The task of boundary creation and maintenance has been studied extensively (Lowry 1972; Luhrmann 1989; Johnson 2002). Forms and strategies rather than content or substance have been highlighted (Urban 1998:210; Urban 2017; Urban 2021). These and other studies are of course indebted to, and develop further, Georg Simmel’s groundbreaking essay on secrecy (Simmel 1950). His depiction of secret societies anticipates many aspects of life inside Peoples Temple.

At the same time, the scholarly emphasis on form rather than content fails to capture the ways that secrets, rather than secrecy, worked within the Temple. Indeed, it was precisely the content of the secrets revealed by initiates that assimilated them into the group and bound them together through loyalty and trust. In addition, the public secrets of Jones’ narcissism, insecurity and cruelty were well-known to insiders, as was his diminished capacity in the final months of Jonestown, due to drug abuse. These secrets were common knowledge to residents of Jonestown, who were skilled in “knowing what not to know” (Taussig 1999:2, italics in original).

The substance of secrets does matter, at least in the case of Peoples Temple. Group members, particularly residents, utilized individual and collective secrets to create a new society uniting individuals once divided by race, class, gender, and age. In this way, they used secrets as a means of social resistance, one of Hugh Urban’s six primary forms of secrecy (Urban 2021). Their encapsulation in the remote jungle interior of Guyana, however, led to an increasing use of severe measures and provided the opportunity to plan for mass suicide. This trajectory from resistance to coercion was not inevitable, but did alter the tenor of the community, leading to the terror of secrecy, another of Urban’s modalities. Thus, secrets were used strategically in the Temple, but it was their content damaging to those who revealed them, useful to those who kept them, and harmful to those who missed them—that made them strategic.

This article first discusses the secret society as described by Simmel, adding the historical dimension identified by Urban. It then turns to four key moments in the life of the group: Indianapolis; Redwood Valley, California; San Francisco; and Jonestown, Guyana. Each location saw an intensification of the use of secrets and an exaggeration of their substance. The ideological shift from resistance movement to an organization increasingly committed to violence is analyzed. Finally, the article looks at the evidence for the public secret of mass murder/suicide, concluding that plans were telegraphed ahead of time in several ways.

 

The Secret Society

In “The Secret and the Secret Society,” Georg Simmel analyzes the contributions that secrecy makes to the smooth running of human relations before he considers the qualities of secret societies, which he finds less conducive to the public good. He observes that in many respects such organizations merely modify or mimic the general features that characterize all groups. That is, secret societies do not qualitatively differ from other organizations, but rather depart simply in emphasis by being “more so”—more separate, more secluded, more egoistic, more centralized, more de-individualized, more equal, and so on. In other respects, however, they depart radically from wider society because in them secrecy moves from the periphery as a useful tool, to the center as a guiding principle.

While a number of scholars have pointed out certain weaknesses in Simmel’s approach (see, e.g., Hazelrigg 1969; Bellman 1981; Erickson 1981; Herdt 2003), several elements of the sociologist’s account nonetheless seem applicable to Peoples Temple. Evidence within the Temple abounds for features Simmel identified as common to secret societies—silence, ritual, and freedom, to note just three. As Urban observes, however, “religious secrecy is also very much a historical process that is bound up in a complex dialectical relationship with the larger political, economic, legal, and governmental structures in which it is enmeshed” (Urban 2021:165, italics in original). This explains why each era of the Temple’s existence—its origins in Indianapolis, its migration to Redwood Valley in Northern California, its consolidation as a politico-religious group in San Francisco, and its culmination in Guyana—witnessed the utilization of secrets in different ways to respond to the specific demands of the times.

Initially the Temple publicly resisted the evils of racism and poverty in the familiar language of the Christian Social Gospel and the mandate of Jesus to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and help the poor (Matthew 25: 35-36), But it grew more secretive as its goals became increasingly political, until members took the dramatic step of leaving the United States to create a new society where they could openly live their ideals. Peoples Temple and the community in Jonestown seem to fit Urban’s modality of secrecy as a form of social resistance, although as conditions in Jonestown deteriorated throughout 1978, the modality of secrecy as terror developed as well (Urban 2021: 19).

