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Source: DICOBE-00610 – Bill W – ADOLPHUS HOTEL – 1951-02-01.mp3 File: dicobe-00610-bill-w-adolphus-hotel-1951-02-01.mp3 Duration: 00:25:50
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Well, now when we get into AA, we become obedient, all right. But we don't become obedient to our fellow AA, we become obedient to CARN. We become obedient to a principle. I'll say this, that if we have 100 AA's three years ago who are breaking their anonymity every day of the week, and that list has now come down to only a half a dozen. And you got a society with 100,000 screwball egocentrics in it, and only six of them are breaking their anonymity publicly as a regular thing.
I say that that's a tremendous amount of obedience. But it's not obedience to a people, it's obedience to a principle. So this society does have the theological virtue of obedience, but happily it is not necessary for us ever to be obedient to a government. Therefore, AA will never be organized in a governmental sense. But we do have to organize these services, these clubs, these offices. A book doesn't get published just by accident, somebody has to look after it.
So you see, my dear friends, all throughout our history, from the coffee and cake days up, we have had to construct services. People have had to do special jobs to help us to function. And my purpose is to make this idea of services and those services respectable, and to get us to feel collectively responsible to see that they go on, because if they don't, AA won't go on in its present form. And the million who don't know will suffer acutely.
Now, years ago, anticipating a need, Dr. Bob and I realized that this movement would surely need a few services for the benefit of the whole. In other words, we knew that this movement would need a standard literature. Hence, the terrific effort to produce that book, our first great instrument of service to the whole of AA. As we told you, we constructed a committee of friends called the Alcoholic Foundation, along with some of us drunk.
As I explained last night, by and by, this book, which a few of us got together and financed and produced, was turned over to that board of trustees who hold that book, Alcoholics Anonymous, in trust for you, the members of AA. They own it. It is your book held by them in trust. An instrument for the whole movement. Well, it isn't a question of holding the book, they have to get it printed. Twenty-five thousand copies a year.
Somebody has to look at it. Well, in the very early days of AA, when the Saturday Post articles came along, our little office, over the first year or two, was entirely supported by the sales of that book. On me, just a gallon of rent. Then later, when that Post article came on, we had thousands of inquiries pour in there. The book sales wouldn't have hired girls enough to answer those kind of letters.
So we came out to the groups of that day in 1941 and said, look, shall we throw all these pleas into the wastebasket? Or will you, the members of AA, come and help us answer these letters? Refer them to the nearest group. Refer them to the nearest group. Help them start groups in the mail if they're near no one else. Supply them with the literature. Will you voluntarily contribute to this foundation so that they can maintain this office in which that job can be done?
So in 1941, just as a rough measuring stick, we said to this movement, if you people will give us a dollar a piece a year down here at the foundation, we will see that all of these inquiries are answered. Meanwhile, the book can pay off its debt and maybe accumulate a little reserve. So that was the second step in the evolution. And the foundation had two kinds of money, book money and your money, which could only be spent on the office.
Well, next thing you know, right after that Post article, back came all these group problems. What do we do about this? What do we do about that? From all over the world. So then we began to be retailers of experience. From the older group, we could say to the newer group, well, their experience tells us this. So we helped propagate the movement and helped organize new groups at a distance. A work which is not going on so much on this side of the water because there's so many of you.
One now takes fire from the other. But all over the world, we're still doing that.
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If you go to London, England, or Oslo, Norway,
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or Durban, South Africa, or to that northernmost group in Alaska, they'll tell you what the Alcoholic Foundation means to them. It is life. It is their only contact with this world that you and I know so well. So the office took on another fund. Well, then pretty soon, the problem arose. Hasn't this society got to have some kind of a public relations policy? I'll tell you how we got thinking about that.
It's a good yarn. There was an AA who caught fire by reading a book in the mail. We started to correspond with him. He was down near Jacksonville, Florida. And he was one of those super promoters. I guess he was a couple of supers above me. All of a sudden, he was on the Jacksonville radio with a curious mixture of AA and some shouting brand of religion. I don't know which one. And sure enough, he got in a few inquiries into Jacksonville over that little station.
