THE ROAD TO JONESTOWN: On this day in 1931, Jim Jones—the charismatic religious leader who instigated a terrifying mass murder-suicide—was born in Crete, Indiana.

Personally, I am not a big fan of charisma. I like my leaders—religious or otherwise—to be more on the sober side. Downright boring isn’t a deal killer for me. Exciting leaders tend to lead their followers to places they’d prefer not to be—like the remote jungles of Guyana.

Jones grew up poor with an interest in religion that was unusual for his age. Also an avid reader of Marx, Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Gandhi, he began attending gatherings of the Communist Party USA in 1951. Determined to become a great man, he asked himself, “How can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church.”

In the early 1950s, with Father Divine as his role model, Jones established in Indiana what evolved over time into the “Peoples Temple.” Unlike many churches at the time, it welcomed people of all races. Jones became a crusader for civil rights. His church grew.

After reading in a magazine that Brazil would be a safe place in the event of nuclear war, Jones flirted with the idea of relocating his congregation there. Ultimately, however, he decided on California. Prophesizing that nuclear war would hit on July 15, 1967, he urged his congregants to follow him to the Golden State.

Things got crazier and crazier as he bounced from town to town in California. The gospel he preached was no longer Christianity. It was socialism. “[T]hose who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought to enlightenment—socialism.” “If you’re born in capitalist America, racist, America, fascist America, then you’re born in sin. But if you’re born in socialism, you’re not born in sin.” He condemned the Bible.

By the 1970s, he was a hard-core loon. He claimed to be the reincarnation of Gandhi, Father Divine, Jesus, and Lenin. For anyone with eyes to see, the Peoples Temple was obviously a cult.

But when it established itself on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco, it grew and grew. Because of its emphasis on civil rights, it appealed in particular to African Americans. But the members of its governing council, like Jones himself, were usually white.

The Temple soon became a political force to be reckoned with. Indeed, it is unlikely San Francisco’s progressive Mayor George Moscone would have won election in 1975 without Jones’s help. In the precincts where Temple members got out the vote for Moscone, he won 12 to 1. The losing candidate—conservative John Barbagelata—always maintained that Temple members committed massive election fraud, and it may well have been true. But true or false, Moscone rewarded Jones by appointing him to the San Francisco Housing Commission where he was made chairman.

One after another big-wig Democrat kissed Jones’s ring. Willie Brown was Master of Ceremonies at a large testimonial dinner in Jones’s honor. Governor Jerry Brown and Lt. Gov. Mervyn Dymally also attended. Harvey Milk spoke at rallies held at the Temple. After one occasion he wrote, “Rev Jim, It may take me many a day to come back down from the high that I reach today. I found something dear today. I found a sense of being that makes up for all the hours and energy placed in a fight. I found what you wanted me to find. I shall be back. For I can never leave.”

Even national figures had to pay homage to Jones. Walter Mondale, then a candidate for Vice President, met with and praised Jones. First Lady Rosalynn Carter met with him on several occasions and corresponded with him about Cuba.

None of them seemed to have noticed that Jones was stark raving mad. Or if they did, they were careful not to say so. Jones had the ability to turn out the vote, and that’s what mattered to Democratic Party leaders.

Eventually, in 1977, things started to unravel for Jones. A San Francisco Chronicle reporter started investigating. The article he produced contained allegations of physical, emotional and sexual abuse of Temple members by Jones, some of it clearly criminal. But Jones had a lot of clout, so the reporter faced resistance at the Chronicle.

Ultimately, the allegations were published elsewhere—New West Magazine. Just prior to publication, Jones and many hundreds of his followers decamped to the cult’s compound in Guyana. Indeed, Jones left the very night an editor read him the article over the phone.

Interestingly, Mayor Moscone continued to support Jones and blandly insisted that his Housing Commission Chairman had broken no law.

The Guyana compound—known as Jonestown—has been in works for a while. In the middle of nowhere, it was to have been Jones’s socialist paradise. It was now his escape from the possibility of prosecution. Lt. Gov. Mervyn Dymally (himself a native Trinidadian) had earlier helped Jones negotiate with Guyana’s Prime Minister Forbes Burnham for permission to move his followers there. And, yes, the belief that Jones had the support of Mondale and the First Lady was thought to be a plus by Guyanese officials.

Conditions were appalling. Like many “socialist paradises,” members were not allowed to leave. Jones himself appeared to be strung out on drugs. And entertainment took the form of Soviet propaganda shorts. But all that was trivial compared to Jones’s increasingly apocalyptic mood. He began to advocate what he termed “the Translation,” in which he and his cultists would die together and be magically transported to a better world where they could live happily.

Much to Jones’s dismay, attention from the media didn’t stop once they arrived in Guyana. Ultimately Congressman Leo Ryan (D-CA) insisted on travelling to Jonestown to investigate whether cult members were being held against their will and forced to engage in heavy labor. Ryan had a special motivation.   He knew the father of a former member who had earlier turned up dead after he had apparently resolved to leave the Temple.

The State Department opposed Ryan’s plan. So did some California Democrats. Harvey Milk, for example, wrote to President Jimmy Carter in 1978 attesting to Jones as “a man of the highest character” and arguing that Temple defectors were engaging in “apparent bold-faced lies” about Jones. He told Joseph Califano, Carter’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, that Jonestown was “a beautiful retirement community in Guyana, the type of which people of means would pay thousands of dollars to patronize.”  But Ryan went anyway, taking with him an entourage that included current Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D-CA) (then a Ryan aide).

Once in Guyana, getting permission to visit Jonestown wasn’t easy. But eventually Ryan was able to visit and talk to several Temple members who wanted to leave. But this was fewer than he might have expected, perhaps because his visit was carefully limited. For a while it looked like Ryan would be able to take this small number who expressed a desire to leave back to the United States. But on November 18, 1978, Ryan and members of his now-expanded entourage were gunned down on Jones’s order while attempting to fly out of the airstrip at Port Kaituma near Jonestown. Speier was among the survivors.

What happened later that evening is the part of the story that Instapundit readers are most likely to be familiar with. I will therefore be brief: Jones called upon all his followers to commit suicide.  And they did … en masse. In total, 909 men, women, and children died in Jonestown, including Jones and his wife (who left a note leaving her assets to the Soviet Communist Party). They drank grape-flavored Kool-Aid (or rather Flavor-Aid) laced with cyanide and tranquilizers. Death came quickly to those who obeyed.

Jones called it an act of “revolutionary suicide.” But in fact many were given the choice between drinking the Kool-Aid and being gunned down and some were indeed shot, so murder-suicide is more accurate.

There were few survivors. A handful of Temple members sensed which way the wind was blowing earlier in the day and escaped into the jungle. One member either slept through the whole thing or managed to hide under her bed (depending on which version of the story you believe).

Even for those, like me, who are old enough to remember the events, the story has a feeling of unreality about it. Things like that can’t possibly happen. And yet sometimes they do.