Jim Jones: The Father of the Progressive Coalition

by W.F. Price on September 10, 2013

Recently, I’ve found myself frustrated with a couple of senators, one Republican and the other a Democrat. Both John McCain and Dianne Feinstein have thoroughly alienated me with their hawkish, anti-populist stances on a number of issues, such as government snooping on citizens, Syria, gun control and illegal immigration.

Because the two of them have been on my mind, I decided to do a little research into their biographies, starting with Feinstein, and I came across quite a story.

Although I knew McCain was pretty old, it seems Feinstein has a good hairstylist and makeup artist, because I thought she was at least ten years younger than her 80 years. In fact, she was well into her 40s when she served as President of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors back in the 1970s, before she became mayor following Dan White’s murder of mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk. That was a long time ago!

The story behind Feinstein’s career is fascinating, as it exposes the cultural displacement and upheaval in urban America during the 1970s, a strange time of which I have only the jumbled memories of early childhood, which are more of a collage than a sequence of events. But despite having been a small child, I clearly remember the stark contrast between the young and old; the modern and traditional. There were the old Irish women who wore black to church, and then the young women in earth tones who didn’t bother going to mass. There were contrasts between the older and younger men as well. Mainly political views and ideas about traditional duties, such as fighting for one’s country and being a family man. Not that all the older men were perfect in that regard, but young men and their fathers rarely saw eye to eye in those days.

The cultural gap between young and old was profound. There was disco on one hand and Lawrence Welk on the other. As for higher culture, public radio frequently played classical music if I recall correctly, while young people listened to folk songs, which I remember fondly, as my mother would sometimes sing them to me. It was an odd time to be a small child, because there was a sense of transition and alienation; of failure of transmission from one generation to the next as the young rejected wholesale all that characterized the old America. In hindsight, I’m glad I had the opportunity to witness a little bit of this historic time, if only for the perspective it gave me.

However, in addition to artistic and political culture there were other, equally important factors at work. It wasn’t all simply a matter of the young hippies vs. the old squares. Entire cities were in transition, too. The young people born in urban neighborhoods were leaving them in droves. During the late 60s the flow of young people out of cities into suburbs that began after WWII began to increase, leaving some cities, like Seattle and San Francisco, depopulated and economically stagnant during the 70s. The people who remained behind were disproportionately those who had no reason to leave cities (the childless) or those who couldn’t afford to (urban blacks). I have become convinced that the reason cities such as San Francisco and Seattle developed such a politically powerful gay bloc by the 1980s is that so many straight couples had moved out to the suburbs that the cities were left disproportionately gay. In my own Catholic neighborhood, almost all the people from my parents’ generation – and there were a whole lot of them – lit out for the ‘burbs.

What happened in the 70s was that formerly bustling urban neighborhoods that had been full of working-class descendants of immigrants, often Catholics and Jews, suddenly lost their youth, leaving empty nesters and lots of vacancies behind. This, I am convinced, is the reason so many formerly Catholic neighborhoods in the US (the list is long, and includes Boston, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, etc.) became gay in the 70s. What better place for a young gay man than a dense urban neighborhood with low rents, decent infrastructure and relatively low crime?

We have to keep in mind that the cultural revolution of the 60s/70s wasn’t exactly a hot war. Dan White’s murder of Moscone and Milk notwithstanding, there wasn’t much of a fight at all, but rather more of an abandonment of the field by one side. Conservative Americans who are fond of complaining about how the country was “taken over” by radicals would do well to remember the parable of the absentee landlord.

And it wasn’t only minorities (sexual and otherwise) who inherited the cities, but other, stranger groups of people. The cultural dissonance of the time produced a bloom of odd cults, many of which temporarily occupied cities. In more demographically and culturally stable times, they wouldn’t have been able to hack it, and would have faced a lot more scrutiny from officials and neighbors. But things being as they were, opportunistic politicians were willing to work with them, which, in San Francisco, made for one of the weirdest political partnerships in urban American history.

When Dianne Feinstein was serving as the President of the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco, the board was divided into two factions, one being more conservative, and the other – Dianne Feinstein’s side – more progressive, to use contemporary terms. Even in the 1970s, the conservatives were a powerful political force, and controlled the board with five seats out of nine total. But all that was about to change, thanks to a new arrival who led an 8,000 strong congregation of faithful believers in a hybrid Christian/Communist religion of his own devising. The man was Jim Jones, the infamous leader of the People’s Temple cult who, together with over 900 of his followers, committed suicide in Guyana by drinking grape kool-aid laced with cyanide (hence the term “drinking the kool-aid”).

