An American Phenomenon
Americans react to most social problems by first shouting "There oughta
be a law," and then calming down to measure the problem and attack it by
spontaneous individual effort. The American weakness for drink first
produced the ill-omened prohibition amendment. Recently it has produced
the more remarkable and more typical response described here.
Alcoholics Anonymous was conceived by a drunk lying on a bed in a drunks'
hospital in New York in 1934, and had a hard birth in Akron, Ohio, the
following year. A doctor of medicine was present but at this critical
moment but was too alcoholically jittery to know an accouchement was
taking place. The American tradition of adverse beginnings was thus
fulfilled by this organization, which today equally fulfills the
tradition of success after struggle. By birthplace, heritage, tradition,
habits, looks, and tone of voice Alcoholics Anonymous is unmistakably
American. And yet in almost every way it contradicts the stencils by
which non-American minds gauge American achievement. It has almost no
money and wishes it could do with still less. In fifteen years its
membership has grown from nothing to 120,000, yet it never urges anyone
to join. Of formal "organization" it has almost none, yet it avers it"
ought never to have any." A man or woman becomes a member by simple
declaration, and need share his decision with only one other human being.
There are no pledges or constraints in A.A.; no records that must be kept
or quotas that must be broken. Seniority confers no favors. A.A. has one
purpose only: "to help the sick alcoholic recover, if he wishes.
In a world whose spiritual values have dropped close to the vanishing
point, the strange society of A.A. places its entire proposition upon the
reality of spiritual experience. It achieves harmony among a membership
in which Catholics associate not only with Protestants and Jews but with
high-decibel agnostics or fancy religionists of species known only to
God. Its members, who know better than to contradict the psychiatrists'
diagnosis that they are "grandiose, infantile, and self-absorbed,"
practice daily an Obedience that has no enforcement mechanism and no
system of punishment for infraction. The one rule common to every A.A.
clubhouse is that if, as rarely occurs, a member seeks to attend a
meeting while drinking, he is escorted to the door, with the invitation
to return only as soon as he recalls his society's purpose.
If A.A., successful and American, had a password proof against any
member's forgetting, it would be "Failure." One by one, each member
tackled something that proved too big for him; only when he acknowledged
his inability to deal with a circumstance that most people can meet with
ease was he able to become a full member of this organization, of those
for whom "one drink is too many and a thousand aren't enough." Dentists
and doctors, stevedores, ministers, cops, poets, publishers, matrons,
vocational-guidance counselors, stenographers, artists, bartenders, and
master mechanics are all to be found in A.A.'s ranks, as diverse and
exclusive as a classified telephone directory. Yet all have a common
vantage point; each one, from a broad and comfortable ridge, has a clear
view downward into the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Although alcoholism is a state so complex that a leak-proof definition is
impossible here, a clinician can, in his own bald terms, describe it
simply: "a progressive, incurable and fatally terminating disease." That
alcoholism could be arrested was well known, but this knowledge was for
many years almost useless, for the arrestment was up to the drinker:
would he or would he not stop? Usually he would not, no matter how he
longed to, for he was inwardly convinced that he could not; so long as he
new that a couple of quick ones would give him a desperately bought
temporary relief from his sufferings, he could see no permanent way out.
Psychiatry's dictum that alcoholism was only a symptom of a deep-seated
psychic disorder was not very helpful in the crisis forever engulfing the
alcoholic and his family.
It dawned on Bill W. in 1934, when he was close to the last stages of
alcoholic disintegration, that if he attempted to help other alcoholics
he might thereby help himself. He went to work--and found himself able to
stay sober for the first time in years. But this was cold comfort, for
the drunks on whom he worked stayed drunk. He was on the verge of a
relapse that might well have been final when he met the drunken Dr. Bob
in Akron. Only then did it dawn that the help must flow two ways:
one-sided preachment was useless, but when help was mutually offered and
accepted between two suffering and desperate drunks, each of whom sought
to help himself by helping the other, a new element entered into a
materialistically hopeless situation. As a result of this help from the
helpless, Bill W. stayed sober and Dr. Bob got sober, and the nucleus of
Alcoholics Anonymous was formed. By the end of that year A.A. had three
members. By the end of another year it had fifteen. By the end of still
another it had forty--divided among Akron, New York, and Cleveland. That
was all.
