ABSTRACT
Why not start this story dead in the cusp of the transformation from the declining idealism of the "hope-filled, rage-filled days" of the sixties into the more sharply ideological New Left. Why not. 1969. Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple already had a decade under their belts, and already had traversed the poor people's and racial equality campaigns, in something of their own updated Father Divine fashion. 1 The Peoples Temple had already made its first trek from Indianapolis to Ukiah, California, armed with the learned information that Ukiah was one of the nuclear holocaust safe zones. By 1969, Jones was expanding rapidly on the original hundred-or-so Indiana followers and was finding his way, as he had done in Indianapolis, into local politics, and he was moving fast into San Francisco's.
