[Editor’s notes: This page was transcribed by Alexandra Prince, a professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College. The editors are grateful for their invaluable work.
[This page consists of three articles (the third of which is a slight edit of the first) submitted to publications in the U.S. by Richard Tropp in Jonestown, followed by correspondence with the publications. The articles were submitted during the summer of 1978.
[The articles appear below ahead of the correspondence.]
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C-11-e-7-a – 7f
In the remote jungles of northern Guyana, over 1,000 Americans have carved out a sprawling co-operative community on one of the world’s last frontiers.
They are members of Peoples Temple, an interracial civil rights church organization, led by Rev. Jim Jones, a socialist. The multi-thousand member Temple has had a stormy twenty five-year history in the United States.
“We’ve been under attack for our stands on social justice, and for our attempts to create a society totally free of racism, based upon economic equality,” explains the vigorous, outspoken, 47-year old Rev. Jones. “Even though most of us are poor, we have managed to save and pull together enough to bring this community into being.”
Anyone who comes to the community (named Jonestown by the Guyanese), recognizes right away that something phenomenal, perhaps unprecedented is taking place.
A thousand acres of cleared jungle are producing well, and feeding the residents. Colorful cottages and community buildings, carefully maintained and landscaped with fruit trees and decorative fencing, are framed in a peaceful setting of rolling fields and orchards. Public utilities, extensive and sophisticated medical services, and a full educational program have already been developed.
An amazingly diverse amalgam of people have made the 5000 mile journey to pioneer in the tropics: a California pharmacist and his family; a country musician from Alabama; a man who worked as a brickmaker for half a century, and his wife, who managed a Convalescent Hospital in Los Angeles; a former Navy drill instructor; a writer for the Black Panther newspaper; a former State College professor, a syndicated astrology columnist, a poverty-program coordinator, a big-city legal secretary, ex-ministers, ex-convicts, an airline pilot; a successful Midwestern salesman; a shoe repairman from Camden, New Jersey … and hundreds more, many of whom had only a dim identity in urban ghettos [holders of a thousand odd jobs that helped patch together the tattered garments of survival.]
Then there are the children, mostly city kids, and a few refugees from suburbia and the emotional tyranny of parents who didn’t understand their longing for something else, something more. And, of course, the hundreds of senior citizens, all brought together by the fiery, controversial Jones who himself started out as an angry yet sensitive child of the Depression in rural Indiana.
Several home-made ‘industries’ have sprung up. A feisty 103-year-old, Pop Jackson, makes furniture. Another old-timer Has perfected a soap-making process from local materials, and a factory has been set up to produce it in quantity, under her supervision. A number of residents are engaged in toy and clothing manufacture.
Ingenuity and resourcefulness characterize Jonestown. An outstanding example is the work of 32-year-old Don Fitch, the wizard of the community machine and welding shop. From scraps, old parts, and practically anything else, Fitch (known as “the Doc”) fashions all kinds of useful gadgets and accessories, from wheelbarrows to pancake griddles. [The Improvisational technologist is currently perfecting a huge mass of pipes, chambers, and ducts –a “smoke generator” –which will convert wood smoke into fuel to power a gasoline engine and save the community thousands of dollars.]
Heading the teaching staff is a veteran in helping children overcome learning disabilities, Tom Grubbs. A creative manufacturer of educational materials, Grubbs has developed an array of homemade interlocking wood puzzles, board games, and special types of blocks that make learning fun and challenging. Primary-level classes are small, emphasizing expressive skills, and the fully accredited high school uses the community as an open-air classroom, training ninety students in over twenty different fields, from veterinary medicine to mechanics to food processing.
On one occasion, a science class discovered a deposit of a white substance, analyzed it, and found it to be a high grade of fire clay. It all led to the establishment of a fire and construction-brick factory, now in production. The development of this “indigenous technology” has attracted wide attention and may even revolutionize building construction in the region.