A wealth of evidence exists concerning the inner life of Peoples Temple. After the deaths, the FBI gathered hundreds of audiotapes and thousands of pages of business records that the group maintained in Jonestown. Additionally, records held in the office of a Temple attorney were turned over to the California Historical Society. These documents included medical records, agricultural reports, written confessions, letters to Jones, personnel evaluations, planning sheets for the move to Guyana, accounting slips for members who lived communally, and much more. Another source of information comes from U.S. government sources under the Freedom of Information Act, which released cables, investigative interviews, and other items relating to the fatal journey of Congressman Leo J. Ryan. Finally, statements given by survivors and former members have contributed to a detailed portrait of the organization. We therefore have much more detailed knowledge of the Temple’s operations than we have of other secret societies.

 

Four Moments in the Life of Peoples Temple

Scholarly histories (Chidester 2003; Hall 2004; Moore 2018a) and popular accounts (Reiterman and Jacobs 2008; Guinn 2017) locate Peoples Temple within the social and political movements of the post-World War II era. Established in Indianapolis in the 1950s by Jim Jones (1931-1978) and his wife Marceline Baldwin Jones (1927-1978), Peoples Temple appealed to working class whites and African Americans with a message of inclusion, justice, and equality. Preaching against the backdrop of a highly segregated city, Jones gave an explicitly interracial message, which adopted a worship style familiar to both white Pentecostals and black churchgoers (Harrison 2004). Marceline Jones was a successful nursing home administrator who brought her talents to bear upon church finance and development. Temple members offered a number of free services to the community and produced a positive impression in the largely segregated city by modeling integration at work. There was little to distinguish the church at that time as a secret society or as a self-conscious community of resistance, since its private goals matched its public rhetoric.

The Jones family with its five children left a thriving congregation in Indianapolis and moved to Brazil in the early 1960s. When they returned two years later, they found the church diminished in size and strength. Jones reported having a vision of nuclear war and urged the Temple’s remnant to move to safety in northern California. About seventy families—black and white in equal numbers (Hall 2004: 63)—followed the preacher-turned-prophet to a rural area 115 miles north of San Francisco. (In the spirit of full disclosure, my older sister Carolyn Layton and my younger sister Annie Moore joined the Temple at this time and became part of the leadership circle. Along with others, they helped plan the deaths in Jonestown. They died there, along with Carolyn’s 3-year-old son Kimo, who was fathered by Jones.)

The move to Redwood Valley marked the second moment in the Temple’s history, and its initial turn toward secrecy. The change stemmed in part from members’ acceptance of Jones as “a prophet of the first degree” (Cordell 1965). It also came from the relocation to a largely white, rural area that did not welcome the integrated group into its midst. As a result, church members did not disclose their participation in the Temple to outsiders. Hiding that connection allowed them to work together clandestinely in government jobs, such as the county welfare office and public schools, without the appearance of favoritism. They could help clients through government services or direct them to Temple programs, and in turn, they could assist church members as they navigated the social welfare system.

Externally, Peoples Temple appeared to be a Christian church simply carrying out its mandate. But internally it embraced a more intensively communal style than mainstream churches, and an idiosyncratically radical political outlook, as it cultivated working class members and attracted young college-educated adults. Among other novelties, it introduced self-criticism sessions that were closed to all but members, and instituted an even more restricted level of participation in a governing body known as the Planning Commission. It launched a program of spying on potential, current, and former members. It blocked the public from some worship services and denied entrance to those who had expressed criticism of the group.

Meanwhile, the group made regular forays in church-owned buses to the urban areas of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Although black pastors in San Francisco accused Jones of poaching members from their own churches, it is clear that African American Christians found his militant message of racial equality and the church’s helpful service programs attractive. With the move of church headquarters to San Francisco in 1972, a self-conscious politics arose. “Peoples Temple became one of the progressive churches, like Glide Memorial, that allied with New Left and counterculture politics”(Hall 2004: 161).

