Thanks to such enterprising efforts, the Temple soup kitchen dished up an average of about 2,800 meals a month. Transients lined up outside the church basement, sometimes at 7:30 A.M., anxious for a hot lunch served by Temple volunteers. Most guests were white, many were alcoholics, and all were down on their luck. They came for the food, not the proselytizing. Yet Winberg and some others preached and counseled about the evils of alcohol and tobacco. Along with working-class degenerates, now and then a former professional on the skids would pass through the food lines. Once a former doctor from Colorado interrupted his free meal to put a splint on a bum’s broken leg.
The soup kitchen rules were simple: no drinking, smoking or fighting. Belligerent drunks came and went, but people generally behaved, especially during the cold Indiana winters. Sometimes the peace, however, was disturbed by chief cook Rheaviana Beam, Jack Beam’s tall and attractive wife. She could do wonderful things with food, but she acquired a reputation for moodiness and fits of temper. She drove some other church members to distraction, and many steered clear of her. But Archie Ijames broke through to her one day, and found that in her private world, Rheaviana felt unappreciated and insecure, unloved. An emotional and philosophical man, he voiced respect for her tireless work helping others, in spite of her temperamental nature. “We’re inclined to see personality [alone],” he told her in the kitchen. “But God is bigger than personality. He sees those doing the work. And I see you doing the job.”
She turned to face him, tears flowing down her cheeks. “You don’t know how much that means to me. You just can’t know.” Each sensed that something special had happened; they had revealed themselves to each other, and expressed the sort of love that Peoples Temple fostered: a love of common cause, an appreciation of your fellowman. In the Temple climate, a black man and a white woman could love each other as friends, as brother and sister, without sexual byplay, family ties or marriage. That always would prove one of the strongest attractions.
Such touching moments of communication moved Archie Ijames. By increments, he made the Temple his religion—and changed his lifestyle to meet its needs. One day his wife asked him, “If you’re working seven days a week at the restaurant, what about the Sabbath?” He retorted, “I’ll make my church down there with the poor and disenfranchised.” Sabbath or not, the Ijameses would feed the needy. This was the beginning; the distinction between their lives and church life was disappearing.
The home life and church life of the Joneses already had merged beyond separation. When they found one of the Temple members unhappy and covered with bedsores in a nursing home, they brought the woman to their large white duplex on North College near Twenty-fourth Street. Marceline converted her own house into a nursing home, with help from Jim, and, while working an outside nursing job, brought the home up to state standards. Though capacity was twenty-four patients, the integrated nursing home sometimes exceeded that number because it was clean and inexpensive; when the nursing inspector came, extra patients were secreted next door in a church member’s house.
The first home belonged to the Joneses, but a second opened as a church enterprise. Both were profitable and required full-time management. So when Marceline’s father took early retirement at fifty-five, he and his wife moved to Indianapolis to help out. They wound up running the homes and living with Jim and Marceline at 2327 North Broadway in a big brown house.
Although Marceline was happy with the nursing homes, she seemed depressed at times. She confided some of her misgivings to her parents: Jim thrived on all the attention he received from his congregation —so much so that he had transformed their house into a quasi-commune. Though Marceline craved privacy, Jim had brought about a dozen people into their home, including at one point his own mother, who worked as a correctional officer at a state women’s prison. They were Temple members, foundlings and friends; and by their cohabitation they formalized the commingling of their religious and personal lives.
With Jim playing pastor, confessor and counselor, the house was turned over to church-related matters, personal problem solving and, sometimes, to chaos. People came and went, making demands twenty-four hours a day. But young Rev. Jones was enamored of his enlarged family for personal, political and psychological reasons.
He took in people who needed and admired him, who were willing to let him guide their lives by direction and example. At home, on a small scale, he experimented with communalism, already convinced of its virtues as a unifying force, a concentrator of his power and an economizing tool. Yet years would pass before the political climate, the times and the place would allow him to put his prototype into full-scale practice.
FIVE
New Directions
With the determination of the little boy experimenting with churches in Lynn, Jim Jones searched for methods and recruiting grounds that would enlarge and tighten his organization. While he pursued the conventional goals of an aggressive fundamentalist preacher—money and members—he also moved in new directions: toward cultlike control of his people and toward communism under the guise of Christian communalism. Jones was a driven young man. He beat the roads of Indiana and Ohio several days a week, often bringing along a few carloads of his followers. And when he was not visiting and recruiting in places such as Cincinnati and Columbus, Indiana, and South Charleston, he tried to increase his numbers in Indianapolis and to generate income to pay for Temple facilities and new programs.
With his extended family, he always had an ear to bend, someone with whom to share an idea or new plan. And he ran his assistants ragged with all his motoring and noisy marathon services which sometimes went to 5:00 A.M., to the chagrin of the church’s neighbors. Jones would not hesitate to wake his assistants with an assignment or a brainstorm in the middle of the night; he seemed to think that because he did not want to sleep or was in the throes of insomnia that no one else was entitled to sleep either. His dynamo mind ran day and night, with sometimes no more feedback than the television, no more company than a book. One way or another, all his problems—petty and awesome—and all his thoughts were channeled into the growth of his fledgling movement. Yet even dynamos and zealots sometimes exhaust their energies, and Jones did too, with increasing frequency. Eventually his problems would become so serious that Marceline would ask their minister friend, Rev. Wilson, and his wife Audrey to pray for Jim.
