Grace Stoen, one of Jones's closest aides for many years before she quit the temple in 1976, explained Jones's elaborate system for gathering information that he used in these readings. "It wasn't until after I left the church that I found out how he did it," she said. "He had a whole staff of people, about six women, and when you entered the church you had to give them your name, address and phone number. Then, once the services began, before Jim came out the staff would go and call up the numbers and say, 'Hi, we're doing a survey and we would like to ask you some questions.' That's how they got the information, then he had it all handy when he called people out during the service."
The technique worked well enough to impress the majority of those in weekly attendance; and when more persuasive displays were needed, Jones frequently called upon loyal members planted in the audience to fake even more impressive cures, to testify that Jones had retrieved them from wasted lives of alcoholism, drug addiction, or prostitution, and to provide heartfelt confirmation of Jones's extrasensory abilities. But always, despite his grand theatrics, Jones's most powerful ploy was the direct appeal he made to each potential convert. "He had a different faith and a different message for everyone he dealt with," said one observer. "He was able to hook in with each one in an individual way."
Grace Stoen recalled the breadth of Jones's preaching expertise. "He was good-looking and he had charisma," she said. "He would rush onto the stage and everyone would clap. Then in the course of the meeting he would do a little religious stuff for the religious people, a little political stuff for the political people, for the real intellectuals he would become intellectual -- at my first meeting, instead of reading the gospel he read the San Francisco newspaper -- and for the common people without much education, he would make a very emotional appeal. Jim Jones had the ability to speak to a thousand people and 999 would get something out of it."
Jones's weekly prayer meetings in San Francisco and Los Angeles were aimed primarily at recruiting blacks who were already familiar with his religious format. At the People's Temple commune in Redwood Valley, however, Jones's fervid preaching and other spiritual pyrotechnics took a back seat to his interracial agricultural community. It was there, at the Ukiah commune in the late sixties and early seventies, that Jones had little trouble converting many of the white members who were to become his top temple executives.
"My husband had always been into social work and working with the underprivileged, and we had five kids of our own who we were concerned about," said Jeannie Mills who, with her husband, Al, served on the People's Temple Planning Commission until they left the group in late 1975. "So we went up to Redwood Valley to see this man who, we had been told, was helping young people get off drugs. What we found was a group of caring, loving, friendly, warm people who immediately accepted us just exactly as we were. These people didn't care what I had. They were more concerned with who I was. My children had instant acceptance; people loved them. The other kids came over to them and were surprisingly friendly. My kids loved it and my husband and I were really impressed with the social structure of the group, so we joined to be a part of a cause that was doing good."
Once they joined the temple, most of the people we interviewed told us, their first two or three months of communal life were rich with emotional rewards and inspiration. Toward the middle to late seventies, however, members began to notice gradual changes in the orchestration of their daily lives and the conduct of temple affairs. In the manner of almost every cult, members were soon cut off from their families. A black woman who never joined the temple recalled the break that took place within her family. "We used to be very, very close, but after they [her relatives] joined Jim Jones, they wouldn't talk to us. Anytime I wanted to see them I would have to go down to the church and ask them to please bring them out. Sometimes they would let me bring them back to my house, but they would always have this anglo girl accompany them so we were never alone."
Jeannie Mills explained to us how Jim Jones succeeded in dissolving family bonds. "He did it slowly. He would say, 'You should always spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with me,' and eventually we had to clear any visits to our relatives. Pretty soon he started saying, 'Your relatives don't care for you. We're the only ones who care for you.' Then he would say, 'If you have to go see them, just ask them for money.' -- but that would cause them to cut you off! Eventually, he denounced the whole world outside People's Temple as unenlightened and uninformed. 'The only real caring people are in the group,' he said. 'If you really cared about society, you'd be in People's Temple.' "
Similarly, Jones's financial requests of his members grew in stages. Until the early seventies, the temple maintained a policy of not exacting forced offerings from its members. Then, citing the practices of other churches, Jones inaugurated a tithing policy of 10 percent, which soon increased to 25 percent of each member's income. Then additional funds were solicited, supposedly to build a senior citizens' center or a school for retarded boys, and the church started selling special healing oils and pictures of Jim Jones in ornate lockets. Finally, Jones ordered members to turn over everything they owned as a measure of loyalty and devotion to the temple. Also during this time, individual work loads were increased to the point of exhaustion. As in other cults, great physical stress was placed on each member in the name of increased service to the church and its urgent mission. Members were required to go on frequent church campaigns throughout the state and across the country, and they were regularly subjected to marathon sermons that kept up for six hours or more. The pressure of hard work, arduous travel schedules, and Jones's interminable indoctrination sessions succeeded in monopolizing most members' attention and energy, leaving them little opportunity to stray or even doubt. As temple life became more demanding, each member's capacity to choose or reject it became more clouded.