In the Bay Area, Peoples Temple appeared to be a liberal church engaged in progressive public causes, but the organization grew more secretive as Jones became a glorified healer whose rhetoric of “Apostolic Socialism” promoted a self-enclosed, collectivist lifestyle. Secrecy attended the radicalization of members. Self-criticism, catharsis sessions became more abusive. Friendships outside the church were discouraged. Uniformed greeters in San Francisco welcomed first-time visitors to the Temple, writing down personal information on index cards to determine if they could be admitted to the service — and to provide information for later reconnaissance or psychical revelation. Spying, intimidation, and publishing disinformation about high-profile defectors became standard procedure for dealing with them. As Simmel observed, betrayal is an ever-present threat to the survival of secret societies (1950). Peoples Temple was no exception.

By 1972 the Temple had three branches in California — Redwood Valley, Los Angeles, and San Francisco — but it was in San Francisco that power and secrecy coalesced in the presence of Jim Jones. The message of Apostolic Socialism combined the mutual sharing practiced by the early church with a pledge to work for political socialism. The ultimate form of God was in fact socialism, in which the love of God and the love of neighbor merged. David Chidester (2003) deduced an ideology based on the sermons of Jones that articulated the new theology and new anthropology. The preacher replaced the “Sky God” of Christianity with the “Divine Principle” of Socialism, with himself as the living embodiment.

He announced himself as savior, redeemer, and deliverer … [and as] liberator, magnetic force, electrifier, captain of salvation, healer of all healers, the deliverer of the ages, the beginning and the end, the door, key, and locksmith to salvation. (Chidester 2003; 55).

Chidester identified a threefold anthropology in Jones’ message for the Temple: the superhuman (Jones), the subhuman (the poor), and the fully human (the socialist). This last category entailed a life lived under socialism free of the disease of capitalism. Jones tried to effect this through healing performances, claiming to take people’s sickness and infirmity into his own body. “Healing provided a ritual pretext for a revolutionary movement committed to the creation of a new social order” (Chidester 2003: 73-78).

Temple members worked to create this new order in a variety of ways. They developed a bureaucracy that efficiently managed the operation of a multimillion-dollar enterprise that encompassed housing, legal advocacy, community activism, small business ventures and more (Hall 1988). Members participated in coalition groups protesting a California Supreme Court ruling in 1976, the Bakke Decision, which eliminated affirmative action programs and other political actions. Inside the Temple, members were expected to donate all of their assets — temporal, spiritual, and material. Some signed over property and other wealth. At the same time, the catharsis sessions grew increasingly harsh as the group sought to replace a so-called “capitalist’’ mentality with a communal “socialist” heart. Boxing matches, beatings paddlings, and public humiliation before the entire congregation were a few of the tools used for reeducation.

Some of these practices came to light in 1977, when New West magazine published accusations from a dozen former members. “Based on what these people told us,” the authors wrote, “life inside Peoples Temple was a mixture of Spartan regimentation, fear and self-imposed humiliation” (Kilduff and Tracy 34). The ex-members said that the Sunday services attended by dignitaries were orchestrated, that faith healings were faked, and that letter-writing campaigns were crafted to target influential opinion-makers.

By the time these secrets had been revealed, Jones and almost 1000 members had emigrated from the United States and moved to the group’s agricultural commune located in Guyana, sandwiched on South America’s north coast between Venezuela and Suriname. This commenced the fourth moment in the Temple’s history. As early as 1974, Temple pioneers began developing property that the group eventually leased from the Government of Guyana. They cleared land for agriculture, constructed roads, built housing and infrastructure, and readied the community for immigrants. When the influx arrived in 1977, the camp’s facilities were primitive and life was difficult, but expectations for success were high. Ultimate independence and self-sufficiency seemed within grasp for the group, which had escaped the institutionalized racism of the United States. If “the essence of the secret society, as such, is autonomy” with which to live in freedom (Simmel 1950: 361), the “Promised Land” of Jonestown seemed to offer that to the immigrants.

But the same interior culture of the organization accompanied the arrivals. A clearly-defined hierarchy with Jones at the top worked through bureaucratic departments to organize life in the new community. Organizational charts, departmental reports, and audiotapes of community meetings demonstrate the extent to which a hierarchic, top-down regimen of authority was installed — contravening the avowed pledge of social equality for all. The group’s secrets were well-protected, since the agricultural project was located hundreds of miles from the capital of Guyana and thousands of miles from the United States. In that respect, autonomy seemed assured. Yet the Jonestown community could not escape its perceived enemies, even on another continent.

