Jim
Burwell was among the first members of A.A. to get sober in New York.
His sobriety date is 6/16/38 and his story can be found in the Big
Book on page 238 called "The Vicious Cycle ."
Please
keep in mind when reading this that his recollection of some of the
specific facts around the first meeting of Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob
Smith are inconsistent with more reliable versions of the same story.
MEMOIRS
OF JIMMY
THE
EVOLUTION OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
By Jim
Burwell
The spark of Alcoholics Anonymous was ignited about
the middle of November 1934 in a kitchen on a second floor at 182
Clinton Street, Brooklyn. This was Bill Wilson s home. The occasion
was the visit of a schoolboy friend of his from Vermont, Ebby
Thacher. Bill was in the middle of a binge, which had started on
Armistice Day. His friend Ebby had heard of Bill's trouble with
alcohol. Ebby was sober and Bill said later that this was the first
time he had seen him in that condition for many years, for he always
thought that Ebby was a hopeless drunk. He greeted Bill on this visit
with the words, I've got religion, Bill says at the time he thought
poor Ebby had probably gotten sober only to become balmy [sic] on
religion. While still drinking, he listened to Ebby's story about
being converted some six months previously by the New York Oxford
Group. He told Bill about the main idea of this group being one
person helping another, and their other formulas. Bill said he
listened to all this talk while he was in the process of keeping the
jitters down by continuously drinking and probably smiling cynically
to himself. When Ebby left a few hours later he practically dismissed
the incident, but he later found that this was not the case. Within
five days he found himself wheeled into his refuge, Towne's [sic]
Hospital on Central Park West in New York, for the third time that
year. On his arrival at the hospital with his wife Lois, he was
greeted and put to bed immediately by his old friend, Dr. Silkworth,
the Director.
Bill
said that after he had been in bed a short while he heard the doctor
talking to Lois by the door, saying that if her husband came out of
this episode and did drink again, he did not honestly believe he
would live six months. [This was during an earlier hospitalization]
Bill states that when he heard these words he was immediately carried
back to his talk with his friend and could not dismiss the idea that
although Ebby might be batty with religion, he was sober and he was
happy. He kept turning this over in his mind, in a mild delirium, and
came to a vague conclusion that maybe Ebby did have something in a
man's helping others in order to get away from his own obsessions and
problems. A few hours later when the doctor came in, he felt a
tremendous elation and said, Doc, I've got it. At the same time he
felt that he was on a high mountain and that a very swift wind was
blowing through him, and despite the several weeks of drinking, he
found he was completely relaxed and quiet. He asked Dr. Silkworth, Am
I going crazy with this sudden elation I have? The doctor's answer
was, seriously, I don t know Bill, but I think you had better hold on
to whatever you have.
While he was in the hospital Ebby and
the other Oxford Group people visited Bill and told him of their
activities, particularly in the Calvary Mission. On Bill's release,
while still shaky, he visited Dr. Shoemaker at Calvary Mission and
made a decision to become very active in the Mission's work and to
try and bring other alcoholics from Towne's to the Group.
This
resolution he put into effect, visiting the Mission and Towne's
almost daily for four or five months, and bringing some of the drunks
to his home for rehabilitation. During this time he was also trying
to make another comeback in his Wall Street activities, for Bill,
like many others, had built up tremendous paper profits in the
roaring twenties, only to go broke in the 29 crash. However, he did
make a temporary comeback in the depression years of 32 and 33 as a
syndicate man, only to have John Barleycorn wipe him out more
completely than ever in his worst drinking year of 1934. Through hard
work and a little good luck, by May 1st, 1935, he managed to become a
leader of a minority group of a small corporation, and obtained quite
a few proxies from others. This group sent him out to Akron, Ohio,
hoping to get control of the corporation. Bill said later that if
this had happened, he would probably have been financially
independent for life, but when he attended the stockholders meeting
he found himself snowed under by the other faction. So around the
middle of May, there he was in the Portage Hotel in Akron [Mayflower
Hotel; Portage was the name of the country club at which Henrietta
Sieberling put Bill up for a few days, after which he moved into Dr.
