In early 1973, Jones approached Mike Touchette, a college student whom he had earlier selected to be a companion to his own son Stephan. Touchette was about twenty, with the clean-cut looks of an athletic fraternity boy. Jones told the young man that he had been watched closely and others had vouched for his trustworthiness. Jones said he was pleased with Touchette’s church work and wanted him in p.c.
Mike had progressed a long way since a first visit from Indiana. His entire family—a half dozen of them—had made the big move to California in two stages in 1970 and 1971 after several years of anguished indecision. The years transformed Mike’s life. He had first discovered the humanity of black people—as people—during that earlier stay in Ukiah in the summer of 1966. One image had stuck with him: Jimmy Jones, Jr., plopping himself on a towel near the Golden Rule pool and saying, “I wanna work on my tan.” Now Mike was married to a pretty young black woman, Archie Ijames’s daughter Debbie. He had performed commendably as Stephan’s companion, as a driver and personal aide to Jones and as a security guard at general meetings. And he had sacrificed football and track for the cause. A year earlier, Jones had privately talked with him and found him receptive and knowledgeable about the prison movement, George Jackson, the Vietnam war and other topics. He also explored Touchette’s attitudes about homosexuality, perhaps to test his tolerance and humility.
Now, Jones flattered him with an invitation to join p.c. It appealed to Touchette because he believed, as Jones said, that p.c. planned the strategy and direction of the Temple. Besides, it would be another shared experience with his friends on the commission, Wayne Pietila and John Biddulph.
Touchette joined as others had joined, feeling honored and rewarded. Once inside, he saw contradictions that he either repressed or could not act upon, out of fear or faith in Jones. The minister would recline on a couch with blankets and pillows, stretched out comfortably while dozens of others packed into a tiny room, most sitting on the floor. Next to “Father” stood a table with juices and other drinks, and a platter with cheese, turkey, chicken breasts, sliced beef or the like. Jones usually munched on peanuts to replenish his “burned-off” protein, and constantly “flushed” his kidneys with fluids because of a urinary tract problem. Jones would order the platter passed around, yet everyone politely declined. Father, because he took everyone’s problems upon himself and drove himself around the clock, needed the fuel more than anyone else, as he also needed the pills always at hand.
Usually, catharsis ate up the meeting time. Hardly anybody except those in the inner circle seemed to be immune, and Jones would even talk about them behind their backs. Marceline attended the meetings infrequently, and when she did, Jones would build her up one minute and tear her down the next. Archie Ijames was humiliated at least once, and the old Becky Beikman adoption matter reappeared with new wrinkles. But often Archie, the diplomat, would get away with going against the grain. Though potbellied Jack Beam oftentimes would lead the lambasting with his usual bombast, he was not spared from attacks either. Tim Stoen, excused to work at his office, would show up very late or not at all.
Almost everyone was poised, dreading an attack. Many got their lashing. Jones made it clear that defending anyone else, especially a friend or a loved one, was forbidden. It would undermine the whole concept of catharsis, allow the person to avoid “confronting himself.” This purging of ego was supposed to make one a better socialist, but members could not escape the pain of being cursed and criticized by brothers and sisters in the cause. Often the sting did not stop when the session ended. A person never could be 100 percent certain about his tormentors again. Friends, spouses and lovers were divided by degrees.
It became all too apparent after a while that Jim Jones, though he sat back as others brought up people for criticism, was choreographing the encounters. Sometimes he would pass a note or would be so indiscreet as to point at someone. Instantly, his closest aides were interrogating, humiliating, ridiculing the target.
Some people were on the receiving end more often than others. Once Jones approached Touchette and asked him to “bring up” Grace Stoen for failing to raise John properly. Touchette felt sympathy for Grace, yet a request from Jones was a command. Touchette thought Grace had been verbally abused too often already, badgered to tears over her son John: people even criticized her for failing to hold up her little son at meetings, to point out Jim Jones and say; “That’s your father”—an ambiguous lesson, since Jones was known as “Father” to all his followers. During one session, Jones seemed to have a heart attack as Grace was ostracized. That made others even more angry with her.