Unaware of most of the Temple’s practices, yet fearing for the safety of family members living in Jonestown, an oppositional force called the Concerned Relatives began to urge reporters and government officials in the United States to investigate the agricultural project. Pressure from these cultural opponents put the community at risk and heightened fears for its survival among those living there. Erickson (1981) examined the ways that risk shapes secret societies. Risk “may induce greater willingness to accept discipline,” although it may, conversely, encourage more contact with outsiders (Erickson 1981: 202). Residents of Jonestown chose the first option.

Fearing for its survival, the group began to turn from being a community of resistance to a community of terror. A security team patrolled day and night. Community meetings exposed personal information of the most intimate kind. Administrators in charge of various departments gave unceasing attention to those working under their supervision, writing frequent reports on habits, feelings, and performance. Those who had a “bad attitude” were assigned to a special work crew charged with onerous tasks. Some members were even required to perform sex acts before the entire group. The need to defend the project, by arms if necessary or by a political act of self-destruction, became a consuming topic of discussion at community meetings.

When Congressman Ryan arrived at the gates of Jonestown on 17 November 1978 demanding to be admitted, the plans for revolutionary suicide went into motion. Ryan received a warm welcome, but the journalists who traveled with him did not. Once inside Jonestown, a reporter received a note from two residents asking for help in leaving. Feeling that the reception for Ryan was a facade, and that the tour of facilities the following day was just a front, the reporters departed from the script assigned to them, which was to passively admire the progress that the community had made. They encountered senior residents in a crowded building and found more people who wanted to leave, although only 15 out of 900 eventually chose to depart with Ryan. Some of the secrets of Jonestown had been revealed—the lack of privacy or autonomy, the lack of modern conveniences and, most importantly, the fact that some residents were unhappy with life in Jonestown.

The final revelation was to come later that day, namely the implementation of the plan for revolutionary suicide, the ultimate act of resistance. Black Panther leader Huey Newton(1942-1989) used the expression to signify the mortal risks that social activists take when they challenge systemic injustice (Newton 1973). Jones interpreted Newton in a literal sense, however, and proclaimed to those dying around him that afternoon that, “We didn’t commit suicide, we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world” (FBI Audiotape Q042 1978).

 

From Resistance to Terror

“If secrecy can be a powerful tactic of social and political resistance, it can also easily serve as a weapon of political violence, revolution, and terrorism” (Urban 2021:137). Before the revelation of the ultimate secret—the plans for mass murder and suicide—Peoples Temple had long utilized secrets to create a sense of interdependence among its members. The personal vulnerability that came from disclosing one’s deepest and darkest self to others tied individuals together into a community of resistance. The first manifestation was the traditional Christian rite of baptism, although the baptisms held in the Redwood Valley Temple signified a commitment to socialism rather than to Christ. According to Jones, they also demonstrated:

“death to self, death to capitalism, death to the profit motive seeking, death to culture seeking, death to status-quoism, death to socio-economic positions, death to class structure, death to racism, death to possessions, death to materialism … and resurrection to love” (qtd. in Chidester 2003: 62-63).

The more important initiation ritual was catharsis, in which members acknowledged patently untrue vices, perversions, and crimes at weekly confessional meetings. Secrets tended to be linked to the personal. In Jonestown, however, confessions became increasingly political, escalating in imagination and violence, as people offered gruesome details about what they would like to do to traitors and enemies. All residents, from youngest to oldest, were required to make public statements as well as written declarations.

As early as its Indianapolis days, the Temple provided “corrective fellowship” to those members who did not live up to the standards of Jones (Hall 2004: 54). In Redwood Valley, “Deeper Life Catharsis” became a regular feature of Temple life, “in which each member of the body was encouraged to stand and get off his chest everything that was in any way a hindrance to fellowship between himself and another member” (Cartmell 2005 [1970]: 23). These were not ordinary hindrances but rather admissions of being a homosexual (the word “gay” was rarely used in the Temple), having molested children, and, quite often, desiring sex with Jim Jones. My older sister Carolyn claimed that her former husband announced in one of these sessions that he wanted asexual relationship with Jones (Moore 1986: 65). My younger sister Annie blithely wrote that if members “have molested children, they say they did but they don’t any more” (Moore 1986: 82). She credulously believed that catharsis literally disclosed people’s deepest secrets, seemingly oblivious to the fact that people confessed to fabricated transgressions out of peer pressure rather than out of culpability for actual wrongdoing.