While in San Francisco, Jim Jones mobilized his thousands of supporters to win the 1975 San Francisco mayoral race for George Moscone, a progressive, who was running against developer John Barbagelata, a conservative who represented the older and more traditional residents of the city, many of whom were from the old Catholic communities.

From Salon’s David Talbot:

It was Burton ally Willie Brown – a rising force in California’s state capital — who first recognized that Jones’s organization could play a pivotal role in his friend George Moscone’s run for mayor. Moscone, a charming and handsome state legislator, had electrified San Francisco progressives with his campaign for city hall. A champion of gays, women, minorities, tenants and organized labor, Moscone was locked in a tight race with a pack of opponents led by conservative realtor John Barbagelata, whose campaign evoked a nostalgia for an older San Francisco, when it was ruled by traditional Catholic values. A meeting was set up between Jones and Moscone in the office of Don Bradley, the candidate’s veteran campaign manager. Bradley was initially cautious. “I was a little leery we were getting into something like the Moonies,” he later recalled. But after he looked into the temple’s campaign history and saw how effective it was in delivering victories, Bradley enthusiastically embraced Jones’s volunteer army. Nearly 200 temple members showed up at Moscone headquarters, fanning out to campaign in some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods, and helping the candidate finish first in the November 1975 election.

Ultimately, Jones delivered at the polls, and it made a difference: Moscone won by a mere 4,000 votes. We have to give some credit to Jim Jones for his political ingenuity. Despite his depravity, Stalinism and delusions, he pioneered what has become the national Democratic alliance between white progressives and minorities. One could even say that Barack Obama owes his presidency to Jim Jones and the tactics he introduced in San Francisco in the 1970s.

However, the time has come for a critical appraisal of the founding values of the progressive coalition, which is approaching a crossroads as its white beneficiaries are entering their twilight years. First of all, it is important to note that Jim Jones was a fervent Communist, and planned to take his followers to the Soviet Union. He decided on mass suicide after a congressional delegation led by Leo Ryan scrutinized his compound in Guyana, where he’d relocated with nearly a thousand followers in 1978. Some of Jones’ henchmen opened fire on the congressman, killing him and several others, leaving the fate of the People’s Temple in doubt and the prospect of a move to the USSR highly unlikely. This prompted the mass suicide, although Jones had apparently been planning and rehearsing it for some time.

In San Francisco, Jones made no secret of his passion for totalitarian Communist leaders, and his allies, including former San Francisco mayor and well-known California politician Willie Brown, praised him all the more for it. Harvey Milk, for his part, enthusiastically supported the People’s Temple, even going so far as to write a letter to President Carter on behalf of Jones and his cult.

Then there was Jones’ personal depravity. He was a drug addict, pimp and philanderer who farmed out underage black girls to white progressive politicians, then blackmailed them (according to former Temple members). He was arrested for soliciting sex in a men’s restroom at a movie theater, and he sodomized his male followers – sometimes in front of their wives – claiming that he was only doing what they wanted him to do. To manage his mostly black followers, he employed a half dozen white women from his personal harem and put them in charge of what essentially became a tropical plantation in Guyana. In the end, he was the worst mass-murderer in American history, personally ordering and supervising the “suicide” of his followers.

Interestingly, Jones may well have been the inspiration for the rainbow flag, which flies prominently above Harvey Milk Plaza today, and thousands of others locations throughout the Western world. The history of the flag, first designed and sewed by Milk’s personal friend Gilbert Baker, is obscure (intentionally perhaps?), but Jones was fond of proclaiming himself to be head of the “rainbow family.” It is not at all far-fetched to suppose that it was Jim Jones who introduced the term to Milk and Baker, and hence the idea for the flag, which first flew in 1978, a few months before the Jonestown massacre and Milk’s assassination. Further supporting Milk’s connection with Jones is the strange and macabre fact that Milk’s ashes were mixed with grape kool-aid before being scattered into the sea.

Very little of this history makes its way into the official story. I am glad I avoided the film Milk, and not because I object to the subject matter, but because learning about the lies of omission (Jim Jones was out of the picture) would have ruined it for me. Sometimes, historians get closer to the truth than those who lived it, because they are not constrained by political loyalties, taboos, and personal concerns. Hopefully, when enough time has passed and Dianne Feinstein, Willie Brown and Jerry Brown are but memories, someone will produce a film that truly does justice to the urban political revolution of the 1970s, which was the seed out of which the contemporary progressive machine emerged.

On looking back, it seems to me that Harvey Milk, George Moscone, Dianne Feinstein and Willie Brown, despite their political achievements, remain in the shadow of Jim Jones. For all their success and determination, they were children under the same father, following a vision they didn’t come up with themselves. Dianne Feinstein and Willie Brown may have lived to see another day, but they, too, drank the kool-aid.

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