Bob's home] without even return fare home and completely at the end
of his rope. Bill's story goes that he found himself pacing the
lobby, backwards and forwards, trying to decide whether to forget it
all in the hotel bar, when he noticed the Directory of Churches at
the other end of the room. The thought struck him that if he could
talk to another alcoholic he might regain his composure, for that had
been effective back in New York. Although he had worked consistently
with drunks for over six months he had not been able to save anyone,
with the possible exception of himself. He telephoned several of the
churches listed, and was finally directed to one of the Oxford
Group's leaders in town, Henrietta Seiberling. Bill tells of calling
Henrietta and being so shaky that he could hardly get the coin in the
slot. The first thing he asked her was, Where can I find another
alcoholic to talk to? Henrietta's answer was, You stay right where
you are until I get there, for I think I can take you to the very man
you are looking for. This she did, and the man she took Bill to see
was Dr. Bob Smith, who later became the co-founder of Alcoholics
Anonymous. When Henrietta and Bill got to Dr. Bob s they found his
wife, Annie, alone. She was in a mental uproar herself because her
husband had been on the loose for several days. After Bill and
Henrietta had waited and chatted on the Oxford Group policies, in
popped the good doctor himself, quite potted and with a potted lily
in his arms for his wife's Mothers Day gift. When Bob had been bedded
Annie insisted that Bill stay and try to straighten her husband out.
Bill did this and his stay lengthened into months. During the next
few days Bill and Bob talked for hours and decided to pool their
resources to help other drunks. When Bob had been dry only a few
weeks, a new hurdle arose, for Bob found it was imperative for him to
go to a medical convention in Atlantic City. Bob did make the
convention, but suddenly found himself drunk on the train going back
to Akron. However, this turned out to be his last spree, for he dates
his last drink June 15, 1935. [Note that Jim's memory of the date
differs from official version of June 10]
This apparent
calamity was probably one of the greatest blessings in disguise for
us later members, for it did cement Bob in this new fellowship they
were launching. Bill stayed on with the Smiths until the 1st of
October and during that time Bob and he managed to secure two more
converts to the fold. Bill then returned to New York where he
continued his previous activities, with daily visits to Towne's and
Calvary Mission. During the latter part of October, Bill got his
first real New York convert, Hank Parkhurst. Hank later became one of
the genuine inspirations of Alcoholics Anonymous, for he was a
red-haired, high-pressure human dynamo. Before his last trip to
Towne's, where Bill found him, Hank had been sales manager for
Standard Oil of New Jersey. From the time of their meeting and during
the latter part of 1935 it was Hank and Bill who did all the ground
work, but even then they had but indifferent success until their next
real convert, Paul Rudell came in about April 1936.
The next
man to be pulled out of the mire, through Towne's, was dear old Fitz
Mayo who joined the others about November 1936. From this time on the
duet became a trio, Bill, Hank and Fitz and they were the spearheads
in drunk-saving for the Oxford Group in the New York area. However,
they discovered in September 1937, that despite all the wet-nursing,
praying and rehabilitation work done at Bill s house on Clinton
Street, of approximately thirty-five or forty drunks, they were the
only three men to come clear in almost two years. During this period
many things happened, some quite tragic, with even an alcoholic
suicide in Bill's home.
In September 1937 the three concluded
that perhaps their technique would be better if they would do their
work with drunks outside of an affiliation with a religious
organization. Having arrived at this decision, the trio formally
resigned from the Oxford Group and concentrated all their efforts on
working with alcoholics in Towne's Hospital, using Bill's home as a
de-fogging station. About this time the first completely alcoholic
meetings were held in Bill's home on Tuesday evenings and average
attendance ran about fifteen, including the drunks' families. Even
though the trio had separated from the Oxford Group, they still
retained a lot of their principles and utilized them in the
discussions at these weekly meetings, but at the same time more
emphasis was placed on the disease of alcoholism as a psychological
sickness. At the
same time they stressed spiritual regeneration and the understanding
of one alcoholic for another.
