(Special thanks to Laura Johnston Kohl for telling me her story. Also, in no particular order, special thanks to the following who have all taken the time to speak with me and answer some (sometimes very basic) questions: Fielding McGehee, Rebecca Moore, Kathy (Tropp) Barbour, Jim Hougan, and Robert Helms.<\/em><\/p>\n If you are a former Peoples Temple member who would be willing to participate in my project, I would love to speak with you. I can be contacted by email: joseph.flatley [at] gmail.com.)<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cNobody gives a shit as long as you don\u2019t become political.\u201d In contrast to the racist attitudes of many in their community, Laura and her friends did their part for the civil rights movement. \u201cAs an integrated group,\u201d she says, \u201cwe helped integrate the largest swimming pool in the area, and the amusement park, and we were loud and active.\u201d<\/p>\n After high school, Laura moved on to the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut. This was in 1965, the year of Lyndon B. Johnson\u2019s Great Society; Operation Rolling Thunder, the joint United States\/South Vietnamese aerial bombardment of the north that would last over three years; Selma, Alabama\u2019s Bloody Sunday; and Joan Rivers\u2019 first appearance on The Tonight Show<\/em>. In Bridgeport, Laura was the president of the Student League for Human Rights, a campus group affiliated with the SDS. Life on the Mason-Dixon line, Laura says, made her \u201cacutely aware that first of all, I was privileged because I was white.\u201d<\/p>\n When Laura left college in 1968, she struggled somewhat in her attempts to carve out a life for herself that was consistent with her anti-racist ideals. Soon she would find herself working for the Connecticut state welfare department by day and hosting the occasional Black Panther meeting in her kitchen at night.<\/p>\n This period of her life was instructive. From the Panthers, she saw the impact that revolutionary social programs could have. Her experience at Woodstock \u2013 where 400,000 young people converged for an open-air music festival that became emblematic of a generation \u2013 drove home the fact that she had to be around like-minded, politically-motivated people. Woodstock Nation, she says, \u201cthat really wasn\u2019t me. It couldn\u2019t be my daily way of living life.\u201d<\/p>\n In early 1970, Laura moved to the West Coast. Upon her arrival in California, she heard \u201cabout Jim Jones who had a church, a group up in Redwood Valley, about two hours north\u201d of where she was living with her sister in San Francisco.<\/p>\n \u201cThat first Sunday,\u201d Laura says, \u201cwe drove up to Redwood Valley and took a look at what was going on in Peoples Temple.\u201d<\/p>\n *****<\/p>\n By 1970, the Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ (to give its full, legally incorporated name) had been in existence for about fifteen years. Jim Jones had been preaching since he was a teenager, and became a student pastor at a Methodist congregation in Indianapolis in 1952. To outside observers \u2013 and more importantly, to donors \u2013 Peoples Temple might have seemed to be religious at its core, but it\u2019s important to note that this was never quite the case. Jones was ultimately a man who sought temporal power. Growing up in a small Indiana town during the Depression, Jones saw that the church was the one social institution that he could infiltrate, even dominate. His major innovation was to combine the methods of Christian churches with the stubborn socialism that he picked up at an early age from his mother. In 1965, apparently heeding some sort of vision of a nuclear holocaust, Jones moved his congregation to Mendocino County, California.<\/p>\n At first Laura, an atheist since the 10th grade, didn\u2019t feel that she fit in with the members of Peoples Temple. They were \u201cpretty righteous,\u201d she says. \u201cI had been through a lot, I wasn\u2019t quite sure I was ready to suck it up and join what looked like a fairly conservative group.\u201d But Jim Jones knew how to play it \u2014 he could be all things to all people. In this case, he appealed to Laura\u2019s activist side.<\/p>\n \u201cJim was always advocating human rights and civil rights,\u201d Laura says. \u201cReally, from the first time I met him, he talked about it, and that\u2019s what I wanted to hear.\u201d During their first meeting, Jones dropped names. He mentioned farm labor leader Cesar Chavez and American Indian Movement co-founder Dennis Banks, and how he spoke to Angela Davis the night before.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd he was a genius!\u201d Laura continues. \u201cHe memorized the Bible front-to-back, so he could put up a theological argument about anything. He could argue any point. But when you asked him what he really felt, he was not a religious person. But I do think that he used religion to pull people in, and then turn them into activists.