In Jonestown, written professions of culpability were routinely required and demonstrated great imagination. One father wrote: “I have screwed my daughters all through their childhoods” (FBI 2009a). In a note addressed to a “traitor”— that is, someone who had left the Temple — one writer joked about a girl they supposedly raped, saying, “if she hadn’t tried to get away we wouldn’t have had to cut her up. Got a kick out of seeing all that blood spurting” (FBI 2009b). Some were more inventive: “I kill animals, let them rot, and then smell the stinch [stench] because I love it” (FBI 2009b). And many were political:

I have at various times plotted to kill people. These include President Nixon, Kissinger, General Haag [Haig], Gov. Wallace, Gov. Reagan. And I would on any given opportunity kill any and all the above. (FBI 2009b).

The Temple’s double consciousness of public Christian progressivism interwoven with a mostly concealed, intensively regimented collective life in its San Francisco days, mutated into a perverse theater of what Jones presented as “Communism” in Jonestown, and with it resistance began to be enforced with terror. Jim Jones read the news from Pravda and other Eastern Bloc sources over loudspeakers, while teachers in the Jonestown school trained students in Russian language, international relations, and doctrine. Bad behavior continued to be disciplined, although many crimes reflected the hardships of life in Jonestown. Taking food or clothing without permission was considered stealing from the community and revealed the lack of a socialist heart.

The importance of ideological purity grew, and those who had betrayed the movement by leaving became the subject of wild and violent fantasies. Apostates who drew media attention to Temple abuses provoked particular ire. A collection of “Letters to Dad” presents an array of proposals from residents for getting even with traitors—kidnapping, choking, strangling, murdering, poisoning, and suicide bombing, to list just a few (FBI 2009c). “When secrecy is indeed a necessary condition,” observes Erickson, “when it stems from need to reduce risk rather than from the fun of having a secret, trust becomes a vital matter” (Erickson 1981:195, italics in original). This explains the furious hatred Jonestown residents felt toward apostates who betrayed the movement.

Meanwhile in the United States, the Concerned Relatives organized public protests, filed more than a half dozen lawsuits, and lobbied Congressman Ryan to travel to Guyana (Hall et al. 2000).They encouraged federal agencies to investigate Peoples Temple; and the Postal Service, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the U.S. Customs Service, and the Internal Revenue Service responded. A major threat to Jonestown’s existence was the Federal Communication Commission’s probe of its amateur radio communications between Guyana and the United States. Aware that these transmissions were being monitored, Jonestown residents not only moved to unauthorized bandwidths, but also spoke in code to disguise their messages (“Peoples Temple Radio Codebook” 2013). Finally, the negative publicity generated by the Concerned Relatives in the United States raised fears in Jonestown that their government patrons in Guyana might turn against them.

Jones framed these activities as a conspiracy in which traitors planned to kidnap the community’s children and destroy their communist experiment by force. Given the group’s isolation, residents began to spy on and report upon each other, since opponents were beyond their reach. “Internal Surveillance Security” reports noted suspicious behaviors. Security “day helpers” wrote up infractions that ranged from sleeping late to forging excuse letters to exhibiting a bad attitude. One individual was written up for not reporting the negative remarks another resident had been making (FBI 2009d).

Social controls escalated. An underground box kept miscreants in sensory deprivation for a period of 24 hours or more, although they received limited food and water (Hall 2004: 240-241). When Marceline Jones learned of the box, she insisted that nurses provide frequent health checks for those being punished (Reiterman and Jacobs 2008: 395). The strictest form of behavioral control was the Extended Care Unit in the Jonestown medical center. Dissidents, troublemakers, and the mentally ill were kept under sedation. Residents seemed to know about the unit, although only a half dozen cases can be documented.

