History of the Start of AA in New York City

Manhattan Group, New York City, N.Y., 1955

By Bill W.

Already, the history of AA is being lost in the mists of its twenty-one years of antiquity. I venture that very few people here could recount in any consecutive way the steps on the road that led from the kitchen table to where we are tonight in this Manhattan Group.

It is especially fitting that we recount the history, because at St. Louis this summer, a great event occurred. This Society declared that it had come of age and it took full possession of its Legacies of Recovery, Unity and Service. It marked the time when Lois and I, being parents of a family now become responsible, declare you to be of age and on your own.

Now lets start on our story.

First of all, there was the kitchen table which stood in a brownstone house which still bears the number 182, Clinton Street, Brooklyn. There, Lois saw me go into the depths. There, over the kitchen table, Ebby brought me these simple principles now enshrined in our Twelve Steps. In those days, there were but six steps: We admitted we couldn't run our lives; we got honest with ourselves; we made a self-survey; we made restitution to the people we had harmed; we tried to carry this story one to the next; and we asked God to help us to do those things. That was the essence of the message over the kitchen table. In those days, we were associated with the Oxford Group. One of its founders was Sam Shoemaker, and this Group has just left Calvary House to come over to these larger quarters, I understand.

Our debt to the Oxford Group is simply immense. We might have found these principles elsewhere, but they did give them to us, and I want to again record our undying gratitude. We also learned from them, so far as alcoholics are concerned, what not to do -- something equally important. Father Ed Dowling, a great Jesuit friend of ours, once said to me, "Bill, it isn't what you people put into AA that makes it so good -- it's what you left out."

We got both sets of notions from our Oxford Group friends, and it was through them that Ebby had sobered up and became my sponsor, the carrier of this message to me.

We began to go to Oxford Group meetings right over in Calvary House, where you've just been gathering, and it was there, fresh out of Towns Hospital, that I made my first pitch, telling about my strange experience, which did not impress the alcoholic who was listening. But something else did impress him. When I began to talk about the nature of this sickness, this malady, he pricked up his ears. He was a professor of chemistry, an agnostic, and he came up and talked afterward. Soon, he was invited over to Clinton Street - our very first customer.

We worked very hard with Freddy for three years, but alas, he remained drunk for eleven years afterward.

Other people came to us out of those Oxford Group audiences. We began to go down to Calvary Mission, an adjunct of the church in those days, and there we found a bountiful supply of real tough nuts to crack. We began to invite them to Clinton Street, and at this point the Groupers felt that we were overdoing the drunk business. It seemed they had the idea of saving the world; besides, they'd had a bad time with us. Sam and his associates he now laughingly tells me, were very much put out that they had gathered a big batch of drunks in Calvary House, hoping for a miracle. They'd put them upstairs in those nice apartments and had completely surrounded them with sweetness and light. But the drunks soon imported a flock of bottles, and one of them pitched a shoe out the apartment window right through one of those stained glass affairs of the church. So the drunks weren't exactly popular when the Wilson's showed up.

At any rate we began to be with alcoholics all the time, but nothing happened for six months. Like the Groupers, we nursed them. In fact, over in Clinton Street, we developed in the next two or three years something like a boiler factory, a sort of clinic, a hospital, and a free boardinghouse, from which practically no one issued sober, but we had a pile of experience.

We began to learn the game, and after our withdrawing from the Oxford Group -- oh, a year and a half from the time I sobered, in '34 -- we began to hold meetings of the few who had sobered up. I suppose that was really the first AA meeting. The book hadn't yet been written. We didn't even call it Alcoholics Anonymous; people asked us who we were, and we said, "Well, we're a nameless bunch of alcoholics." I suppose the use of that word "nameless" sort of led us to the idea of anonymity, which was later clapped on the book at the time it was titled.

There were great doings in Clinton Street. I remember those meetings down in the parlor so well. Our eager discussion, our hopes, our fears -- and our fears were very great. When anyone in those days had been sober a few months and slipped, it was a terrific calamity. I'll never forget the day, a year and a half after he came to stay with us, that Ebby fell over, and we all said, "Perhaps this is going to happen to all of us." Then, we began to ask ourselves why it was, and some of us pushed on.

At Clinton Street, I did most of the talking, but Lois did most of the work, and the cooking, and the loving of those early folks.

Oh my! The episodes that there were! I was away once on a business trip. (I'd briefly got back to business.) One of the drunks was sleeping on the lounge in the parlor. Lois woke up in the middle of the night, hearing a great commotion. He'd got a bottle; he'd also got into the kitchen and had drunk a bottle of maple syrup.

And he had fallen naked into the coal hod. When Lois opened the door, he asked for a towel to cover up his nakedness. She once led this same gentleman through the streets late at night looking for a doctor, and not finding a doctor, then looking for a drink, because, as he said, he could not fly on one wing!

On one occasion, a pair of them were drunk. We had five, and on another occasion, they were all drunk at the same time!

There was the time that two of them began to belabor each other with two-by-fours down in the basement. And then, poor Ebby, after repeated trials and failures, was finally locked out one night. But low and behold, he appeared anyway. He had come through the coal chute and up the stairs, very much begrimed.

So you see, Clinton Street was a kind of blacksmith shop, in which we were hammering away at these principles. For Lois and me, all roads lead back to Clinton Street.

In 1937, while we were still there, we got an idea that to spread AA we would have to have some sort of literature, guide rails for it to run on so it couldn't get garbled. We were still toying with the idea that we had to have paid workers who would be sent to other communities. We thought we'd have to go into the hospital business. Out in Akron, where we had started the first group, they had a meeting and nominated me to come to New York and do all these things.

We solicited Mr. [John D.] Rockefeller [Jr.] and some of his friends, who gave us their friendship but, luckily, not much of their money. They gave Smithy [Dr. Bob] and me a little boost during the year of 1938, and that was all; they forced us to stand on our own.

In 1938, Clinton Street saw the beginning of the preparation of the book Alcoholics Anonymous. The early chapters were written -- oh, I should think -- about May 1938. Then, we tried to raise money to get the thing published, and we actually sold stock to the local drunks in this book, not yet written. An all-time high for promotions!

Clinton Street also saw, on its second floor, in the bedroom, the writing of the Twelve Steps. We had got to Chapter Five in the book, and it looked like we would have to say at some point what the book was all about. So I remember lying there on the bed one night, and I was in one of my typical depressive snits, and I had an imaginary ulcer attack. The drunks who were supposed to be contributing, so that we could eat while the book was being written, were slow on the contributions, and I was in a damn bad frame of mind.

I lay there with a pad and pencil, and I began to think over these six steps that I've just recited to you, and said I to myself, "Well, if we put down these six steps, the chunks are too big. They'll have to digest too much all at once. Besides, they can wiggle out from in between, and if we're going to do a book, we ought to break those up into smaller pieces."

So I began to write, and in about a half an hour, I think, I had busted them up into smaller pieces. I was rather pleasantly surprised that, when numbered, they added up to twelve -- that's significant. Very nice.

