Next, a Panel Discussion on the peoples temple. And theder jim Jones Community called jonestown he established in guyana. In 1978 more than 900 americans died in jonestown because of cyanide poisoning and what is called the jonestown massacre. The Panel Includes two former members of the peoples temple. And two authors on books on the subject. The California Historical society hosted this discussion. Its about an hour and a half. I want to welcome you all to the California Historical society. On behalf of my board of trustees, my Incredible Team and staff, our volunteers, all of our members and all of our guests, welcome for a very special in poignant and powerful afternoon. We are deeply honored for our dear partners and friends. I think part of the is overused and i like using polluters colluders. The San Francisco public library, you cannot ask for better friends. This is a special part of the one city, one book extravaganza. Thinking susan goldstein, marcia ander, Christina Reddy allowing guests to present this incredible panel today. Special thanksa and remembrance to jim jones junior, who was hopeful to be with us today. He sends you and the panelists his best but he was able to participate due to health reasons. We will send out some good love to jim. The California Historical society is honored to hold the peoples temple collection. It was the decision of the california courts. California Historical Society was chosen as the repository in 1983. We have worked tirelessly with many survivors and many historians and students who want to learn about what happened in and how over the past intervening years. We are proud to be the largest repository of archival materials relating to the peoples temple and jonestown. Whether it be digitization of super eight films. For over 50 different collections contained within the peoples temple. A broader collection that we are honored to stuart. Steward. Especially for our members and supporters out there and for our remarkable archival staff. This is the work that you helped us do. Preserving fbi files, or photographs and other items. Your support enabled our work. We are honored to invite you after the program ends back to our library over my right shoulder. Its a north Bigger Research library. It is the portal to our remarkable collections. Staffmie henderson on our has lovingly laid out a number of pieces from the collection. Including a number of letters that david used to write his book. Not seen or touched that part of history come back afterwards and hold in your history hands. Its even more powerful. I am honored to be here today and moderate the panel. I will introduce my colleagues. And get the conversation going. Have them talk amongst themselves and and take questions from all of you. We are deeply honored that cspan2 is here. We like it when they are here because you might like to look a little better under lights. We cant see you all that well but you all the beautiful because you are mostly back with. Backlit. Antimoderate and help the questions flow, you will have filed little pencils that are cute and a blank card. If you have questions, please feel free to jot one down. Razor and discreetly like you are bidding. One of our great team will come and collect them. For those of you that it into a panel, some of the questions circulate on top of each other. We can answer a lot of questions in good time. So i will introduce to your right into my left starting with john cobb. John is one of the few surviving members of the peoples temple. He was born into the temple. His family was part of that first pioneering members of the doubt from indianapolis to Redwood Valley in california. And they were there for the beginnings of reverend jones attempt at establishing the church. He was a member until the groups tragic and in 1978. And he was in georgetown with the Basketball Team. He tragically lost 10 members of his family in jonestown. And he is currently writing a book about his story. We are all wishing him well. The completion date says 2016. To johns left, marshall kilduff. He said he of the best you ever because he walked from the chronicle building on fifth and mission. For those that know his long and illustrious decades, old career writing for the chronicle but also the very powerful piece that was not accepted by the chronicle in 1978. He has given voice to politics or lack thereof development, city affairs. , as a native of San Francisco, he matriculated from the lovely campus on an old farm in palo alto. Greatns us today to add a depth of narrative. He coauthored suicide cult, history of peoples temple and jim jones. Talbotu marshall is mr. Who wrote season of the witch. There seems to be no fitting choice as both the generations face who actively remember living here and being here in that horrible november of 1978. , n David Talbots book season of the witch is the book. Is being read widely this week. Is an americans journalist we are honored to call our own in california. A trailblazer and entrepreneur. He was the founder and editorinchief of one of the first web magazines salon. Com. , he figured out the web long before anybody else. Are you wearing your glasses . Its not a jim jones thing. Its the life. I have sensitive eyes. Forgive me. When we talk later i will take my glasses off. He really has lovely eyes. And turning an idea into a way to consume knowledge with salon. Com. After leaving salon he increased , his reputation as a historian. Historians like to think of journalists as faster writers in the art. We are welcoming him into the tribal unit. Called finished a book brothers which is on the kennedy brothers. He also worked as an editor for mother jones and writes prolifically for time the new , yorker, rolling stone, and many other publications. Last on the podium and certainly not least in terms of big heart and personality and soul is eugene smith. He had just turned 21 years old prior to november 1978. As he broke and i will