Anxiety about the Concerned Relatives’ conspiracy against the community fostered debate about the nature of resistance. Would they fight back if attacked? Would they kill the children in order to prevent them from being tortured? Would they themselves be willing to die? A belief in the inevitability of sacrificial death was inculcated through lectures, arguments, written assignments, and suicide rehearsals. Planning for mass death began at the end of 1977. The serving of a California court order against Jones that September became the pretext for Jones and a select few to stage-manage a six-day siege against the project. The majority of people sincerely believed they were under attack. Throughout the following months, Jonestown residents were polled again and again about their fears, their ability to withstand torture, and their eagerness to kill their families before dying themselves. Numerous notes affirm the duty to “see to the children,” as they euphemistically framed murder.

Dad: I’ve seen the ones who suffer in battle —it’s always the children. I don’t wish to see them go through the pain. A quick method to put Bobby and Lena to rest is all that I’m concerned with. I won’t mind fighting then. (FBI 2009a).

At least five letters to Jones written in Jonestown in 1978 present various plans for killing a thousand people — a partial list includes poisoning, shooting, drowning, decapitating, stabbing, and asphyxiating (“Making Plans to Die” 2021). Young and old alike publicly professed their desire to go down fighting or to commit revolutionary suicide. “If we drink the potion, I would do so,” wrote 61-year-old Magnolia Harris. “[I]would do whatever is necessary to serve this cause, would see the children and seniors are taken care of, then fight until the end,” proclaimed 9-year-old Toby Stone (“Making Plans to Die” 2021). Many people said they wanted to go down fighting, taking out as many enemies as they could. But others took revolutionary suicide in its literal sense.

About a half dozen suicide drills in which residents lined up and took what presumably was poison occurred before the final White Night. When the last day came, many adults — though by no all — were mentally and physically prepared to go through the ritual. (We cannot say that the children committed suicide, nor those seniors who were injected as they lay in their beds.) The murder of Leo Ryan, three journalists, and a Jonestown defector as they attempted to depart from the Port Kaituma airstrip, six miles from Jonestown, was not as carefully choreographed. It seemed to be an impromptu act that justified going ahead with revolutionary suicide. Jones predicted that the crime of assassinating a congressman would force Guyanese troops to enter Jonestown and it would be the end, one way or another. Resistance had turned to terror.

 

Conspiracies in Plain Sight

The fact that parents murdered their children, coupled with the fact that nearly three-quarters of those who died were African American, evoked immediate disbelief and the subsequent rise of various theories to explain what “really” happened. There is overwhelming evidence to show, however, that the residents of Jonestown conspired among themselves to commit revolutionary suicide (Moore 2018b). Early theorists did not have access to the mountain of documents, tapes, and interviews now available that shows the extent of planning that went into the events of 18 November. Nevertheless, their speculations continue to reverberate across the Internet today—from the deaths disguising the assassination of Congressman Leo Ryan by the CIA, to the bodies serving as containers to ship drugs into the United States. (We count about two dozen different hypotheses.) Michael Barkun explains the appeal of conspiracy theories by observing that “a conspiracist worldview implies a universe governed by design rather than by randomness” (Barkun 2013: 3).

The deaths in Jonestown were not only not random acts of evil, however, but were in fact designed as a political protest that was telegraphed in advance on at least four occasions. Jonestown resident Pam Moton signed a letter dated 14 March 1978 that was sent to all U.S. senators and representatives. After extolling the accomplishments of Jonestown, and detailing the persecution the project had undergone, Moton concluded by writing: “I can say without hesitation that we are devoted to a decision that it is better even to die than to be constantly harassed from one continent to the next” (Moton 1978).

A few weeks later, Moton’s letter, which a member of Congress appeared to have shared with the Concerned Relatives, was presented as evidence of “Human Rights Violations” at Jonestown. The relatives held a press conference in front of the Federal Building in San Francisco cataloguing the abuses occurring in Jonestown. An affidavit from former member Yolanda Crawford made the Temple’s intentions evident. She testified that she heard Jones say, “If anyone tries to start anything, we are ready and prepared to die for our cause.” She further swore that he proclaimed that ‘“I will lay my body down for this cause’ and asked others to make the same promise, which they did by a show of hands” (Crawford 1978).

