FBI file on Jonestown.

In the three centuries since the arrival of the first European dissenters to America's shores, the American religious experience has long featured communal religions, persecuted sects, and self-isolating communities. But little stunned post-war America as much as news of the events of November 18, 1978, when reports surfaced that James Warren ("Jim") Jones, founder and head of the Peoples Temple, had ordered the mass suicide of nearly one thousand of his mostly American followers in the jungles of Guyana. A national soul-searching would follow in the wake of this traumatic series of events, forever branding the name "Jonestown," as reporters then designated the enclave, in the American religious psyche. Alongside the Manson Family murders less than a decade earlier, events at Jonestown shook any understanding of modern American religious life, deepening the already pervasive fear of cults throughout the United States and fueling the study of new religious movements in the United States. Born in Crete, Indiana, in 1931, Jim Jones entered the Pentecostal ministry as a youth, establishing a congregation in Indianapolis that took the name The Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ (shortened to Peoples Temple) in 1955. By the late 1950s, inspired by Father Divine, the Peoples Temple adopted a more explicit form of religious communalism and a set of religiously-inspired communistic tenets. By the early 1960s, Jones' increasing concern about the nuclear threat and subsequent interest in political power precipitated a shift in his religious beliefs. Relocating to northern California, the Peoples Temple became a force in Republican and Democratic politics as the number of followers from both the black and white communities joined. As for Jones himself, his apostolic socialism transformed into a species of communistic totalitarianism until he finally abandoned all Christian tenets to assert his own Godhood. By 1977, Jones had decided to relocate with his followers to the South American nation of Guyana, setting up what would come to be known as Jonestown. Just before and soon thereafter exposes of the cult-like character of the Free Peoples Temple began to appear, supported by defectors seeking the return of family members. Meanwhile, in Jonestown, Jones elaborated to his followers, largely isolated from any news media or family connections, the idea of a mass suicide of his followers. With the American public already aware and fearful of cult religions, the publicity and activity drew the attention of the federal government, particularly as stories of gun-running circulated. By this time, Jones was ill, addicted to drugs, and possibly demented. However, he still ruled his colony and in 1978 he began to excite his isolated followers with stories of impending disaster. He regularly called for "White Nights," where followers would trial run the group's act of "revolutionary suicide," as Jones termed the idea. Following the news of the mass suicide and Ryan's murder, rumors spread that Jones had left instructions for assassinations to take place in the United States, and that he had created a hit list of targets that included government officials and defectors from the Peoples Temple. The FBI scrambled to identify and interview people who might be connected to Jones to make sure that they were not a threat. The summary reports of those interviews represent the bulk of the FBI file on Jonestown. These interviews feature a great deal of information on its inner workings and activities, including arms smuggling, drug trafficking, terrorist attacks, the white nights rehearsals, and the public ritual beatings intended to humiliate and psychologically control Temple members. The interviewees also reveal the nature and degree of Jones' paranoia, his aberrant behaviors, use of narcotics, and unconventional sexual practices, all of which he had integrated into the self-styled apocryphal religious belief system. If anything, the FBI's files on Jonestown provide an insight into the 1970s culture of paranoia in the wake of the Charles Manson murders and the Patti Hearst kidnapping, both of which receive reference in this collection and the FBI's efforts to engage with those frightening manifestations of counterculture opposition to mainstream America.