A group starts in Jacksonville. So he beats on his chest. All of a sudden, he writes a letter up to the Foundation office, and he says, I got a contract with the Gulf Life Insurance Company. They're going to hire me as a broadcast. They're going to put me on an All-American hookup. About 100 stations. To give my 13 lectures on Alcoholics Anonymous. Inherited scripts. My God, I looked at the scripts, and they stunk.
They were terrible. Well, then the issue arose. Could any AA member appoint himself to stand up on the national radio network to represent all of us by just appointing himself to do the job? And the damn script stunk. What could we do about it? So I write him a nice diplomatic letter, and I say, Well, of course it's wonderful you're a top star in the group in Jacksonville, but I don't think the drunks around the country would like that.
Frankly, some of it is on the AA party line. Why, I wouldn't even dare take the responsibility you're taking. You're going to break your anonymity, you tell me. You've got to tell that this is your message to the drunks of America. Besides, you're going to get paid for this job, by the Gulf Life Insurance Company, and your scripts aren't really straight AA, frankly. Why don't you consult with our board of trustees, and maybe we can revamp this thing and maybe get an authorization.
Well, he was a super promoter, you know, in his own right. So he writes me a very crusty letter. And what he says to her was, You, Mr. W., and the board of trustees, who do you think you are? This is America. I've got a right of free speech to say. All right, that brought us right square up with the issue, did this movement have any control, whatever, about what was said about it? Could any AA nominate himself to represent us all in a matter as vital as that?
Which would affect the lives of hundreds and maybe thousands of people? Well, so I wrote him back a letter and I said, Like Voltaire, I would be the first, my dear friend, to defend your right of freedom of speech. But, if I'm going to defend your right to speak freely, I will see to it that the several thousand AAs in this country speak their mind very freely on this broadcast of yours, if you put it on.
And I will suggest to them that they write letters to your sponsors, the Gulf Life Insurance Company and the Mutual Broadcasting Company, telling them just what they think about that lousy script of yours. You're still at liberty to put it on, but if you do, look out for the free speech from these drunks. I want about 3,000 of them just talking loud, you'll really hear it. Well, we didn't have any broadcasts from down there.
But that raised a problem. Was anybody going to be appointed to look after such matters? So, years ago, I wrote to groups at that time and said, Will you entrust these trustees of the foundation with power to overlook our public relations? Local public relations, any group can do anything it likes. But when we got a piece in Saturday Post, or a national broadcast, or a motion picture, won't you name this board of trustees to look after these things through your office here in New York?
And you wrote in and you gave us control of your public relations. I don't mean illegal control, but a tradition has grown up that AAs, if they're going to do a job like that, come to watch and be sure that it's regular.
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So now, by now, the board of trustees has come into control of your book, it's come into control of your propagation machinery, it's come into control of your pamphlet literature, it controls declaring thousands of inquiries every year, not only from drunks, but from God knows how many people. Last year, that office answered 78,000 letters. That's a lot of mail. So is AA going to answer its mail? Well, I guess it is.
Well, then, other services developed up there. It began to be obvious that the foreign groups had to have translations of all our pamphlet literature, maybe finally of our books. The book needed to be done in Oslo, Norway. It needed to be done in England. They couldn't buy books here. Lois and I went to Broadway this summer to arrange that. Now, this matter of public relations is terrifically important.
Before I leave that subject, let me just tell you two more stories. Recently, on the newsstand here, you could buy a magazine called Fortune, kind of a flossy dollar business magazine. Some of you picked that up and you saw in it one of the best articles on alcoholic phenomena ever printed. And you probably said, well, that's a nice piece. You didn't know, of course, that our office spent hours and hours and hours with the guy who wrote that piece.
