When the Ijameses filed a petition to adopt Becky, all hell broke loose inside and outside the Temple. Church members and Becky’s family opposed it vociferously; outsiders made crank phone calls. Some accused Ijames and Becky of promiscuity and dishonorable motives, calling the black preacher everything from a crackpot to a pervert. Once Becky’s relatives tried to have her taken by force from the Ijameses.
Gossip around church took on the heated and pious tone of a crusade. Neither side yielded; both supported their positions with the Bible and reported prophecies and revelations from God. Becky’s husband Chuck inflamed the controversy by telling other members that Ijames had been “getting chummy” with Becky. Helpless and frustrated, Winberg decried the adoption as nonsense, but Ijames remained firm. “God has laid this upon my heart and I can’t let it go,” he proclaimed. The climax came when Temple leadership set up a committee to hear testimony for two days. Virtually all adamantly opposed the adoption; some quoted the commandment: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.” Young Harold Cordell, an influential member and an ardent Jones supporter, spoke in favor of the adoption, to no avail. Ross Case finally told Ijames: This thing about being interracial is experimental in Indianapolis and if it fails here, people will always say ‘Peoples Temple tried it and look what happened to them.’
“Let it go,” he pleaded.
The rest of the committee sided with Case, and Ijames backed off. Still, the controversy had further kept Winberg off balance until Jones could give him a rude shove out the door in June 1963. That month a sequence of events touched off by Jones seemed to dash all hopes that the four ministers ever would be reunited. First, the exiled pastor dispatched Malmin to take over the church and gave no advance notice. Next, Ross Case, sensing a showdown coming, decided to leave Indiana—and to strike out for the nuclear “safe zone” of Eureka, California, a few hundred miles north of San Francisco. Then Jack Beam came back from Brazil with disheartening news about Jones’s missionary labors. Instead of staying around Indiana to help put the church back in order, he was heading for Hayward, California. He said he was joining relatives in that suburb across the bay from San Francisco. But Beam was actually following orders from Jones to scout California for a possible relocation site.
When Jim Jones himself resumed his place in the pulpit a few months later, he discovered he could not recapture times past. At first, he tried to regain his old momentum; the cash flow improved almost immediately, and by New Year’s he had summoned up his old Pentecostal rhythms. But soon his paranoia about nuclear holocaust, his self-adulation and his attacks on the Bible escalated to the point of counterproductivity. Without the forum and the legitimacy of his human rights post, he was perceived simply as a controversial preacher chipping away at the written foundation of Christianity and elevating himself on an altar. Inside the church, having laid the groundwork through Bible-criticism and “miracles,” he now accepted the mantle of Jesus Christ. Humility gave way to insecurity and fear, which in turn fed his hunger for reinforcement, prestige, power. Rather than working through the emotional problems that had caused him to flee to Brazil, he surrendered to them.
Step by step Jones was leading his people to the conclusion that he was a prophet. They had seen him Christlike feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, inspiring compassionate deeds; they had witnessed his miraculous feats through the Holy Spirit. The people trusted him and stood in awe of him; they compromised themselves by accepting his destruction of the Bible.
The first time Jones referred to himself as more than a man, Archie Ijames tried to protest, though privately. “Brother Jones, you shouldn’t let it be happening. They’ll say we’re just another cult.” As so often happened, it was another member, not Jones, who answered the criticism, with these words: “He’s the only God you’ll ever see.”
Jones’s defender was a heavyset white woman named Patty Cartmell. Though Ijames did not know it yet, Jones had taken this earthy and fanatical woman into his confidence; he recruited her to gather information for his revelations, by spying and subterfuge. She helped him with his cheap magician’s tricks, perhaps out of love, or belief in Jones. When Patty Cartmell said, “He’s the only God you’ll ever see,” she did not necessarily mean that Jones was a heavenly God; she meant that there was no God except the force of goodness and love in each person. And she would believe to the end that Jim Jones was filled with more love than any living being.
As in Lynn, Jim Jones ran into more difficulty outside his safely encapsulated sphere of control. Outside the church, he needed to be circumspect, but was not. Rather than continue the religious message Ijames had been delivering on WIBC radio during his absence, Jones adopted a purely social message combined with detailed criticism of the Bible. In one brochure Jones billed himself as an apostle: “I am causing untold thousands to believe in the Jesus of ancient history by the great miracles of healings, prophecies and discernment I perform in His Name.”
Jones seemingly misjudged how far he could go without being labeled a heretic. His radio shows aroused such consternation in the Christian community that radio WIBC took him off the air. Though Jones told confidants that the station had silenced him because of complaints from listeners, he claimed to the Indianapolis News on April 17, 1965, that outside harassment—including anonymous phone callers who told his children he was a “devil, an anti-Christ”—had caused him to drop the show.
At this same time, Jones believed that ministers were spreading a rumor that he had been committed to an insane asylum during his two-year absence. He also apparently believed that the Internal Revenue Service was investigating him, though it was not. These concerns, coupled with the religious community furor over his statements and the Temple’s somewhat retarded condition, did not bode well for the church’s future in Indiana.