"Nothing was ever done drastically," recalled Grace Stoen, "that's how Jim Jones got away with so much. You slowly gave up things and slowly had to put up with more, but it was always done very gradually. It was amazing, because you would sit up sometimes and say, wow, I really have given up a lot. I really am putting up with a lot. But he did it so slowly that you figured, I've made it this far, what the hell is the difference?"
A most revealing example of Jones's gradual manipulation can be seen in his attitude toward the Bible. From the beginning, in typical cult style, he relied upon subtle distortions to soften and remold his converts' beliefs. Jeannie Mills recalled how this technique made her a firm believer in Jones:
"For the first four months we heard the same sermon about errors in the Bible," she said. "He cited Matthew 1:16 and Luke 3:23, which gave two different genealogies of Jesus. Then he handed out this whole long list of errors, and I went home and checked them out and it was just incredible. God wasn't the sweet, loving God I had always thought him to be. Here I saw he was murdering and commanding people to murder and to take young women for handmaidens and do other atrocious things. I was really disillusioned. When he destroyed my Bible, it was as if he had just pulled the rug out from under me. There I was with everything I had believed for thirty years gone. So I figured, yeah, he must be right. And I saw that he was doing all these very humanitarian, loving things, and I thought, well, by their fruits ye shall know them."
In 1976, as Jones's attacks on the bible grew more vicious, he prompted one woman to quit the temple. "I left when he denied God," she said. "At first he preached Christ just like anybody else would, but then he cursed God and called Mary a whore and he threw the Bible across the church. He said he was going to destroy the Bible, that it was nothing but a paper idol. Until then I had really believed in him. I thought he was a prophet come from God."
While the temple grew rapidly -- accumulating wealth, membership, and political power -- Jones's declarations and behavior became more extreme. He stepped up his preaching about imminent earthquakes and nuclear holocausts and of a coming race war between blacks and whites. He established a "relationship committee" to pre
side over his methodical splitting up of marriages and families, and, while he declared sex evil, he solicited temple members to engage in relations with him as a sign of their loyalty. Jones carried on impulsive affairs with white female members of his inner circle, and pursued illicit relationships with other members, both men and women, as well as with people outside the temple.
Yet, despite his own sexual profligacy, at one point Jones directed church members to swear off all sexual relations, even with their own spouses. According to Jeannie Mills, Jones's defense of abstention was based on ideological, not spiritual grounds.
"He considered sex to be counterrevolutionary," she told us. "He justified it by saying that when Mao Tse-Tung went on his Long March all of his soldiers gave up sex because you just can't have a revolution when your heads are filled with sexual desires. He said, 'We're in the middle of a revolution, and you should all be willing to put aside sex until we're able to live in our beautiful utopia.' "
Jones's prohibition against sex was heeded by much of the temple membership, but like so many of his arbitrary rules, it also gave rise to numerous acts of transgression and disobedience. Jones was deeply disturbed by any violations of his edicts, however minor. In the beginning, in Redwood Valley, discipline was mild and evenly meted out. Mischievous children were spanked, goldbricking members were chastised verbally. But in the early seventies, Jones's punishments became less evenhanded, and progressively more severe to the point of brutality. A young child who had stolen a cookie or two teenagers caught holding hands might be beaten repeatedly with a heavy wooden paddle known as the "Board of Education." Older members deemed slack in their duties might be compelled to fight in "boxing matches," sometimes for several hours, with up to three or four bigger, stronger opponents. Others, particularly the children, would be subjected to the "blue-eyed monster" -- a secret disciplinary weapon that was said to be a kind of electric cattle prod that sent a severe shock through the child's body. Jones rarely administered these punishments himself. He required members of his choosing to carry out the beatings. The entire temple membership was called on to witness and be warned.
In 1973, Jeannie and A1 Mills were forced to watch as their teenage daughter, Linda, was brought up before the commission. Linda's response, as well as their own, gives some insight into the extent of Jones's influence.
"She hugged a girl in the parking lot who hadn't been to church for several weeks, so Jones decided that Linda was a traitor," Jeannie Mills told us. "They beat her seventy-five times with the board, and she screamed bloody murder, but when they finished she said, 'Thank you, Father,' which was what everybody had to say after a beating. When we got home that night, Linda told us that it was the most positive experience she ever had, and I thought, as horrible as this seemed, as sick as it made us, this was the first time I had ever heard Linda say she had learned a lesson."
According to Mills, it was Jones's response that determined how the members would react to the various disciplinary measures. "We all watched Jim's cue. If Jones laughed, we laughed. If he got incensed, we got incensed. If you looked disapproving or if you even frowned, one of the ushers would turn your name in to Jones and you'd get called up for discipline yourself."
