by Jeff Guinn
Everyone expected him to talk immediately about the eight student defectors, but Jones instead segued into a tale of how, just a few days earlier, “our enemies” tried to take away “Sister Jones’s job,” for once identifying Marceline as “Sister” rather than “Mother,” making her, and himself by inference, one among, as well as above, the rest of them. As Jones told it, Marceline’s bosses believed she was “befriending the poor” too often in her work with state hospitals and care facilities, and so they fired her, claiming “conflict of interest.” But Jones stepped in, he set them straight, and Sister Jones not only got her job back, she was promoted. Standing up for Marceline, doing what was right, almost killed Jones: “[Those] people brought my strokes up, blood pressure up . . . my heart wasn’t worth two cents.” Yet he persevered.
Marceline, onstage beside her husband, asked his permission to speak: “One of the things I wanted to say is, you know we can sit and we can praise our leader for what he is, but the time’s come when we’ve got to become what he is . . . the only difference between him and us is that we’re not willing to live the selfless life to become what he has become.”
Then Jones finally mentioned the eight students, and spoke sorrowfully. These young people now found themselves out in the cruel world: “It’s not going to be much fun out there.” Panicky, confused, they were certain to contact family members or other Temple friends, “so if they call any one of your phones, you tell them, ‘Father loves you, Father cares for you, Father says come home.’ ”
If any or all of the students did return, Jones wanted everyone to welcome them warmly, citing a famous New Testament change of heart: “Let’s remember that Sauls become Pauls. . . . We can still make something of them, if they’ll let us. Have you got that message in your mind and in your heart? . . . If they call, let them know we love them.”
Jones didn’t mention any of the accusations against Temple staff in the students’ letter, or the references to his sex life, gambling that the few family members the young people might have privately shared these concerns with hadn’t mentioned them to anyone else. Instead, Jones gave the wayward young people some credit. They had access to funds in a Temple college account and left the money where it was. “They could have drawn it out without any trouble.” He was making certain that everyone knew this, Jones said, because some of his followers might have erroneously concluded that these traitors were entirely bad, and it was important “to always tell all sides of the story.”
Jones predicted that these errant young people would eventually be overcome by guilt, especially when they realized how much pain and suffering they had caused Jones, their families, and the rest of the Temple membership. “If any of those children call, do not tell them any pain that we’ve had, any suffering we’ve had. I think it might be in their minds sometime that they might try to restore themselves [to the Temple] by trying to, you know, act out against our enemies. . . . They’re going to want to make it up to us. And we don’t want them to do anything wrong.”
The message was effectively delivered and its theme clear—no grudges, no new enemies, love the wayward children, forgive them, welcome them if they came back—and, although there were occasional communications between them and their families, and a few fruitless conversations with Jones himself, they didn’t return. A few among the eight would eventually become active enemies of Jones and the Temple.
Toward the end of the meeting, while engaging in call-and-response with his audience, Jones broached another subject, interjecting it smoothly, planting a seed without undue emphasis. What would become first a gradually recurring, then a dominant, topic in Peoples Temple was mentioned obliquely, but publicly, for perhaps the first time.
Jones said, “I’ll tell you, each of you’ll [count] for a thousand [instead of] one, ’cause you are people who upon the ends of the world have come, wherever you are at, you’re going to make history. . . . It’s destined to be. Now you may not like the kind of history we make, we may be swinging through the sky on a rope . . . but I would rather go down as [abolitionist] John Brown [hanged for leading a pre–Civil War insurrection against slavery] than, who was that fella that sold out? Nathan Hale?”
Someone shouted, “Benedict Arnold.”
“Benedict Arnold. Now, of course, if the British had won, he’d have been a hero. . . . [There’s] a quote I had here. It’s important. It’s very good, from John Brown: ‘Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of millions in this slave country, whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.’ John Brown, [speaking] as he was on the scaffold, ready to be hung after the raid on Harper’s Ferry, the federal arsenal, Virginia . . . October sixteenth, 1859. . . . His demeanor prompted one conservative New Yorker to confide in his . . . journal, ‘One’s faith in anything is terribly shaken by anybody who is ready to go to the gallows condemning and denouncing it.’ And we can do that. We can shake people’s faith in the love of money and racism. We can shake their faith in it, dramatically and tremendously, if we will be willing to go to the gallows for what we believe. I don’t think we’re going to the gallows, but I’m ready. Aren’t you?”