At that point, a couple of drunks sailed in. I showed them the proposed Twelve Steps, and I caught fits. Why did we need them when six were doing fine? And what did I mean by dragging God from the bottom of the list up to the top?

Meanwhile the meetings in the front parlor had largely turned into hassles over the chapters of the book. The roughs were submitted and read at every meeting, so that when the Twelve Steps were proposed, there was a still greater hassle.

Because I'd had this very sudden experience and was on the pious side, I'd lauded these Steps very heavily with the word "God." Other people began to say, "This won't do at all. The reader at a distance is just going to get scared off. And what about agnostic folks like us?" There was another terrific hassle, which resulted in this terrific ten-strike we had: calling God (as you understand Him) "the Higher Power," making a hoop big enough so that the whole world of alcoholics can walk through it.

So, actually, those people who suppose that the elders of AA were going around in white robes surrounded by a blue light, full of virtue, are quite mistaken. I merely became the umpire of the immense amount of hassling that went into the preparation of the AA book, and that took place at Clinton Street.

Well, of course, the book was the summit of all our hopes at the time; along with the hassling, there was an immense enthusiasm. We tried to envision distant readers picking it up and perhaps writing in, perhaps getting sober. Could they do it on the book?

All of those things we speculated on very happily. Finally, in the spring of 1939, the book was ready. We'd made a prepublication copy of it; it had got by the Catholic Committee on Publications; we'd shown it to all sorts of people; we had made corrections. We had 5,000 copies printed, thinking that would be just a mere trifle -- that the book would soon be selling millions of copies.

Oh, we were very enthusiastic, us promoters. The Reader's Digest had promised to print a piece about the book, and we just saw those books going out in carloads.

Nothing of the sort happened. The Digest turned us down flat; the drunks had thrown their money into all this; there were hardly a hundred members in AA. And here the thing had utterly collapsed.

At this juncture, the meeting -- the first meeting of the Manhattan Group, which really took place in Brooklyn -- stopped, and it stopped for a very good reason.

That was that the landlord set Lois and me out into the street, and we didn't even have money to move our stuff into storage. Even that and the moving van -- that was done on the cuff.

Well, it was then the spring of 1939. Temporarily, the Manhattan Group moved to Jersey. It hadn't got to Manhattan yet. A great friend, Horace C., let Lois and me have a camp belonging to himself and his mother, out at Green Pond. My partner in the book enterprise, old Hank P., now gone, lived at Upper Montclair.

We used to come down to 75 William Street, where we had the little office in which a good deal of the book was actually done. Sundays that summer, we'd come down to Hank's house, where we had meetings which old-timers -- just a handful now in Jersey -- can remember.

The Alcoholic Foundation, still completely empty of money, did have one small account called the "Lois B. Wilson Improvement Fund." This improvement fund was fortified every month by a passing of the hat, so that we had the summer camp, we had fifty bucks a month, and someone else lent us a car to try to revive the book Alcoholics Anonymous and the flagging movement.

In the fall of that year, when it got cold up there at the summer camp, we moved down to Bob V.'s. Many of you remember him and Mag. We were close by the Rockland asylum. Bob and I and others went in there, and we started the first institutional group, and several wonderful characters were pried out of there.

I hope old Tom M. is here tonight -- Tom came over to the V's, where he had holed up with Lois and me, then put in a room called Siberia, because it was so cold.

We bought a coal stove for four dollars and kept ourselves warm there during the winter.

So did a wonderful alcoholic by the name of Jimmy. He never made good. Jimmy was one of the devious types, and one of our first remarkable experiences with Jimmy was this. When we moved from Green Pond, we brought Marty with us, who had been visiting, and she suddenly developed terrible pains in her stomach.

This gentleman, Jimmy, called himself a doctor. In fact, he had persuaded the authorities at Rockland that he was a wonderful physician. They gave him full access to the place. He had keys to all the surgical instruments and incidentally, I think he had keys to all the pill closets over there.

Marty was suffering awful agonies, and he said, "Well, there's nothing to it, my dear. You've got gallstones." So he goes over to Rockland. He gets himself some kind of fishing gadget that they put down gullets to fish around in there, and he fishes around and yanks up a flock of gallstones, and she hasn't had a bit of trouble since. And, dear people, it was only years later that we learned the guy wasn't a doctor at all.

Meanwhile, the Manhattan Group moved to Manhattan for the first time. The folks over here started a meeting in Bert T.'s tailor shop. Good old Bert is the guy who hocked his then-failing business to save the book Alcoholics Anonymous in 1939.

In the fall, he still had the shop, and we began to hold meetings there. Little by little, things began to grow. We went from there to a room in Steinway Hall, and we felt we were in very classic and good company that gave us an aura of respectability.

Finally, some of the boys -- notably Bert and Horace -- said, "A.A. should have a home. We really ought to have a club." And so the old 24th Street Club, which had belonged to the artists and illustrators and before that was a barn going back to Revolutionary times, was taken over. I think Bert and Horace signed the first lease. They soon incorporated it, though, lest somebody slip on a banana peel outside. Lois and I, who had moved from the V's to live with another A.A., then decided we wanted a home for ourselves, and we found a single room down in a basement on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village.

I remember Lois and me going through Grand Central wondering where we'd light

next, just before the Greenwich Village move. We were very tired that day, and we walked off the main floor there and sat on one of those gorgeous marble stairways leading up to the balcony, and we both began to cry and say, "Where will we ever light? Will we ever have a home?"

Well, we had one for a while in Barrow Street. And when the club was opened up, we moved into one of those rooms there. Tom M. came over from the V's, and right then and there a Tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous was generated. It seemed that volunteers had been sweeping the club; it seemed that many of the alcoholics had keys to the club; and they came and went and sometimes stayed; and sometimes they got very drunk and acted very badly -- doing we know not what. There had to be somebody there to really look after the place. So we thought we'd approach old Tom, who had a pension as a fireman. We said, "Tom, how would you like to come and live at the club?"

Tom says, "What's on your mind?"

"Well," we said, "we really need somebody here all the time, you know, to make the coffee and see that the place is heated and throw some coal on that furnace over there and lead the drunks outside if they're too bad."

"Ain't ya gonna pay me?" Tom says.

"Oh, no," we said. "This is Alcoholics Anonymous. We can't have any professionals."

Tom says, "I do my Twelfth Step work, I don't charge 'em nothing. But what you guys want is a janitor, and if you're going to get me, you're going to pay, see?"

Well, we were very much disturbed about our own situation. We weren't exactly paid -- they were just passing the hat for us, you understand. I think that we went for seven years of the history of this Society with an average income of seventeen hundred bucks a year, which, for a former stockbroker, is not too big.

So this question of who is a professional and who isn't bore very heavily at the time on Tom and me. And Tom began to get it settled. He began to show that if a special service was asked from anybody full-time, we'd have to pay or not get it.

So, finally, we haggled Tom down on the theory that he already had a pension, and he came to live there, and meetings began in that old club.

That old club saw many a terrific development, and from that club sprang all the groups in this area. The club saw the passage of the Rockefeller dinner, when we thought we'd all be rich as a movement, and Mr. Rockefeller saved us by not giving us money.

