{"id":83208,"date":"2018-10-18T14:08:31","date_gmt":"2018-10-18T21:08:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=83208"},"modified":"2026-02-27T16:13:00","modified_gmt":"2026-02-28T00:13:00","slug":"archivists-of-tragedy-excavating-the-mystery-of-jim-jones-and-peoples-temple","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=83208","title":{"rendered":"Archivists of Tragedy: Excavating the mystery of Jim Jones and Peoples Temple"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Editor\u2019s Note<\/strong>: This article was originally published in the\u00a0May 8, 2016 edition of<\/em> Kernel Magazine<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Fielding McGehee knows when Jim Jones is about to repeat himself. \u201cHe has verbal cues,\u201d McGehee tells me. \u201cWhen he gets on one of his toots, I can pretty much type as he\u2019s talking. He\u2019s just playing his own tape.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>McGehee is familiar with those cues because he\u2019s listened to Jones\u2014the charismatic leader of the Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ, a religious movement made infamous on Nov. 18, 1978, when Jones and more than 900 others died in a mass murder-suicide\u2014more than anyone else alive. McGehee has heard Jones at his most critical, like when he complains that his congregation is failing to follow orders. And at his most paranoid, when Jones describes the American government locking black people in concentration camps. And at his most compassionate, when he tells his followers he loves them\u2014and sounds like he means it.<\/p>\n

Or meant it, that is. Tenses play murkily in the world of archival recordings, where even four decades later, the past is vibrant and alive in the headphones. McGehee spends much of his time in that world, transcribing tapes recovered by the\u00a0FBI<\/a>\u00a0from Jonestown, the commune in the jungles of Guyana where Jones and his followers met their ultimate end.<\/p>\n

The tapes exist because Jim Jones was himself an archivist. From the beginnings of the Peoples Temple in 1955 Indianapolis to its height in 1970s San Francisco, Jones recorded his sermons. He wanted both to create a historic document and for them to be passed from one congregation to another, extending the reach of his message. Over time, tapes were recycled; the remaining ones were supposedly burned in a bonfire at Stinson Beach in Marin County, California. But down in Jonestown, the FBI found nearly 1,000 more tapes. They were taken to Washington, D.C. for investigation, but on eventually releasing the tapes to the public, the bureau provided only raw summaries describing what was on them, including the ever-popular description \u201cJones speaking.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHell, that could be anything!\u201d says McGehee, so he\u2019s been listening and transcribing to discover just what\u2019s on the tapes. Sometimes, it\u2019s nothing. \u201cWe\u2019ve found an exciting tape that had one minute of a truck engine running,\u201d he says. \u201cBut we also found tapes where Jones talks about the conspiracy against him, how they\u2019re going to take on their enemies, how they\u2019ll fight to the last man.\u201d The tapes are in no particular order, labeled with an arbitrary numbering that\u2019s beautiful in its bureaucratic apathy. Yet when examined, the tapes tell the true story of what happened at Jonestown. \u201cYou can hear the deterioration of the community, almost in real time.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the 66-year-old McGehee, each new tape is a mystery, and he\u2019s never sure what he\u2019ll find. Unraveling the larger mystery of what happened at Jonestown is what has kept McGehee and his wife, Rebecca Moore, persevering in assembling the definitive archive of the Peoples Temple. They\u2019ve spent four decades listening\u2014and they\u2019re not stopping anytime soon.<\/p>\n

\u201cI once said my last day is going to be Nov. 18, 2028, the 50th anniversary,\u201d says McGehee. \u201cBut I realize now I may not be done. I\u2019ll keep going as long as I can, but it\u2019s a job that hasn\u2019t been finished.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Jim Jones and Soviet diplomatic official Feodor Timofeyev at Jonestown. FBI photo.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

McGehee\u2014who previously had a \u201cvaried career\u201d as reporter and political activist\u2014recalls exactly where he was when he heard about the tragedy at Jonestown. By then, Jim Jones had already made a mark on his family.<\/p>\n

Years earlier, his wife\u2019s two sisters, Carolyn and Annie, had fallen in with the Peoples Temple, both becoming integral members. On the morning of Nov. 19, 1978, as they left their Washington, D.C., home for a jog, McGehee and his wife glanced at the newspaper. They saw that U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan, who\u2019d gone to Jonestown at the behest of his San Francisco Bay Area constituents worried about their relatives living in the commune, had been assassinated by members of the Peoples Temple.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt didn\u2019t really register,\u201d says McGehee. \u201cAbout 10 minutes into [the jog], Becky was like, I\u2019m too distracted; let\u2019s go back and figure out what the hell\u2019s going on.\u201d They began making phone calls, following reports, sifting the nuggets of truth from the cloudy deposits of breaking news. Shortly after Ryan\u2019s murder, Jim Jones told his congregation they had only one option: The collective suicide he\u2019d spent months preparing. He told them how their deaths would be viewed, saying, \u201cWe committed revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.\u201d At least some Temple members protested, but Jones was adamant, raving about the forces arrayed against him and cajoling his flock to follow him by drinking a cyanide-laced fruit drink.<\/p>\n

They did\u2014though not as docilely as would be later suggested, and evoked the glib phrase for unthinking allegiance, \u201cdrinking the Kool-Aid.\u201d The night was chaotic, and few Temple members survived. In the aftermath, confused reports reached McGehee and his wife at their home. People were dead, they knew, but how many? First it was a few hundred, then 700, now 900. The Moore sisters played a central role in the Peoples Temple and were unlikely to have survived. Later,\u00a0a letter<\/a>\u00a0from Annie Moore arrived, beginning ominously, \u201cI am 24 years of age right now and don\u2019t expect to live through the end of this book.\u201d<\/p>\n