His people stood and cheered.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CONSEQUENCES
Jones’s soft public words aside, the Gang of Eight defections left him determined to exert even more control over his followers. That kind of betrayal wouldn’t happen again.
The new, tougher era started with the same inner circle that had been criticized as too white and too influential. Jones made his expectations of Carolyn Layton, Terri Buford, Jack Beam, Tim Stoen, and some other key members of the Planning Commission clear. They must be more observant and crack down on anyone displaying even the slightest sign of straying. To prevent any Planning Commission members from acting on traitorous thoughts themselves, Jones devised an effective method of ensuring their loyalty. Blank pieces of paper were distributed—some remember Carolyn Layton handing them out—and the P.C. members were instructed to sign their names at the bottom. If any of them angered Jones, he was free to fill in whatever “confession” he liked over their signatures, then display it to the rest of the Temple membership or even the police. Everyone complied. Tim Carter remembers, “It was like a loyalty test. That was the way we looked at it.” The signed pages were kept carefully filed, ready for use if Jones deemed it necessary.
Previously, Jones mostly observed at P.C. meetings. Now he did much of the talking, most of it on some nights, though seldom about Temple programs and goals. Instead, Jones moaned about all the responsibilities placed on him, or else boasted about his sexual prowess, particularly how the women he favored with his attentions enjoyed unequaled carnal bliss. For Jones, this bragging was an effective way to remind everyone of his complete mastery. They were sometimes required to report on their own sex lives and sexual fantasies, occasionally in writing. Most understood that Father wanted these verbal and written responses to take the form of personal tribute. Sandy Bradshaw wrote, “The only person I have had sex with for the last eight years has been J.” This was the kind of kowtowing Jones especially enjoyed—of course, Bradshaw wouldn’t sleep with anyone else. She’d had him, and who else could compare? It was no coincidence that Bradshaw became one of his most trusted lieutenants.
The changes were more incremental for the general members, who had no idea of what took place at P.C. sessions, only that they were rumored to be interminable. There was still considerable fellowship, good times with good friends, and opportunities to help the downtrodden, to offer a socialist example that would encourage others to make the world a better, fairer place, and even the opportunity to travel, the kind of cross-country excursions that were far beyond the means of most ghetto dwellers. Better-heeled members might find crammed buses, bland box lunches, and gas station restroom stops to be annoying, but for many of Jones’s fo
llowers, just the opportunity to get out on the road and see sights beyond the burned-out Watts Street and rat-infested Western Addition tenements seemed miraculous.
In August 1973, the Temple bus fleet, jammed from aisles to luggage racks with excited adults and kids, most of them black, set out from California for Washington, D.C., making stops in Houston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Advance crews blanketed the poorest areas of the cities with leaflets, and auditoriums were filled—it was always thrilling to see strangers’ responses to Father. The nation’s capital, though, was the highlight. Temple old folks and kids wandered wide-eyed around the Capitol Building and National Mall, and then, to the absolute astonishment of onlookers, began picking up trash, doing this chore cheerfully, leaving the area spick-and-span—but not before a reporter from the Washington Post arrived. On August 18, a small item with the headline “The Welcome Tourists” appeared in the newspaper:
The hands-down winners of anybody’s tourists-of-the-year have got to be the 680 wonderful members of the People’s [sic] Temple Christian Church of Redwood Valley, Calif.—who bend over backwards to leave every place they visit more attractive than when they arrived. Like thousands of other tourists, they went calling on the U.S. Capitol the other day, but unlike others who tramp through our town spreading litter helter-skelter, this spirited group of travelers fanned out from their 13 buses and spent about an hour cleaning up the grounds.