By the end of 1964, Jones started to make scouting trips to California to see how his two former assistants, Jack Beam and Ross Case, were faring. Early in 1965, he and Marceline settled on a westward move. Despite certain inherent risks in uprooting the church, the move could prove personally therapeutic and bring tremendous organizational benefits.
The move to California represented far more than a search for a haven from nuclear holocaust and racism. Jones also envisioned a unifying experience; he was already interrogating members to test their loyalty, and squelching dissenters. A change of location would be an acid test. Removing his people from their midwestern roots, having them sell their homes and quit their jobs, would make them more dependent, and thus more receptive to total commitment.21
Jones chose a time and a place—California in the 1960s—where change and conflict abounded; yet the locale was in a pastoral place, not entirely unlike his own Indiana farm country. Such a redneck area would hardly welcome with open arms an integrated group of communalists, but this alienation would isolate his people and tie them yet closer to him. The place he chose could feed his conflicting needs for escape and ongoing conflict.
Even the dream he shared with his people was wrought in the darkness of his paranoia, tinged with love and a strange melancholy that would bear no antidote other than an entire world that was free, and happy. But first Jones had to convince his people to leave Indiana when, in fact, only he needed to leave; he had to persuade them that it was in their interests to flee with him. One Sunday, in a touching display of emotion, Jim informed the Indianapolis congregation of his plans. With nostalgia and sadness, he sang the song “September.” He went around the church and touched each member lovingly. He seemed truly to care. He took pains to reconvey the danger of nuclear holocaust. The world conflagration would come July 15, 1967, he said, and only those in nuclear safe zones would be spared in that terrible blast and fallout. He set up a moment of truth: Were they with him or not?22
Jones wanted others to adopt his apocalyptic vision. In his grand castle of paranoia, justifiable concerns about thermonuclear war exploded into a doomsday scenario. He, like some latter-day Moses, would lead the
people to the Promised Land to live interracially. Yet there was no way to separate the warped world view from his idealized vision and his social conscience, nor the real threats from his paranoia, his benevolence from his cruelty, his genius from his madness. Jones was a puzzle within a fragile puzzle. For some, the beautiful sides of Jim Jones, his charisma, his childlike frailties, his charity, justified the migration across the continent.
The safest place in the United States is Eureka, California, a landlocked port of nearly 30,000 people 283 miles north of San Francisco and more than 100 miles north of the nearest target.... It is west of the Sierras and upwind from every target in the United States.
Esquire January 1962
The Cases had auctioned or given away almost everything they owned, paring down their belongings to clothes, a refrigerator, books, a Ping-Pong table and not much more. After writing away for California teaching credentials, they had piled into a rented plane with Archie Ijames’s son Norman, a pilot. In charting routes over the 10,000-foot Sierra Nevada, Norman determined that he could not fly directly to Eureka, but needed to pass over the mountain range farther south, and land first in Ukiah. That met Case’s approval, because he recalled that the nuclear “safe zone” described in the Esquire story had included Ukiah as a southern boundary. Case decided to start applying for teaching positions in each city from Ukiah northward. Fortuitously, the school superintendent in Ukiah offered him a job. The Cases put their money into a tract home in a relatively new neighborhood and dug a backyard fallout shelter. As they went about the business of small-town living, time stretched the distance from Indiana.
Now and then, the Cases made the trip south to the Bay Area to visit their old friends, the Beams, in Hayward. And once Beam phoned Case and invited him down to Hayward for a reunion of the old Temple ministers, including Jones. During that gathering, it became clear that nuclear annihilation remained on Jim’s mind.
“Jack, you must go to bed every night with nightmares thinking about nuclear bombs that could fall on this place,” Jones said. Hayward was not only outside the safe zone but dangerously near the many military installations around the bay. Case’s new hometown, on the other hand, held immediate appeal for Jones. When Case invited him up to Ukiah for a visit, Jones readily accepted. The area seemed safe from fallout, and there were plenty of job possibilities.
Since the Gold Rush, Mendocino County’s timber had bound it to the San Francisco Bay Area one hundred miles to the south. Recently the county’s vineyards had become a major producer of California wines, but even in Ukiah, a city of 10,000 surrounded by vineyards and pear orchards, the lumber industry held sway. Masonite, Louisiana Pacific and other companies operated big mills there. Also, as a county seat, Ukiah enjoyed economic benefits and public-sector jobs out of proportion to its size.
Jones used the invitation to Ukiah as much to test his former assistant as to evaluate the city. Jones knew Case’s traditionalism might clash with his own self-deification, that Ukiah might prove too small for both of them. While being escorted around town and later in Case’s home, Jones picked the brain of his former assistant. In the process, Jones dropped several comments about his own philosophical drift. For instance, Jones once asked, “Would they go for any Hindu or Buddhist teachings in Ukiah?”
A little lost for words, Case said, “I don’t think so.”
Though Case took him literally, Jones, in mentioning Eastern religions, was alluding to an increasingly eclectic theology that provided stepping stones to self-deification.23 And during a drive down School Street, Jones declared pointedly, in discussing the unfortunate fate of an Indiana member who had failed to heed one of his warnings: “People must learn to obey their spiritual leaders.”