\u201d<\/p>\n Much can be learned about a radical group from the way it chooses to communicate its message. Weather Underground, born from the New Left student movement, was known for its communiques. Characteristically, its use of the written word was as insightful as it was clever and irreverent. With Yippies, you need to ponder the meaning of its spectacles, whether that meant raining money onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, running a pig for president, or applying for a permit to magically levitate the Pentagon (Laura was there, by the way; you\u2019ll have to ask her how that particular ritual worked out). The political rhetoric of Jim Jones, which he called \u201capostolic socialism,\u201d was conveyed during Peoples Temple services. And, most tellingly, his message was imparted through a degree of deception.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery service had a political message,\u201d says Laura. In fact, \u201cevery conversation had a political message.\u201d Depending on his audience, Jones \u201cwould start out with religion, and he\u2019d move it into a socialist message.\u201d In other words, religion was the bait. Politics was the hook.<\/p>\n What eventually brought Laura into the fold was the realization \u2014\u00a0demonstrated by the dedication of the SDS and the Black Panthers and the \u201chigh\u201d she felt from experiencing the collective human energy at Woodstock \u2014\u00a0that if a better world was possible, \u201cyou really couldn\u2019t be a lone voice and have an impact. So the more I went back to Peoples Temple, the more I realized that Jim was really an advocate, and he could be my voice.\u201d<\/p>\n *****<\/p>\n Soon after meeting Jim Jones, Laura moved to Mendocino County, to live and work amongst Temple members. She would remain there until 1977, when she was dispatched to Guyana.<\/p>\n By any measure, the amount of good that Peoples Temple was able to achieve during its California saga is pretty remarkable. San Francisco Examiner<\/em> religion editor Lester Kinsolving (one of the first, and perhaps loudest \u2014 certainly the most obnoxious \u2014 of the Temple\u2019s critics) offered an accounting of the group\u2019s holdings in a 1972 article<\/a> that included a 40-acre children\u2019s home, three convalescent centers, a heroin rehabilitation center, and \u201cin the words of one of the Temple\u2019s three attorneys, \u2018our own welfare system.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n In his book Black and White<\/em> (later republished as Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy<\/i><\/a>), Shiva Naipaul recounts a conversation with Art Agnos that took place in the aftermath of the Jonestown tragedy. A member of the California State Legislature who would later go on to become mayor of San Francisco, Agnos\u2019 constituents often relied on the charity work of Peoples Temple. If someone in his district lost their welfare check, for instance, \u201cyou would send them over to Jim Jones and that day<\/em> they would be taken care of.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019d go in if you were in trouble,\u201d Agnos continued, \u201cif you were in need, and they\u2019d take care of you. No questions asked.\u201d Compared to other social services, those provided by Peoples Temple were of higher quality, and involved none of the proselytizing generally associated with religious social service organizations. (\u201cNo tambourines played. No sermons listened to. They just walked in and were seen to\u2026. [a] kind of dignified, good service.\u201d) As it turns out, this was not only good Christian charity \u2014\u00a0this was an excellent recruiting tool. People would often turn up for the free medical care and, liking what they saw, stay for the Temple services.<\/p>\n Combining elements of the Pentecostal revival and the political rally, we can get an idea of what these services were like, thanks to the group\u2019s efforts to preserve the words and ideas of its leader. After Jonestown, the FBI recovered more than 950 audiotapes from the settlement. Discounting blanks, music, and stuff recorded off the radio, there exists an estimated 600-900 hours of tape documenting Temple life. One particular tape from the summer of 1973<\/a> is pretty typical of what Laura would have heard from Jones in this period.<\/p>\n It begins mid-sentence, in the midst of some typical Jim Jones oratory. He\u2019s discussing psychosurgery, experimental brain surgery used for behavior modification. This was being debated in the media at the time as an experimental treatment for extreme cases where psychotherapy, drugs, and electroshock proved ineffective. This type of behaviour modification was also being touted by scientists like of Jose Delgado<\/a>, author of the 1969 book Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society<\/em>, as a means of creating a more civilized society \u2014\u00a0through outfitting everyone with electronic brain implants. (This sort of utopian totalitarianism wasn\u2019t merely a fringe concern. The Gray Lady herself, The New York Times<\/em> ran an article<\/a> later that year comparing psychosurgery pioneer Dr. Vernon Mark to \u201ca Clockwork Orange type who carries his patients screaming to surgery, who seeks to develop psychosurgery as a dehumanizing and dictatorial instrument for pacifying and controlling man’s mind.