For some time it appeared that Jim Jones, on the basis of his remarkable feats and charismatic speaking abilities, would take over the Laurel Street church itself. The aging pastor was planning to retire and needed an inspirational young replacement. Rev. Jones was invited back on numerous occasions and drew tremendous crowds. But in the end, the church board voted down the move to hire him because members feared his aggressive recruiting of blacks. “Wherever I have a church, all people will be welcome,” he said. With that, he walked away from Laurel Street for good; about a hundred people, almost half of the congregation, followed him. It was his first major public stand for principle and his first successful theft of church members.
By 1956, Jones had stopped renting the little “Community Unity” building and had put a down payment on a nicer church at Fifteenth and North New Jersey in a racially mixed inner-city neighborhood. The little church, which he called “Wings of Deliverance,” constituted a real step up in the world. It had stained glass, arched windows, a steeply peaked roof and a red brick parsonage next door. Having acquired a congregation and a solid church building, Rev. Jones then further dignified his brand of religious work by referring to it as a “movement.”
The core of his congregation came directly from Laurel Street. Among them were Loretta Stewart, who became an organ player, her mother Mable, who became a church nursing home supervisor, plus several members of Edith Cordell’s family. Rev. Russell Winberg, seeing that he too had no chance to take over the Laurel Street pastorship, assumed a position as Jones’s associate pastor and brought along his wife Wilma, the other half of his ministerial team. The idealistic young couple, who had met while attending an Assemblies of God Bible school in Texas, were among the strongest fundamentalist Christians in Jones’s church. But perhaps the most important newcomer was Jack Beam, a husky pharmaceutical company maintenance man.
Beam had devoted tremendous amounts of time to the Laurel Street church, doing odd jobs there and serving on the church board. The jovial, shrewd and extremely loyal man hit it off with Jim Jones, and gave him the same single-minded dedication. Through all sorts of trials and to the very end, Jack Beam would remain a true friend and important aide.
Most Laurel Street defectors tagged along for the same reason that many would initially follow Jones over the years—his healings. This fact trapped Jones: to maintain the hold on such people, he was forced to continue healing, carrying the entire load of deception on his own. In Jones’s frenzied rise, amid overflow crowds and a chaotic barrage of words, he hardly had time enough to try to understand the phenomenon buoying up his career. But he marveled sometimes at how a faked healing could stimulate seemingly genuine healings. Though drugged by a stupendous sense of power, he kept a degree of skepticism about his miracle cures. In fact, he often wondered to himself about how long they lasted or whether people really were ill in the first place. Jones was not above convincing someone that he had a disease in order to “cure” the nonexistent ailment.
Wider recognition would help him expand Wings of Deliverance into the movement he almost immediately renamed “Peoples Temple.” Jones did not care where he harvested his people. He brought his congregation around to black churches for exchange services and tried to recruit whenever he could. Once he went to a spiritualist state convention where his revelations were accepted as clairvoyant. Eventually, he drew nearly twenty spiritualists to Peoples Temple, one of them Edith Parks, the middle-aged matriarch of a growing family that would follow Jones almost anywhere.
Jim Jones had realized that the ministry amounted to a numbers equation. More people produced money and projects, and those in turn equaled more accomplishments and notoriety. For Jim Jones, the key to breaking into that circle of success seemed to be people, not dollars. He did not inherit a ready-made congregation with a big church and fat offerings, as some young preachers did. He was not bankrolled by a wealthy denomination. Fittingly, Jim Jones took the hard road, alone and with no outside support. But along the way, he grasped an important lesson: an image could serve as well as or better than reality. Religious people, with their eyes and minds on the heavens, and their hearts open, were more susceptible to a con job and sleight of hand than most people.
Creating an image meant creating publicity, and that meant a bold move. Soon after the move to his new church, he organized a mammoth religious convention to take place June 11 through June 15, 1956, in a cavernous Indianapolis hall called Cadle Tabernacle. To draw the crowds, Jim needed a religious headliner, and so he arranged to share the pulpit with Rev. William Branham, a healing evangelist and religious author as highly revered by some as Oral Roberts or Billy Graham.