A few months after the break
with the Oxford Group, January 1938, I was brought into the New York
fellowship from Washington by Fitz Mayo, whom I had known since
boyhood. I was enticed to New York by the existence of this new group
and a small job that Hank Parkhurst gave me in a little business he
and Bill had gone into on the side. [Honor Dealers] When I arrived in
New York I found myself thrust into this new group of three or four
actively dry alcoholics, who at that time had no group name, or real
creed or formula.
Within the next two or three months, things
really started popping. Hank, with his promotional ideas, started to
push Bill into writing a formula, the trio finally decided a book
should be written on our activities and this was in June 1938. Bill
was naturally given the job of writing the book for he was the only
one who had made any real conclusive study of our problem. From what
I can remember, Bill's only special preparation for this was confined
to the reading of four very well known books, the influence of which
can clearly be seen in the AA Book. Bill probably got most of his
ideas from one of these books, namely James Varieties of Religious
Experience. I have always felt this was because Bill himself had
undergone such a violent spiritual experience. He also gained a fine
basic insight of spirituality through Emmet Fox's Sermon on the
Mount, and a good portion of the psychological approach of AA from
Dick Peabody's Common Sense of Drinking.
It is
my opinion that a great deal of Bill's traditions came from the
fourth book. Lewis Browne's This Believing World. From this book, I
believe Bill attained a remarkable perception of possible future
pitfalls for groups of our kind for it clearly shows that the major
failures of religions and cults in the past have been due to one of
three things: Too much organization, too much politics, and too much
money or power.
Bill
started his actual writing of our book in the later part of June 1938
in Hank Parkhurst's office in Newark, with Hank's secretary, Ruth
Hock, taking dictation. About a month later Bill had completed two
chapters. Each had been brought up at the Clinton Street Tuesday
night meetings. Bill would read what had been written to the group as
a whole and then pull apart and suggestions added by all those
present. When these two chapters were rewritten, we were all very
elated because we felt we were well on our way to saving all drunks
everywhere.
With these two chapters in hand, and without any
introduction of any kind, Bill went to see the editors of Harpers
Publishing Company. Harpers immediately caught fire and offered Bill,
on the strength of this one visit, a $1,500 advance payment to finish
the book, plus regular author's royalties. Bill said later that he
almost succumbed to this offer because that was big money in those
days and we were all broke. When Bill returned and reported this
offer, Hank said, If it's worth that much for just two chapters from
an unknown author, it's worth easily a million to us, and the trio
immediately determined that Bill would finish writing the book and
our Group would do the publishing.
In August, promotion
minded Hank formed our first corporation for handling this book, to
be named 100 Men Corporation and he provided that two-thirds of the
corporation would belong to him and Bill, the other third to be sold
on shares at $25 par to friends and members. He announced that this
third should easily bring us in $10,000, which was to see us through
publication. Our idea at this time was that the book alone would save
the drunks in the majority of cases, by self-education. Then it was
decided that there would be some that the book alone would not do the
job for, so another corporation was founded at the same time called,
The Alcoholic Foundation. The Foundation's function would be the
disbursement of funds and the establishment of alcoholic farms all
over the country. The money for this, of course, we would get after
the sale of the first million books. Then we were faced with the
problem of who was to go on this new foundation. At this time, August
1938, we had only four men dry over a year in New York. These were
Bill, Hank, Fitz and Paul Rudell, so to these four Dr. Bob Smith of
Akron was added.
During this time of promotion, corporations
and other such activities, Bill continued his writing of the book,
averaging about a chapter a week. These were made up in triplicates,
one copy going to Akron, one to the Clinton Street meetings and the
third reserved as an office copy. These chapters, as completed, would
be ranked and mauled over in the two group meetings, changes were
noted in the margins and returned weekly to the Newark office. About
the middle of October 1938 the manuscript of the book was finished
and the personal stories that appear in the AA book, in its present
form, were contributed by individual members from Akron and New York.
