However, as the Temple grew and recruited nationwide, even the hard-driving Jones could not be omnipresent, could not make personal visits to every home, could not take the time to counsel everyone personally and ask them to join. Instead he used his people as salesmen. And the Temple relied increasingly on a sort of subscription list of all who attended a Temple service, knew a Temple member or belonged to a church “fellowshiping” with the Temple. Prospective and active Temple members were mailed newsletters.
Though little more than mimeographed flyers primarily designed to announce Temple services and events, the newsletters also functioned as a recruiting tool and a written record of Temple history and lore. They carried portions of Jones’s sermons and reported church acquisitions and expansion plans, as any church bulletin would. But Temple publications reflected an urgency, issuing warnings about emergencies and impending crises, ballyhooing the bizarre and the miraculous—and tossed these ingredients together with folksy humanitarian concern and reverence for life. The church bulletins touted nonviolence along with euphemisms for socialism—such as “apostolic social justice.” The Temple presented a largely religious façade; no one would yet catch Jim Jones promoting socialism in writing.
In fact, Jones honestly did fear exposure and attack for his ideas. But the line between fabrication and truth, between real and imagined threats, ran a crooked course. Under the influence of paranoia and drugs, his mind leaped to fearful conclusions, bypassing judgment and reason. His sickness magnified problems: he anticipated not just one reaction to an action, but many. If he were exposed as a socialist, he believed a sort of domino effect would destroy him and his church—the friendly Republican power structure disowning him, Disciples of Christ stripping away his church status, the Internal Revenue Service moving in, the news media attacking, redneck vigilantes bringing up the rear. Such fears dogged him everywhere. His paranoia and his grandiosity nourished each other. He told his followers that only effective crusaders need fear being attacked. If he were not under attack from someone somewhere, his self-importance suffered, and he needed to create his own bogeyman, or to provoke natural enemies, as he apparently did with the Nazis in Indiana.
As in the Midwest, Jones wielded fear like a club, prophesying bombs, earthquakes, fascist revolutions, plus fires in homes, auto accidents, deaths and injuries to the unfaithful. In pleading for members, he combined a foreboding sort of hucksterism along with a promise of salvation. “Attention,” shrieked the first line of a newsletter in 1970. “This one time, you need to read every word of what may be your last communication with us unless we hear from you. Vital prophecies about people and events herein. Your future depends upon it.” To such twentieth-century fire and brimstone, Jones added the true message: social justice is our primary concern. Contribute to the cause. Join us if you want to catch the freedom train.
Jones adjusted his rhetoric to make the Temple more palatable to his targets. “Living the Acts of the Apostles” was his euphemism for Christian communalism—or Temple-style communism—but the newsletters implied a nonpolitical orientation. In 1970, the newsletters did not even take stands on current issues such as the war in Vietnam or the civil rights record of the Nixon administration. That year, with only 1,500 people on the mailing list, with the Temple chartering buses and exploring expansion to San Francisco, the Temple presented little in the way of a coherent identity.
A year later, a well-coordinated nationwide recruiting drive was under way, still relying most heavily on the healings. In 1971, the newsletters heralded recruiting efforts in San Francisco and bus trips to Los Angeles and big cities in the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest and the East Coast. The church purchased its first few buses, and Jones kept up a superhuman road schedule, leading several services during each of his stops, often two a day. In the course of this all-out effort, newsletter mailings catapulted from 6,000 to 36,000. By late 1971, the voice of Jim Jones could be heard on radio broadcasts over much of the United States, Canada and Mexico. The Temple had purchased time on religious stations in California, Washington, Ohio and other places.
Jim Jones always played the headliner’s role, but his supporting cast of young white crusaders increased the scope of his ministry. Their writing and language skills immediately improved the newsletters; their social skills and appearance helped create a favorable public image.
