Jim Jones was the self-appointed “messiah” of the People’s Temple, a San Francisco based cult in the 1970s.
In 1977, Jones convinced over 1,000 people in the congregation to move to the jungle in Guyana, South America to create a “utopian” society they called Jonestown. Jones preached socialist ideas to a mixed-race congregation that was a majority African American, and all had faced economic insecurity. This attracted them to his promises of living a better life in a commune, where everyone looked out for each other, not just themselves.
Jim Jones.
In the 1950s Jones was a young preacher in Indiana and called for racial integration when it was an unpopular idea. He was also known for his work with the homeless and was on the Human Rights Commission in Indiana as well. However, after moving his church to Northern California, he “became obsessed with the exercise of power” (Britannica, Jim Jones). Soon negative media attention focused on Jones’s suspicious activities, including taking the income of cult members for himself. Like Hitler, Jones suffered from a growing paranoia, which might have partly been caused by taking large doses of prescription drugs. His paranoia prompted the later move from California to the remote jungle in Guyana.
Relatives in the U.S. became very concerned about their family members so far away under Jones’s control. This led a U.S. Congressman, Leo Ryan from the Bay Area, and some journalists to go to Jonestown in November 1978, with Jones’s permission. Some of the congregation passed secret notes to the visitors, saying they wanted to leave but were being held against their will. As the visitors were boarding their plane with a few people who wanted to leave, Jones’s militiamen opened fire on them. Five people died on the airstrip, including Congressman Ryan, then the plane took off.
On November 18, 1978, shortly after the assassination of Congressman Ryan, Jones orchestrated a mass “suicide,” getting over 900 Jonestown followers to line up to drink Kool-Aid laced with the poison cyanide. (Actually, it was misreported as Kool-Aid but was actually a copy called Flavor-Aid. The report led to the popular saying that someone is “drinking the Kool-Aid” to mean they are mindlessly following along with a bad plan.) Over 400 of the people who died were children, from tiny infants up to 17-year-olds. Jones himself was found with a gunshot wound to the head, most likely self-inflicted. Until the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers, the Jonestown massacre represented the greatest number of U.S. civilian deaths in a single event that wasn’t caused by a natural disaster.
How did a man who preached racial and social equality turn evil? His biographers have explained that even in childhood Jones showed a need to control and deceive people, and had extreme anger toward people who betrayed or abandoned him. Along with paranoia, these are also some of the traits used to describe a “malignant narcissist,” which a number of prominent psychiatrists have also noted in Trump and Hitler’s characters. Jones was a loner without a lot of friends, and once locked some kids in his barn. He performed experiments on animals, killing them and then giving them funerals. One childhood acquaintance, Chuck Wilmore, said, “I thought Jimmy was a really weird kid…. He was obsessed with religion; he was obsessed with death” (Rolling Stone, Jonestown Massacre). According to another biographer, Jones was fascinated with Adolf Hitler. He was really impressed that Hitler outsmarted his enemies by killing himself before they could capture him at the end (Rolling Stone, Jonestown Massacre).
The Jonestown tragedy has been seen as both a mass suicide and a mass murder. The victims lined up to drink the poisoned punch, and in fact had drunk what they thought was a poisoned drink on an earlier occasion, when Jones was only testing their loyalty. On the other hand, they were also being brainwashed by a madman. In addition, by the time Jones carried out the actual suicide plan, he had armed guards with guns to make sure no one could get away. Some victims had marks that suggested they were injected with the poison against their will. The children were also not capable of making such a decision voluntarily, making their deaths murder.
Like Hitler, Jim Jones was a charismatic leader who was able to get people’s attention. He preyed on people who felt powerless and were struggling economically, so they were vulnerable. Both Jones and Hitler had an unusual ability to convince others to do terrible things, although in Jones’s case it was only to themselves and their children.