As previously mentioned, the name of the book at this time was 100
Men and the new corporation had finally raised, through forty-nine
members in New York and Akron, about $3,000.
We then
submitted the book to Dr. Yussel, well-known critic of New York
University this was about the 1st of November and he was paid $300 to
edit the book. Practically nothing was done to the personal stories
of the individual members and there was less than 20% deletion from
the original manuscript. When Yussel returned the book we found our
100 Men Corporation broke, the $3,000 gone. The only concrete assets
we had besides the manuscript were some blank copper plates to be
used in printing. We also found our name 100 Men inadequate for we
had forgotten the ladies and we already had one girl, Florence
Rankin, on the ball. In one or our discussion meetings at Clinton
Street other names were brought up for consideration. Most prominent
of these were This Way Out, Exit, The End of the Road and several
others. Finally we hit on our present name. Nobody is too sure
exactly where it came from but it is my opinion that it was suggested
by one of our newer members, Joe Worden, who had at one time been
considered quite a magazine promotion genius, and who had been given
credit for starting the New Yorker magazine. Hank and Bill finally
decided on the name Alcoholics Anonymous in the latter part of
November 1938.
About this time we almost had a disaster in
our still wobbly group but it later turned out to be a Godsend. Bill
and Hank had distributed quite a few copies of the original
manuscript to doctors, psychiatrists and ministers to get a last
minute reaction. One of these went to Dr. Howard, Chief Psychiatrist
for the State of New Jersey. He became greatly interested and
enthusiastic, but was highly critical of several things in the book,
for after reading it he told us there was entirely too much Oxfordism
and that it was too demanding. This is where the disaster nearly
overtook us, for it nearly threw Bill into a terrific mental uproar
to have his baby pulled apart by an outside screwball psychiatrist,
who in our opinion knew nothing about alcoholism. After days of
wrangling between Bill, Hank, Fitz and myself, Bill was finally
convinced that all positive and must statements should be eliminated
and in their place to use the word suggest and the expression we
found we had to. Another thing changed in this last rewriting was
qualifying the word God with the phrase as we understand Him. (This
was one of my few contributions to the book.) In the final finishing
the fellowship angle was enlarged and emphasized. After many
arguments and uproars, the manuscript was finally finished, complete,
in December 1938. We now had one real problem no money.
It
was about this time that the 100 Men Corporation was closed out and a
new one started named Works Publishing Company. This name derived
from a common expression, used in the group, It works!! Those that
had stock or interest in the old corporation maintained the same
priority in the new one.
(Editor's
Note: Three years later the original stock subscribers returned all
their shares and interest in Works Publishing Company to The
Alcoholic Foundation. Today no individual has any financial interest
in either the Alcoholic Foundation or in Alcoholics Anonymous)
Then
a new wrinkle was devised by our master-minds we would make a couple
of hundred multilith copies of the finished manuscript and these we
would use as a promotion for more stock selling and at the same time
to get possible endorsement of well-known people, particularly, in
the fields of religion and medicine. These copies were distributed to
the Works Publishing Company shareholders and possible prospective
stockholders. With these multilith copies we sent out a prospectus
for our corporation and a note saying that the copy could be
purchased for $3.50 and a copy of the book, if when printed, would be
sent gratis to each purchaser. From this venture, we did not get one
new stockholder. However, the copies did get into all sections of the
country.
One created quite an amusing incident for it got
into the hands of a patient in a psychopathic hospital in California.
This man immediately caught fire and religion all in one fell swoop.
He wrote and told us about the wonderful release he had from alcohol
through our new Alcoholics Anonymous multilith. Of course all of us
in New York became highly excited and wires bounced back and forth
between us and our new convert regarding this miracle that happened
3,000 miles away. This man wrote the last personal history in the
book while he was still in California called the Lone Endeavor . Our
New York Groups were so impressed by his recovery that we passed the
hat and sent for him to come East as an example. This he did, but
when the boys met him at the bus station the delusion faded, for he
arrived stone drunk and as far as I know, never came out of it.