That club saw the Saturday Evening Post article published. In fact, the Post at that time said, "No pictures, no article." If you will look up the March 1, 1941, issue of the Saturday Post, you will see a picture of the interior of the club, and a flock of us sitting before the fire. They didn't use our names, but they insisted on pictures.

Anonymity wasn't then quite what it is today. And with the advent of that piece, there was a prodigious rush of inquiries -- about 6,000 of them.

By this time, we'd moved the little office from Newark, New Jersey, over to Vesey Street. You will find in the old edition of the book [Alcoholics Anonymous] "Box 58, Church Street Annex." And that was the box into which the first inquiries came. We picked out that location because Lois and I were drifters, and we picked it because it was the center of the geographical area here. We didn't know whether we'd light in Long Island, New Jersey, or Westchester, so the first A.A. post office box was down there with a little office alongside of it.

The volunteers couldn't cope with this tremendous flock of inquiries -- heartbreakers, but 6,000 of them! We simply had to hire some help. At that point, we asked you people if you'd send the foundation a buck apiece a year, so we wouldn't have to throw that stuff in the wastebasket. And that was the beginning of the service office and the book company.

That club saw all those things transpire. But there was a beginning in that club at that time that none of us noticed very much. It was just a germ of an idea. It often looked, in after years, as though it might die out. Yet within the last three years, it has become what I think is one of the greatest developments that we shall ever know, and here I'm going to break into my little tale to introduce my partner in all this, who stayed with me when things were bad and when things have been good, and she'll tell you what began upstairs in that club, and what has eventuated from it. Lois."

(Lois then spoke about the formation and the early days of Al-Anon Family Groups.)

So, you see, it was in the confines of the Manhattan Group of those very, very early days that this germ of an idea came to life. Lois might have added that since the St. Louis conference, one new family group has started every single day of the week since, someplace in the world.

I think the deeper meaning of all this is that AA is something more than a quest for sobriety, because we cannot have sobriety unless we solve the problem of life, which is essentially the problem of living and working together. And the family groups are straightening out the enormous twist that has been put on our domestic relations by our drinking. I think it's one of the greatest things that's happened in years.

Well, let's cut back to old 24th Street. One more thing happened there:

Another Tradition was generated. It had to do with money. You know how slow I was on coming up with that dollar bill tonight? I suppose I was thinking back -- some sort of unconscious reflex.

We had a deuce of a time getting that club supported, just passing the hat, no fees, no dues, just the way it should be. But the no fee and dues business was construed into no money at all -- let George do it.

I'd been, on this particular day, down to the foundation office, and we'd just put out this dollar-a-year measuring stick for the alcoholics to send us some money if they felt like it. Not too many were feeling like it, and I remember that I was walking up and down the office damning these drunks.

That evening, still feeling sore about the stinginess of the drunks, I sat on the stairs at the old 24th Street Club, talking to some would-be convert. Tom B. was leading the meeting that night, and at the intermission he put on a real plug for money, the first one that I'd ever heard. At that time, money and spirituality couldn't mix, even in the hat. I mean, you mustn't talk about money! Very reluctantly, we'd gone into the subject with Tom M. and the landlord. We were behind in the rent.

Well, Tom put on that heavy pitch, and I went on talking to my prospect, and as the hat came along, I fished in my pocket and pulled out half a buck.

That very day, I think, Ebby had come in the office a little the worse for wear, and with a very big heart, I had handed him five dollars. Our total income at that time was thirty bucks a week, which had come out of the Rockefeller dinner affair; so I'd given him five bucks of the thirty and felt very generous, you see.

But now comes the hat to pay for the light and heat and so forth -- rent -- and I pull out this half dollar and I look absent-mindedly at it, and I put my hand in the other pocket and pull out a dime and put it in the hat.

So I have never once railed at alcoholics for not getting up the money. There, you see, was the beginning of two A.A. Traditions -- things that had to do with professionalism and money.

Following 1941, this thing just mushroomed. Groups began to break off out into the suburbs. But a lot of us still wanted a club, and the 24th Street Club just couldn't do the trick. We got an offer from Norman Vincent Peale to take over a church at 41st Street. The church was in a neighborhood that had deteriorated badly -- over around Ninth Avenue and 41st. In fact, it was said to be a rather sinful neighborhood, if you gather what I mean. The last young preacher that Peale had sent there seemed very much against drinking and smoking and other even more popular forms of sin; therefore, he had no parishioners.

Here was this tremendous church, and all that we could see was a bigger and bigger club in New York City. So we moved in. The body of the church would hold 1,000 people, and we had a hall upstairs that would hold another 800, and we visioned this as soon full. Then there were bowling alleys downstairs, and we figured the drunks would soon be getting a lot of exercise. After they warmed up down there, they could go upstairs in the gymnasium.

Then, we had cooking apparatus for a restaurant. This was to be our home, and we moved in. Well, sure enough, the place filled up just like mad! Then, questions of administration, questions of morals, questions of meetings, questions of which was the Manhattan Group and which was the club and which was the Intergroup (the secretary of the club was also the Intergroup secretary) began to get this seething mass into terrific tangles, and we learned a whole lot about clubs!

Whilst all this was going on, the AA groups were spreading throughout America and to foreign shores, and each group, like our own, was having its terrific headaches. In that violent period, nobody could say whether this thing would

hang together or not. Would it simply explode and fly all to pieces? On thousands of anvils of experience, of which the Manhattan Group was certainly one (down in that 41st Street club, more sparks came off that anvil than any I ever saw), we hammered out the Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous, which were first published in 1946 [April Grapevine]. We hammered out the rudiments of an Intergroup, which now has become one of the best there is anywhere, right here in New York.

Finally, however, the club got so big that it bust. The Intergroup moved. So did the Manhattan Group, with $5,000 -- its part of the take, which it hung on to. And from the Manhattan Group's experience, we learned that -- although the foundation needs a reserve -- for God's sake, don't have any money in a group treasury!

The hassles about that $5,000 lasted until they got rid of it somehow.

Then, you all moved down to dear old Sam Shoemaker's Calvary, the very place of our beginning. Now, we've made another move.

And so we grow, and such has been the road that leads back to the kitchen table at Clinton Street.

New Delegates

Memorandum “ January 1961"

Re: New Delegates

By Bill Wilson

I've been asked to venture some opinions on the questions of new Delegates to the General Service Conference.

As we know, representation is now based on one Delegate from each State or Province, regardless of population. Then, in large areas, we have extra Delegates, representing large populations. And in a few cases, where the areas are huge but sparsely populated, we have a few extra Delegates, these based on geographical considerations.

For the operation of the Conference itself, this is a sufficiently representative cross-section of A.A. The actual conference meetings would not be hurt if we had ten less Delegates, nor appreciably helped if we had twenty more. For this particular purpose we have enough for the present. More Delegates would just mean more expense.

But this isn't the whole story. On his return home it is not fair to burden a Delegate with too great a population of groups, even though he has plenty of committeemen. Nor is it fair to burden him with a huge and sparsely populated area, too big for him and his committee to manage. If we don't make adjustments of these conditions, then our local communications will suffer.