You didn't know the guy himself was the vice president of Fortune and the damn good AA, but that he had to come over to our office to get background and to get the idea on the tradition and all the stuff that's in that piece. You didn't know we spent some of your money long-distance calls to his home in Florida, that some of the Fortune staff were over and we had a conference about it. That's why it was a good piece, because somebody was looking after these things for you.
You see, a lot of these services have been unknown, have been unseen to you. AA has a good public relations record, sure, because we mind our own business, but also because somebody all these years has been looking after these things for you. Let me give you one more example. Let me give you one more example. Of course, AA's are everywhere. One of them happens to be a producer in the Paramount Company.
Another producer in the company started to produce a picture about alcoholics and animals. He had a script written. It was called Mr. and Mrs. Anonymous. The AA got a hold of it and he shipped it down to New York, screaming, he said, this is terrible, it misrepresents AA, which, in its original version, it says. From our point of view, it was really a stinker row. You know, boy means girl in AA, they're both drunk, but instead of AA, cure in them, love cures.
They have a lot of love in AA, but never knew it would cure drinking. So that wasn't a very accurate representation. Of course, to pass the Hays office, the picture came out all right, because boy loved girl so much in AA, I don't know whether it was in the club room or not. Boy loved girl so much that the boy finally went back to his wife and it all ended happily ever after. You know, that isn't just the kind of a picture that would do AA out of a gun.
It wasn't awful, but from our point of view, it just sucked. Well, now that's what started a year ago in Hollywood. You people wouldn't know that we had on the job one of the best movie agents in New York and she did the work free because she had a father who died of alcoholism and one of her best friends covered up in AA. So we had her service as one of the truest agents in New York to go to work on that film.
We had an immense amount of correspondence with the Paramount. We had AA actors and other AAs in Hollywood working over that situation. We got the Hays office into it. We had a lawyer even threaten lawsuits on it. Incidentally, if there are any newspaper reporters here, I wish they wouldn't feel that I'm criticizing the Paramount company or report this particular part of the thing. I'm trying to illustrate a point.
And little by little, the Paramount people came around to our point of view and whittled the thing down and took the title off it, Mr. and Mrs. Anonymous, so that when you see that picture, you'll say, you'll say, girl, it ain't too bad. But if you've seen it in its original form, you'd have jumped right over the fence and said, who forces this on us? Now that is the kind of work that's been going down there for years and years and years.
A few years back, Sinead, New York, started to put out a newspaper called The Grapevine.
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The Foundation didn't have anything to do with it. I didn't have anything to do about it. All on its own steam, it got on national circulation. So about five years back, having seen the thing make good, I wrote and asked the group, Do you wish to make this your principal journal of Alcoholics Anonymous? Almost unanimously, he wrote back and he said yes. So therefore, The Grapevine was attached to the Foundation.
So there is your principal mirror of A.A. thought, which is all the time broadening its usefulness and its pages and opening them up to A.A.'s in all parts of the world. On its magic carpet, we can fly all over the A.A. landscape, look over each other's shoulders every morning. Now those surveys have directly and indirectly accounted for about a half of the size of Alcoholics Anonymous and a great deal of unity.
Is it very obvious, is it not obvious that those things should go on? And don't you see that if they break down someday, because they're not tended to, or because they're not supported, that the millions who don't know may suffer? Supposing that a breakdown took place there, and those services failed, and it got into the world press, something had gone wrong at A.A. headquarters. What do you think would happen in foreign lands?
Well, I'll tell you. I was in England last summer. Those Britishers are just where we were ten or twelve years ago. Sure, they know A.A. works over the water, but they still wonder if it isn't the anti-gadget. Yes, we've got a little inner group in London. There's 300 members around there. But still, only three or four doctors in Grapevine know anything about A.A. The press won't print anything about A.A.
Only the Financial Chronicle in London wrote a piece about A.A. up to last summer. I don't know why the Financial Chronicle. Some British twist of some sort. The doctors don't know anything about it. The Church of England don't care a hoot. Okay, supposing that something gets into the world press to the effect that A.A. has gone sour at the top over here. Don't you think all the drunks are going to turn their faces to the wall and go on suffering or die?