One 82-year-old woman who was policing the area at the foot of the Capitol explained to reporter Frank Jones that the members take pleasure in sweeping across the country this way. The church, which has black, white and American Indian members, has already won friends in dozens of cities since its tour left Redwood Valley Aug. 8, and still more areas will benefit by the members’ stop offs on their return trip.
Jones orchestrated the whole thing, having a Temple member posing as a D.C. resident call the Post newsroom and report this amazing act taking place at the Capitol. Reporter Frank Jones was steered to the eighty-two-year-old member who had been prepped in advance to say just the right things. Once the brief mention was published the Temple promptly announced that its members in the caravan had been declared “Tourists of the Year” in the nation’s capital by the prestigious Washington Post.
Eventually, the Temple newsletter was expanded into a full-fledged, professional-looking publication named The Peoples Forum. Until the Temple bought its own, Carlton Goodlett allowed the church to use his newspaper presses; the Peoples Forum editorial staff bickered constantly about each issue’s content, only to find at deadline time that every story had to be approved in advance by Jones himself. He always wanted last-minute changes. Many copies were distributed door-to-door for free. Members with day jobs in the San Francisco and Los Angeles business districts were expected to spend their lunch hours selling copies on the street.
* * *
As Jones’s determination to thwart potential betrayal increased, so did the Temple’s commitment to disciplining its members. The Planning Commission sometimes decreed corporal punishment as a last resort for members who’d committed acts that otherwise would qualify for correction by outside law enforcement. It was one more aspect of the Temple taking care of its own. Occasionally, some P.C. members felt moral lines were being crossed, even with the worst offenders.
Peter Wotherspoon was a pedophile, accepted into Temple membership despite his openly admitted failing. He was informed from the beginning that even the slightest further illicit act with a child would be unacceptable, but he couldn’t resist. A ten-year-old Temple boy reported that Wotherspoon had engaged him in a sex act, and Wotherspoon was brought before the Planning Commission to answer for it. An obvious solution would have been to turn Wotherspoon over to the police, but that ran counter to Temple tradition. Instead, Wotherspoon was taken to a back room and ordered to strip and lay his genitals flat on a table. Then Jack Beam, wielding a length of rubber hose, pounded W0therspoon’s penis and scrotum until they were swollen several times over. Wotherspoon had to be catheterized and lay in bed for days afterward, unable to move. But he was allowed to remain in the Temple, with the understanding that any additional transgression would result in something even worse. Though no commission member questioned the seriousness of Wotherspoon’s statutory rape or that a substantial disciplinary act was required, some were shaken by the barbarity of his punishment.
Even more troubling to several P.C. members was Jones’s brutal treatment of longtime Temple member Laurie Efrein. Unlike Wotherspoon, she committed no crime beyond adoring Jim Jones, and at one P.C. meeting he chose to humiliate her for it.
During a commission meeting, Jones griped that the sexual demands being made on him were just too wearying. He called on some of the P.C. members who’d been with him. Efrein hadn’t. Quite a few Temple members felt that she had a crush on Jones, and hoped at some point he’d have sex with her. Now Jones turned his attention to Efrein. He told her to stand, and demanded that she explain to the rest of the group what she thought she had to offer Jones sexually. Then he ordered her to take off her clothes.
Efrein complied—disobeying could have been interpreted as a traitorous act. When she was naked, Jones said that she’d “been coming on to [me]. . . . If I had a list of the people I didn’t want to fuck, you’d be on top of the list.” He demanded that Efrein admit she wanted him to die. After Jones verbally abused her some more, Efrein was required to remain naked for the remainder of the meeting, which lasted another few hours. A few weeks later, Sharon Amos called Efrein aside and explained that Jones was sorry for what had happened—it had been an attempt to provide her with “personal therapy.” Efrein replied, “It’s all right,” and remained a loyal follower.