They flew to Reno, Nevada, to be with Moore\u2019s parents, and the family debated what to do. Rather than letting the confused reports trickling out of Guyana define their daughters\u2019 lives, the family decided to speak out on behalf of those who couldn\u2019t speak for themselves. Moore\u2019s father, a Methodist minister, used his pulpit to urge the world to see more than bodies at Jonestown\u2014to see them as people.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Classroom at Jonestown, 1978.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Within a few weeks, Moore and McGehee filed their first\u00a0FOIA<\/a>\u00a0request with the\u00a0CIA<\/a>, seeking any information about Peoples Temple. Initially, they were blown off: A rep asked why they\u2019d believe the agency knew anything. \u201cGive me a break,\u201d McGehee told the rep. \u201cYou have 900 Americans who\u2019ve renounced the U.S. very publicly, went to a Third World country with a socialist society, and took millions of dollars with them.\u201d Common sense broke the agency\u2019s poker face. \u201cHe said, \u2018Well, I guess when you put it that way.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus began the largest collection of documents relating to Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. As the CIA and FBI finished their investigation over the next few years, they began\u00a0releasing documents<\/a>, essentially straight to McGehee and Moore\u2019s mailbox. McGehee estimates they\u2019ve filed nearly 300 FOIA requests, in addition to multiple lawsuits\u2014one of which remains active\u2014to build the collection they maintain as the Jonestown Institute. It includes census records from the Peoples Temple, sermons, letters, critical writings by concerned relatives, government documents tracking the organization, and yes, all those tapes.<\/p>\n

In 1998, they began putting the collection online.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Volleyball game at Jonestown. FBI photo.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Web archive of the Jonestown Institute,\u201cAlternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple<\/a>,\u201d states that its purpose is to \u201cpresent information about Peoples Temple as accurately and objectively as possible.\u201d It\u2019s all laid out for anyone to access. Sometimes, the audience is bored college kids looking for some midnight macabre. Other times, it\u2019s researchers closely inspecting Jim Jones\u2019s world. John R. Hall\u2019s\u00a0Gone From the Promised Land<\/em>\u00a0drew heavily from the archive, as did David Chidester\u2019s Salvation and Suicide<\/i><\/a>, the NPR documentary\u00a0Father Cares<\/a><\/em>, and the PBS documentary\u00a0Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m suspicious of any resource that claims to have comprehensive information. Usually, it means they just have whatever facts, or apparent facts, to back up whatever the people running it believe,\u201d says Jeff Guinn, an author of nonfiction books covering everything from Charles Manson to Bonnie and Clyde to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, who\u2019s working on a new book about the Peoples Temple.\u00a0He\u2019s written that<\/a>\u00a0it\u2019s \u201cthe toughest project I\u2019ve ever undertaken.\u201d But, he says, \u201cOne of the things that astonished me about the Jonestown Institute was the willingness to accept all points of view and simply make them available, even if it might be something they personally disagreed with.<\/p>\n

\u201cWorking with [them] provided me with invaluable tools\u2014not only the material, but their willingness to get me in touch with other people, even those who disagree vehemently with a lot of the things on the site,\u201d Guinn adds. \u201cThey don\u2019t exclude anyone. That\u2019s important.\u201d<\/p>\n

Guinn\u2019s book, scheduled for spring 2017 publication, is called\u00a0Someday Everybody Dies: Jim Jones, Peoples Temple, and Jonestown<\/em>. The title references a quote by Jones from the so-called \u201cdeath tape<\/a>,\u201d recorded as he urged his followers, many of whom resisted until the end, to participate in the mass suicide. It\u2019s easily the most harrowing of all the tapes\u2014and not coincidentally, the most listened-to by far. But getting through just a few minutes of it is tough enough, so how can anyone spend years with this material?<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not a project for the faint of heart,\u201d McGehee says. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to say I enjoy the work, but I get real fulfillment out of it.\u201d Decades of work have helped the couple find some distance from the work, but it still affects them. \u201cBecky can always tell when I\u2019ve been working all day on photos of the kids, or working with family members who had children in Jonestown,\u201d says McGehee. It\u2019s an all-encompassing task: time not spent transcribing, or making PDFs searchable, or editing articles, or putting together the annual compendium\u00a0The Jonestown Report<\/em><\/a>\u00a0is spent diving back into the archives to make corrections.<\/p>\n

To McGehee, the popular understanding of the Peoples Temple and what happened in Jonestown are as incomplete as 18th-century maps of Africa. \u201cIt had shorelines, maybe a couple of major rivers, Mount Kilimanjaro.\u201d With their work on the archive, Moore and McGehee hope to fill in the map and make it actually useful for future explorers\u2014so that anyone who truly wants to study the Temple can find some insight.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople think that Peoples Temple is just the story of Jim Jones, and it wasn\u2019t,\u201d says McGehee. Instead, it\u2019s also the story about how people came to follow him, what they believed and stood for, and why they decided to do what they did. And about what happened afterward. \u201cIt\u2019s an attempt to show that they weren\u2019t just bodies rotting in the sun,\u201d he says. \u201cThey were human beings.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Editor\u2019s Note: This article was originally published in the\u00a0May 8, 2016 edition of Kernel Magazine.) Fielding McGehee knows when Jim Jones is about to repeat himself. \u201cHe has verbal cues,\u201d McGehee tells me. \u201cWhen he gets on one of his toots, I can pretty much type as he\u2019s talking. He\u2019s just playing his own tape.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":67900,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-83208","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/83208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83208"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/83208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":134378,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/83208\/revisions\/134378"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/67900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}