GOD’S SOCIALIST: THE RISE AND FALL OF PEOPLES’ TEMPLE

When the 1960s began, Dwight Eisenhower was President, Frankie Avalon was at the top of the charts, and few Americans had heard of Vietnam. By the end of the decade, the country had been politically and culturally transformed by war, the civil rights movement, and a youth rebellion unprecedented in American history. The rise and fall of notorious cult leader Jim Jones and his Peoples’ Temple movement provides a microcosmic portrait of a revolutionary era whose battle lines remain as social and political fractures to this day.

God’s Socialist: Prologue – Two-thirds of the over 900 people who committed suicide with Jim Jones in the jungles of Guyana were African Americans. Who were these people, and why would they follow such a man?

God’s Socialist #2: What Child Is This? – Monsters are made, not born. An eccentric boy from a broken family, Jim Jones finds purpose in the struggle against racial and economic oppression.

God’s Socialist #3: Head North, Then Turn Left: The Great Migration of African Americans from the Jim Crow south hit the rocks of white resistance in the northern cities, where young militants inspired by Malcolm X and Huey Newton continued the struggle began by Martin Luther King, Jr. and his stoic southern marchers.

God’s Socialist #4: Sex, Drugs, and Revolution – The student movement, radicalized by TV images of American power brought down on black marchers and Vietnamese peasants, cuts ties with the Old Left, and sets off on a militant crusade ‘pig Amerikkka.’

God’s Socialist #5: The Wounded King – The radicalism of the ’60s crashes headlong into the diminishing expectations of 1970s America. The Weather Underground veers off toward its explosive climax. As the idealism of the student movement is shunted into self-help fads and therapy sessions, what remaining energy of the radical left is drained into increasingly bizarre and violent channels.

God’s Socialist #6: No Driver at the Wheel – The student movement is dead. The Black Panther Party has been torn apart by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Activism devolves into struggle sessions and terrorism, as the movement for civil rights and social justice is left to “drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen.”

God’s Socialist #7: A Gallant, Glorious, Screaming End – Jim Jones at Peoples’ Temple follow the remnants of the 1960s radical left into the fire.