Gone from the Promised Land

Jonestown in American Cultural History

John R. Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351516907
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

In this superb cultural history, John R. Hall presents a reasoned analysis of the meaning of Jonestown--why it happened and how it is tied to our history as a nation, our ideals, our practices, and the tension of modern culture. Hall deflates the myths of Jonestown by exploring how much of what transpired was unique to the group and its leader and how much can be explained by reference to wider social processes.

PART I

1

Jim Jones

It was Jim Jones who brought people to murder and mass suicide, but who was Jim Jones? Clearly, the man’s life and vision raise certain themes that came into play over and over again in the events leading up to the final carnage. By themselves, I argue, these themes do not explain the final debacle. But the outlook of Jones was like a picture frame around a world where a multitude of hopes and fears, plans, ploys, and agendas came to a head.

Some observers would paint a coherent picture of Jones as the Anti-Christ. Others, among them a few followers who survived Jonestown, believe he was a saint. Perhaps Jones was both, for he was no ordinary man, and the multiple facets of his life reflected a volatile set of contradictions onto his followers and detractors alike. This and the following two chapters explore the frame of Peoples Temple’s world by considering the early life and ministerial calling of Jones, by asking what, if anything, there was to the philosophy of the would-be messiah, and by pondering claims that he was a charlatan, a fraud, or a madman.¹

Hoosier Parents

Some people are born into wealth; others at least inherit a socially de-fined place in the world. Jim Jones had neither. He was born an outsider at the height of the Great Depression, in the Indiana farm village of Crete, in overwhelmingly rural Randolph County, along the Ohio border.

Randolph County had its origins in the arrival of pioneers who settled the first colony of the United States, the Old Northwest Territory. In the early 1800s they filtered north from Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina, and beginning in the 1820s they streamed west along the National Road. For the most part the settlers were at least nominally Protestant. Sometimes they were self-consciously religious. The very first pioneers to settle Randolph County included Quakers who left the piedmont areas of North and South Carolina. Some of them were proslavery, and other pro-slavery migrants from the South settled eastern Indiana too, by moving up the valley of the Whitewater River from its mouth at the Ohio River. But in the antebellum years, many Quakers opposed slavery, and some established stations on the Underground Railroad to help slaves escape from their owners.²

Underground Railroad activity seems to have had an effect on the com-position of the area: by 1860, at the beginning of the Civil War, Randolph County had the highest proportion of Blacks compared to total county population of any county in Indiana, with a total of 825 settled in a series of small communities away from the major towns. After the Civil War the Black population began to decline as younger Blacks abandoned farm life for the cities.

By 1930 the Randolph County population had settled into a relatively stable pattern. The 24,858 inhabitants were 98.9 percent White and native born. Immigrants, mostly from Germany and Canada, made up about half a percent of the population. The remaining half a percent were Blacks, only 136. Even by 1951 there were no Jews, and only a remarkably small 2.6 per-cent of the population were Catholics. The county where Jim Jones was born thus bore the indelible stamp of a White Protestant culture of Quakers, Methodists, Baptists, and other such denominations, with southern as well as northern origins.³

An apocryphal story popular among Kentuckians today has it that the Indiana term Hoosier comes from the question posed by early settlers to one another, trying to pin down origins and social position: ”Who’s yer parents?” Perhaps with justification people of the Hoosier State dispute that story, but it is a telling one for Jim Jones, for it underscores his marginal origins. James Warren Jones was born on May 13, 1931, the only child of James T. and Lynetta Putnam Jones. The father was one of twelve children from a prominent Randolph County family of farmers and schoolteachers, descendants of early Baptist settlers from Virginia and Quakers from Pennsylvania. The mother viewed her husband’s family as “bigoted” and closed minded. “They were just not broad minded about anything,” Lynetta later complained. “They would pick out these facts, and these was the facts and that was the way it was.”⁴

For all the resentment Lynetta Jones felt toward pretensions of social position and scholastic elitism in her husband’s family, she could not fault her husband on those grounds. Despite his family’s upstanding social position, “big Jim” never amounted to much. In the World War he had received a lung injury from mustard gas, and he took up the life of a disabled veteran upon his return. A government check made him a man of meager means, but the war injury left him an “invalid” and a “very bitter, cynical person” in the recollection of his son.