Therefore the Conference Committee on Admissions should weigh each new application for a new Delegate on its own merit, taking into consideration the primary factors of population, geography - and also expense. But this process of adding delegates ought to be gradual, aiming at the remedy of obvious and marked flaws in local communications. We should, our budget allowing, continue to remedy obvious flaws in local communications and that is all.

It should be re-emphasized that the Conference is not a political body demanding a completely rigid formula of representation. What we shall need will always be enough Delegates at New York to afford a reliable cross-section of A.A. plus enough more to make sure of good local communication.

It is my understanding that Ontario has applied for an extra Delegate. Here I would prefer to express no specific opinion, this being the function of the Committee on Admissions and the General Service Board.

I'm only suggesting that the frame of reference described above may be a suitable one within which to make each specific determination.

BILL WILSON'S TALK AT GUEST HOUSE

(Transcribers note: The following address was delivered by Bill W. at Guest House, a treatment center for alcoholic priests in Lake Orion, Michigan, a few years before his death, possibly in 1968 or 1969. Where words are unintelligible, best guesses appear in brackets)

Well, I like the informal discussion type of approach. It seemed to me that on an occasion like this questions have something of infinitely more value than a lecture or a story. But Ripp* suggested that I make some remarks here tonight, and I'm only too glad to do that.

(*Transcriber's note: probably refers to Austin Ripley, who founded Guest House in 1956.)

And coming down on the plane, I got speculating with myself about the early days of AA and about the meaning of them in terms of the grace of God. I read somewhere that if a grain of wheat, which has been stored for centuries in, a dry place is exposed to the right soil and the right climate and to enough light from above it will manifest life and it will unfold and it will grow. But this presupposes the right soil, the right climate and, above all, enough light.

Well, I think it's that way with AA. I remember, years back, when we first began to get publicity, and the first very large occasion was a feature piece done in the Saturday Evening Post which all at once produced us about six thousand members. This was in '41, and by then a number of medics had become close friends, some of them psychiatrists. And these fellows allowed their names to be used (a rather audacious step in those days, I assure you) their names were used in the Post article.

I make this point because, when later asked to testify on another occasion, they refused to do it, and these were the circumstances: the first gal that got sober in AA is one known to many of you as Marty, still very much a going concern in the educational field. Marty was a most difficult case. God knows we're all complex, but Marty was really a champ. And she had been under the care of a Dr. Foster Kennedy, a man of very wide repute in that time, worldwide renown, a neurologist. And he watched Marty as she was planted in the new soil. He watched her receive this light.

Well, he was tremendously impressed. He came to some meetings and soon he said to me, "Bill, would it be possible to have two or three of the psychiatrists in institutions who have seen recoveries of very grim cases, people that you say are friends of yours and who have testified for you in the Post piece, couldn't we get a group of this sort to come to the Academy of Medicine and explain what hey have seen?" Well, we thought this was just great, because in those days there were few friends, indeed. So shoring by these people, by reason of Dr. Kennedy, well, what could be better? So, one by one, we went to them, and we

said "would they come to the Academy" and we supposed they would. After all, some of the Kennedy glory could brush off, and, you know, they were friends anyhow, and they'd proved it, so why not? And not a one would do it!

And, when pressed for their reasons for not doing it, each one of them separately said the same thing. In effect, each said, "Look, Bill. You folks have added up in one column more of the resources which have been separately applied to alcoholics than anyone else. For example: you have this kinship in suffering; you have possibilities of communication that others don't have; you have a crude form of self-examination or analysis and of catharsis; you have a great new outgoing interest; you reduce guilt by restitution and you have this great compelling interest in helping others.

"And then there is the religious factor. And then there is this factor of the hopelessness, so far as the resources of the individual are concerned, of this malady. Now this is a formidable list of forces, but we still can't come to the Academy."

"Well, why not?"

"Well," said they, "we see in AA, sometimes in weeks, in a few months, shifts in motivation that even the sums of these forces couldn't begin to account for, because we all too well understand the difficulties of this subtle compulsion. And the sum of them won't add up to the speed of these transformations in these very grim cases. So, for us, there is an unknown factor at work in AA. And, among ourselves, being scientists we call it the "X" factor. We believe you people call it the grace of God. And who shall go to the Academy to explain the grace of God to that body? No one can. And we simply won't."

So, I think it is just as futile as ever for any of us to presume to explain this matter of grace around which our entire galaxy of principles and activities gathers and clusters. We can't do that, but we can examine this matter of the soil and this matter of climate and this matter of illumination [for], which, for some reason or other, we have made ourselves ready. Clearly, God's grace is in and through all.

So, it might be said, "Why haven't alcoholics sobered many times more often through grace than they have? It's available. Why hasn't religion been more successful, numerically at least? Why hasn't medicine been more successful? How is it that laymen seem to be doing this thing?" So I would like to tell a story depicting, at least as it seems to me, what the soil is and what the climate is and what the light is, these things of which we have been placed in such treasured possession.

There is no doubt that in an ordinary sense of time AA began in the office of a psychiatrist, and we might be mindful of this when we criticize people in this profession. Of course, for most of us, the origin is two thousand years old, for some of us perhaps older. But I am speaking of the situation in an immediate sense: how was it precipitated? This too is a matter of conjecture, but here's how it seems to me.

There was a certain businessman of great attainment. He's cut down by the grog, he runs the gamut of treatments in this country, and this would be in the year about 1932 when he was just about at the end of his tether. So, he went abroad and became a patient of Dr. Carl Jung.

And, as all of you know, Jung was one of the founding fathers of the "art" (I prefer that instead of "science") of psychiatry. And Jung, Adler, Freud were the three founding fathers, but, of these, only Jung seemed to think that man is something more than two dollar's worth of chemicals, a bundle of instincts and an uncertain intellect. Jung thought that man had something beyond this, that man has soul.

So our traveler had found a truly great human being, great, indeed, as events [spell or fell] out. He placed himself under that dear man's tutelage for a whole year, becoming more and more confident that the hidden springs of this baleful compulsion to drink were being understood and removed and cast away. He began to feel more free. There was no drinking while he was under treatment. At the end of a year, he left Carl Jung and in one month he was tight. And the bender was terrific.

So, in infinite despair, he came back to Carl Jung and said, "Is there anything now for me? You were my court of last resort." And this great man said, "Roland, I thought for a time after you first came that you might be one of those rare cases in which my art has been helpful. Otherwise I should not have encouraged you to stay. But, alas, I am obliged to conclude that you are not, and that there is nothing that I have to offer you. My art has failed you."

I need not say that, coming from a man of his eminence, this was a statement of beautiful humility. And the whole destiny of AA, you and me and all of us, has since hung on that sentence.

So then Hazard found that agony was added to despair, and he cried out, "But is there nothing else?" And this was the answer he got: "Roland, time out of mind, alcoholics have recovered here and there, now and then, through religious experiences, spiritual experiences let us say, or very truly through conversion (a naughty word for us AA’s; we don't use it for obvious reasons).