read this, for all intents and purposes, jonestown was the forge that sealed me and dictated my immediate future at that time. My only responsibility was to survive. There was no place to hide or to disappear. Eugene lost his mother, his wife and his infant son that day. And he has spent the rest of his life dedicated to remembering and persevering. Was toponsibility survive in previous knowledge in the depths of his heart and memory. He turned to writing. Obviously an interesting part of what we are going to talk about today is how do you begin to write about this whether for personal memory or from journalistic or historians perspective. Eugenes recent articles include one for the jonestown report. And he is also working on a book. I think 2016 will be a big year. It will be. You heard it here at the California Historical society. Please join me in welcoming my for incredible panelists. [applause] i think im going to ask david first to provide a brief historical context. As he has done so eloquently. We dont have two chapters of time. Time with this kind of the as you so beautifully show us, starting after the summer of love and the rise of the counterculture. That helps us understand the rise of peoples temple and the reverend jones. All of us kind of blur together. My new book is about the dark history of the cia. Its called the devils chessboard. Is there any other . The context for peoples temple i think you have to look at frankly some of what is going on in the city already. The social disruption and the redevelopment the tore at the heart of black San Francisco. That was the seed in the garden for jim jones to establishes his political roots in this town. And began to have white influence over the liberal leadership of San Francisco. I dont think he could have done that if the fillmore had not been hollowed out by the San Francisco redevelopment agency. Which tore out the heart and soul of what was once known as the harlem of the west. A vibrant middle class black community. Nightclubs, stores, houses and so on. My own son, joe talbot, is working with my honorary son to make a movie that is kind of continuing the legacy. The last black man in San Francisco. To this day, you have a declining africanamerican population. And robbed of his political power. That definitely was the feeling at the time of jim jones came here from Redwood Valley, he was moving into a political vacuum. There were some africanamerican churches there. He became such a powerful force because he was a master of manipulating people. He was a master and these gentlemen can tell you more about that. About finding out what politicians weaknesses were. What his turn ons were and exploiting them. He delivered bodies and votes. Vote early, vote often. We can talk about the election of 1975 as a key turning point. The mayors race with George Moscone a narrowly won due to voter fraud. First and foremost San Francisco doing soulsearching has to analyze what it did to the Africanamerican Community to allow that redevelopment or negro removal as James Baldwin called it. It was into that vacuum that jim jones moved. Thank you so much. I am often reminded of that wonderful James Baldwin quote that American History is more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever written about it. In this context of the horrors of urban renewal. Especially as they played up in San Francisco targeting the japaneseamericans. They had just and back being incarcerated in camps. And then simultaneously the africanamerican communities. They had moved into some areas during the war that it been held by the japanese community. An incredible cycle of displacement. And in comes a man with great charisma, charm and power. I would like to ask john and in eugene to share some firsthand about their experiences and their families experiences with the church and helping us better understand from their perspective. John hi everyone. My experience is unique in that there are probably two or three other people other than myself that were born into peoples temple who are still living. That is what i knew from day one. All of the things that ive read them because i have not Read Everything or most of the things we hear or talk about have been factual things. What happened this day and that day and so forth. What has been missed was the daytoday occurrence of peoples temple lives. Daytoday what happened. Not even jim jones. Just several people that made it simple function. Woulds it and, it perfectly without jones. Have functions even better. He was just incapable of doing anything towards the end. There is a story i have repeatedly seen. What happened daytoday in jonestown . Why people were there . What drove people there. There is a sense that they were like mindless people following a cold. It was cult. These are people that i know and are still alive today are very successful. They did not have a problem integrating back into society. We were not that much different at all. One of the things that is offered several things that it offered. A lot of people say was involved politically. That was the driving force. But i look at the same things happening today. Oer the same things that people are voting for in looking for help with education, health care housing, being able to put food , on the table. Once you became a member of the peoples temple, you did not have to worry about that anymore. You did not. Political beliefs everyone wanted to make the world a better place for this basic these were provided for you at some cost. Its funny. I have talked to a person that i knew whose family was part of peoples temple. Probably about 20 years. She has a few kids and grandkids now. She said johnny boy, i was the resulting the peoples temple now. These kids today need that structure and purpose. Granted there were a lot of , terrible things that happened. But the reason why people were there daytoday and the functionality. How they live daytoday i think has been