As a prelude to the event, the Herald of Faith, a Christian newsletter out of Chicago, provided Jones a forum in its May 1956 issue. In his eloquent and almost biblical prose, Jones disguised his agnosticism—or atheism—and hid the fact that he was using religion for social goals. But he subtly revealed the role of religion in his own escape from poverty.
“Christianity, like a watch, needs to be wound if it is to start running. The Word states that, ‘He that hungereth and thirsteth after righteousness shall be filled.’ We cannot progress with God until we see if there is something to answer our quest for truth. Is there any divine response to man’s yearning for a transformed life? Is progress merely a lifting of one’s self ‘by his own bootstraps’? Is what we hear from heaven but the echo of our own pleading cry?”
Some eleven thousand Christians attended opening day of the convention, to see Branham and twenty-five-year-old Jim Jones. Though Branham was known from Chicago to the Carolinas, his ministry was not particularly strong among blacks, but Jones’s was becoming so. Blacks constituted about a fifth of the congregation that day. Many came to see Jim Jones in the afternoon preliminary service, then stayed around for the climactic nighttime session with the great healer Branham, a quietly charismatic, balding man in his mid-forties.
Though Jones was much more boisterous in his delivery and prayers than Branham, both preachers followed much the same Pentecostal procedure, relying heavily on numbers—addresses, social security, telephone and insurance policy numbers—all facts any good private detective could dig up. Like fortune-tellers, they told people about their past and future lives. Branham even told people what their doctor had said on the last visit. All this discernment was designed to build faith to that peak when “healing” was possible. The prayer lines stretched from the rear of the auditorium to the stage and across it. Individuals came forward in turn for a private consultation with Jones or Branham. As the preacher laid hands on the person and prayed aloud, the energy climbed. In the pews, the faithful lifted their hearts and minds in prayer. Feverish, some uttered cries of ecstasy, or pleaded to Jesus for a miracle. Some “fell out” before the preacher could even touch them. But usually the preacher appeared to give them a good shove on the forehead at the conclusion of the prayer, and that, their own inclination and whatever power came from the Holy Spirit sent them toppling backward, their hands up in surrender to the heavens. Some crumpled softly to the floor, but many keeled over, stiff as boards; it was fortunate that sturdy young men stood by to catch them and lay them down gently. “Hallelujah! Praise the Lord,” the people cried as their brethren experienced the Holy Spirit. All around the auditorium people raised their voices in thanks. If all went well, bodies spilled down the aisles like an upset pile of cordwood. Some people touched by the Holy Spirit were supine, twitching, eyelids aflutter, their mouths spasmodically opening and closing, like fishes on land. Some popped to their feet almost immediately, smiling, disheveled but refreshed; their neighbors hugged them as they returned to their seats. Others stayed entranced on the floor—seemingly forgotten by everyone—for minutes and sometimes hours.
By evangelical standards, the more people who “fell out,” the better. Branham not only enjoyed one of the best averages around, but he also could get people to fall out of their seats when he was on stage; he could reach them wit
hout touching them. And sometimes virtually everyone on whom he placed his hands dropped over. Jim Jones the novice could not rival Branham’s percentages.
The exposure proved invaluable to Jones. One person introduced to the Peoples Temple pastor by the event was a lanky black man in his mid-forties named Archie Ijames. Ijames had come to hear William Branham, but he was just the man Jim Jones needed. Jones had been experiencing difficulty making blacks believe he was sincere about racial brotherhood; Ijames could help bring them into the fold.
When Jones later contacted him personally by phone as part of a citywide effort to recruit blacks, Ijames at first declined to come to Temple services. But then he and his family began listening to Jones’s paid radio show each Sunday night. The message of the Living Gospel jibed with Ijames’s personal philosophy; the humility and honesty of the preacher struck him. “I don’t know everything and I don’t pretend to have all the answers,” Jones said. “But I’m doing the very best that I know.... Come, and let’s get together.” The following Sunday the Ijames family went to a new, larger Peoples Temple church, a former synagogue at Tenth and Delaware streets, near downtown Indianapolis.