"But," said the doctor," this benign lighting seldom strikes, and no one can say where or when it will, or for the resuscitation of whom. So I simply would advise you to place yourself in a religious atmosphere, remembering the hopelessness of your doing anything about it on your own remaining resources alone, and cooperating with your associates and casting yourself upon whatever God there may be."

So Roland aligned himself with the Oxford groups of that time, a rather

evangelical movement, rather aggressive (very easy it is to criticize). It was nondenominational, however, and it used simple common denominators of religions, simple moral principles. It called upon its members to admit that they could not solve the life problem on their own. It called upon them for self-examination. It called upon them for restitution. It called upon them for a kind of giving in the Franciscan manner, the kind of giving that demands no return in money, power, prestige and the like, the losing of one's self in the lives of others. Such was the nature of the crowd with which he became associated.

Unaccountably, to him, the obsession to drink left. And for some years he had no more trouble. At the time in the groups there were a few alcoholics sober. There is one now at Ann Arbor that goes back to that time, an old friend who never became an AA. Sobered up in the Oxford Groups.

So Roland returned to America. And the groups here in those days were headed by an Episcopal clergyman called Sam Shoemaker. And in his congregation and among the groups were two or three other alcoholics that, for the nonce, were staying dry.

And Hazard had a summer place near Bennington, Vermont. And these friends, one of them son of a local judge and himself an alcoholic, described the plight of a boy who was a school-time chum of mine, Ebby Thatcher. And Ebby had been deteriorating horribly. There were summer folks in the town above Manchester. Ebby had run his car into the side of the farmer's house, pushed the wall of the kitchen in, the door could still be opened to the car, Ebby stuck his head out and, to the poor woman cowering in the corner who hadn't been hit, he said, "Hey, what about a cup of coffee?"

Well, the town fathers had had it. They were going to commit Ebby for alcoholic insanity, so the judge's son and Hazard picked up the man who was to become my sponsor.

Meanwhile, I had gone the route with which you're all familiar. I had sobered up the summer before, scared to death by the verdict of my doctor, Dr. Silkworth, the one we have since named "the little doctor who loved drunks," and must have then because in his lifetime he dealt with some forty thousand of them as a hack doctor in a drying out place.

And he had an idea that this thing was an illness having several components: a spiritual illness, a moral illness and also a physical illness. And, perhaps oversimplifying, he was apt to describe an alcoholic as a person condemned by a compulsion to drink against his own interests, to drink in spite of his perfect willingness to stop, and that this drinking was coupled to an increasing sensitivity of the body which, if the drinking went on, guaranteed his insanity and, one day, his death. So this sort of a sentence had been spoken to Lois at long last by my doctor, Dr. Silkworth. So you see the soil was under preparation. We were beginning to learn a little more about climate. Ebby and my other friend Roland had received a considerable amount of light.

Well, I got drunk in about two months, even in spite of this sentence that I would have to be locked up or go nuts, maybe within a year. And then my friend Ebby, who had been brought to New York from Vermont, who had unaccountably sobered up for the time being in the Oxford Groups, came to visit me for I too was in great despair.

Despair is the primary ingredient, indeed, of this soil. In the medical

jargon we might call it "deflation at depth." Some deflation, huh? So, Ebby came to see me. And he pitched at me this list of moral (you might say) clichés. Nothing so new about that. I was in favor of honesty. I was in favor of helping other people.

I was in favor of practically everything he had to say except one thing: I was not in favor of God, for I had received one of these magnificent modeled modern schillings, scientific schooling, that assured that by a series of stages, picking up increments from somewhere as they went along, I could be traced back to a single piece of ooze in prehistoric seas. And this was my faith. And science was my god.

So along comes Ebby, and along comes Jung, for whom I had respect, and here was my doctor: Science can't do it; medicine can't do it; psychology can't do it. Religion? Sometimes. That was his story. But how could I buy religion? So I felt trapped. In other words, I was gripped in the trap which we every day construct for the drunk who approaches us saying, "Well, I think the group life must be great. Helping other people? I'm for it. But I couldn't get the spiritual angle (as our jargon has it)."

Now, as you know, this gentleman is the newcomer, like me, is being caught in this trap. When you and I talk to another alcoholic, and we identify ourselves as having been denizens of this strange world, and, having emerged, and we describe this malady in the terms of our god, Science, and THAT God pronounces the sentence of hopelessness upon us, the sentence, we are deflated at depth. And then we learn that now we have accepted our personal hopelessness, there still isn't any hope because we cannot go for the God business.

And this was the awful dilemma into which I was cast by my friend Ebby,

bringing, on the one side, all of this bad news, but on the other side, the spectacle of his own release, and that was the word to use. He didn't say he was on the water-wagon; the obsession had just left him as soon as he became willing to try on the basis of these principles, and, indeed, as he became willing to appeal to whatever God there might be. And this was reducing the theological requirements an awful lot.

Well, I went on drinking about three weeks, and in no waking hour would I forget the face of my friend, a spectacle of release as I looked out through a haze of gin into his face, as he pitched this "synthesis" at me. So I thought, "well, I better go up to the hospital and get sobered up. A conversion experience is not for me: I'm an obstinate Vermonter.

Besides, I can't buy it. People say to me, 'Have faith.' And I believe I'd have faith if I could have it but I can't. But anyhow, I'll go and get dried up.

So I went to the hospital. I must have had a little optimism, because I came in with a bag of beer (I had tried to share it on the subway up). I was waving a bottle.

Dear little Dr. Silkworth came out and I yelled at him, "This time, Doc, I got it!"

He said, "I'm afraid you have, Bill. You better get upstairs and go to bed." And he looked very sad, for he loved me. So I went upstairs, and went to bed. I was there while I entered the D.T.’s.

So, in about three days, I was all in the clear. But, the more sober I got, the more awful the despair, the depression. So, I think it was the morning of the third or the fourth day that my friend Ebby showed up in the doorway, and my feeling was ambivalent at once.

So I said, "Well, this is the time he's going to pour on the evangelism." And on the other hand I was saying, "Well, he should be looking for a job. Why is he up here at eleven o'clock in the morning to see me? He does practice what he preaches."

So, Ebby knew my prejudices, and so he waited for me to ask him again for that neat little formula through which he had achieved release. And dutifully he went through it: you got honest with yourself, with another person in confidence; you made restitution; you helped others; and you prayed to God as you understood Him (I think he might have even used that phrase).

And without much more ado, he was gone. No pressure. And again I couldn't have truck with the God business. And again the despair deepened until the last of this prideful obstinacy momentarily was apparently crushed out. And then, like a child crying out in the dark, I said, "If there is a Father, if the is a God, will he show himself?"

And the place lit up in a great glare, a wondrous white light. Then I began to have images, in the mind's eyes, so to speak, and one came in which I seemed to see myself standing on a mountain and a great clean wind was blowing, and this blowing at first went around and then it seemed to go through me. And then the ecstasy redoubled and I found myself exclaiming, "I am a free man! So THIS is the God of the preachers!"

And little by little the ecstasy subsided and I found myself in a new world of consciousness. And one of the early reflections in this world of great peace which stole over me was that all is well with God. I am a part of His cosmos at last. Even evil in His hands can be transmuted into good.

