Jonestown Transcription – Ella Stuccio

[Editor’s note: Ella Stuccio was one of the students in Prof. Alexandra Prince’s Religion 230 class on Religion and Society who assisted in the transcription of letters from Jonestown residents. This is the paper she wrote about her experiences in working with the text.]

There were thousands of written texts, including many letters, authored by Peoples Temple members found in Jonestown, Guyana after the tragic mass death event on November 18, 1978. Collected and haphazardly scanned by the FBI, a good portion of these pieces of writings have sat awaiting transcription into a more accessible digital form for decades. With each piece transcribed and published, a little more is revealed about Peoples Temple, its inner workings, and its membership, adding to the whirling, often enigmatic, tapestry of Peoples Temple and its final frontier. The letters also help us remember and commemorate the words and lives of the authors, many who lost their lives in Jonestown.

It’s difficult to accurately summarize the distinct and varied contents of the forty or so letters I transcribed over the past couple of months in a short essay, but upon reading through all my transcribed pieces, a few recurring themes appeared. In many of the letters written to Jim Jones, often addressed as “Dad”, Temple members confess a wide variety of misdeeds. These confessions largely followed a loose structure of describing the sin, acknowledging the impact, apologizing profusely, and thanking Dad. Most often these confessed wrongdoings described small interpersonal mistakes or brief moments of immoral behavior. Their confessions and ardent apologies shine more light on what Jim Jones and Peoples Temple as a whole believed to be immoral or wrong. One young member, 17 year old student Lisa Wright, describes the underlying problem with the petty theft she performed back in the states: “…I was just selfish and thinking about my own ass and not the collectives.”^[1] As a community operating as a collective, relying heavily on each other in a fragile new society with limited resources, small misdeeds like mishandling an interpersonal conflict or stealing a “cottage sheet”, as mentioned by survivor Preston Wade, could be viewed as representative of deeper, potentially disastrous individual or collective behavioral defects.^[2] These confessions also more simply offer greater insights into the personal and interpersonal mundane experiences of life in Jonestown. Members had petty arguments and interpersonal issues. They stole, made mistakes, and complained. And they ultimately reflected on their actions, felt remorse, and promised to try to do better.

Another theme found across my transcription set is a pattern of confirmations that members are willing to die for their cause and a subsequent emphasization of their commitment to the movement. Following a description of the freedom and joy the young and the old experience in Jonestown, Guy Mitchell, who was in Georgetown for medical reasons on November 18, 1978, expresses this sentiment in simple terms: “And to die for all of this is enough to die for.”^[3] Many members overtly express their willingness or even expectations that they will die as part of the movement in their letters. While the repetition of these similar sentiments suggest these promises were prompted or pressured in some way, these passionate written commitments to end their lives for the movement, reveal a deep commitment to the cause and a distinct perspective on life and death. Members described life as unlivable without Peoples Temple; the death of the movement was the true end of one’s life. Russell Moton, a  Farm Manager in Jonestown from Philadelphia, states that he “would die” if the movement ended.^[4] Alethia Orsot, a dedicated Temple member who was in Georgetown for a dental appointment on the night of the tragedy, describes the emotional turmoil she experienced as an accidental survivor of the mass death event: “I wanted to share in that final moment of unity, and knew I had been robbed of that chance.”^[5] From Orsot’s perspective, the mass death in Jonestown wasn’t an exclusively horrible occurrence, it was a collective experience based upon established philosophies of dying for a cause. These confirmations of a willingness to die for Peoples Temple shine a brighter light into the ever-murky, complex waters of the level of autonomy and motivations involved in the mass death event.

Members also expressed their commitment to the cause beyond promises to lay down their lives. Charles Marshall, a young student and farm manager, describes how he would react if Jim Jones died: “I would stay with the revolution if anything happened to dad because in every other revolution in the past the revolution fell apart and I think that should end somewhere and in this revolution I believe it should go on and I will do whatever I can to help it go on.”^[6] This commitment to the cause beyond Jim Jones stands out as it counters a media-driven narrative that Jim Jones was the central and exclusive motivation for membership. Marshall reminds us that many members were incredibly dedicated to the wider socialist communal cause, independent from any attachment to their leader.

These expressions of commitment to the cause were often intertwined with a recurring commentary of the deficiencies and evils of American government and society. Joe Johnson Jr., a 21 year old field worker from Missouri, articulates his firm hatred for the state of America in a letter to Jim Jones: ”I would rather be dead than to go back to a racist form of neo-fascism of the United States of America!”^[7] Another example, written by Guy Mitchell, described the crooked systems observed in the states and confirms “I have not and could not ever think of going back there, I have seen too much corruption in the states…”^[8] Accounts of the early lives of Temple members from a series of oral histories assembled in the book Stories From Jonestown, often filled with stories of racism, addiction, and poverty, contextualize one of the driving forces behind the act of joining Peoples Temple and moving to Guyana. These descriptions of the oppressive American systems help us remember why so many people felt the need to join a revolutionary separatist movement and leave the U.S. altogether. The endless failures of the U.S. facilitated the success of Peoples Temple. Nell Smart, a former member who lost her children in Jonestown, redirects blame for the tragic loss in her account: “In some ways, we as a society do have to take responsibility. Our system of government does not address the issues that are happening with people. It’s the system that causes some person like Jim Jones to be able to come in and say, ‘Look what you’re not getting, look what you should be getting.’”^[9] Capitalist America in many ways fueled the membership of Peoples Temple and the creation of Jonestown.

The act of transcription makes the words of a largely deceased community alive again in some form. The information from these letters reveal in small ways more information on the ever-evolving, ever-moving scape of Peoples Temple and Jonestown. In the act of transcription and analysis it’s important to remember the questions presented by Orsot in her anguish of the loss of her community in Jonestown: “Who is to speak for them? Are they to lie there forgotten and thrown away behind exaggerations, distortions and misrepresentations?”^[10] Through transcription, we allow the deceased individuals, through their preserved writing, to speak for themselves. These letters center the humans behind the twisted history of Peoples Temple and through their words and careful analysis we learn more everyday about their relationship to Peoples Temple and the workings of the larger movement.

Bibliography

Notes

^[1] Lisa Wright, EE-1-UVWXYZ-4.

^[2] Preston Wade, EE-1-UVWXYZ-42.

^[3] Guy Mitchell, EE-1-M-104.

^[4] Russell Moton, EE-1-M-106

^[5] B. Alethia Orsot, “Together We Stood, Divided We Fell.” In The Need for a Second Look at Jonestown, ed. Rebecca Moor & Fielding M. McGehee III (The Edwin Mellen Press, 1989): 101.

^[6] Charles Marshall, EE-I-M-111.

^[7] Joe Johnson Jr., April 18, 1978, EE-1-I&J-45.

^[8] Guy Mitchell, EE-1-M-104.

^[9] Leigh Fondakowski, Stories from Jonestown. (University of Minnesota Press, 2013): 191.

^[10] B. Alethia Orsot, “Together We Stood, Divided We Fell.” In The Need for a Second Look at Jonestown, ed. Rebecca Moor & Fielding M. McGehee III (The Edwin Mellen Press, 1989): 97.