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Once established, Jones and his faithful began making evangelistic forays to San Francisco and beyond. He again bought an old synagogue, this one in the run-down Fillmore area of San Francisco's inner city. Using it as his headquarters, he opened an infirmary, a child-care center, a carpentry shop and kitchens for feeding the neighborhood poor. His services were dazzling, with soul and gospel music and dance groups. He attracted increasing numbers of black parishioners (the Peoples Temple was more than 80% black). He involved them in liberal causes, busing them to protest demonstrations, making them canvass for politicians he favored, and ordering them to undertake letter-writing blitzes.
He took them on pilgrimages, one of which brought eleven busloads to Indiana and Florida (to visit his then-retired spiritual mentor Myrtle Kennedy); another brought part of his flock to Washington, D.C., where he had them pick up trash on the Capitol grounds. Editorialized the Washington Post in August 1973: "The hands-down winners of anybody's tourists-of-the-year award have got to be the 660 members of the Peoples Temple . . . who bend over backwards to leave every place they visit more attractive than when they arrived."
Politicians were particularly impressed. Governor Jerry Brown came to the Peoples Temple. San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, who received important help from Jones in his close 1975 election, appointed him to the city's housing authority in 1976. (Said the mayor about last week's horror: "I proceeded to vomit and cry.") The sheriff and district attorney were temple visitors, but Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally outdid them all by dropping in on the 27,000-acre plantation in Guyana that Jones had acquired in 1974.
Vice President Walter Mondale recognized Jones' help in the 1976 campaign and invited him aboard his private plane.
When Jones helped a rally for Rosalynn Carter in San Francisco by busing in 600 loud supporters, he was rewarded with a "Dear Jim" thank-you note hand written on White House stationery. Jones claimed to have received appreciative letters from Senators Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson, and HEW Secretary Joseph Califano, among others.
The temple swelled with new members—up to 20,000, Jones claimed. But his services became stranger and stranger. Jones would "heal" parishioners by pretending to draw forth "cancers" that actually were bloody chicken gizzards.
And his megalomania soared.
Said his old associate the Rev. Case: "Jim stopped calling himself the reincarnation of Jesus and started calling himself God.
He said he was the actual God who made the heavens and earth." Jones ordered his followers to buy, and sell to the public, small pictures of him to ward off evil. He demanded for
the temple's coffers all members' savings and earnings, amassing a fortune that a former member estimates at $15 million. Discipline gave way to brutal beatings. It was a progression perhaps foreshadowed way back in Indianapolis when the young preacher once threw his Bible to the floor and yelled at his associates, "Too many people are looking at this instead of looking at me!"