In the huge food-preparation facilities (3000 meals per day, plus snacks, special dietary meals, etc.) new specialties and delicacies are frequently cooked up from locally grown products. Many jungle teas, herbal and medicinal recipes have been concocted. The diet is balanced with a variety of vegetables, poultry, fruits, and even whole-grain rice (a non-paddy variety), grown right in Jonestown. Nutrition levels are high, as witnessed, for example, by a visiting head of a Guyana dental school. He examined 87 children and found a total of two cavities.] The 65-member medical team has helped upgrade community health levels in surrounding areas. Up to three hundred people a week, mostly Amerindians, come from as far away as fifty miles by canoe and on foot to get treatment at the Jonestown free clinic. The young project physician, Dr. Laurence Schacht, who is now training a team of young “barefoot doctors,” has done significant work in prevention of parasite-caused diseases, and has consulted with scores of physicians in many countries via amateur radio. Under his supervision, a remarkably thorough system of preventative care and monitoring has been instituted, including [breast exams, blood-pressure checks, weight-watching, and periodic complete physicals for the entire community.]
Education is of critical importance in Jonestown. Classes of all kinds are offered to the community at all hours. A campaign is underway to wipe out illiteracy among the elderly, some of whom had virtually no formal schooling. Community education and entertainment is enhanced by a 10,000 volume library and a large-screen television system with over a thousand hours of high-quality video-taped programming. Spirited “‘town forum” meetings form the cornerstone of an elaborate structure of participatory government. All have a voice, from the oldtimers down to the children.
The community functions around a system of social sharing, and personal money is not used. [This, along with an adherence to equalitarian principles, has eroded destructive forms of competition, and even though many residents formerly depended on the “welfare state,” they have assumed a high degree of individual responsibility for the collective good.]
People coming to Jonestown often find themselves marveling at the staggering amount of development that has been accomplished in a place that, not long ago, was an almost impenetrable jungle. Clearly, Jonestown is a community where things get done.
Sitting around the ‘table in the community’s agricultural office for a farm-analyst’s meeting are some of the people who are responsible for it all: field crop supervisor Jan Wilsey, a young Pomo Indian woman from northern California; expert tractor operator Phil Blakey, who grew up in Northumberland, England; an attorney who manages the 5000-tree citrus project; the project agronomist, Russell Moton, an alcoholic from the Philadelphia ghetto who the Temple sponsored through school; Dorothy Buckley, a teenager who grew up in the racism and poverty of rural Mississippi (where she watched a friend starve); Jack Barron, a 57-year old chemical engineer from a prominent family in Delaware, This sort of diversity, reflecting a cross section of the American experience, characterizes Jonestown.
If there is any group approaching homogeneity, it is the 250 senior citizens, mostly black, many started out in the rural South, but found themselves at the end of the line in the inner city slums of Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston. Today, in a place where gentle, persistent trade winds temper the tropical sunshine, they have found peace, and a new lease on life. They are pleased to be useful and to participate in every area of community activity, and they enjoy the respect that ·elderly people deserve.
Another important dimension of Jonestown can be found among the over two hundred teenagers and young adults who were unable to find the handle for their lives in the big cities: many were sinking into the crime/drug morass. Talk to them, and you hear much the same story: they have found something to put themselves into, a community to build, a future and a challenge in a young, ”third-world” nation that doesn’t make people feel useless, or stigmatize them as “niggers” or young “punks,” Recently eighty of them staged an electrifying variety show at the Cultural Center in Georgetown (the capitol), seen by 2000 people. Several of the young men [in the “Soul Steppers,” a fast-paced dance/mime group,] were members of [the Crips,”] a notoriously tough Los Angeles street gang. But you wouldn’t know it today.
Phenomenal? Yes. But how did all this happen. We have to look for answers to the moving force behind Jonestown, one of the most dynamic crusaders for social justice on the American scene, Jim Jones.
Barely into his twenties, he founded Peoples Temple in Indianapolis during the McCarthy period on a platform of human service and complete racial equality. He had been dismissed from his first church assignment for insisting that blacks be seated in the front. It wasn’t long before many people were calling the controversial young minister a “nigger lover” and a “communist.” (With small qualification, he pleads guilty on both counts). And it wasn’t just name calling: gunshots, rocks, molotov cocktails, sugar in the gas tank, dynamite, endless hate calls…
“It was a struggle all the way, year after year,” says Marceline Jones, a Registered Nurse and Rev. Jones’ wife for nearly thirty years. The couple took in needy people (up to twenty-five at a time), and adopted many children of all races, in addition to their natural-born. At the age of 29, Jim Jones became Indianapolis’ first Human Rights director, and spearheaded an intense drive to integrate all public facilities.