missed. Part of the thing that is jeremy to write is of the people that are no longer with us their , story has never been told. They died and were labeled as people who were casualties. Wrong place, wrong time. Of course some of the people didnt want to be there. I will expose a lot of that in my book. If they had a choice to leave they would have. ,overall i think there was so much more that was missed to that whole story. The negatives and the craziness of jim jones has been repeated endlessly. Like where we are in our culture in time, people are ready to hear what else happened there. Other than the facts. That is what has driven me to write. That is where i met with it. As far as my story, i was born there. I had a different understanding of it. I saw it for what it really was behind the scenes. A lot of people came in and saw jim jones is a profit, a hitler, a god. I never saw him is that. A lot of the things he perpetrated he could do, i do for pretty much day one he was not doing those. That is not why i or mckinley was there. My mother wanted a better life for her kids. We moved from indianapolis against my fathers he eventually followed us. There were other reasons for it. Basically, that is my story. Im doing a pretty good job of telling it and i think it will be interesting. It would be a lot different from what is out there so far. Thank you john. I would love to come back to some of those stories about the daytoday community that was formed and the needs that were met. And especially in the 1970s we all hoped and believed that we are all created equal. It was a crazy time. Eugene . Eugene i came into the temple basically when i was 15. The summer of ninthgrade coming in. I had always been politically inclined because my mother was. In addition to that she was always searching for that religion. In detroit we were part of Aretha Franklins fathers church. We were part of dr. Laughlins church. We have been catholic, we had been baptists, we had been nondenominational. Every six months it was a new religion. [laughter] i basically revolted around 12 or 13 and said im done with this. She had heard about jim jones. I went to hear him speak at irwin junior high in fresno. And i thought he was interesting. The sunglasses threw me off. I didnt really come back and i was 18. Then i moved into a commune in San Francisco. At the temple. I stayed behind the stage initially. For me the temple was a candy store in the sense that there were no limits on what i could do. There was no limit to happiness. No end to my learning. In seventh grade i was already reading at a 12th grade level. So coming into the peoples temple and 18 and having a Printing Press and they would shop and a construction crew, having all these resources to get you into the community and meeting people. It all seemed normal. What made it seem normal was that you would see Jerry Brown Willie brown at a meeting or jane fonda. We are not all being full. Something about this has to be real. Or so you assumed. What happens after a period of time is that jim jones became background noise. What you felt responsible for the other people that were there. They were your family. A lot of people stayed because they didnt want to leave their family there alone. They didnt want them to be abused or possibly hurt. Or interrogated because you left. Some people stayed out of guilt, some people stayed out of responsibility. Some people stayed out of love for other human beings that they had no blood relationship with but felt entitled to protect them. Protect them and be at their call so to speak. When they were called, we never called old people old people. They were the repository of knowledge. When an elder person spoke you are expected to listen. If they needed assistance, you are expected to assist. During that time they passed on their knowledge to us. We passed knowledge on the younger ones. Jonestown was a little bit different. Getting there was an adventure. Being there was an adventure. And a lot of times you were working on adrenaline because he , andr had a white knight even when you did know it was real there was a certain urgency to it because you were being awakened at a dead sleep and running to the pavilion to see what had happened. Were they under attack . Were they going to take the children . Were they going to kill the seniors . Were they going to bomb us off the map as if it never happened. Even if you knew that there was a certain fright. My first night in jonestown we were going through all these potholes. They were huge because it was red clay. You cannot see the jungle. It was only 20 yards on either side of you. You could hear the pavilion miles away. People yelling and screaming. These delights in the middle of the jungle. It was very close to venezuela. That was why we were there. That was the disputed area between venezuela and guyana. By having a religious community there on Agriculture Mission justified guyana seizing the property. The jumping off the trailer and going to the pavilion. Seeing people you would not seen for years or people you thought had left but they had not. Seeing my wife who was just weeks away from delivering a i had probably not seen her in four months in my mother in over two years. Sometimes longer than that. Getting there and back meeting was easy. Staying there and that committee was difficult. That is it. Thank you. Marshall, you started work in 1976. In about january of 1977 working as the recorder for the chronicle, investigating the peoples temple church. Wanting to write about it for the chronicle but not accepted. David details is very closely in terms of how close the chronicle editorial leadership was to jim jones. It then publishing was 1978 . 1977. Publishing his piece. Marshall if you are trying to get me fired, you are doing a very good job. [laughter] let me try to strike a quick note of contrast. These idealism driven accounts life in the church. The way it would look to you or i