Just months before they set off for the jungles of Guyana, Jim Jones and the congregation of the Peoples Temple stood in front of the International Hotel in San Francisco, a single-resident-occupancy building in what was then called Manilatown. Stripped of context, the images from that night could serve as a type of nostalgia porn for the radical ’70s. The fight to save the hotel and its population of mostly impoverished, elderly Filipino men had been taken up by a coalition of Asian American, gay, and student activists. The Peoples Temple, whose congregation was mostly Black, provided foot soldiers for a prolonged confrontation. When the police finally arrived to evict the tenants, they were met by a multiracial, working-class coalition who put their bodies on the line to save housing for the indigent.
Everyone knows the plot twist at Jonestown. The set-up is assumed: A charismatic leader entices nearly a thousand impressionable young people to follow him into the jungle. The center does not hold. Nine hundred bodies are laid out for the obligatory helicopter shot. All the other gaps are filled in with the assumption that all the things Jones preached, whether apocalyptic gospel, communism, or equality among the races, will go bad when taken to extremes. This may well be the correct way to think about Jones, a mass murderer who led a mostly Black congregation to its death, including members of his own “rainbow family.”
“Jonestown fulfilled the most dire warnings of its opponents,” write John R. Hall, Philip D. Schuyler, and Sylvaine Trinh in their book Apocalypse Observed. “After the murders and mass suicide, Peoples Temple became the quintessence of the ‘cult,’ stereotypically portrayed as an organization that drains both property and free will from its members and ‘brainwashes’ them into a ‘group mind.’” There are certainly cults that do these things, but Hall and his coauthors’ scholarship makes an important distinction between Jones, the con-man preacher, megalomaniac, and murderer, and his congregation. The latter “sought to participate in an integrated community that transcended persistent racism in the United States. In a society where the practice of religion is largely segregated from everyday socioeconomic organization and practice, the group infused its members’ working lives and social relationships with new ‘religious’ meaning.”
Religious lessons about loving one’s neighbors and caring for the less fortunate, in other words, had been tangibly expressed by the Peoples Temple. Something similar could be said about the church’s ideas of socialist liberation: Well before Jones ever stood in front of a congregation, the left had sought what, in modern terms, would be called a “multiracial, working-class movement” built on solidarity and shared struggle. What that actually might look like has been clouded by history, in no small part by efforts to cast any type of communal living or emancipatory action as yet another Jonestown. I am not trying to make excuses for Jim Jones here or even to entirely separate the flock from its doomsday apostle—Jones did not act alone in Jonestown, and the killing of children, in particular, had to be carried out by loyal followers. Nor do I wish to argue that Jonestown’s role as a cautionary tale comes entirely from some unfair twisting of its intentions—918 dead are 918 dead.
But I first encountered the photos from the International Hotel a couple of years ago, while doing research for my upcoming book. While I recoiled at the sight of Jones with his dark sunglasses and bouffy hair, these were exactly the types of pictures that work well in the turbine of online historical associations: See? There have been examples of multiracial, working-class solidarity. The association with Jones, of course, made them unusable, but I wondered why there were so few obvious replacements.