It did not take Jones long to realize that he had found a black man to stand by his side. For his part, Ijames had discovered an organization which could resolve his own conflicts over race and religion.
Born into a North Carolina farming family in 1913, Archie Ijames had quit school at sixteen when his father, a schoolteacher and sharecropper, died. His poor but proud Methodist family took religion seriously, kept holy the Sabbath, and taught its seven children never to swear. At seventeen, Archie had a religious experience that led him to affiliate with the Church of God, Body of Christ. But over the years religion eventually proved ineffective against the racial problems confronted by Archie and his wife Rosie, also from a sharecropper’s family. Though he attended Bible school and served as a pastor of a church until the mid-1940s, Ijames quit organized religion altogether after he moved to Indiana. He became disgusted with churches after getting an insider’s view of a very unChristian power struggle.
When he met Jim Jones, Ijames considered himself an independent thinker and called himself a universalist; he too wanted to break down barriers between people. Recently he had seen little hope for doing it through a church. But he was heartened by Jones’s efforts to fully integrate Peoples Temple by increasing black representation from about 15 percent to 50.
Jones made Ijames feel needed and wanted. The church invited Ijames’s two oldest daughters to join the choir, and accommodated the family’s long-standing religious practice by promising never to ask them to work on their Sabbath, Saturday. Soon it shaped up as a church for life. “The day will come, Brother Jones, when I’ll find people with whom I can share my life one hundred percent,” Ijames said. Replied Jones, “Well, if you don’t find it here, you won’t find it anywhere in the world.”
The quest for brotherhood, however, did not rank highest on the list of attractions for most who came to Peoples Temple. It frustrated Jones that so many people gravitated to the church wanting only miracles. “Grand Central Station” he called it, with a touch of bitterness. Too many people came to be healed, then left without hearing the social message. But gradually Jones managed to perfect a sort of bait and switch technique ; some of those who came initially for the healings would stay for the social commitment.
The presence of Archie Ijames on the pulpit as associate pastor served as a reminder of that message, and helped convince many blacks that Jones was a true integrationist. As for the white fundamentalists, they could always look up at the reassuring long white face of Rev. Winberg. The two sat along with Jack Beam in nice padded chairs. This little team shared the preliminary duties, opening the service, leading singing and prayers, introducing Jones.
The services were scheduled for Sunday mornings and a weekday evening and followed—as they always would—the revivalist format familiar to Jones and to most of the people. Yet the young minister maintained his tolerant ecumenical tenor. People stood and testified about their experiences, joys and troubles, all in the spirit of brotherhood. Some spoke in tongues and others interpreted. Jones, though he thought it gibberish, participated to make the “tongues people” feel welcome. He simply faked it.
In a warm-up, the husky preacher usually sang a couple of songs, his chest swelling, his lungs booming out traditional hymns. The crowd joined in, swaying, waving their arms in the air. Then without notes, he sermonized for hours, about brotherhood, the failure of organized religion to address social injustice, the problems of the poor. To make his points, he was as apt to throw in something from that day’s newspaper as he was to quote the Bible.
In a climate of love, a line formed down the center aisle for the finale, the healings. At his invitation, people would come forward and gather around him like children. On one day in 1957, Jones spotted a seven-year-old black boy named Jim Cobb hiding in the crowd. The boy had cried when his mother, Christine Cobb, had coaxed him, almost dragging him, to the cluster of people around the pulpit.
Christine Cobb, a steelworker’s wife, had abandoned her neighborhood Baptist church to go across town to Peoples Temple. Her neighbors were baffled—they had not experienced the warm and friendly atmosphere that so attracted her, and were not impressed when she told them about the psychic powers of Jones, who could tell her about a recurring dream she often had.
As the others around young Jim moaned and shouted, young Jim Cobb hunched down shyly. Yet the white man, wending his way through the crowd, stopped dead in front of him.
