The Collected Writings of Richard Tropp

Richard D. “Dick” Tropp was a core member of Peoples Temple’s inner circle and is widely considered to be the organization’s official scribe and in-house historian.

As a Temple member in California, Tropp directed letter-writing campaigns and wrote and edited the group’s newspaper, Peoples Forum. He also began gathering oral histories of Temple members for a planned biography of Jones and the movement, work he continued to do even after his emigration to Guyana in October 1977.

While in Jonestown, Tropp was a main contributor to at least two unpublished books on the perceived conspiracies against the organization — one the 52-page Target: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple and the nearly 500-plus Conspiracy Book. This distinguishes his role from Jonestown resident Edith Roller, whose extensive journals were not written for an audience.

Tropp’s writings paint him as an introspective, serious man moved by intensity and injustice. Focused and determined, he was known to seldom laugh but to be an understanding teacher. Having been a professor at Santa Rosa Junior College, he later plied his skills by teaching at Jonestown’s school.

Tropp’s letters also show he was a man in conflict with himself. He encouraged intellectuals and elites (of which he considered himself) to be watched, and suggested they should be executed once they’d served the cause’s purpose. In another letter, written after a White Night in May 1978, he politely but adamantly advocates for Jones to make Jonestown more transparent to the public and to start planning the settlement’s future.

A witness recalls him arguing with Jones against the idea of poisoning the community on Nov. 18, but just hours later, he wrote Jonestown’s last words, as ever with an eye for history, by instructing responders to “collect all the tapes, all the writing.”

Tropp and his younger sister, Harriet Sarah Tropp, died in Jonestown.

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The individual writings below include RYMUR citations, and should open with the FBI’s official designation of these records, which is “RYMUR 89-4286.” Each RYMUR page has a unique number. Tropp’s dramatic reading on pages EE-1-T-64 – EE-1-T-65, for example, should be cited as RYMUR 89-4286-EE-1-T-64 – RYMUR 89-4286-EE-1-T-65.