So I had been deflates at depth by a fellow sufferer who used the scientific verdict to deflate me, who used his ability to communicate to me through our kinship of common suffering, and who made the example of a person who practiced what he preached. So, then, for me, here indeed was the soil, here was the climate, and, God knows, the light was great.

Now, I venture this assertion [that every member] of AA has a spiritual awakening or experience of exactly this character. Certainly it is not for me to dicker with theologians, but let me say I prefer to think that there is no essential difference between what happened to me and what happens to each sound AA, excepting the time element.

Going back to those psychiatrists who said, "We can't understand this tremendous shift in motivation despite all your resources." Well, in my case the shifts ...[tape paused]. but the fruits have been the same. And one of the most terrible compulsions and obsessions known has been expelled from us almost wholesale. It's true, this happy synthesis of medicine, religion and our own experience in suffering, in recovery and sharing the grace of this, one with the next. So, fellas, there's my speech.

Q: Bill, is that light relative in the sense of illumination? It must be. Not every one of us has gone through the experience of ecstasy or any light shining or ...

OK. Maybe... You know, this is a curbstone opinion, but here's how I look at it. You go to AA meetings and somebody gets up, and this happens time after time, and he says, "Now, folks, I ain't got the spiritual angle. Yet. I'm making the group my Higher Power. They're sober and I wasn't. So I got a Higher Power, I ain't got the spiritual angle the way you fella’s did. And as for Bill's thing, well, he looks sane in other respects, but, you know.."

Now, this guy will get up there and tell a story of losing this compulsion and of its being cleared out of him and his being re-motivated in many other ways, just like those psychiatrists said, in a matter of months, or of six months or a year.

Now just take one of those fellows and try to imagine all of those shifts in motivation taking place within six months, or within six minutes instead of six months. I think, had this happened to that fellow, he too could have had ecstasy.

So I think it's a time element, and I personally see no great advantage in these tremendous experiences, save in my case only one. It did give me an instant conviction of the presence of God which has never left me from that moment, in spite of the worst I can do (and it's often been damned bad), and no matter what the pressure. And I feel that that extra dividend may have made the difference whether I would have persisted with AA in the early years or not.

Actually, it has some liabilities, and I've seen it in others who have had these experiences in AA, and there are quite a lot. And this is the penance, and I think you theologians give us some excuse for it too, of beginning to think that, because we have these tremendous illuminations, that WE are something special.

So, you begin to develop a kind of a paranoia alongside of a perfectly valid experience. And this is just what happened to me. I damned near botched up the whole works by coming out of this working furiously with drunks and, before anybody had been sobered up, I got so far off base as to loudly declare one time to an audience by no means spellbound that I was going to sober up all the god damned drunks in the world! Now THAT is pure paranoia if you ever...

So, don't long for the illumination. I think you're apt to have the experience that's appropriate

Q: Well, I'm not longing for it. I...

Well, some people do. You know: "Oh, my God! If I could only have one like Bill's!" Now, actually, this may be said very sincerely because this may be a guy who's slipping around, but he may be slipping around on account of the fact that he's a little schizy and needs some of them vitamin B3s, so now we'll put on Hawkins.

Moderator: Well, you got it from the horse's mouth, fellas. Very inspiring and illuminating, the things that Bill [tells] of how this all began. Now you've gone with him you know what the purpose of their meeting is here: is on niacin. And tomorrow we'll have Dr. Hoffer and Dr. Osborn and a couple of other people. But one of the most active in the field with some startling developments is Dr. Dave Hawkins in New York, and I'll read you a little bit of his background: both his Bachelor of Science degree and medical degree were received from Marquette University. He interned in Columbia Hospital in Milwaukee. He then graduated from [end of tape] Transcriber's note: According to "Pass It On," Dr. Humphry Osmond (not Osborn) and Abram Hoffer were English psychiatrists working in a mental hospital in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, principally with alcoholics and schizophrenics.

It was they who introduced Bill to LSD. Later, they gained some success in treating alcoholics by administering vitamin B3, also known as niacin. Bill felt strongly that this was the key to the "allergy of the body" that Dr. Silkworth had suspected, and spent the remaining years of his life actively promoting niacin therapy (much to the consternation of the AA fellowship).

Have the Traditions been widely accepted?

A - When they were first written in early 1946 as tentative guides to help us hang together and function, nobody paid any attention except a few "againers" who wrote me and asked what the hell they were about.

Nobody paid the slightest attention but little by little as these Traditions got around we had our clubhouse squabbles, our little rifts, this difficulty and that and it was found that the Traditions indeed did reflect experience and were guiding principles. So they took hold a little more and a little more so that today the average A.A. coming in the door learns at once what they're about, about what kind of an outfit he has really landed in and by what principles his group and A.A. as a whole are governed. (Transcribed from tape, Fort Worth, TX, 1954)

Bill W

American Psychiatric Association

The following is a talk Bill gave to the American Psychiatric Association in 1949.

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHIATRY © Vol. 106, 1949. THE SOCIETY OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS WILLIAM W., CO-FOUNDER

Alcoholics Anonymous is grateful for this invitation to appear before The American Psychiatric Association. It is a most happy circumstance.

Being laymen, we have naught but a story to tell, hence the quite personal and unscientific character of this narrative. Whatever their deeper implications the attitudes and events leading to the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous are easy to portray. Two alcoholics talk across a kitchen table. One is drinking, the other is not. Severe chronics, the threat of commitment hangs over both. The time is November 1934. The active drinker became, years later, the writer of this paper.

My sober visitor was an old friend and schoolmate, long catalogued by physicians and family as hopeless. I enjoyed the same rating and well knew it. My friend had arrived to tell me how he had been released from alcohol. In truth, the quality of his sobriety seemed different. Having made contact with the Oxford Group, a nondenominational, evangelical movement, my friend had been specially impressed by an alcoholic he had met, a former patient of C. G. Jung.

Unsuccessfully treating this individual for a year, Dr. Jung had finally advised him to try religious conversion as his last chance. While disagreeing with many tenets of the Oxford Group, my former schoolmate did, however, ascribe his new sobriety to certain ideas that this alcoholic and other Oxford people had given him. The particular practices my friend had selected for himself were simple:

1. He admitted he was powerless to solve his own problem.

2. He got honest with himself as never before; made an examination of conscience.

3. He made a rigorous confession of his personal defects.

4. He surveyed his distorted relations with people, visiting them to make restitution.

5. He resolved to devote himself to helping others in need, without the usual demand for personal prestige or material gain.

6. By meditation he sought God's direction for his life and help to practice these principles at all times.

This sounded pretty naive to me. Nevertheless my friend stuck to the plain tale of what had happened -- no evangelizing. He related how practicing these precepts, his drinking had unaccountably stopped. Fear and isolation left and he had received considerable peace of mind. With no hard disciplines nor any great resolves, these attributes began to appear the moment he conformed. His release was a byproduct. Though sober but months, he felt he had a basic answer. Wisely avoiding any argument, he then took leave. The spark that was to become Alcoholics Anonymous had been struck.