The
major result of the multilith was our first important endorsement
outside of our group and friends. It came from Dr. Harry Emerson
Fosdick, pastor of the Riverside Baptist Church in New York and a
nationally-known speaker and writer.
So here we were again,
broke, only more so!
Bill came to our rescue, as usual, by
floating a $2,500 loan from Dr. Towne [sic], who already had a good
slice in the original corporation. With the blank copper plates and
Dr. Towne's loan, Hank prevailed on the Cornwall Press, in February
1939, to make 8,000 copies for our first edition. The book was
purposely made to look bulky for two reasons -- to give it an air of
intellectual authority and to make it look like a lot for the money.
The dust jacket, with its familiar red, black, yellow and white, was
designed by one of our artist members, Ray Campbell, whose story in
the book is called An Artist's Concept . Although Cornwall did print
these 5,000 books in April 1939, they still felt that we were quite
short in our down payment and insisted that the books be kept in a
bonded warehouse and withdrawn only on the payment of $2.00 per copy.
Our method of distributing the books was to get possibly ten copies
out at a time, and the members would individually buttonhole
libraries, doctors and others for sales. Funds received from these
purchasers were in turn used to buy additional copies, which in their
turn were sold in the same way. About the only bookstores we could
interest at the start was Brentano's in New York, who did gamble on a
half a dozen copies. Five of the very first books were presented to
Dr. Fishbein, editor of the American Medical Journal to whom Dr.
Towne had lauded AA. Dr. Fishbein had promised to give us a real
buildup in the Journal but when his review appeared, it merely said
that AA was nothing new and had no real significance to the medical
profession. So another balloon busted.
In June, Bill and Hank
decided to try another promotion stunt this was to put a 2 x 3
advertisement in the New York Times Book Review. This cost us $250
and I have often wondered where the money came from. We thought we
had the real answer to publicity this time, and we all sat back and
started guessing and betting among ourselves on the number of
requests we would get for our million-dollar book. The estimates
ranged from 2,000 to 20,000 copies, but we were due for another
disappointment, as only two copies of the book were sold in spite of
our seven-day free trial offer.
It was about this time that
we got our first really active girl member, Marty Mann, who took the
AA program while under restraint at Blythwood Sanitarium. Marty's
efforts on behalf of women alcoholics in the early days were of
inestimable value and today she is one of the most indefatigable
workers on behalf of AA in the country.
It was also in June
of this year that we made our first contact with the Rockefeller
Foundation. This was arranged by Bert Taylor, one of the older
members, who had known the family for years in a business way. Dr.
Richardson, who had long been spiritual advisor for the Rockefeller
family, became very interested and friendly, and Bill and Hank made
frequent visits to him, with Hank on one side asking for financial
help and Bill on the other insisting on moral support only.
Our
first national publicity was arranged through one of our new members,
Morgan Ryan in August 1939. This was a spot on the We The People
radio program, which was then very popular. Again we were
disappointed, for this publicity brought us only a dozen inquiries
and one book sale. This was despite the fact that we sent out 10,000
post cards to doctors and ministers in the New York area announcing
the broadcast. It was also in August that a real calamity befell
Bill, for he and Lois were evicted from their home on Clinton Street.
This had once been Lois' girlhood home and was AA s first home.
Little did Bill and Lois know that for the next two years they would
be homeless, dependent on the hospitality of other AA s.
About
this time, too, another AA Group was launched in Cleveland, Ohio. The
founder was Clarence Snyder who had received his AA Indoctrination
with Dr. Bob in Akron. Clarence and his wife, Dorothy, obtained our
first newspaper publicity, which was in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in
September 1939. As a result of this publicity the Cleveland Group,
within thirty days, became temporarily the largest group in the
country.