Rankled, Case criticized Jones. “You take too much control over people,” he said.
“I’ve thought about that,” Jones responded with patronizing sincerity. “And I’ve talked about it with my psychiatrist. He said I can’t release them too fast from their dependency or they’ll have psychological problems.” Jones’s mention of a psychiatrist, if he indeed was seeing one this early, came as a surprise to Case.
Not having gleaned enough from Case face to face, Jones had others continue the testing.
Harold Cordell, who had stood up for Archie Ijames in the adoption fight, did the first bit of probing. He, his brother Rick and a few other family members were part of the Temple advance team sent to California to make sure housing, food and jobs were ready for the settlers.
On February 18, 1965, Harold Cordell, then a professional accountant, wrote Case six pages of praise for Jim Jones and criticism of the Bible. The disconcerting letter immediately confirmed Case’s suspicions about Jones’s religious plunge. It questioned the Bible’s story of creation, and expressed the opinion that demons cast out by Jesus were probably germs. “Many think God spoke to these ‘prophets’ and ‘disciples’ of past history, but that he has never spoken since,” Cordell wrote. “I know this to be untrue. I know he has always had a man speaking his will through the ages and does have at least one that I know today, namely Jim Jones. He is a prophet of the first degree whose prophecies always come true to the minute detail....”
In a postscript, Cordell cautioned against misconstruing his praise of Jones, saying, “He is a man as Jesus was.”
Though the adoring words revolted Case, he played coy when Jack Beam visited him a few days later; he suspected Beam was there as Jones’s agent to monitor his reaction to the letter. When Beam asked Case to read the letter aloud, Case did so as though it did not faze him in the least. But later that month, when a group of four Temple men, including Beam and Archie Ijames, came to the area to make arrangements, Case revealed himself. He called Beam and Ijames into the kitchen, where he again read the letter aloud, critically this time, and asked his two friends whether they agreed with Cordell’s sentiments. Beam kept interrupting until Ijames said, “Quiet down. Brother Ross has a problem with this letter.”
“That’s funny,” Beam said. “I told Jim that he didn’t have any problems with that letter at all.”
After hearing the letter, Ijames maintained that the time for dissent in the Temple had ended, that the will of Jones was paramount.
Case then posed the gut question: “Are you still a Christian?”
“I am not,” Ijames said. “I’m a universalist.”
Traumatized and disappointed, Case told his old friend, a man he had called his brother, that he could never subordinate his mind to the commands of a minister who pretended to be a prophet. He quit Peoples Temple at that moment: it was February 24, 1965.
The rift had widened too far. Case was through with Jim Jones, or so he thought. Had Case been left behind in Indiana like Winberg, he would have been nothing more than another orthodox Christian sifted out of the changing Temple. But Case had the misfortune to be living in the path of Jim Jones.
NINE
Rural Eden
In July 1965, as schools let out for summer vacation, the Indiana congregation prepared to push west. Dozens had turned deaf ears on Winberg and other skeptics who thought they were mad to abandon their Indiana homes for what promised to be a nomadic life governed by a capricious preacher. They said good-bye to friends, loved ones and neighbors; they packed their cars, pickup trucks and moving vans, then headed west in a big caravan led by a car carrying Jones, his mother and his housekeeper Esther Mueller, along with a sick dog and her puppies. Marceline Jones had traveled to California earlier with Stephan and Jimmy, Jr.
The contingent bumped along with everything they owned piled high, looking like refugees from the Dust Bowl days, imagining what lay ahead in the Promised Land. One can only imagine the awesome responsibility Jones felt as he looked over those dozens of exhausted and expectant travelers strung out behind him. They had altered their life course to follow him across the continent, toward uncertainty. They placed their faith in a troubled man who had told them they might need to change the name of their church, i
n case Indiana racists tracked them to California. Jim Jones no longer was running alone.
Jones had asked a great deal of his people. Some were unwilling to uproot their families; many considered church a weekend ritual, a weekly investment in the hereafter. Others, like Christine Cobb, the mother of the little black child with the ear problem, held back because her husband, a nonmember, declined to forfeit twenty-two years of seniority and good pay to follow a “Prophet of God.” The migration split families too, with some members joining the exodus, others taking their chances with the mushroom cloud.
That summer, about 140 Hoosiers poured into Ukiah. The Beams arrived too, from Hayward. Soon word spread around town that an Indiana preacher had transplanted his entire church into this small town. For those who did not hear about the Temple through the grapevine, the Ukiah Daily Journal carried an admiring story headlined “Ukiah Welcomes New Citizens to Community.” It was a very good public relations kickoff, and took on added significance because the editor’s wife, Kathy Hunter, had written it.
Despite the hospitable welcome, Jones apparently had some misgivings about the extent of the racial tolerance—he told Hunter that his adopted son was of “Negro, Caucasian and Indian heritage.” Few blacks lived in Ukiah, and some white people preferred to keep it that way. A few black church members, among them Archie Ijames, experienced discrimination when they tried to buy or rent homes. Still, the church members settled their families in the area and found or made jobs.
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