Jim Jones enthralled followers

Jim Jones enthralled followers

"He was very charismatic," Leslie Wagner-Wilson, a Jonestown survivor, says of the Rev. Jim Jones.

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With the cadence and fervor of a Baptist preacher, the charm and folksiness of a country storyteller and the zeal and fury of a maniacal dictator, Jones exhorted his followers to a fever pitch, audiotapes recovered from Jonestown reveal.

As he spoke, they applauded, shouted, cheered. One follower who survived the "revolutionary suicide" at Jonestown on November 18, 1978, said that Jones was the most dynamic speaker he had ever heard.

Like all powerful speakers, Jones' greatest asset was his ability to determine what listeners wanted to hear and give it to them in simple language that appealed to them on an almost instinctual level.

"He was very charismatic, very charismatic," said Leslie Wilson, who survived that fateful day in Jonestown by walking away from the settlement before the cyanide that killed more than 900 Peoples Temple members was distributed. She was one of 33 people who began the day in Jonestown and lived to tell the tale.

"He could quote scripture and turn around and preach socialism," she said. "He appealed to anyone on any level at any time." Hear Jones declare "I am God" »

Many of his followers were elderly African-Americans drawn to his cause by his soulful delivery and Pentecostal preaching style, including at times speaking in tongues. That hair-raising fervor was perhaps only overshadowed by what he said.
When I say, I am God, then I feel [faith] well up within my soul. And I see it well up in you, and I see the sick healed, and the blind see, and the dead raised. ... You wanna know how I feel, I never feel so good as when I say I am God," he shouted in a full-throated roar in a 1972 sermon.

Jones further enraptured crowds with faith healings -- laying hands on disabled or sick people who would miraculously be cured of any ailments. Though insiders later revealed that these healings were staged, Jones' mastery of word and presentation left few in attendance with any doubts about his abilities.

He also indoctrinated many young, idealistic liberal white people in progressive 1970s California with the themes of socialism, equality and political activism. And he justified his brand of socialism with the Bible for those recruited from more conservative religious factions, who might have found such left-wing ideas tough to swallow.

"The only ethic by which we can lift mankind today is some form of socialism," he said in another 1972 sermon. "There's a smattering of it in the, in the New Testament. It's very evidently clear on the day of Pentecost that they that believed were together and had all things common."

Socialism, he said, is "older than the Bible by far."

But by the time Jones and many of his followers completed a lengthy relocation from California to Jonestown in Guyana in 1977, he had begun to change as a speaker. His trademark passionate delivery gave way to blind fury and incredible rage.