How Jim Jones led disciples to ‘drink the Kool-Aid’ Matt Damsker
Four decades of fanaticism, terrorism and light-speed media exposure to violence and victimization haven’t dulled the horrors of November 1978, when Jim Jones and more than 900 of his followers — along with California U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan — died in a jungle colony in Guyana. To this day, when we reference any blind-faith drinking of “the Kool-Aid,” we’re talking Jonestown — even though, in some ultimate irony, the fallen didn’t ingest poisoned Kool-Aid. But the barely flavored cyanide was more than enough. Jonestown is one man’s monument to charismatic madness, a sheep-to-slaughter moment that defies final analysis.
Still, author Jeff Guinn has retraced Jim Jones’ journey with a deeply researched effort. In The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and
Peoples Temple (Simon & Schuster, 468 pp., Guinn reintroduces us to a man of some potential — a young Indiana preacher whose fiery mixture of gospel and Marxism reached a racially integrated congregation in the nascent era of civil rights in the 1950s.
Jones’ progressivism won notice, and his ambition sought the horizon. In the ’60s, he relocated his church, the Peoples Temple, to Northern California, attracting hundreds of new disciples among struggling, low-income folk.
Jones took their money, their hopes, and led them like some Bay Area Elvis. It wasn’t long before he was adrift in drugs and extramarital sex with the women he preached to — unapologetic, unpredictable, performing fake faith healings and promising salvation. The man of God who might have risen to West Coast political leadership fell into a dark, paranoid place, ranting of imminent nuclear war and against the CIA and FBI.
As authorities began to question his actions, Jones sought sanctu- ary far from the U.S., leading an exodus to Guyana that confounded and frightened the relatives of his followers. A church had become a jungle cult. Congressman Ryan flew to Jonestown to investigate, but as he and his aides boarded their plane to return home, Jones ordered his armed lieutenants to ambush the delegation, killing Ryan and others.
Within hours, Jones decreed mass suicide: “Lay down your life with dignity. … Stop these hysterics,” he urged the Temple holdouts while the rest — young, old, babes in arms — lined up for their syringes full of poison. “This is not the way for people who are socialists or communists to die.”
Guinn’s reporting is fully rounded; he unearths details to show all sides of Jones the leader, a firebrand who helped to integrate Indianapolis years before desegregation laws, who established programs for drug addiction, poverty and battered women. Former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown once introduced Jones as “an American Gandhi.”
What lesson Guinn imparts in 500 jungle-dense pages may have been summed up in two lines by Bob Dylan: “Don’t follow leaders/ Watch the parkin’ meters.” Yet only a cynic would dismiss this narrative as useless. The Jonestown massacre opened eyes wide to the nihilism of cults — and, perhaps, to the limits of charisma.