Big Jim, Lynetta, and their only child left their forty- or sixty-acre farm at Crete when they could no longer make a go of it in the height of the Great Depression, probably in 1933 or 1934. They moved to a house next to the railroad tracks in the nearby town of Lynn, which in 1930 had a population of 936, two train lines, and a going casket industry. In these environs James T. Jones spent a good deal of time hanging out at the local pool hall, garnering what respect he could as an old-timer who had served his country. According to a journalism professor who grew up in Lynn, big Jim also belonged to the Ku Klux Klan.⁵

Even before they moved from the farm, the father of Jim Jones seems to have reached the point of life defeat, and it was Lynetta who took responsibility for the family of three, taking what jobs she could pick up, including housework for her neighbors across the Arba Pike. “Finally when everything just seemed to run out” on the farm, she remembers her hus-band “would slump there, and just, i've done all I can do.' He'd burst into tears. 'I've gone as far as I can go.'” The small and wiry Lynetta looked at him with quiet determination: “You cry, my love; I'll whip this [Great Depression] if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

Lynetta Jones felt little in common with her husband’s family: “Some of them harbored a poorly concealed notion that being as fit and able as I was in the skills of survival was unbefitting a female of my size and stature and somehow detracted from the thing they called respectibility.” A woman with straight black hair and purported Cherokee Indian blood, she hailed from Gibson County, near the Wabash River in the southwestern corner of Indiana. She was born to Mary Putnam, a woman from Kentucky married to a tenant farmer named Jesse Putnam. When Lynetta’s father died, their landlord, a local landowner and stave-mill owner named Lewis Parker became the girl’s “foster father,” apparently when she was little more than a child.⁶

Always down to earth, Lynetta Jones spoke in the archaic southern piedmont accent prevalent in southern Indiana, with the same colloquial expressions, run-on sentence grammar, and clipped phrasing that were to mark her son’s “backstage” voice all his life. She obtained some education, at an Arkansas agricultural college and a business college in Indiana, but neither her formal schooling nor the station she attained in her married life rewarded her with the social position that she felt her due. Trapped in poverty and living with a husband with whom, she later recounted, she did not share a bed, Lynetta worked in tomato fields and at factory jobs. During World War II she began commuting to a job with Perfect Circle Corporation in nearby Hagerstown. There Lynetta not only earned a wage but also helped organize workers in the class struggle of labor by night. Her resentment thus found a focus in the privileges of class and her own low station. She struggled mightily for the only child born to her, for whom she desperately wanted better circumstances: “My ambition for my son knew no bounds!” she once explained. Another of her turns of phrase was more foreboding: “I didn't want him to devote his life to just being a slave to the death interest in people.”⁷

Jim Jones’s father had little influence on him, except as an example of failure. The boy was reared as Lynetta’s son. He picked up a great many of his mother’s ways, and carried them with him in his whole life and work. To begin with, Lynetta’s religious legacy was less than conventional. She was a rough and ready woman who smoked and cursed and drank. She mocked people like the Joneses' neighbor in Lynn, Mrs. Kennedy, who Lynetta believed took religion too seriously.

Mrs. Kennedy was a member of the Church of the Nazarene, a Holiness sect opposed to consumption of alcohol and use of tobacco. The Nazarenes had formed at the turn of the century by consolidating several Holiness movement groups. These groups had split off earlier from the Methodist Episcopal Church out of dissatisfaction with the Methodists' emphasis on the social gospel and their suppression of the rollicking camp-meeting-revival worship style in vogue since the beginning of the nineteenth century. As Lynetta Jones put it, the Nazarene Mrs. Kennedy believed in “the hellfire and damnation and on all the brimstone that went with it.” From that churchly perspective, Lynetta suspected the opinion that she herself “was going to hell straighter than a bird could fly.” But Lynetta only laughed at her friend, and tried to set her straight: “Well Myrtle, you're just all tied up with this. . . . No matter what you think it says, it don't say nothing as ignorant as that.”⁸

The mother of Jim Jones was not too taken with the idea of a “sky god” in heaven, but she believed in spirits nonetheless. They abounded in the world and its creatures and their visions. Lynetta always had loved the woods and wild animals and she even had been “rather fond of snakes since early childhood.” The penchant for animals sometimes shaded off into realms of fantasy. Lynetta lived in a somewhat magical world. No sky god, but in the world enchantment lay in the stories of animals, in visions, and in spirits that possess humans. Jim Jones seems to have picked up his mother’s sense of the divine but inexplicable forces of animism. Like her, he was derisive about the “sky god” but believed in forces that shape a world of fate beyond human control.