In relying heavily on them, Jones attached a higher priority to building a strong organization than in making it a model of integration. Falling victim to his impatience, he reinforced the racism of the larger society. Because many whites came to the Temple with educational advantages and social skills, the pragmatic preacher drew a disproportionate number into his inner circle. His white elite in turn attracted even more well-educated whites, many of them from the Bay Area....
When the first warm spring days arrived in May of 1970, Joyce Cable Shaw was sunbathing in the garden of her Upper Market Street apartment in San Francisco. Her snowy Samoyed puppy frolicked around her. As she puffed on a marijuana cigarette, sipped a cold beer, read a book on astrology, Shaw felt good about herself. She earned a decent salary as a psychological tester at the University of California, and had a busy social life. Her biggest worry was deciding whether to buy a Volkswagen van. In fact, she had dropped her analyst the previous afternoon because she no longer needed one.
When the phone rang, it was a girl friend, another astrology buff. “How ‘bout coming with me tonight to hear a good man talk?” she asked. Shaw did not have a date that Saturday night, so she agreed to go along, out of curiosity.
When Joyce Shaw entered the rented auditorium on Geary Street with her friend, she was immediately approached for what turned out to be the equivalent of a sorority rush. The welcomer was Linda (Sharon) Amos. Seeing Shaw’s semihip garb of wire-rimmed glasses, poncho, and Levi’s, Amos told of her own artistic interests, her attempts at a professional dancing career, her dabbling in the North Beach beatnik scene. Learning that Joyce was divorced, she talked about her own failed relationships, her marriage to a “male chauvinist” who provided her with a daughter and little else, her live-in arrangement with a black man who gave her two more children. The Temple, she said, had lifted her out of her depression, made her feel useful. Much of what Amos said registered with Shaw; her own rather hedonistic life, though running smoothly, lacked something.
When Jim Jones strode onto the stage, a rush of energy rippled through the audience and a peculiar feeling of déjà vu flashed over Shaw. As the preacher spoke of guilt and injustice and euphemistically of socialism, Shaw’s instincts pulled her in opposite directions. The power of Jones’s presence was undeniable, but ambiguous—as if he were either very good or very evil.
That night Shaw reached no conclusions, despite Jones’s manipulations. The preacher, calling out a little black woman sitting next to Shaw, claimed to have healed her of a stroke. As proof, he asked Shaw to take the woman’s hand. The woman gripped with what appeared to be normal strength—and Shaw reported that to the congregation, thus confirming the “miracle” healing. Perhaps a healing had occurred, thought Shaw. She believed in metaphysics and psychosomatic healings. In any case she shared the joy of those Jones claimed to heal.
Looking around the auditorium, evaluating the people, Shaw asked herself whether the organization held anything for her. As her eyes roamed, she spotted a tall dark-haired young man, with pale complexion, glasses and severe features, a member of the church band. Their eyes may have met for a moment. She found him handsome. He looked like her type of person, a college graduate from her generation.
By the end of May 1970, Joyce Shaw felt twinges of dissatisfaction with her job, her nine-to-five routine, the life of a single working woman in the city. With her new VW van and her puppy, she contemplated moving back to the country. But the first time she attended a Temple service in Redwood Valley, she felt her metal folding chair get harder and harder. When she heard a rooster crow, something dawned on her: she had grown up in Ohio le
ss than a hundred miles from Jim Jones’s hometown—these Temple people were primarily transplanted midwesterners, the very type of people she had wanted to escape.
Shaw had been reared in New Carlisle, Ohio, in a socially prominent family. Though conservative by background, Methodist by upbringing, she had kept an open mind about religion and experimented with a pacifistic church. She had attended Miami University of Ohio, married a Hungarian and, before their divorce, become an anticommunist. She had supported Hubert Humphrey for president in 1968 and marched against the war in Vietnam.
When Shaw came to Peoples Temple that spring day in 1970, she still was groping for a framework for her life. Her misgivings about the midwesterners and their rural parochialism soon gave way as she discovered the beauty of the Temple’s caring atmosphere. She started to like the homey Hoosiers such as Rheaviana Beam. She could relate to a handful of college-educated people such as Amos. And Jim Jones seemed to live up to his billing as a great humanitarian.