Threats on his children finally caused him to seek a ·place of more toleration. In the mid-60’s, the Joneses moved to California, and Peoples Temple flourished. By the early 70’s it had branched out into several cities with a combined membership well into the thousands. The Temple organized effective drug rehabilitation programs, medical and emergency services for the needy, working in the inner cities on many levels to combat racism and poverty, even setting up a network of urban communes. Harassment continued, culminating in 1973, when the huge San Francisco community center was gutted by an arsonist. The church council got together and decided to look around for a place to start a co-operative community in a setting of peace — a lifelong dream of Jim Jones. The big questions: where?
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C-11-e-11a – 11b
[Handwritten note on upper side of page reads:] “Another country charting – path out of mass society”
In the early 1960’s, while on a missionary tour, Jim and Marceline Jones passed through British Guiana. They had a good feeling about the people, the climate, the atmosphere. In late 1973, Rev. Jones and several staff members went back there ~- the nation had won its independence in 1966 and was now called Guyana — to discuss setting up an agricultural project. They were offered a large tract of land in the interior, where the government has been trying, with limited success, to encourage the Guyanese to settle (practically the entire population is concentrated on the narrow coastal plain), and develop the rich potential of the land. Back in California, members of Peoples Temple discussed the offer, and soon dispatched a “team” to Guyana to pioneer that initial land clearing and construction.
The pioneer team overcame great obstacles {a story in itself), and, before long, the land was opened up. Supplies were brought in, houses erected, wells dug, and the first crops harvested by Christmas, 1974. People began arriving, at first slowly (the population was still under 100 at the end of 1976), and then in large numbers through 1977 until today, there are over 1100 residents.
Although much has been accomplished, the community is still in its early stages of development, and a host of projects and plans are in the works, more agriculture, handcrafts, bee-keeping, food processing, (toy and clothing manufacture,) fish-farming…even gold prospecting. The area is full of possibility, and virtually unexplored. [(Jonestown is actually located at the edge of what has been designated as one of the world’s last frontiers, the “Guiana Highlands.”)]
Today, Jim Jones is proud of the Temple’s new efforts at establishing a collective society in Guyana. “It’s been a kind of new birth for many of us, young and old. In the States, those of us from black, Indian and minority backgrounds especially, suffered hardship and humiliation because of race. Many worked slavishly as ‘house-servants or sharecroppers. They had nothing, and were not able to participate in an “American dream” that is so deceptively held up as a possibility for all. Even people in the middle-class have their troubles. Something is missing, and we know what it is — community. Mass society is a disease, maybe a terminal one.”
Some have commented that Jonestown is a “retreat.” “Nothing could be further from the truth,” [counters] affirms Rev. Jones. “We have, on the contrary, taken a giant step forward into the future, In the context of a developing society, we can feel like whole human beings, not commodities [and expendible ones, when they are not useable for someone’s profit)]. The people here have their own land, their own community. [They participate in all areas of decision making.) They have effective control of their [society, their] environment, The People respect one another, and the earth.
“When attorney Mark Lane author of Rush to Judgement visited us, he perhaps best summed up our efforts and others for building human-centered societies. He said [Handwritten note inserted from margin]: stood in the middle of this rainbow of people living together in harmony and very simply said: ‘This is the future…or there won’t be any.’”
[Handwritten note at bottom]:
About the author:
Richard Tropp is the principal of the Jonestown Community High School, and taught English in California for ten years, and most recently at Santa Rosa Junior College (1972-77)
Other biographical data:
Born 1942, Brooklyn, NY
M.A. University of California (1967)
Lived in several intentional communities during 1960’s before joining Peoples Temple in 1970 with his wife, Kathryn, an artist and organic gardener. He is an associate editor of the Peoples Forum, the Temple’s large circulation Bay Area newspaper.
[Marginal note] 250 words can easily be edited out
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C-11-e-11c – 11f is an edited version of article at C-11-e-7a
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C-11-e-1
October 30, 1978
James N. Wall, Editor
Christian Century
407 S. Dearborn St.
Chicago, Illinois 60605
Dear Mr. Wall,
Today I received in the mail an envelope containing photos I had submitted to the Century to accompany an article I had submitted somewhat earlier. There was no note of explanation, nor have I received the manuscript back. I do not know if the manuscript has been rejected and if so, if there is a reason for its not being returned (insufficient postage?). I would sincerely appreciate hearing from you about the manuscript. If it is indeed the case that it has not been returned due to insufficient postage, I am enclosing some international postal coupons for that purpose.
Thanks for your attention to this.
Sincerely yours,
Richard D. Tropp
encl.