Jones’s expansion attempts were those of an impatient and aggressive man. While on a quest for new organizational techniques in the late 1950s, he had read extensively about Father Divine, spiritual father of the gigantic Peace Mission movement. In typically direct fashion, Jim Jones drove to Philadelphia to meet the black cult leader in person. He invited Rev. Wilson along.
Jones hoped to learn something from a sharecropper’s son who had become a self-proclaimed “Dean of the Universe,” god to tens of thousands of followers and lord of a religious empire worth millions of dollars. But most of all, Jones hoped to acquire Divine’s throne; he was acutely aware that the elderly evangelist soon would be departing this earth.
Father Divine had climbed a long, somewhat zany ladder to deification. Born sometime between 1860 and 1880 as George Baker in Savannah River country, he had decided to turn preacher when he tired of handyman’s work in Baltimore. In 1914, Baker—arrested and booked as “John Doe, alias God”—was found to be of unsound mind and evicted from Georgia. The next year, however, he turned up in Harlem with a dozen followers. Divine’s next arrest provided him with his first bona fide miracle: four days after having sentenced “God” to a year in prison and a $5,000 fine for being “a public nuisance,” the judge dropped dead. Informed of the heart attack, Divine nodded forlornly: “I hated to do it.”
The legend spread. By 1936, authorities estimated that his New York-based movement was making $10,000 a week from dozens of business concerns including apartments, restaurants, cleaning shops and two newspapers. In the 1940s, while headquartered in the City of Brotherly Love, the movement picked up momentum and
incalculable amounts of money. Divine purchased hotels, or “Heavens,” around the country’s largest cities and filled them with followers whose names reflected the philosophy of peace, love and docility.
In 1946, the “Heavens” quaked when Divine, then between fifty-five and seventy-five years old and bald-headed, married a twenty-one-year-old blond Canadian stenographer named Edna Ritchings. He eventually silenced murmurings of dissent with a revelation: his late wife, a black woman named Penninah, had approved the marriage and entered the white woman’s body.
Divine—who seldom appeared publicly except to dispel recurring rumors of his demise—reigned from a nineteenth-century mansion on the seventy-three-acre Woodmont estate. It was there that he received Rev. Jones.
The visit went harmoniously because the two men shared concerns about segregation and overpopulation. Divine even invited Jones to deliver a sermon to his followers, and the Mission photographers took photos of the Indiana preacher for an article in Divine’s newspaper, The New Day. Jones noticed another favorable sign: Divine was too old to preach, and instead played tape recordings of sermons from his more robust years. The visit ended with expressions of hope for future fellowship.
On the drive back to the Midwest, Jones’s enthusiasm for Divine upset his traveling companion; Rev. Wilson did not believe Divine was God, and it seemed stupid and scripturally unsound to advocate celibacy as the cult leader did.
But Jones had more than a flirtation with Divine’s ideas in mind. Back in Indianapolis, the preacher lavished praise on the man and his mission. Privately, he confided to his aides a long-range plan: he would succeed Divine, if only Mother Divine would stay out of the way, he said.
Jones prepared for his inheritance by studying tape recordings of Divine’s sermons. He examined more of Divine’s writings. He instructed Russell Winberg, the printer, to run off copies of a religious tract defending Jones’s acceptance of the controversial evangelist, and largely praising him. And he encouraged his aides and congregation to not only give all to Peoples Temple, but also to refrain from sex, in keeping with Divine’s teachings—and only to adopt children.
Some of his own followers became extremely upset when he lauded Father Divine. The religious tract scandalized other preachers who criticized the Temple for supporting a pretender to the throne of God. Then, during the Joneses’ supposed life of celibacy, Marceline turned up pregnant—and Jim had to swallow his pride and announce it to the bemused congregation.
After the initial visits to Father Divine, not-so-subtle changes crept into Jim’s theology and behavior. Troubling as they were to his family and closest aides, these trends could not be attributed to the black evangelist’s influence, as many attempted to do.
One day Mrs. Baldwin rebuked Jim gently when he came flying down the stairs, Bible in hand, declaring: “Mom, this Bible has got to be torn down! It’s full of inconsistencies, and our churches are failing to carry out the great commandment to feed the widows and children and take care of the needy. ‘The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life!’ ”
“Jim,” she said patiently, “that Bible is very precious to me, but I do believe the Holy Spirit makes it alive in our hearts.”
Jim had started reading his Bible again with great intensity, picking it apart with the vigor of a crusader; the list of inconsistencies he compiled would serve him for years. When he began speaking publicly about such things, however, he touched off a firestorm. After all, he was assailing the Word of God, the foundation of belief for Bible-oriented Christians. Many could not tolerate such blasphemy and deserted. More important, those remaining behind were compromised; by allowing Jones to ridicule the Gospel, these fundamentalists had surrendered part of themselves to him.