The Temple held its own press conference a week later to counter the Concerned Relatives’ charges. Suicide plans were signaled a third time in a statement read by Jonestown resident Harriett Tropp, who asserted that, “before we will submit quietly to the interminable plotting and persecution of this politically motivated conspiracy, we will resist actively, putting our lives on the line, if it comes to that. This has been the unanimous vote of the collective community here in Guyana.” Tropp compared their decision to those in the Warsaw ghetto who resisted the Nazi presence and to patriots of the American Revolution. She quoted Patrick Henry’s famous words — “Give me liberty, or give me death” — to justify the community’s willingness to die for its beliefs (Tropp 1978).

Clearly these death threats could be, and actually were, interpreted as political rhetoric. But a fourth and final account revealed in stark terms the very real danger contained in the Temple’s threat. Deborah Layton Blakey had defected from Jonestown in May 1978. A few weeks later she declared at a press conference that residents of Jonestown were going to kill themselves, noting that the group first planned to “extinguish itself in a mass suicide” during the September 1977 crisis. In February 1978, Blakey participated in a suicide drill, an event that convinced her “that Rev. Jones had sufficient control over the minds of the residents that it would be possible for him to effect a mass suicide.” During the drill, everyone — children included — were told to line up; each was given a glass of red liquid, informed that it contained poison, and told that they would die within 45 minutes.

When the time came when we should have dropped dead, Rev. Jones explained that the poison was not real and that we had just been through a loyalty test. He warned us that the time was not far off when it would become necessary for us to die by our own hands. (Blakey 1978).

Blakey communicated these facts not only to the news media but also to Congressman Ryan and to officials in the U.S. Department of State.

The conspiracy to commit mass suicide, therefore, was announced ahead of time. It was so outlandish as to be unbelievable. But the whole point of a “doomsday machine” is lost if you keep it a secret, as Dr. Strangelove pointed out in Stanley Kubrick’s eponymous film. “Put even more simply, the most secretive of secrets is the open secret, the secret that is so fully disclosed that it appears not to be a secret” (Wolfson 2009: 64). My own sister’s last letter to me from Jonestown referred to such an open secret. “A lot of new and interesting things should be coming out soon that will show the different attempts to destroy our group,” Annie wrote the month before she died. “What’s interesting is that it is all coming out before we are all dead” (Moore 1986: 282).

 

Issues Remaining

Annie’s letter alludes to a conspiracy against Jonestown and the revelation of enemies’ plans to dismantle the project. Other conspiracies also existed in plain sight, most notably those of the Concerned Relatives, who sought to gut Peoples Temple through lawsuits, media coverage, governmental investigation, and even criminal activity (Moore 2018a). I have not described the full extent of the activities of this oppositional secret society that conspired to bring about the end of Jonestown.

I have also focused on the most negative, the most damaging, and the most salacious elements of the history of Peoples Temple. The secret society comprised in Jonestown was far more complex than this article might suggest. I have disregarded the fact that many survivors found their work in the Temple and in Jonestown to be the most meaningful time of their lives. Their efforts to create a new society free of racism, sexism, and poverty are worth studying further.

The move from resistance movement to one of terror is instructive as well. One of the most significant issues to be investigated is the effect of physically withdrawing from the wider society. A group advocating protest and opposition to the status quo that remains within the system must navigate reality —real people, real institutions, real problems. Once the group becomes secluded and establishes a new kingdom, township, or community that is geographically encapsulated, the daily encounters with people who think differently vanish and the salutary effects of normative dissonance evaporate. Secrecy becomes the guiding principle. And when oppositional groups deliberately provoke resistance groups, intensifying their feeling of risk and insecurity, the possibility of a turn to terror escalates.

A final issue requiring additional consideration is why everyone missed the secret hiding in plain sight. Frank Kermode offers one explanation: “Outsiders see but do not perceive. Insiders read and perceive, but always in a different sense” (Kermode 1979: 144). This accounts for my own failure to understand what my sister was truly saying in her final words to me. It also explains the inability of U.S. Embassy officials in Guyana to comprehend the coded message they were hearing on shortwave radio as the deaths were occurring (FBI Audiotape Q1290, 1978): “A lot of people have seen Mr. Fraser, [pause] I think Mrs. Brownfield has offered to help.” According to the Jonestown codebook this meant “People have died” and “Do what you can to even the score.” And so they did. The inability to recognize such open secrets remains a problem to be resolved.

 

References