According to Lynetta’s later account, even the birth of her son was shrouded in deep and mystical circumstances. She had been on the verge of death once, before she was married. Typhoid fever took her mother’s life in 1925, and attacked Lynetta a year later. Her fever came on in the woods, where she awoke “eyeball to eyeball with snakes of all sizes, with some eggs just hatching.” Somehow she made it home, where she lived with her foster father Lewis Parker, by then in his late 60s. When Lynetta’s fever peaked four weeks later, she recalled, she “seemed to go down to the Egyptian River of Death and look it over. . . . There was an Egyptian burial box which could be used as a boat, I thought, and a plank that could be used as a paddle. My mother walked out on the other shore.” “You are not permitted to cross that river yet,” her mother told Lynetta in the dream. “There are two very important things you must do before you come here. Your world is so full of sorrow and sadness, and Lew needs you now that he is old.” In the dream, Lynetta recounted, “I turned to retrace my steps,” and “came to the bed where the sick woman was and found I was the sick woman.”

Lynetta’s strength rebounded upon awakening. She took care of the aging Lew Parker, married James T. Jones, and took her foster father to live with her new husband. “My mind was made up long in advance,” she later recalled, “that my child should be exactly like Lewis Parker even though he was no blood kin.” Five years later Lynetta gave birth to a little boy who had brown eyes just like Parker’s, “though both my husband and myself had blue eyes.” A little over a year later Lewis Parker died back in south-western Indiana, and Lynetta Jones provided the information for the death certificate.

Lynetta Jones later said she had not wanted to marry or bear children. In her recollections, she raised innuendoes about the paternity of her son Jim Jones. The child was born of a feverish vision that linked her dead mother’s wishes with the fate of Lewis Parker, the family landlord and patron who Lynetta said was “the most outstanding character I had ever met in my life.” Her only child had more than the brown eyes of his “godfather”; Lynetta later would proclaim him to reflect the goodness that she saw in Parker: “Nothing was too much for him to do to relieve poverty and need, trouble and unhappiness, wherever he found it,” she said of the man nearly fifty years her senior.⁹

Hoosier Boy

Lynetta Jones had desperately wanted a boy but she was not prepared for the baby who “entered this vale of tears.” He “looked like every nation out in the world but his own, and a little bit of his own too.” She thought, “God forbid, this is gonna be one of the ugliest children.” But she doted over him and indulged him all the same. The child got a bad case of “three months' colic,” Lynetta recalled: “I was constantly tormented over him, and the fact is my insecurity because of my fear that I didn't know how to handle him and how to raise him or rear him right or something, and he was so important to me that 1 was just beside myself in the rearing of him.”

Perhaps because of her anxiety, Lynetta Jones did little to bridle the child, and “he just about always got his way about whatever he wanted to do.” Around town he had the reputation of a little hellion. He could walk around without clothes. He brought animals home and his mother would care for them. He brought tramps home and she would feed them. Eventually he would charge items at the grocery store without permission and his mother resigned herself to paying the bill. She could not give him a “lickin”' for any of his misdeeds, she said. If she tried, little Jim would let out a screech that brought the household menagerie to his side and bowled her over.