In a number of such attacks, Jones would fall back, clutching his chest. He was cut to the heart, he moaned; he had wanted Grace to get an abortion but she had refused. His attendants would quickly give him oxygen or nitroglycerin pills. As much as anything, these so-called heart attacks seemed to be brought on by his own manipulative bent. Once in a while, the nurses supposedly would draw a pint of his blood to stimulate him and thin his blood. Jones would lift up the blood for all to behold: “This blood is so good that if they could put it into sick people, they would be healed.”
Sometimes Tim Stoen was present when Jones claimed John was his own flesh and blood. Tim would say nothing to contradict his pastor. The young prosecutor’s behavior convinced some people that John was indeed Jones’s biological, not just spiritual, offspring. Within the decade, many would put their lives behind that very claim.
EIGHTEEN
Lourdes on Wheels
For some time, Jones had been recruiting in California’s metropolitan areas. Weekend bus trips established strong constituencies in San Francisco and Los Angeles as well as satellite congregations in almost a dozen lesser cities. By 1972, the Temple was calling Redwood Valley the “mother church” of a statewide religious movement. Moving the seat of power into an urban area seemed a strategic necessity. The Ukiah area afforded no room for expansion, and bus trips did not build loyal congregations.
On September 3 and 4, 1972, the Los Angeles temple was blessed and dedicated as thousands witnessed scores of revelations and healings. The imposing brick Moorish-style complex that had once housed the First Church of Christ, Scientist was located at the corner of Alvarado and Hoover in the heart of Los Angeles, within easy driving range of Temple believers in the far-flung metropolitan area and largely black suburbs. The dedication provided a spectacular kickoff.
“During the Sunday meeting, one elderly brother was felled by a stroke,” according to a Temple announcement. “While the Pastor was ministering to others, registered nurses ... rushed to give aid and comfort, but could detect no signs of life! Pastor Jim Jones then came ... and reached down and said, ‘This is our new church in Los Angeles. This cannot happen here! I am the Temple of the Holy Ghost. I command you to arise!’ ... The man bolted back into consciousness, ... becoming the 40th person to return from the dead in public meetings this year. Praise God!”
From the start, the Los Angeles temple was set up chiefly as a way station and recruitment center. Los Angeles was much bigger than San Francisco and included large black communities in the center city, Watts, Compton and elsewhere. Jones set up a permanent staff there and showed up with his busloads of northern California members every other weekend. Vast collections helped keep the Temple growing, and the number of attendees figured heavily in Temple’s false claims of twenty thousand members statewide.30 But the real commitment came when Los Angeles-area blacks began moving to the north. Four hundred miles up the jagged California coast, a mere two-hour drive from Ukiah, lay Jim Jones’s city of conquest.
The Temple descended on the hilly city with the missionary zeal of the Franciscan padres and the naked ambition of the Forty-niners. To get people to the church, healings were promoted in the most sensationalistic way. But that put the Temple into a sort of Catch-22. Healings tended to draw right-wingers and religious nuts—the very sorts of people to keep out of a closet socialist group. People who prese
nted themselves as radical, particularly the whites, were screened closely too. The ever-present specter of infiltration became an obsession; Temple members believed that someday the government, through the FBI, CIA or another agency, would try to destroy “the most promising hope for world socialism.”
When an interested person came to the heavy front doors of the San Francisco temple, he or she would not simply pass unmolested into the inner areas of the building. All newcomers were met at the door by a mostly white greeting party assigned to chat with them and size them up. In the lounge, various counselors further screened potential members, as subtly as possible. Based on written thumbnail evaluations, people were shunted to the counselor best equipped to handle their type.
The interrogators asked in a friendly and conversational manner about the newcomer’s background. Those flagged as troublemakers were allowed to stay to chat in the lounge, but they were told it was a closed meeting. “We’ll call you for the next meeting,” they would be told, then never phoned.
