The most beloved show in television history about daytime drinking, Mad Men, just wrapped up its eight-year run, with Don Draper and his ad-pitching peers marching boldly into the 1970s. For past Mad Men seasons, Ken Jennings of Jeopardy! fame has helped us debunk some persistent myths from the 1950s and the 1960s so we've asked him to keep on truckin' and do us a solid by debunking some "Me Decade" misinformation as well. It turns out that a lot of what we think we know about the seventies is pretty "far out."
The Debunker: Did the Jonestown Cultists Drink the Kool-Aid?
Comedian Louis C.K. does a joke about how much crazier and more vivid the 1970s were than anything we have today. "Today people are like, 'The president's kind of disappointing," he said. "Really? Our president wept like an insane person and then got on a helicopter and flew away!" But when I look back at the hallucinatory, holy-crap-did-that-really-happen Seventies, I don't think about Watergate. I think about Jonestown.
This was actually a thing that happened. A crazy Midwestern preacher lured almost a thousand Americans to the jungles of Guyana and got them to commit "revolutionary suicide" by taking cyanide. Jim Jones's armed guards also murdered five people who were trying to get to the bottom of Jones's "People's Temple"—including a U.S. congressman! Today, Jonestown only really comes up when we talk about corporate flacks or Silicon Valley evangelists "drinking the Kool-Aid." It was the biggest mass death of U.S. civilians in history before 9/11, and we made it into irritating business jargon!
But here's the detail that most people don't know: the 907 people who died of cyanide poisoning at Jonestown did not ingest the poison in Kool-Aid. Instead, Jones's aids mixed up the fatal cocktail in metal drums of grape Flavor Aid, Kool-Aid's cheaper competitor. Somehow Flavor Aid escaped unscathed from this public relations nightmare, with Kool-Aid taking the hit instead. The Kraft brand seems to be doing okay though, still selling over $300 million worth of its fruity powders every year.
Quick Quiz: Kool-Aid's 1970s mascot, the wall-busting "Kool-Aid Man," was a giant pitcher filled with what flavor of Kool-Aid?
Ken Jennings is the author of six books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.