On her birthday, New Year’s Eve of 1971, she faced a choice. Should she go to Winterland auditorium in San Francisco for a rock concert or should she drive to Redwood Valley for one of the Temple’s monthly birthday parties? When she arrived at the Temple, she found that the church was inaugurating a new practice, issuing membership cards for admission to services. The membership requirements seemed minimal to Shaw, similar to tithing in other churches—donating 25 percent of her income, and agreeing to request the church’s permission before taking a vacation. When Shaw enlisted, Jones instructed her to secure a job in the Ukiah area before moving north, evidently so she would not burden the church financially.
Soon she was hired as an eligibility worker at the county welfare department where Sharon Amos and a few other members worked, and she moved into a rented house. Her place needed painting, but before she could tackle the job, a church member called. “Joyce. We really need you. You have to come and work on ‘files.’ ” Obediently she went to alphabetize names and addresses of those who attended meetings, for a master list used to mail newsletters and to solicit donations. It so happened that the tall man she had noticed at her first service also was assigned to work on the files. She knew little about him, except that his name was Bob Houston and he had two lovely daughters. They had chatted once outside church. She thought him pleasant, good-hearted, intelligent. When she looked at him, she thought of a stern Calvinistic minister with a stiff clerical collar and a personality to match. But he spoke her language and knew what was going on in the world. He was not one of those blindly ignorant followers, orgiastically waving his arms, adoring Jim Jones. The social service work and the humanistic values excited him.
It soon became apparent to Shaw that all was not harmony in the Houston household. In a criticism session in front of the church, members accused Houston, falsely, of flirting with another man’s wife. The charge gave Jones a convenient bridge to a full airing of the couple’s problems. Phyllis was put on the hot seat, too, as the pastor dissected their sex lives and the state of their marriage. When Bob and Phyllis acknowledged that they had not slept together for a year, Jones sent out their daughters to clear the way for the personal questions. “Do you think about sex?” he asked. And Houston replied, “All the time.”
Phyllis proclaimed that she did not like her husband or the sexual demands he put on her. Assuming the role of Solomon, Jones asked her: “What are you going to do? How do you feel about Bob interacting with someone else?”
“I don’t care, but I don’t want it to be blatant,” she replied. The couple would stay married in name only, for the sake of the daughters. Agreeing that the arrangement was preferable to divorce, Jones granted each permission to establish extramarital relationships.
Shortly after this unconventional ministerial counseling, Joyce and Bob were driving home together from their work at the church when the inevitable happened. They had been sitting together in the car talking, and one thing led to another. Like good Temple members, they went to Jones for sanction. He approved the affair, merely cautioning discretion.
Late that year, Bob moved out of the family apartment and into a cottage at Mendocino State Hospital, where he worked as a music therapist. He and Shaw announced their wish to live together. Jones gave his blessing—yet only a few weeks later, as though to reinforce his control over their love lives, he withdrew permission. He did not do so directly; he used the newly formed church council, a group of so-called counselors who advised church members with problems and helped enforce Temple policies. The council decreed that the Houstons would have to start living together again for the sake of the community—and presumably the children. Though the council said Joyce and Bob could continue to see each other, Houston was annoyed. Shaw was livid. But every time she objected, members of the council cut her off.
Bob Houston moved back home. He and Phyllis wasted no affection on each other. They lived under constant stress, a dresser jammed between their beds. While Phyllis found a Temple boy friend of her own, Bob’s affair with Joyce went on, time and energy permitting.
Like other couples in the Temple, they became as attached to the church as to each other. They undertook tasks with the enthusiasm of new converts, happy to be made an integral part of the organization so quickly. A word from Jones, the hint of a suggestion, might send them off to do his bidding.