\u201d) It\u2019s really just one small leap of the imagination from this to Jones\u2019 assertion that psychosurgery is part of a program to pacify African Americans<\/p>\n \u201cWhat they want,\u201d Jones says, \u201cis every black person to go on as a slave. And they\u2019re trying to \u2026 alter their behavior so that they will not question the dirty, stenching, smelling ghettos that they\u2019re living in, and they will not quarrel with the fact that they\u2019re making half the wages of the white person, or they will not quarrel with the fact that they\u2019re sent over to Vietnam to fight the rich man\u2019s wars.\u201d<\/p>\n This is the kind of threat, according to Jones, that Peoples Temple must flee America to escape.<\/p>\n \u201c<\/strong>We want to see a Jerusalem, a socialist Jerusalem,\u201d he says. His rap is quasi-socialist, presented in religious language, with some de rigueur<\/em> sci-fi thrown in. He stumbles over his words a bit, but that\u2019s to be expected when you\u2019re talking off-the-cuff (and probably high as a kite).<\/p>\n \u201cAstronomers,\u201d he continues, \u201cthey never have found any heaven. They\u2019ve not found any heaven out there. There\u2019s no bejeweled city of enchanted inertia. No one\u2019s been able to get it on a telescope. No one\u2019s been able to pick up the heavenly choir on any of the radar waves they send out there. Nobody\u2019s been able to pick it up, because it\u2019s not out there.\u201d<\/p>\n Without naming Guyana, he proposes what will become known as Jonestown, \u201ca modern heaven.\u201d<\/p>\n The tape goes on like this for a good seventy-five minutes or so, painting a picture of a country being torn apart by \u201cthe Antichrist system,\u201d capitalism, that is the root cause of racism. It\u2019s only a matter of time before Peoples Temple either escapes the United States or faces extermination. In the wake of the 1960s, when the United States government assassinated political leaders home and abroad, the idea that Jones and his followers were next must have seemed wholly plausible.<\/p>\n Looking back, Laura characterizes the 1960s as a time when \u201cthe vigilantes just took over,\u201d when radicals and genuine reformers were under the gun. \u201cIt didn\u2019t matter who was legally or constitutionally elected,\u201d she says, \u201cthey\u2019re going to just get rid of anybody they don\u2019t like. So in that decade, along that ten year span, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, so many others were killed. For me, in a way, that set my tone.\u201d It was a tone of defiance.<\/p>\n \u201cI wasn\u2019t going to sit passively by,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n For Laura and her fellow members of Peoples Temple, this defiance took the form of both separating themselves from the dominant racist society and doing their part to aid its victims. This was not only in the tradition of the ethical mandate of the New Testament, it had clear parallels to the Survival Programs<\/a> of the Black Panther Party. They might have been taking a page from Huey Newton\u2019s autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide<\/em>.<\/p>\n During her time in Northern California, Laura held down a job with the state welfare department while filling any number of roles in the Temple during her off hours. In fact, like everyone else at the Temple, she didn\u2019t really have off hours. Laura was a member of the Planning Commission, the committee that worked closely with Jones to run Peoples Temple. She was also one of the drivers in the fleet of coach buses that the group used for its periodic trips across the United States, sometimes venturing into Canada or Mexico. She tackled various administrative tasks, and was at different times the head of a couple of the group\u2019s communes. This was all in addition to attending Temple services and meetings several times a week.<\/p>\n The long hours were to be expected. After all, despite the fact that Jones wore a clerical collar and appended \u201cReverend\u201d to his name, Peoples Temple was a radical, revolutionary organization. And accordingly, this led to behavior that would have been out-of-place in a conventional Christian church. Sometimes, in order to enforce discipline, a physical punishment might be rendered. Or as in Laura\u2019s case, you might accidentally doze off in a Planning Commission meeting and wake up to find Jim Jones pointing a pistol at you.<\/p>\n This was all part of \u201cthe burden of creating a heaven on earth,\u201d Laura writes in her memoir Jonestown Survivor<\/a><\/em>. \u201cI thought that being a revolutionary just had to be hard, and this was hard, so it must be making me a better revolutionary.\u201d<\/p>\n WIth the benefit of hindsight, she now sees this behavior not as revolutionary, but as \u201cemotional abuse.