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Flavor Aid and Cyanide: The Architecture of Jonestown's Final Day
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Nine hundred and seventeen people died in the Guyana jungle on November 18, 1978 — but the mechanisms that made Jonestown possible were built years earlier, in Indiana and San Francisco. This episode traces Jim Jones from progressive hero to architect of mass death, and asks the question no one wants to answer: why did intelligent people stay?
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before Jonestown, Jim Jones was a hero. After Jonestown, he was a monster.
James Warren Jones was born in nineteen thirty-one in Crete, Indiana. He grew up in poverty, in a household without much stability, and he developed an obsession early with two things that would define his life: religion and race.
People ask how intelligent people got drawn in. The better question is: what would have made them suspicious early enough to leave?
The move to Guyana in nineteen seventy-seven was framed as the fulfillment of the mission. A communal agricultural settlement in the jungle, free from American capitalism and racism, a genuine new society.
The Flavor Aid was mixed with potassium cyanide, along with sedatives. It was not, as Jones promised, a peaceful or painless death.
Several people were not at the compound when the poisoning began, because they were at Port Kaituma airstrip, alive and bleeding in the grass. Congressman Leo Ryan had arrived in Jonestown the previous day with a delegation that included journalists and congressional staff.
The Concerned Relatives had been raising alarms for years before Ryan's visit. They'd gathered testimony from former members.
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