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Sunday 22 November 2009

The secret letters of the Jonestown death cult

Thirty years after the mass suicides and murders in Guyana, Barry Isaacson unveils a cache of letters he found in his LA home, mapping the pain of one of the families

Jim Jones had founded the Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ in Indianapolis in the late 1950s. In 1965 he moved his congregation to Ukiah, California, where he seized the opportunity to recruit from the counter-culture college-educated idealists who would help transform his rustic church community into a social movement. The Chaikins moved up to Ukiah almost immediately after they met Jones. Very quickly, they were appointed to the church’s governing body, called the Planning Commission. Gene Chaikin became Jones’s principal in-house legal counsel and an architect of the movement’s transition to communalism, which formed the core of its self-identification as a politically radical sect from the mid-1970s onwards. For the time being, Phyllis had to settle for a less vaunted role — Jones urged her to take a nursing degree so that she could help run the Temple’s profitable care centres for the elderly — and she chafed at being perceived as the wife of an executive. The children were often billeted in a Temple-owned ranch in Ukiah while their parents devoted themselves full-time to church activities. When the entire congregation visited Los Angeles and San Francisco in a fleet of Temple buses, it was to proselytise, not to spend time with ‘outside’ family members, something explicitly frowned upon by the minister who encouraged his flock to address him as ‘Dad’. In the single letter to his daughter, copied and preserved in the briefcase we found, Dr Alexander writes: ‘If Rev’d Jones and the Peoples Temple are against the commandment “Honor thy father and mother” unless they are members of the Peoples Temple, it is your choice whether to break off all contact with your kin forever... Your refusal to reply to this letter will be evidence enough that you have abandoned us.’

In 1973, Gene Chaikin was part of the first group of Peoples Temple members to scout the location of a possible new home for the community in the jungles of Guyana, a long way from capitalist America. An avid horticulturalist and too ingenuous to be the kind of Temple ‘operative’ who helped Jones stage fake faith healings and exercise political muscle in San Francisco, Chaikin gratefully exchanged his legal pad for a machete. For several months in 1975 the delicately built, intense Jewish attorney became what Temple survivor Don Beck calls ‘a gentleman farmer’, helping build an extraordinary, viable agricultural commune in the inhospitable jungles of Guyana. However, physical separation can only have added to the effects of the Temple’s ideological disdain for marriage and conventional family life. As the organisation moved towards full communalism, Gene’s commitment to his family was classified as ‘paternalistic’ and Phyllis was reported as feeling ‘repressed’ in her bourgeois marriage.

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