The air pulsed with excitement as Rev. Jones looked down at the boy. Jim Cobb stood there with a lump in his throat as the preacher wrinkled his forehead and bore his eyes into him. Then the minister put his right hand on Jim’s head, and his left fell onto his ear. “You have an ear problem, my son,” he declared softly.
Jim Cobb was startled. How did this man know about the ear surgery and his dizzy spells?
“Your ear will be fine, my son,” the preacher assured him as though he could foresee the future. As Jim’s mother cried out thanks to Christ, Rev. Jones started to walk away, then turned. “You’re going to be a leader someday,” he told the boy with a smile.
As things turned out, Jones was only half right. Jim Cobb would need another ear operation five years later; but he would become a leader someday—a youth leader in Jones’s church. As he grew older, Jim Cobb would realize that Peoples Temple promised something very rare in Indianapolis. From his earliest years in the ghetto, racial disharmony had been an ugly reality to him. So he reveled in the pervasive feeling of brotherhood in the huge congregation. And he respected the courage and frank uncompromising language of Rev. Jones: “We are an interracial group. And if anyone doesn’t like that, you don’t have to give your money.”
The rhetoric was substantiated by human service projects that yielded some positive publicity in 1957. On January 4, the now-defunct Indianapolis News reported that Jones had made the human relations honor roll of the weekly black newspaper, the Indianapolis Recorder.
Jones wanted the church to exemplify egalitarianism, to shelter the needy, to provide a family for the lonely. Stray animals and people were taken in. He ordered everyone to wear casual clothes to church one Easter Sunday, so no one would feel out of place or inferior. He rounded up black kids in the neighborhood and took them to the zoo for a picnic. The church opened a soup kitchen for the poor and skid row characters in February 1960, and soon expanded its social services with missionary ardor. Peoples Temple gave away canned goods or paid the rent for some indigent, provided free clothing at a job placement center and delivered coal to poor people who otherwise could not heat their homes.
Jim Jones inspired it all. Often he reached into his own pocket to help street beggars and the needy. But before he gave a substantial sum to anyone, he had his aides investigate to make sure the person deserved it. If Jones saw a need, he tried to fill it. A benevolent opport
unist, efficient, savvy, businesslike, he was the sort of preacher who could convince the owners of the synagogue he bought to loan the money interest-free if it were repaid within a year—and who would satisfy the debt one day early.
Human services aside, Jim Jones was not fashioning an ordinary church. Step by step, he demanded more of his people than most Christian churches. His always escalating demands would cause some followers to drop by the wayside, but in the long run would tighten his organization. As part of a systematic binding process, he attempted to keep his members with the Temple “family” on Christmas and Thanksgiving, rather than with blood relatives. It was the earliest sign that he someday would ask members to forsake their families. He wanted his congregation to look upon him and the Temple as the most important part of their lives; indeed he hoped they all would dedicate their lives to the Temple and its goals, as he had. Total commitment, he realized, would maximize the contribution of each individual member. And total dependency would ensure continued commitment. Consequently, as he issued his call to humanitarianism, he offered a deal: if you donate your material possessions, I will meet all your needs. Summoning up passages from the Bible, he urged his people toward a form of socialism he called religious communalism.
Archie Ijames was among the first to commit his life to Temple work. When the free restaurant opened in 1960, the response was overwhelming: the Temple served eighteen meals on the first day, one hundred on the second. Asked to help out, Ijames, a carpenter by trade, quit all outside work and dedicated himself to hustling food for the poor. Charity was not a novelty to him and Rosie; even before meeting Jones, they had distributed scrounged and scavenged foodstuffs to the needy. Now, adapting their methods to the Temple program, Ijames stretched the $25 weekly food program budget into meals for several hundred poor people. He and his wife bought overripe produce dirt cheap or found free edible food at railroad freight yards and unloading areas. They convinced butchers to discount their prices for a small payoff, and to give them Saturday’s meat that would spoil over the weekend.
Raven Page 9