As a rule, moderates could attend the first meeting unless they had terrible personality problems. A victim of circumstance, such as a black drunk or drug addict, most likely would be admitted. In fact, few blacks were barred, except rigidly religious people who might rebel upon hearing Jones’s blasphemy and profanity.
Attendees each were assigned an interpreter of sorts to sit with them. The escorts explained the rationale behind Jim Jones’s cussing, or his dancing on the Holy Book, and they also observed the neophyte’s reaction to such things and to the political and social content. Plenty of religious people, especially older blacks, stomped out. Jones’s aides tried to intercept them so they would not leave angry. Once, a woman was furious about Jones’s praise of Marx. Cartmell assuaged her by saying, “Jim didn’t say ‘Marx.’ It was ‘Mark’ as in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”
After the first meeting, people desiring to join were asked to come back. They were expected to attend five consecutive Sunday meetings before acceptance. By the second meeting in the upstairs, high-ceilinged auditorium with the elevated podium, each person would be adopted by a sort of guardian angel. The newcomer could select a seat by himself, but someone would watch discreetly from a distance; any comments were added to a three-by-five-inch evaluation card. The newcomer would be allowed to stay for the Sunday potluck dinner in the downstairs dining hall, which gave people a chance to evaluate one another and get acquainted.
Between the third and fifth week, the newcomer was checked out as thoroughly as possible. He could expect to lose some of his garbage to Temple trash sifters, or be called for a phone poll or some other ruse designed to weed out agents and conservatives. Temple ferrets looked for negative or incompatible reading habits, attitudes and lifestyles. By the fifth week, the recruit received a membership card to be shown at the door before services. Later he would be directed into a church program, or job.
In its own ghostly blue light, the convoy ate up miles and miles of blacktop. Eleven big Greyhound-type cruisers, with destination windows reading “Temple,” ran California freeways every weekend and the nation’s interstates quarterly. In the space of several years, the church had advanced from charter buses to a few used clunkers to a trim fleet of large passenger buses housed in a well-equipped garage that looked like a small airplane hangar. These mobile and highly visible signs of rising fortunes were themselves one of the most important recruiting and fund-raising tools.
From the outside, nothing differentiated Bus No. 7 from the rest of the diesel-powered fleet. But the flagship cruiser was Jim Jones’s personal bus, outfitted with armed guards and special creature comforts. Having seen Jones trying to nap on the back row of the bus in his rumpled clothes, some of his aides closed off the last few rows of seats with a partition. So that Jones could shave and freshen up before his next sermon, they put in a tiny sink. They installed a small bed with protective metal plates at the head and hung curtains on the windows. The furnishings were then rounded out by a clothes closet, an ice chest and a shortwave radio. When Jones found out about his relatively posh accommodations, he acted furious at this affront to his egalitarian principles. He accepted them nonetheless.
Getting close to Father was as desirable on the road as it was at home. Those assigned to Bus No. 7 were privileged. Naturally, the inner circle was allowed to share the bus with Jones, as was the Jones family. For Jones’s fellow passengers, the monotony of the trip was broken when he emerged from his compartment to joke and visit. The sound of Jim’s laughter—as high-pitched and as cackly as a midwestern granny’s—pushed their own laughter to deafening extremes. Fat Patty Cartmell would team up with Jack Beam for some slapstick, being loud, witty and nearly lewd. Tickled, Jim Jones would lead the applause as they played off each other, encouraged by their captive audience. Jack would ham it up as Geraldine, the Flip Wilson character; Patty often poked fun at her own obesity.
When Jones retired to his compartment to rest, the others quieted down as well, though now and then a woman would slip into Jones’s private boudoir. But little John Stoen, just a few years old, was precocious. Late one night, as the buses carried slumbering members between San Francisco and Los Angeles, John sat in deep thought for several miles, apparently not happy to be the only one awake. He marched up to the front of the bus and picked up the driver’s intercom CB. “Come in. Come in!” he called. “All Peoples Temple, attention please!” The drivers on all the other buses responded quickly, assuming some emergency was at hand.