The boy’s mother did not have a great deal of time to supervise her child in the first place. She brought her husband and son through the “awful times” of the Depression by working long hours and pinching every penny. As her son put it, “I had less of material comforts, although my mother made every effort to give me what she could.” Even in the midst of poverty she managed to save money for young Jim’s college, hoping for more for him than she had. Lynetta possessed that old-time virtue of thrift that had been learned of necessity, if nothing else, by the early settlers. Jim admired his mother for it, saying in Jonestown at her death in 1977 that she knew “how to make a dollar go. I learned that from her. . . . You can be sure I learned how to make a dollar stretch, and it’s a damn good thing, or we wouldn't all be eating right now.” Like his mother, Jones held down consumption and harnessed cash flow to the accumulation of savings all his life, in a way that mimicked what the sociologist Max Weber once termed “the ascetic compulsion to save” among Puritans and Quakers.¹⁰

Lynetta Jones passed on much of her practical and earthy “religion” of animism, spirit forces, and frugality to her son, but her own ways could not quite contain her son’s spiritual odyssey. The Nazarene Mrs. Kennedy and other neighbors exposed the boy to the range of respectable religious experience available in Lynn, including the Methodist Church and the pacifist Quaker meeting of his father’s family. Mrs. Kennedy was the mainstay; she would “fox him up and take him to the Sunday school and church and all this sort of thing.” But the next thing Lynetta knew, a woman from the local Pentecostal church came calling for young Jim.

The Pentecostal groups had arisen as an almost inevitable extension of the Holiness movement that spawned Mrs. Kennedy’s Nazarenes. Waiting for the millennium in the 1890s, Holiness leaders searched for a “new Pentecost,” in which believers would receive definitive proof of their own salvation in the Holy Spirit, just as the apostles of Jesus had, according to the New Testament’s Acts 2, on the seventh Sunday after Easter. In 1906 in Los Angeles a Black Baptist preacher named Seymour claimed to re-discover the proof of grace. He promoted a doctrine of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, originally set forth by the Reverend Charles Fox Parham of Kansas. Seymour thus served as a major catalyst for the Pentecostal movement: in the revival on Los Angeles’s Azusa Street that was to continue unabated, sometimes night and day, for three years, speaking in tongues became established as the definitive material sign of salvation.

On Azusa Street the movement was racially integrated: Whites, often putting aside deep racial prejudices, sought the laying on of Black hands in order to become filled with the Holy Spirit. During the early phases of Pentecostalism’s rapid growth, interracial worship remained common, but by the 1920s social pressures in the South led to virtually complete segregation of the various Pentecostal denominations.

Pentecostalists were disdained by the more conventional denominations, and sometimes denounced and persecuted, even by fundamentalists, for their immoderate practices, their sometimes outrageous claims about supernatural balls of fire and the like, and their crusades against churches that could not heal, allegedly because they were lost in unbelief. In general the Pentecostal sects attracted the dispossessed and marginal elements of society, sharecroppers, tenant farmers, unorganized factory wage earners, and others who banded together in communities where they could better survive collectively in a changing world from which they often felt excluded.

One of the most interesting analyses of Pentecostal groups, that of W. J. Hollenweger, suggests that they thrived especially among the disenfranchised and the “poor in spirit” who could not easily contend with an increasingly alien, rationalized world. Such people feared being made fun of by outsiders who would be astounded at their inability to contend with modern civilization. In the comfort of their congregations they could ex-press their own social needs “liturgically,” that is, in the vocabulary of salvation. While they prayed for the redemption of the Second Coming, Pentecostalists could practice a form of social welfare in a community that operated outside established channels of charity.¹¹

As a boy, Jim Jones went to Pentecostal services where they praised God in enthusiastic and unregimented ways, looking to befilledwith the Holy Spirit in immediate ecstatic possession of the charismatic gifts described in the book of Acts. Lynetta Jones felt the woman who came to take young Jim to the services was “a zealot” who “got savage in her determination to hang on to” him: she had the boy out at a poor country church “made from scraps o' professionals' [materials]”; she put the boy of eight or ten up in the pulpit, as a “drawing card and a fundraising thing,” and she “hauled him all over the country” on the revival circuit. Religious ecstasy took its toll. When Jim Jones began to jerk in agony in his sleep, “felt snakes and things like this,” Lynetta decided it was enough of the “holy roller” business. One day when the woman appeared “with the devil looking out of her eyes,” to take Jim to services, Lynetta chased her off, and kept her son at home. But for his mother’s intervention, young Jim Jones might have lived the life of a child prophet like the boy marvel Marjoe Gortner.

Decisive as it was, Lynetta’s rescue of her son from the throes of Pentecostalism came too late: Jim Jones already was long lost to the fascination of religion. “I recognized that my father was infinite spirit,” Jones later ...