Don't you think the newspapers will continue to clam up? Don't you think the doctors will say it's the Yankees fan? Don't you think the clergymen will all be looking the other way? Will that stop A.A. abroad? No. But it might slow it up for years. It might slow it up five years. It might slow it up ten years. So I ask each of you seated here tonight, what if Alcoholics Anonymous had been five years too late for you?
So it is by such illustration that I urge that these services, that Dr. Bob and our friends created for you years ago in New York, services for the benefit of the whole that cannot be done separately or regionally, that these things go on. That you now come to understand what they are, what they mean, what they cost. Fortunately, it's a very small business. If every drunk in the movement spent a 75 cents a piece a year, we'd be on easy street.
Very small business, but very important. So then, about four years ago, five years ago, a few of us began to realize that these services were still in the hands of a very few people. That they were very remote from you. That they were still a function of Dr. Bob and me and our friends. And one had developed that Dr. Bob had cancer. I was horrified to realize that he and I were the principal link between that board of trustees who looked after these things and you.
And that one of those links was going to go out after a while. And then I would be the only remaining link. And then when I went out, or it was also the cook or something, then one would… In other words, if that happened, the first time those fellows made a mistake,
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the first time this movement had a problem too hot for those trustees to handle, you people would wake up and find your business in the hands of strangers. And you would say of Smith and me, why did they leave things this way? Why didn't they give us a chance to look after our own business? Why didn't they build some links between this board of trustees and us? And those would have been very good questions.
So we realized that the service at the top level there in New York for the benefit of the whole, and especially of the million who don't know, would have to be linked directly to you. So that your representatives from each state and province of North America could come down there and sit down with that board of trustees each year and act as a guide to them. People would be able to come home and say, yes, I've been there, I know, I have seen, it is worth the money, people.
Let's support it. A cross-section of AA who could give this movement an opinion about itself, who could advise those trustees. In other words, somebody or something who could take the place of Dr. Bodley and me. We realize now that you have grown up. You should come into possession of these assets. Your money, your book, your public relations, your principal newspaper, your office of mediation and propagation.
These things should now be turned over to you. So Dr. Bob and I together prepared something we call the third legacy. The legacy of service in general, and in particular the legacy of those services which cluster around the foundation of New York. And those services constitute your third legacy. And in the opening paragraph of the third legacy pamphlet, which I expect not many of you have seen, Dr. Bob and I make you your bequest, and there it is.
We, who are the older members of AA, bequeath to you, who are younger, these three legacies. The twelve steps of recovery, the twelve traditions, and now the general services of alcoholic phenomena. Two of these legacies have long been in your keeping. By the twelve steps, we have recovered. By the twelve traditions, we have achieved a supreme unity. Being someday parents of all, Dr. Bob and I now wish to deliver to the members of AA their third legacy.
Since 1938, we and our friends have been holding it in trust. This legacy is the general headquarters services of alcoholic phenomena. The foundation, the AA book, the grapevine, and the AA general office. These are the principal services which have enabled our society to function and to grow. Acting on behalf of all, Dr. Bob and I ask that you, the members of AA, assume guidance of these services and guard them well.
The future growth, perhaps the very survival of alcoholic phenomena, may one day depend on how prudently these arms of service are administered in the years to come. So there, my friends, is your third and last legacy. So with me, you must now see that our cathedral of the spirit is approaching completion. On its great floor, you and I can see inscribed the twelve steps of recovery. Already a hundred thousand are standing there and may be joined by a million more.
You and I have seen its side walls go up, now buttressed by our twelve steps of tradition, which we hope will contain this beloved society of ours in unity for so long as God may need it.
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And do you now not see that we are affixing the spire to this cathedral and that the spire of our cathedral of the spirit will be named the spire of service, a beacon to the million who do not know. And may its symbolic finger ever point straight upward toward God. Amen.