What then did happen at the kitchen table? Perhaps this speculation were better left to medicine and religion. I confess I do not know. Possibly conversion will never be fully understood.

Looking outward from such an experience, I can only say with fidelity what seemed to happen. Yet something did happen that instantly changed the current of my life. I haven't had a drink for over fourteen years. All else will be mere personal opinion -- or just fancy.

My friend's story had generated mixed emotions; I was drawn and revolted by turns. My solitary drinking went on, but I could not forget his visit. Several themes coursed in my mind: First, that his evident state of release was strangely and immensely convincing. Second, that he had been pronounced hopeless by competent medicos. Third, that those age-old precepts, when transmitted by him, had struck me with great power. Fourth, that I could not, and would not, go along with any God concept. No conversion nonsense for me. Thus did I ponder. Trying to divert my thoughts, I found it no use By cords of understanding, suffering, and simple verity, another alcoholic had bound me to him. I shall not break away.

One morning after my gin a realization welled up. Who are you, I asked, to choose how you are going to get well? Beggars are not choosers. Suppose medicine said carcinoma was your trouble. You would not turn to Pond's extract. In abject haste you would beg a doctor to kill those hellish cancer cells. If he didn't stop them, and you thought conversion could, your pride would fly away. You would soon stand in public squares crying Amen along with other victims.

What difference then, I reflected, between you and the cancer victim? His sick body crumbles. Likewise your personality crumbles, your obsession consigns you to madness or the undertaker. Are you going to try your friends formula -- or not?

Of course I did try. In December, 1934, I appeared at Towns Hospital, New York.

My old friend, Dr. W. D. Silkworth, shook his head. Soon free of sedation and alcohol, I felt horribly depressed. My alcoholic friend turned up. Though glad to see him, I shrank a little. I feared evangelism. Nothing of the sort happened. After small talk, I again asked him about the Oxford Groups. Quietly, sanely enough, he told me, and then departed.

Lying there in conflict, I dropped into a black depression. Momentarily my prideful obstinacy was crushed. I cried out: Now I’m ready to do anything - anything to receive what my good friend has. Expecting naught, I made this frantic appeal: If there be a God, will he show himself!

The result was instant, electric, beyond description. The place lit up, blinding white. I knew only ecstasy and seemed on a mountain. A great wind blew, enveloping and permeating me. It was not of air, but of Spirit. Blazing, came the tremendous thought, You are a free man! Then ecstasy subsided. Still on the bed I was now in another world of consciousness which was suffused by a Presence. One with the Universe, a great peace stole over me and I thought, So this is the God of the preachers; this is the Great Reality. But reason returned, my modern education took over.

Obviously I had gone crazy. I became terribly frightened.

Dr. Silkworth came in to hear my trembling account of the phenomenon. He assured me I was not mad; that I had perhaps undergone an experience which might solve my problems. 

Skeptical man of science he then was; this was most kind and astute. If he had said hallucination I might now be dead. To him I shall be eternally grateful.

Good fortune pursued me. Somebody brought a book entitled Varieties of Religious Experience and I devoured it. Written by James, the psychologist, it suggests that conversion can have objective reality. Conversion does alter motivation, and does semi-automatically enable a person to be and do the formerly impossible. Significant it was, that marked conversion experiences come mostly to individuals who know complete defeat in a controlling area. The book certainly showed variety. But bright or dim, cataclysmic or gradual, theological or intellectual in bearing, such conversions did have common denominators, they did change utterly defeated people. And so declared William James. The shoe fitted. I have tried to wear it ever since. For drunks, the obvious answer was deflation at depth and more of it. That seemed plain as a pikestaff. I had been trained as an engineer, so the views of this authoritative psychologist meant everything to me.

Armored now by utter conviction and fortified by my characteristic power drive, I took off to cure alcoholics wholesale. It was twin jet propulsion; difficulties meant nothing. The vast conceit of my project never occurred to me. I pressed my assault for six months; my home was filled with alcoholics Harangues with scores produced not the slightest result. None of them got it. 

Disappointingly, my friend of the kitchen table, who was sicker than I realized, took little interest in these other alcoholics. This fact may have caused his endless backslides later on. For I had found that working with alcoholics had a huge bearing on my own sobriety

.

But why wouldn’t any of my new prospects sober up?

Slowly the bugs came to light. Like a religious crank, I was obsessed with the idea that everybody must have a spiritual experience just like mine. I’d forgotten that there were many varieties. So my brother alcoholics just stared incredulously or kidded me about my hot flash. This had spoiled the potent identification so easy to get with them. I had turned evangelist. Clearly the deal had to be streamlined. What came to me in six minutes might require six months in others.

It was to be learned that words are things, that one must be prudent. It was also certain that something ailed the deflationary technique. It definitely lacked wallop.

Reasoning that the alcoholic's hex, or compulsion, must issue from some deep level, it followed that ego deflation must also go deep or else there couldn’t be any fundamental release. Apparently religious practice would not touch the alcoholic until his underlying situation was made ready. Fortunately all the tools were right at hand. You doctors supplied them.

The emphasis was straightway shifted from sin to sickness -- the fatal malady, alcoholism. We quoted doctors that alcoholism was more lethal than cancer; that it consisted of an obsession of the mind coupled to increasing body sensitivity. These were our Twin Ogres of Madness and Death. We leaned heavily on Dr. Jung's statement how hopeless the condition could be and then poured that devastating dose into every drunk within range. To modern man science is omnipotent; it is a god. Hence if science would pass a death sentence on the drunk, and we placed that verdict on our alcoholic transmission belt, it might shatter him completely. Perhaps he would then turn to the God of the theologian, there being no place else to go. Whatever the truth in this device, it certainly had practical merit. Immediately our whole atmosphere changed. Things began to look up.

Bankrupt at the time, I stumbled into a business venture. It took me to Akron, Ohio, where the deal quickly collapsed leaving me dispirited. Alone, I panicked in fear of getting drunk. This was something new for I realized that I hadn’t thought of drinking since the December 1934 experience. I could now see my peril clearly and thus brush off the usual rationalizations. With relief, I perceived that my new spiritual conditioning really meant something now that the heat was on. But that didn’t stop the compulsive up rush of drinking desire. I needed to talk to another alcoholic, and quickly.

Shortly I was introduced to Dr. Robert S., a surgeon. He was an alcoholic in a bad way. This time there was no preachment from me. I told him my experience and what I thought I knew about alcoholism. Needing him as much as he did me, there was a genuine mutuality for the first time and, as we now say in A.A., he soon clicked never to drink again. That was June 1935. We began to spend long hours on drunks at a local hospital. One of them is sober yet, no relapse. Though nameless, the first A.A. Group had actually started. Dr. S. has since hospitalized some 4,000 cases at Akron. The bulk have recovered. All this too without a cent of monetary return to him. Thus he became co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. As I left Akron in September 1935 three alcoholics were staying sober.

Arrived at New York, I set to work and another A.A. group took shape. But nothing was very sure; we still flew blind.