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C-11-e-2
November 3, 1973
Vera Backstrom
Editorial Assistant
East West Journal
233 Harvard St.
Brookline, Massachusetts 02146
Dear Ms. Backstrom:
Thank you very much for your letter of August 31st. I sincerely hope that the enclosed manuscript and photos will be suitable for publication in the Journal. Please feel free to edit the manuscript as necessary. I consider the manuscript to be only a very brief overview, and you may want me to add material in certain areas. Please write me if there is anything more you may need from me.
You do not have to return the manuscript. I have, however, enclosed international postage coupons for print returns. There is already considerable international interest in Jonestown, and if the enclosed article is published in the Journal, I would like to be able to circulate reprints to many nations. Also let me know if you would like additional photos or photos on specific subjects, and I will try to accommodate you. Thanks for your interest.
Sincerely yours,
Richard D. Tropp
Enc.
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C-11-e-3
November 3, 1973
Ruth Kaswan
The Urban Alternatives
Box 303
Worthington, Ohio 43085
Dear Ms. Kaswan,
Thanks for your letter of October 11th. I sincerely hope that the enclosed manuscript and photos will be suitable for publication in Green Revolution. It’s a little long, but feel free to edit it down however you wish, change the title, etc. I consider the manuscript to be only a very brief overview, and It has been hard to keep everything down to article-length dimensions. We are currently preparing a book that we hope will make an impact – – Jonestown is a very unique and exceptional story. There is already considerable international interest in our co-operative, and if the enclosed article is published in Green Revolution, I would like to be able to circulate it to people in many nations. If you have any questions or want more or different material, please contact me. Thanks very much for your interest.
By the way, the fact that there is no honorarium is absolutely okay. It seems that so many who are doing good work are having to struggle along. If what I have to say about Jonestown brings some hope and encouragement to just one reader, we are well-paid.
Best of luck.
Sincerely,
Richard D. Tropp
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C-11-e-4
[Letterhead of East West Journal in Brookline, Mass.]
August 31, 1978
Mr. Richard Tropp
P.O. Box 893
Georgetown, Guyana
Dear Mr. Tropp,
Thank you for your recent letter and pamphlet about Jonestown. It seems like a most remarkable place and we would like to see your article about it for possible publication in the Journal… but only if the Jonestown tenants eat only locally grown foods. If that is the case, please do tell us about it and other aspects of their life, and we would be delighted to review the article for possible publication in East-West Journal.
I am enclosing a copy of our editorial guidelines for your reference. Are you familiar with our macrobiotic focus?
Sincerely,
/s/ Vera Backstrom
Vera Backstrom
Editorial Asst.
enc.
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C-11-e-5-a
[East West Journal editorial guidelines]
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C-11-e-5-b
[Handwritten note on reverse side]: Another innovation of the Jonestown community (named in honor of its founder by the Guyanese) is year round, [illegible word] wells. They promise to have a
On an occasion a science class discovered a deposit of white substance and found it to be a high quality grade of fire clay. The find led to the setting up of a construction-brick factory which now is in production. The developments of this indigenous technology may even revolutionize construction in the distinct.
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C-11-e-6
[Handwritten note at top]: Revise an article & submit. Christian Century? (rejected?)
[Letterhead of The Urban Alternatives Group in Worthington, Ohio]
11 October 1978
Richard Tropp
P.O. Box 893
Georgetown
Guyana
Dear Mr. Tropp:
Jonestown certainly sounds like an impressive place, and one from which we may have much to learn. but I should begin by telling you that doing it! – – or Humanizing City Life, as we renamed it – – had to suspend publication. We are, however, not completely dead. We have sort of merged with another alternatives magazine, Green Revolution, which has been around for 35 years. They carry a few pages under the Urban Alternatives heading as a sort of Newsletter for us, and in addition I serve as a contributing editor. However, since they are in eastern Pennsylvania (York) and we’re in central Ohio, the association is somewhat lacking in intimacy. So far there have only been two issues of GR under the present arrangement. The situation is somewhat tentative, but I’m pretty confident that material I submit will be published. GR is going to our subscribers and is the publication our members receive with their membership.
I would be very interested in a story about Jonestown – – 1500-2000 words. You understand, of course, that there’s no money for honoraria. But GR is quite a respectable magazine and is read by many activists in the alternatives movement.
I hope to hear from you. And good luck with your projects.
Cordially,
/s/ Ruth Kaswan
Ruth Kaswan