In addition to physical correction, Jones had other ways of keeping people in line. In Planning Commission meetings, he asked members to sign "loyalty oaths," in which they confessed to having committed criminal acts or to being homosexuals or lesbians. He made them sign statements swearing that they were willing to kill enemies of the temple and then commit suicide, and he instructed members that if they should ever leave the temple and attempt to expose him, he would release the documents to discredit them.
And always, from the beginning, Jones threatened the lives of potential defectors. "You know, after '73 we didn't stay in because we loved the group," said Jeannie Mills. "We stayed in because we knew we would be killed if we left. Jones had told us hundreds of times, privately, publicly, in Planning Commission meetings -- it was common knowledge -- that if you left the church you'd be killed."
Several years later, when the Millses finally did leave the church, Jones's henchmen seemed bent on carrying out his orders. "We lived in cold terror for about a year," said Jeannie Mills. "They put harassing letters on our porch. They called us in the middle of the night. We had cars tailing us. Jones used any tactic he could think of, figuring that if he could keep us scared, we would be quiet. And in most cases it worked. People who left him twenty years ago in Indianapolis are still afraid to speak out."
These acts of physical punishment, coercion, and, finally, repeated unconfirmed reports of murder underscore the failure of Jones's haphazard attempts at mind control. For the most part his methods were randomly selected and crude. He was less of a mind-bender than an arm-twister. Because he had no systematic technique for controlling his members' internal thought processes, Jones was constantly forced to control them from without.
"What was amazing was that he would beat these people, and it would hurt, really hurt," remembered Grace Stoen, "but they would still go ahead and disobey his rules. Then, as each form of punishment would lose its effect, he would introduce a new one that was more drastic. This really bothered Jim Jones, the fact that he could not obtain that control."
Ironically, Jones was losing control over his own members as he appeared to be gaining influence in the outside world. In 1975, Jones mobilized his followers to deliver a bloc of votes that helped liberal Democrat George Moscone become mayor of San Francisco, a favor that was returned when Jones was appointed chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority. Flexing his newfound political muscle, Jones used his position to make other contacts, collecting a file of personal letters from such luminaries as First Lady Rosalynn Carter, Vice President Walter Mondale, H.E.W. Secretary Joseph Califano, Jr., and Senators Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson, which he later used as letters of entrée and endorsement in Guyana and elsewhere (although some of those letters now appear to have been forged).
With each social and political gain, the focus of Jones's attention shifted further away from his people and his temple. He became obsessed with himself, playing his role of "Dad" and "Father" to the point of irrationality. Eventually, Jones not only claimed to be God, but, at various times, the reincarnation of Christ and Lenin, and he came to demand from his followers total identification with his mushrooming self-image. "No matter what you did as an individual," recalled Grace Stoen, "everything had to be credited to Jim Jones. We had to constantly say that the only reason we were in the temple was because of Jim Jones, that the only reason we did something was because of Jim Jones. You had to, and if you didn't, you got confronted for not giving him credit. He was a megalomaniac. He was determined to go down in history."
If he was concerned with his place in history, Jones was also obsessed with his welfare and personal safety. He instituted unusually strict security measures in his temples, searching all incoming worshipers and eventually requiring all members to wear badges with photo-identification. He also endeavored to make "Father's" personal safety of paramount concern.
"He would say to people in meetings, 'What are we going to do if anyone ever tries to get Jim Jones?' And everyone would scream, 'Kill! Kill!' " recalled Grace Stoen. "A thousand people with their fists in the air screaming, 'Kill! Kill!' That was heavy."
In time, someone did try to get Jim Jones, not to harm him physically but to expose him. As early as 1972, San Francisco Examiner religion writer Lester Kinsolving attacked Jones in print for his claim to have brought more than forty persons back from the dead, also for his habit of surrounding himself with aides armed with pistols and guns. Jones was outraged. According to Grace Stoen, it was this first media criticism that confirmed his worst fears.
"The bad press totally blew him apart," said Stoen. "From that point on, Planning Commission meetings were stepped up to almost every night. Jones said we had to be prepared because these kinds of things were going to happen again. He becam
e obsessed. That's when he began to believe there was a conspiracy out to get us."
Jones sustained other crushing blows during that period. In 1973, the People's Temple had its first large-scale defection. Eight young members of Jones's revolutionary guard quit in response to Jones's growing extremism. According to Jeannie Mills, it was this defection, as much as the Kinsolving articles, that pushed Jones to the edge.
"Those eight young people were a revolutionary group within the temple," she said. "They'd been hyped up with stories of Che Guevara and they had been doing some practice with weapons, and when they left, Jones got scared. He really thought they were going to come after him. Actually, all they wanted to do was get out of the temple so they could live their own lives. It was at that point, though, that Jones started taking ridiculous precautions to save his life, like instituting the guards and having us sign incriminating letters for his protection. That was also when he issued the order that if anything ever happened to him, every person who had ever left the temple was to be killed."
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