It was soon necessary to retire from the Oxford Group. The good people there had disapproved of us. For our purpose, the Oxford Group atmosphere wasn’t entirely right. Their demands for absolute moral rectitude encouraged guilt and rebellion. Either will get alcoholics drunk, and did. As nonalcoholic evangelists, they couldn’t understand that. Good friends these, we owed them much. From them we had learned what, and what not, to do.

Then commenced a 3 year season of trial and error eventuating in our textbook Alcoholics Anonymous, published in 1939. That book, now backbone of our A.A. society, opens with a typical story of drinking and recovery. Next comes a chapter of hope, entitled There Is A Solution. In A.A. vernacular two chapters describe alcoholism and the alcoholic, their object being of course to first identify and then deflate. A chapter is devoted to softening up the agnostic.

This leads to the Twelve Steps of present-day Alcoholics Anonymous. The heart of our therapy, and a practical way of life, these Steps are little but an amplified and streamlined version of the principles enumerated by my friend of the kitchen table.

The balance of the text is mostly devoted to practical application of these Twelve Steps, and to reducing the inner resistance of the reader. Working with other alcoholics is very heavily emphasized. Chapters are devoted to wives, family relations, and employers. The final chapter pictures the new society and begs the recovered alcoholic to form a group himself. This ideology is then shored up by 30 case histories, or rather stories, written by A.A. members. These complete the identification and stir hope. The 400 pages of Alcoholics Anonymous contain no theory; they narrate experience only.

When the book appeared in April 1939, we had about 100 members. One-third of these had impressive sobriety records. The movement had spread to Cleveland and drifted toward Chicago and Detroit. In the East it inclined to Philadelphia and Washington. There was an extraordinary event at Cleveland. The Plain Dealer published strong pieces about us backed by editorials. A barrage of telephone calls descended on 20 A.A. members, mostly new people. A.A. book in hand, they took on all comers. New members worked with the still newer. Two years later, Cleveland had garnered by this chain reaction hundreds of new members.

The batting average was excellent. It was our first evidence that we might digest huge numbers rapidly.

Then came great national publicity. The Saturday Evening Post piece (March 1941) shot thousands of frantic inquiries into our tiny New York office. This gave us lists of alcoholics in hundreds of cities. Business men traveling out of established A.A. centers used these names to start new groups. By sending literature and writing often, A.A. groups sprung up by mail. With no personal contact whatever, this was astounding. Clergy and medical men began to give their approval. I wish to say that Dr. Harry Tiebout, chairman of our discussion today, was the first psychiatrist ever to observe and befriend us. Alcoholics Anonymous mushroomed. The pioneering had ended. We were on the U.S. map.

As of 1949 our quantity results are these. The 14-year-old society of Alcoholics Anonymous has 80,000 members in about 3,000 groups. We have entered into 30 foreign countries and U.S. possessions; translations are going forward. By occupation we are an accurate cross section of America. By religious affiliation we are about 40% Catholic; nominal and active Protestants, also many former agnostics, and a sprinkling of Jews comprise the remainder. Ten to 15% are women. Some Negroes are recovering without undue difficulty. Top medical and religious endorsements are almost universal. A.A. membership is pyramiding, chain style, at the rate of about 30% a year. During 1949, we expect 20,000 permanent recoveries, at least. Half of these will be medium or mild cases (average age about 36) a fairly recent development.

Of alcoholics who stay with us and really try, 50% get sober at once and stay that way, 25% do so after some relapses and the remainder usually show improvement. But many problem drinkers do quit A.A. after a brief contact, maybe three or four out of five. Some are too psychopathic or damaged. But the majority have powerful rationalizations yet to be broken down. Eventually this does happen providing they get what A.A. calls a good exposure, on first contact. Alcohol then builds such a hot fire that they are finally driven back to us, often years later.

They tell us that they had to return; it was A.A, or else. They had learned about alcoholism from alcoholics; they were hit harder than they had known. Such cases leave us the agreeable impression that half our original exposures will eventually return, most of them to recover. So we just indoctrinate the newcomer.

We never evangelize; Barleycorn will look after that. The clergy declare we have capitalized the Devil. These claims are considerable but we think them conservative. The ultimate recovery rate will certainly be larger than once supposed.

Such is a glimpse of our origin, central therapeutic idea, and quantity result.

The qualitative result is assuredly too large a subject for this paper.

Alcoholics Anonymous is not a religious organization; there is no dogma. The one theological proposition is a Power greater than one's self. Even this concept is forced on no one. The newcomer merely immerses himself in our society and tries the program as best he can. Left alone, he will surely report the gradual onset of a transforming experience, call it what he may. 

Observers once thought A.A. could appeal only to the religiously susceptible. Yet our membership includes a former member of the American Atheist Society and about 20,000 others almost as tough. The dying can become remarkably open minded. Of course we speak little of conversion nowadays because so many people really dread being God-bitten. But conversion, as broadly described by James, does seem to be our basic process; all other devices are but the foundation. When one alcoholic works with another, he but consolidates and sustains that essential experience.

The forces of anarchy, democracy, and dictatorship play impressive roles in the structure and containment of our society; Barleycorn the Tyrant Dictator is quite impersonal. But Hitler never did have a Gestapo half so effective. When the anarchy of the alcoholic faces his tyrant, that alcoholic must become a social animal or perish. Perforce, our society has settled for the purest kind of democracy.

Naturally, the explosive potential of our rather neurotic fellowship is enormous. As elsewhere, it gathers closely around those eternal provocateurs: power, money and sex. Throughout A.A. these subterranean volcanoes erupt at least a thousand times daily; explosions we now view with some humor, considerable magnanimity, and little fear at all. We think them valuable object lessons for development. Our deep kinship, the urgency of our mission, the need to abate our neurosis for contented survival; all these, together with love for God and man, have contained us in surprising unity. There seems safety in numbers. Enough sand bags muffle any amount of dynamite. We think we are a pretty secure, happy family. Drop by any A.A. meeting for a look.

But, there isn’t the slightest evidence that violent neurosis, drunkenness, or lunacy is to be the destiny of Alcoholics Anonymous. Such dark forecasts have not materialized.

Many an alcoholic is now sent to A.A. by his own psychiatrist. Relieved of his drinking, he returns to the doctor a far easier subject. Practically every alcoholic’s wife has become, to a degree, his possessive mother. Most alcoholic women, if they still have a husband, live with a baffled father. This sometimes spells trouble aplenty. We A.A.’s certainly ought to know! So, gentlemen, here is a big problem right up your alley.

Now to conclude: We of A.A. try to be aware that we may never touch but a segment of the total alcohol problem. We try to remember that our growing success may prove a heady wine; that our own resources will always be limited.

So then, will you men and women of medicine be our partners; physicians wielding well your invisible scalpels; workers all, in our common cause? We like to think Alcoholics Anonymous a middle ground between medicine and religion, the missing catalyst of a new synthesis. This to the end that the millions who still suffer may presently issue from their darkness into the light of day!

I am sure that none, attending this great Hall of Medicine will feel it untoward if I leave the last word to our silent partner, Religion:

God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference.

## Read at the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association©, Montreal, Quebec, May 23-27, 1949. ©