One Sunday in 1959, twenty-eight-year-old Jim Jones tested them with a fiery sermon in his Delaware Street church. The evangelical rhetoric leaped from subject to subject, as Jones guided his congregation along an emotional journey, from despair at the threat of damnation to ecstasy at the promise of redemption. His voice, his dramatic timing, with exhausting climaxes followed by an almost conversational lull, carried the crowd from one feverish crescendo to another. Into his evangelism, Jones wove themes that indicated the long-range direction of Peoples Temple, and he projected a kind of “us against them” view of the world, enunciated in terms of those who would enter God’s kingdom and those who would not.
There was another tone as well—that of the petulant, egotistical man impatient with the inattentive, pleased when he had the audience firmly within his control. “You ready to go home?” he would shout at one point, mockingly secure in his own power. “Too bad!” At another moment, he warned his listeners to wake up for the healings coming. “Either you endure sound doctrine when I preach it,” he threatened, “or you don’t hear it.”
Then at one point, readopting his pose of humility, he apologized for rambling. Yet upon examination, even Jones’s vagaries possess an uncanny internal logic.
“You need to wash somebody’s feet today, most of you,” Jones thundered from his pulpit. ”Not some little grandma you love, but someone you don’t like at all. I’ll never forget one old lady in our church. She was so starchy. She said, ‘I’m not going to wash feet.’ Finally, we talked her into washing feet, the feet of a friend, and the friend wouldn’t let her....
“And that poor old lady just sat there and sat there, and the blackest Negro woman in my church—she hated ‘em, she hated ‘em so bad she couldn’t stand ‘em—the blackest, ugliest, dirtiest Negro woman in our church”—the crowd laughed—“came up and sat down and said, ‘Wash my feet.’ ” There was more laughter. “And she washed the feet and she got her victory.
“I didn’t speak that to reflect on race. We got a principal and a doctor and a dentist in my church who are Negro. My best and most intelligent people and some of my most forthright of our constituency are Negro—about ten percent—and by far the ten percent of our Negro population got more intelligence than our so-called white people. But in our church we don’t call ‘em white or Negro. We call ‘em by name.”
Jim Jones paused for a moment to gather momentum for the next burst. Then, with his voice, he transported his listeners to a streetcorner. There he was, he told them, at the corner of Market and Alabama ministering to a drunk. The moral: Jim Jones cares about everyone; he is not a hypocritical Christian.
Having aroused their admiration, Jones now challenged his people to do the same, to dedicate everything to the cause. He reminded the congregation of the early days of Christianity, and he drew parallels between Christ’s apostles—who had forsaken their belongings to live communally—and the Temple’s ministers.
“I’m not the pastor. There are four pastors and we get along beautifully. I’m so thankful for just a little bit of it, that touch, that togetherness, that creates a fellowship in the heart. And we need it. It speaks for itself.”
He picked up the volume, suddenly, to roughly quote the Bible: “And they sold their possessions and goods and imparted them to every man as every man had need.” And he boomed a challenge: “Now what are you gonna do with that? Any opinion? No, I didn’t think so.”
“It’s true and it’s pitiful. Communism has sold itself to the possession of the group mind. Only one thing’s gonna counter communism. It has its Messiah. It has its Bible. It has its tomes. And the only thing that’s gonna stop it... is for us to sell what we have and impart them to every man that has need.”
Here was Jones’s proposal: to fight communism with communalism.
“God for some time has been putting it upon our hearts to sell what we have and give it to the corporate community of our church,” he went on. “Our Temple now is starting our restaurant, a mission that will feed people without cost. Running a grocery and no charge for food. We’re asking people to give as God blesses them. No charge for anything because God is free and everything He has is free. It’s been provided. Our aged home, the nicest in the state of Indiana, has been establishe
d on the basis of from each according to his ability to each according to his need.”
Had there been another closet Marxist in the audience that night, surely he would not have missed that most famous of lines from Karl Marx’s 1875 “Critique of the Gotha Program.” But Jones, though borrowing from Marx, played upon the fact that his Christian audience would recall the similarities in the Acts of the Apostles, 4:34-35: “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid at the apostles’ feet; and distribution was made to each as any had need.”
That biblical passage eventually would allow Jones to call Christ the first communist. In the meantime, it allowed him to use religion to bring people to communalism—the best way to keep them in his organization—and ultimately to communism.
He went on. “I know if there weren’t a few people healed here every week... or a different person called out by discernment, I know some of you wouldn’t come to hear me preach.... Some of you don’t like to hear this tonight. But you better get ready to hear a lot more of it... We needed it. Amen.”
Jones concluded his hour-and-a-half sermon with music and a prayer, then spoke in tongues to keep the hard-core Pentecostalists happy. “In the name of the Son of God, Hallelujah! Mura muca shukado da mucada mucada.... Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
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