None of the Planning Commission members who were upset by Jones’s treatment of Efrein criticized him for it, either directly or in private conversation with each other. Letting Jones blow off steam, even in such questionable ways, was preferable to the risk of him becoming overwhelmed by constant stress and breaking down. So they praised him for everything he did, and agreed with all he said. Jones fed off that; almost forty years later in a speech at Bucknell University, Stephan Jones said, “My father’s image of himself resided completely in his perception of other people’s perception of him . . . if you’re surrounded by a lot of people, who . . . regardless of what they’re thinking, are showing you that you’re okay and not only are you okay, but you’re the cat’s meow, you’re not going to get better.” And Jones didn’t.
His new, sterner approach extended to the rest of the Temple members. Public meetings with their emphasis on social justice remained the same, but some of the discipline doled out at Planning Committee sessions spilled over into the private meetings. Father called members “on the floor” to answer for relatively minor transgressions—smoking, misbehavior in school, exhibiting bourgeois behavior—and announced a penalty. These might entail staying up all night cleaning Temple bathrooms, or a few extra hours of other church chores. Some were inventive—a youngster caught with cigarettes had to smoke a cigar in front of the whole congregation, and his resulting nausea amused everyone. But now there were, occasionally, “licks” administered, a whack or two on the ass with a board. Most of Jones’s followers were white working class or black lower class, and they were already familiar with corporal punishment. “To me, a swat on the rear really wasn’t much,” Alan Swanson remembers. “I thought, so what?”
But it escalated. Swanson wasn’t put off by licks, but he was appalled when, in a private Redwood Valley meeting, Jones ordered a woman who’d allegedly broken some rule to have her hands tied and then tossed into the swimming pool. She was left to gasp and struggle for a few moments, then pulled out. “I started wondering, ‘What if he does that to me sometime?’ ” Swanson recalls.
Yet some former members, repulsed by much of what Jones did, caution that physical punishment was only used as a last resort.
“At least 80 percent of all problems in the Temple were not even br
ought up (in public meetings),” Tim Carter says. “Step one, if somebody screwed up, was counseling. Step two was more counseling. Step three, you were called up on the carpet. Sometimes being called up in front of everybody, that humiliation, worked where counseling didn’t. I remember one boy, eleven or twelve, had watched his father murder his mother. This kid was very antisocial, in fact he was a bully. He got one-on-one counseling in the Temple for years, just everything the Temple knew how to do, and he was never brought up until 1976 in San Francisco when he got a spanking, five whacks. And after that, he changed. The discipline worked where love hadn’t. That kid only responded to fear.”
Jones was careful not to become legally liable for physical punishment of children. When youngsters under eighteen were disciplined, their parents (or Temple legal guardians) signed releases that permitted the kids to be beaten.
Eventually, Jones began ordering occasional boxing matches during private services. A transgressor would be instructed to put on boxing gloves, then fight another, usually tougher, member of the congregation. Sometimes, the person being punished would have to box several others in succession, until, in Jones’s estimation, he or she had absorbed enough punishment. Many onlookers cheered—Father’s justice was being administered. Those who felt differently questioned their own reactions.
“We individual Temple members had no real authority, but we weren’t mindless robots,” Tim Carter says. “We willingly gave up some freedom for the greater goal. If you got upset with something, with Jones, you still felt respect for others in the Temple and you’d think, ‘If this is wrong, these other very intelligent, very decent people wouldn’t be here, so, therefore, I must be wrong.’ ” The boxing matches and the beatings with a board or rubber hose went on, not in every private meeting, but frequently enough that they were not an uncommon occurrence.
Some members, put off by the harsh discipline or by other Jones edicts (posted notices sometimes concluded, “Nothing is to be said in public or private in opposition to this policy as it was put into effect by Father”), tried to leave. Most found it difficult to get away. The problems involved in defecting began with money. Most dissatisfied members were destitute. If they lived communally, they’d turned over all that they owned, including paychecks if they had outside employment. Everyone was reduced to minimal personal possessions, and bank accounts were discouraged. Moving away from Redwood Valley or to some other neighborhood in San Francisco or Los Angeles required deposits on rent and start-up utility costs. Turning to relatives for money or a place to stay was often impossible. Jones actively discouraged contact with outsiders, especially kin who had not chosen to join the Temple. Many members had already been estranged from parents or siblings even before they decided to follow Jones.