Since those years A.A. has evolved into a membership of 120,000 divided
into some 4,100 local groups. Metropolitan areas such as New York,
Cleveland, Chicago, and Los Angeles may harbor 100 to 200 groups each.
Ninety prisons have A.A. clubs within their walls, and over 100 clubs
exist to further the A.A. idea, although not formally affiliated with
A.A. In Chicago the weekly "intergroup" meeting never brings out fewer
than 1,200 A.A.'s at a time. In New York, the "Annual Banquet" may have
to be abandoned unless some way can be devised of splitting it into
sections, for no hotel has a ballroom large enough to seat it.
Much more important are the statistics of sobriety. Of those who make a
genuine effort to stop drinking through A.A. principles, 50 per cent get
sober at once, and stay that way. Another 25 per cent get sober after
some relapses. The remaining 25 per cent show improvement. A.A. is not
out to make a showing. It refuses to screen its membership, as some
doctors would like, to eliminate the "hopeless" cases; gaining a
statistical advantage is not A.A.'s purpose--and furthermore an
impressive number of "hopeless" cases have recovered. A.A. quietly and
with good cause believes that all those who relapse or drop away will be
back later and permanently, if they live. The word "cure," however, is
not in the A.A. vocabulary. On the contrary the man who succeeds in
staying sober must still recognize himself as an alcoholic.
Suppose you were to go to an open meeting of A.A., as you are perfectly
free to do. You would find yourself in a group of from thirty to 300
people, one-third of whom might be women. (Only 10 to 15 per cent of
A.A.'s active membership is female, but non-alcoholic wives of alcoholic
husbands are attending meetings in increasing numbers, and this
attendance is strongly encouraged.) The average age would be between
thirty-five and forty and is steadily growing younger; it used to be that
an alcoholic seldom recognized his trouble until his middle forties,
whereas now, with greater publicity for the whole problem, he sees what
is wrong sooner; today, some A.A.'s are not much over thirty. Prosperous,
less prosperous, and poor would be represented in about equal thirds; so
would the educational levels of college, high school, or less. If this
were a typical meeting, 40 per cent of those present would be
Catholics--double the number you would encounter in an exact sample of
the U.S. population. At the other end of the scale are the
Jews--represented by no more than a sprinkling, even in New York.
There is no use trying to draw conclusions from appearances; the blowzy
old lady near the front may be a casual visitor who never had a drink in
her life, whereas the pink-cheeked, white-haired gentleman who looks like
a deacon may have had a record of fifty alcoholic admissions into
hospitals and jails. The group is probably meeting in the parish house of
a church, a political clubhouse, a public auditorium, or a small
mezzanine banquet room of a hotel--any place where an evening's rent is
reasonable and the atmosphere is neither so high-toned as to discourage a
man wearing out his last pair of shoes nor so forbidding as to scare a
Caspar Milquetoast. The air is dense with tobacco smoke, and the
evening's chairman has to bang his gavel hard to cut through the loud,
familiar talk. There is no set speech for chairmen, but a typical opening
might be something like this:
"Ladies and gentlemen, I wonder if the new people who are here for the
first, second, or third time would please raise their hands. . . . That's
fine. I'll ask the old-timers to please make themselves known to the new
people and try to see they have a good time. As you know, AA. groups have
two kinds of meetings, open and closed. The closed meetings are for
alcoholics only, but tonight is an open meeting, so everybody is welcome.
If there are any reporters here I just want to remind them that they can
write anything they like so long as they don't use anybody's name. You've
got to respect us on that because some people are funny: they usen't to
mind being seen in the Hotel Metropolis so drunk they couldn't stand up,
but they're still a little bit sensitive about being seen sitting down
here cold sober. . . .
"Maybe you think we have some fancy test that can tell you whether you're
an alcoholic or not. But we haven't. The only person who can decide
whether you're an alcoholic is yourself. If you want a little helpful
hint I'll tell you something I heard Fanny J. say at a meeting a couple
of months ago: when anybody stops boasting about how much he had to drink
the night before and starts lying about it, there's maybe just a little
bit of a chance that he's getting to be one of us. But that's up to you.