Our first medical endorsement also came in September
from Dr. Richard Smith, Superintendent of Rockland State Hospital in
New York. His praise was the result of our work with alcoholics in
the hospital there over a period of approximately six months. The
first national magazine to give us a break was Liberty, in October
1939, with a two-page article labeled Alcoholics and God . This
article brought in about a thousand inquiries and sold possibly one
hundred books. My guess would be that as a summary for the year 1939,
we had three active groups with a total membership of less than 200
and a gross book sale for eight months of less than 500. By the end
of 1939 also, AA was beginning to get some real recognition. At the
end of December that year John D. Rockefeller, Jr. issued invitations
to some 200 of his closest associates and friends to a dinner to be
held February 8th 1940 at the Union League Club in New York. The
invitations stated that the purpose of the dinner was to have these
people meet a group of people on whom Rockefeller had become
interested, no name announced. The dinner and the publicity were
arranged by Rockefeller's personal publicity man, Ivy Lee. Sixty
actually attended this dinner, some of the more prominent being Dr.
Fosdick, Owen Young, Wendell Wilkie, Sorenson of the Ford interests
and Dr. Foster Kennedy, President of the Psychiatric Association.
Before this dinner we felt it would solve all our problems,
especially the financial ones, for Ivy Lee himself estimated the
personal wealth of those present to be well over two billion dollars.
Fate was against us again despite glowing talks by Dr. Fosdick,
Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller and Bill, the total contributions to
Alcoholics Anonymous were less than $1,500, $1,000 of which came from
the Rockefeller Foundation. (All of these contributions were later
returned in full.)
Still we learned later that we had gained
a great deal more than money from this dinner, for thereafter the
Rockefellers allowed their name to be publicly used in connection
with AA. It has always been my contention that this was the real
turning point in the history of AA.
During the next six
months practically the whole country was spotted with AA groups.
Between February and June 1940 Fitz and myself started groups in
Philadelphia, Washington and Baltimore. About the same time Earl
Treat migrated from the Akron Group to start one in Chicago, and Arch
Trowbridge also went from Akron to Detroit. It was also during these
months that Larry Jewell left Cleveland and organized a group in
Houston, Texas. Kay Miller, a non-alcoholic but the wife of one of
the early Akron members moved into Los Angeles and started their
group. In the Fall of 1940 a Jewish member named Meyerson, a
traveling salesman, started AA groups in Atlanta, Georgia and
Jacksonville, Florida.
The next outstanding event in
Alcoholics Anonymous growth was the publication of the Saturday
Evening Post article. This was mostly arranged through the efforts of
two well-known Philadelphia physicians, Dr. C. Dudly Saul and Dr. A.
Wiese Hammer. They had gained the interest of Judge Curtis Bok, one
of the owners of the Saturday Evening Post and in the early days of
Philadelphia AA, Judge Bok had been a constant visitor to the group.
It was in a large part due to his interest that Jack Alexander was
assigned to do a feature article on Alcoholics Anonymous in August
1940. We were later told that the editors also thought Alexander
would be a good man to possibly expose this new screwball
organization. However, Alexander did promise that he would not write
his article until he had visited groups and seen AA in action. He
traveled from New York and Philadelphia as far West as St, Louis and
attended AA meetings. His experience with these groups made him so
enthusiastic over the AA setup that the article he wrote was
responsible for the largest sale of a single issue of the Post in its
history. The Alcoholic Foundation office in New York reports that
over 10,000 inquiries were received from this one article. Even today
people coming into AA groups in various parts of the country tell us
that their first knowledge of Alcoholics Anonymous was the Saturday
Evening Post article by Jack Alexander.
It is my guess that
in March 1941 there were less than 1,000 active AA members in the
Country and the following year we added at least seven or eight
thousand members.
(Editors Note: From this point on there is
little the writer can add to add to the all over picture of AA s
progress for this can be seen more clearly through the eyes of the
New York office and the original group.)