When the church had matured beyond the mimeographed bulletin stage, Jones mentioned the need for a magazine. Eagerly Bob Houston, Joyce Shaw, a peace movement veteran named Garry Lambrev and others threw themselves into the project. Houston and Shaw spent more time together, working late in the Redwood Valley publication office, taking long drives to Fort Bragg on the coast to borrow a typesetting machine, or to San Francisco to moonlight on a printing press. Through innovation and long hours, the group turned out the first issue of The Living Word in July of 1972. When Jones saw the slick tabloid-sized newspaper, filled with photo features and testimonies, he beamed. “This is really good.”
Within a short time, the Temple would purchase its own presses, set up a corporate publishing entity called Valley Enterprises and make some of its college graduates, including Joyce Shaw, full-time publications workers. They would sleep and eat sporadically, work around the clock and fight deadlines and Jones’s eccentricities. They bit their tongues when Jones ordered them to destroy ten thousand copies because he thought the word “vivisection” would offend some people, though it was applied to the Temple’s rescue of a chimpanzee named Mr. Muggs. (Actually, the chimp had been bought in a pet store.) The publications crew would excitedly inaugurate the Peoples Forum newspaper in fall of 1973, and watch it grow to a circulation of tens of thousands, distributed to many neighborhoods in San Francisco. Jones’s grand plan would be to compete as a third major daily newspaper in the city to the south. But that was in the future. First, he needed more bodies.
Jones always said that religious people made the best members because they were the most easily conditioned to self-sacrifice, devotion and discipline. From the churches of America, he wrested most of his people. For several reasons, the majority of these were blacks. As a group, blacks were traditionally religious. Blacks had suffered more than other racial groups and were more receptive to an egalitarian message. And, like a number of white Protestants, young blacks were seeking “relevance,” activism, even militancy in their churches.
Jones’s recruiting patterns reflected his emphasis on blacks. The church canvassed poor and working-class neighborhoods in San Francisco with leaflets, inviting the public to services at rented and borrowed auditoriums and halls.28 The invitations proclaimed the miracles of Jones and, in alarmist terms, tied the Temple’s future presence in San Francisco to their funding appeal. As part of the come-on, newsletters invited the city folk to bring their children on Bay boat cruises or to Redwood Valley for picnics, swimming and horseback riding. Prospective members were asked whether they wanted Jones to establish a church outright in the Bay Area, to join the leadership of an es
tablished church or to accept an existing pastorship, as though one had been offered.
The Temple used two buildings on Geary Boulevard in the mainly black Western Addition-Fillmore area. When meetings were held at Benjamin Franklin Jr. High School, a top aide to then-Mayor Joseph Alioto greased the skids with school officials. Crowds in the hundreds wedged into the auditorium. Some meetings lasted so long that the Temple provided box lunches. The Temple arranged other services at the Way Auditorium and across town in Bayview-Hunters Point at the Old Opera House. And Jones tried to borrow facilities from other ministers.
Ironically enough, it was the 1968 assassination. of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that presented Jones with his first opportunity to steal black members from established San Francisco churches. When racial feelings heated up following King’s murder, Rev. George L. Bedford, black pastor of Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, invited members of Caucasian churches to come and worship. Jones brought about fifteen of his Temple members to services and asked Bedford for permission to continue the fellowship. Next time, Jones showed up with busloads of members from Ukiah, about 150 in all. The Temple and Macedonia began a Christian exchange program, rotating services between Redwood Valley and San Francisco. The generous Bedford put up Jones at the downtown Hilton Hotel one time and opened his own home to Jones another time. Once, at Jones’s request, he put up a married couple and two young white women—all Temple members—at his home.
At the third service at Macedonia, Jones went into a healing performance, using one of Bedford’s members as a subject. When the member emerged from the restroom and Temple aides displayed a red blob of “cancer” supposedly passed from the rectum, dozens of Bedford’s members watched in awe. Unimpressed, Bedford resolved to stay away from Jones after that. But the damage had been done.
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