"Some people are able to get the A.A. program while they still have their
jobs and their wives and their homes, but there are others who don't seem
to be able to quit drinking until they've lost everything. That's given
rise to the saying that there are 'high-bottom' drunks and 'low-bottom'
drunks. But remember what Bill W. said: 'The difference between the
high-bottom drunk and the low-bottom drunk is that both are lying in the
gutter but the high-bottom drunk has his head on the curb.' We are all
drunks. If you think you are a drunk we invite you to join us.
"You're going to hear from three members tonight, and they're all going
to have very different stories to tell. All we ask of you new people is
that you keep an open mind. If you don't happen to hear anything tonight
that fits in with your own story, or reminds you of your own pattern of
drinking, please keep coming, for sooner or later you're bound to hear
something that hits you right where you live.
"And I ought to tell the newcomers that we don't practice any religious
ritual of any sort here, except that we end every meeting by standing up
and reciting the Lord's Prayer, and we ask you all to join. The first
speaker this evening . . . "
The first speaker, and every speaker at every A.A. meeting, begins with
one standard line: "My name is_____, and I am an alcoholic." Thereafter
he says exactly what he likes, and what he usually likes is to tell the
story of his drinking, and how, eventually, he came into AA. What a
newcomer, feeling in his heart of hearts that he is an alcoholic, expects
to experience at the first meeting can never be known, except it is a
good bet he does not expect to be shaken with laughter. But that is what
usually does happen to him, and what usually dissolves his intention of
leaving after the first twenty minutes and making a dash for the nearest
bar. No one has quite such terrific stories to tell as an alcoholic, and
once he is released from his fears and shames by having put his alcoholic
activity behind him he makes a formidable raconteur, using his old self
as the butt of his new. The laughter that
shakes the hall is the laughter of recognition.
Over and over, the newcomer hears references to the Twelve Steps and in
particular to the Twelfth Step. The Twelve Steps constitute at once the
philosophy of A.A. and its means to therapy for the alcoholic who is
making an honest attempt to stop drinking. They are not absolutes, but
are presented as suggestions. In condensed form for the quick-reading
non-alcoholic, they are these:
First, the alcoholic admits that he has become powerless over alcohol;
that his life has become unmanageable. This is the admission of failure
without which his ego does not undergo the deep deflation that seems the
key to success.
Next, he comes to believe that only a Power greater than himself can
restore his life, and turns his will and his life over to the care of God
as he understands Him.
Further, via nine detailed suggestions, the alcoholic undertakes a
searching moral inventory of himself; admits to God and one human being
his wrongs and shortcomings, asking God to remove them, and himself
making the human amends possible. He seeks by prayer and meditation to
improve his conscious contact with God as he understands Him, praying
only for knowledge of His will, and the power to carry that out.
Finally, having had a spiritual experience, he tries to carry this
message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all his
affairs (the Twelfth Step).
"Alcoholics Anonymous"' said Bill W. when the American Psychiatric
Association invited him to address it in 1949, "is not a religious
organization; there is no dogma. The one theological proposition is
'Power greater than one's self,' but 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
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 William James, does seem to be our basic process. . . .
"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 sandbags muffle any amount of dynamite. We think we are a
pretty secure, happy family. Drop by any A.A. meeting for a look."
Among the toughest of the tough, the lowest of the low, the most cynical
of the cynical, the program works. The alcoholic, man or woman, is merely
urged to look again at the idea of a Higher Power, and to dissociate that
idea from the old-man-with-the-whiskers, the angry Santa Claus, the
avenging anthropomorphic tyrant with which he was stuffed and terrified
in his childhood. Gradually the phrase "as you understand Him" takes
hold. Sometimes the concept of the Higher Power can be accepted only by
some elaborate stratagem. One alcoholic, determined in his agnosticism,
at last solved his problem by accepting as a Power greater than himself
the steam radiator that clanked and hissed in his miserable room. It was
hot and full of energy and burned him when he touched it. It was
sufficient. The radiator clanked inscrutably; the alcoholic stopped
drinking.