\u201d<\/p>\n *****<\/p>\n Laura received her resident visa<\/a> for Guyana on April 5, 1977. Rather than live at the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project (Jonestown\u2019s official name), she remained in the capital city of Georgetown, living in the Temple home at 41 Lamaha Gardens. Jonestown was remote \u2014 situated\u00a0in a patch of northwest Guyana, a full twenty-four hours travel from Georgetown \u2014 and it was essential to have a base of operations in the capital. The home had a ham radio for maintaining communication between Jonestown and San Francisco, accommodations for Peoples Temple members arriving from the United States, and according the book Raven<\/em> by Tim Reiterman and John Jacobs, boasted a \u201ctastefully simple\u201d living room \u201cwith hardwood floors, throw rugs, a couch,\u201d and a stereo with \u201ca good selection of jazz and popular music\u201d for entertaining Guyanese government officials. The settlement, which would never see self-sufficiency, depended on a steady flow of provisions. And in order to insure a steady flow of provisions, the government had to be kept happy. This allowed Laura to do her job, procuring food and supplies and sending them off to Jonestown aboard one of the Temple\u2019s two boats<\/a>, Cudjoe<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cI really did everything,\u201d Laura says. \u201cI was going to the abattoir and getting sides of beef and pigs, I was going out to different parts of Georgetown and getting coconuts and pineapples\u2026 I\u2019d buy mostly food and equipment parts for machinery in Jonestown, and clothing, and supplies that we\u2019d need, and then I worked with people coming in and helped them get their paperwork and everything [else] together.\u201d<\/p>\n Then, after about a year living in Georgetown, Laura had sex with a pharmacist she met in the city \u2014 a violation of Temple rules. When Jones found out, she was sent to live in Jonestown.<\/p>\n \u201cAs soon as I got to Jonestown,\u201d she writes in her memoir, \u201cI was called up front at a public meeting. Jim told me he was disappointed in me, and said, \u2018I should have slept with you myself.\u2019 I do remember cringing at that thought.\u201d Then, after some token roughing up \u2014 \u201ca couple of people slapped me\u201d \u2014 Laura received her sentence: assignment to the Public Services Crew, also called the Learning Crew (because you were sent there to be taught a lesson). This was probably the least of the punishments doled out in Jonestown<\/a>. For other offenders there could be more serious consequences, reportedly involving snakes, drugs, and something called \u201cthe box,\u201d a six-by-four foot underground cell.<\/p>\n For Laura, her love of Guyana and the whole Peoples Temple project was so great \u2014 and she was kept busy enough \u2014\u00a0that this uglier side of Jonestown sort of faded into the background. Working on an agricultural crew meant that, long hours aside, she was working to feed herself and other Temple members. It was important, dignified work, and that took the sting out of the discipline. Soon, in addition to toiling in the fields, she would teach Spanish at night, work in the law office, and take on other jobs around the settlement.<\/p>\n \u201cYou know,\u201d she says, \u201cI loved it. I would never have left. We had 1,000 people living in the middle of a rainforest, and we were feeding everybody three meals a day,\u201d despite the fact that poor growing conditions and primitive conditions made it a constant struggle to find enough food for everyone. \u201cAnd we had a free medical clinic, and we had this awesome community that was multi-racial, multi-educational level, just everything. It was my dream community. And I felt that we were at the very beginning, like pioneers. And the part of it that was difficult, we\u2019d get over it, and we\u2019d be able to fix everything that\u2019s wrong with it.\u201d<\/p>\n This was where things stood in October of 1978, when Jones sent Laura back to Georgetown.<\/p>\n At this point, Jim Jones \u201cknew the clouds were coming over,\u201d Laura says. He was convinced the upcoming visit from Congressman Leo Ryan would mean the end of the Temple, that it would mean the end of Jones. Looking back, Laura says that she believes Jones \u201csent me back into Georgetown to take up my old job, so that some people who were in Georgetown could go back into Jonestown with their loved ones. So that\u2019s how I ended up not being in Jonestown on November 18.\u201d<\/p>\n *****<\/p>\n
\n\u2014 Jim Jones<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/02-flatley.jpg\")
<\/a>Laura Johnston Kohl was born in Washington, D.C. in 1947, one of \u201cthe generation that was most affected by all the catastrophes\u201d of the 1960s and 1970s, she says. Her parents split when she was young, and her childhood was spent living with her mother, her grandmother, and two sisters. Three generations of strong women were living under one roof. Her mother was the breadwinner for the family, and was always politically active. Often, her family would host activists from the deep South while they were in participating in various protests and marches in the capitol. From an early age, growing up in still-segregated Rockville, Maryland, Laura was well aware of the injustice that surrounded her.<\/p>\n