“Drivers, awaken your people,” John commanded. “Tell them Father loves them every one and no harm will come to them. Ever. Then tell them to go back to sleep again.” The drivers followed the orders; everyone’s spirits lifted.31
On bus trips, Sandy Bradshaw and other staff maintained positions outside Jones’s parlor. Their leader often required secretarial services and other assistance. Jones would pop out of his compartment unannounced at all hours to ask them to take dictation or write down notes for tasks that had to be performed as soon as the buses stopped. There was time to do recommended reading, such as “Introduction to Socialism,” but generally the exhausted staff women catnapped when they could.
Jones’s clock-be-damned style of administration dazzled his aides. From a dead sleep, he could get up and rattle off a letter of several pages, or distill a convoluted problem into a precise solution. His thoughts cascaded; his decisions and commands made sense. But his demands placed his secretaries under great stress as they struggled to keep up. In turn, Jones tried to show his appreciation. Except when exhausted or ill, he always was patient and took care to thank them.
Jim Jones bragged that the Temple never would embark on a cross-country trip that did not net $100,000 to $200,000, and he told Richard Cordell, one of his early adherents, that a million dollars a year was a realistic goal. Still, even with the tremendous loyalty of Temple members, it was a chore to gather seven hundred people to fill eleven buses; and sometimes Jones would have to settle for trips with three or four buses.
In the early 1970s, Temple buses traversed the nation a few times a year, making one- and two-night stands in the largest cities. During a stopover in Washington, D.C., the Temple called on California congressmen and a lengthy and laudatory description of the Temple was placed into the Congressional Record in June 1973 by Democratic Representative George Brown. The praise came after the church donated several thousand dollars to California newspapers “in defense of press freedom.” During the stopover, the Washington Post, in an editorial page item on August 18, 1973, provided still further kudos for the Temple’s public relations folder: “The hands-down winners of anybody’s tourist-of-the-year award have got to be the 660 wonderful members of the Peoples Temple... this spirited group of travelers fanned out from their 13 buses and spent about an hour cleaning up the [Capitol] grounds....”
Inconveniences and sacrifices notwithstanding, Temple travelers derived benefit from their trips. Whatever Jones’s ulterior motives, many of his peop
le were being afforded their first opportunity to see the United States, to visit the nation’s capital and meet their Congressmen in person. They felt pride in being part of a recognized group. For many, the collective identity helped erase lifelong feelings of powerlessness.
Travel conditions, however, bordered upon the inhumane. At rest stops, Temple members were reduced to bathing in sinks. They gobbled their food in transit, sandwiches of cheese and peanut butter on day-old bread, cold cans of chili or ravioli. A hot meal was as rare as a warm bed. Some people actually sought out sleeping space in the unventilated luggage compartments under the buses because that was one place for sleep uninterrupted by the frequent offering calls that Jones made over the CB radios.
Two, three and even five collections were taken each day as they traveled between cities. Telling them “The ends justify the means,” Jones asked his collectors on each bus to use various ruses to keep the travelers reaching into their purses and wallets. Sometimes, the buses would stop and passengers would be told that they needed an inflated amount of money to get across a toll bridge or to make repairs on a bus. The buses would sit until the collections satisfied Jones.
Not even the poverty-stricken were excluded from these desperate pleas for money. Some members actually competed to see who could donate the most. Even people working menial jobs or on government assistance were pleased to part with their money. Some bragged. They were supporting an institution that belonged to them. They sought the approval of their leader, and their comrades. No one wanted to feel or appear greedy or selfish. And no one who sacrificed a great deal wanted to look across the aisle at a tightwad or a holdout.
The pressure did not cease when the bus engines cooled off. Advance teams had set up services and leafletted in cities all along the way. Ads were placed in local newspapers and on local religious radio stations. In the lobbies or outside auditoriums, the Temple set up tables to peddle pictures of Jim Jones, holy oil blessed by him and other religious artifacts. And people who did not know Karl Marx from Harpo Marx came to see what the leaflets promised:
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