One by one, the speakers who rise and tell their stories 12,000 times or
more a week the country over are driven to say the same thing: "I don't
understand it, but I don't need to; it works." Certainly one thing that
works is the feeling of fellowship engendered by several hundred people
in the same room, every one of whom knows at firsthand the exact horrible
details of alcoholic suffering. Most alcoholics, before they encounter
A.A., are convinced that nowhere in the annals of medicine or abnormal
psychology can any parallel to themselves be found. "It may be all right
for some people but it would never work for me" is the most common first
response heard by an A.A. having his first talk with an alcoholic who
does not yet dare to hope. Nothing is a more powerful solvent to this
sort of suffering egotism than being physically surrounded by several
hundred people, every one of whom once held precisely that same thought,
and slowly realizing that the horrors once thought to be unique are, in
reality, a universal experience in the society of A.A. Most A.A.'s carry
fat address books in their pockets; in these are crammed the names,
addresses, and telephone numbers of the A.A.'s he has met inside or
outside his own group. This is the equipment he needs for what is known
as the Nickel Therapy: when the desire for a drink reaches dangerous
proportions, the AA. drops a 5-cent piece in a coin telephone and dials
the number of a fellow member who will sit out the siege with him.
The Twelfth Step, by which alcoholics work with alcoholics, does not mean
that A.A. evangelizes, proselytizes, or whoops things up in any way among
"hot prospects." If a despairing wife calls an A.A. (almost every sizable
telephone book in the U.S. has an A.A. number in it) and asks that he
"try to do something with Jim," the first inquiry must always be directed
to the point, "Does Jim want it?" If the answer is "No, but God knows he
ought to," the AA. will beg off seeing Jim and have a chat with his wife
or family instead. Only when Jim is ready to talk will the AA. go to work
directly. Even then, there is no urging. The A.A. member will talk not
about Jim but about himself. He will emphasize that no A.A. takes any
sort of pledge of sobriety. He works, instead, on the" Twenty-four Hour
Plan," which the A.A. often expresses as "Tomorrow I may go on the
damnedest bender you ever heard of, but I'm not going to have a drink
today. The Twenty-four Hour Plan is of vital importance to those who have
newly stopped drinking-for to them, nine times out of ten, the
contemplation of the balance of a lifetime without the solace of alcohol
is intolerable. Yet A.A.'s who have been dry ten years or more still
wisely make their plans for sobriety no further than a day in advance.
The first longing of someone who has stopped drinking is to be able to
resume it successfully; only slowly is this point of view replaced by the
one that says "I wouldn't take a drink now, even if I could." All this
the A.A. discusses at low pressure.
Where the A.A. truly burns to get something across to the suffering
alcoholic is in telling him that not only is life possible without
alcohol but it is a damned sight more pleasant. This is difficult. A
universal feature of advanced alcoholism is a sharp constriction of
interests: the alcoholic who once belonged to a choral society, went to
sketch class once a week, collected matchbooks, and went on short-line
railroad excursions has now abandoned all these things in favor of
continuous drinking. It is hard for him to find his way back to these
things alone: it is hard for him to find his way back to society at all.
But A.A. offers him a society that will instantly welcome him, ask him no
questions, but instead begin to deluge him with the mirthful, frightful
record of its own calamities.
A.A. is founded on the Christian principle of Love. It is the fashion,
even in these dark days, for the worldly to scoff at such a declaration,
but the A.A. does not scoff and does not blush at holding so
old-fashioned an idea. Like ceasing to drink, the A.A. finds that loving
his fellow man makes no impossible exactions of an ordinary,
all-too-human being.
There was once a new A.A. named Joe, who came to an older A.A. named
Fred, asking advice. Joe had encountered a third A.A. named George whose
every attribute of personality Joe found repulsive. Was it essential that
Joe should love George? Yes, said Fred, it was. Joe thought for a long,
dismal moment and then announced that if this were true he would have to
retire from the program and resume drinking; loving George was beyond his
powers.
"Wait a minute," said the old A.A. "There isn't anything to keep you from
loving George. Hell, you don't have to like the s.o.b. any more than I
do."
* Anonymity is, to the A.A., of immense spiritual significance--reminding
him "to place principles above personalities." Bill W. and Dr. Bob,
referred to in this article, were the first two members of A.A. and thus
cannot escape some identification as "founder" and "co-founder." Dr.
Bob's death late in 1950 revealed him at last to the general public as
Dr. Robert H. Smith, noted surgeon of Akron, Ohio.
** Of all groups needing A.A., the American Negro stands first. AA.
Welcomes him, but the Negro's knowledge of alcoholism as a sickness is
understandably slow in developing. Only in the last few years have A.A.
groups formed in Negro communities such as New York's Harlem.
Source: Fortune, February 1951
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