Archive note: This compilation includes a Third Legacy address followed by radio excerpts. The radio portions overlap the separate Two NY Radio Interviews recording. The final appended interview ends mid-sentence; component dates and locations are not all confirmed. Separate radio interviews.
Audio
Transcript
Source: Unidentified Historical Recording – Bill W Candidate Identity Review BW0060 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: bill-w-the-third-legacy-and-radio-interview-excerpts-compilation-aa-date-unknown-archive-19002.mp3 Duration: 01:08:16
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One day he was teaching to people one time on the side of the mountain. And he was telling them about a wonderful rare life, and he said to these people, if you want to come along with me, if you like this way and want to come along with me, the first thing you have to do is deny yourselves. You have to come on purpose. And then he said to them another time, if you just find your lives looted in the tears of your parents, completely looted there, in purpose.
It's my pleasure, ladies and gentlemen, to present to you this morning, one that has lost his life again, and also that you and I might have made a way. I present our beloved Bill. Thank you. Well, good morning, folks. I think I'll start plumping on this stuff. The chairman just got off a line that I think could keynote this talk. He said, in effect, that AA was a story handed down. And that story handed down is the legacy of each of us.
And it is our privilege, the means of living itself, indeed, to transmit that to the next one. The story handed down, our inheritance, our legacy. Now, this legacy comes in three parts. And in recent times, you've all been hearing a lot about the third legacy. I make no doubt, as do some of you, the third legacy sounds like a hell of a jumble of boards of trustees and magazines and offices and secretaries and trustees and delegates and group representatives and conference members and…
and an awful lot of dogs, it sort of appears. That's your impression, perhaps, of the third legacy. Now, I purpose, in this next hour, to see if we can't get this third legacy business down out of the clouds, where it really belongs, so that you can see what it is. Maybe you don't know it, but you really know already what it is. Now, let me take a simple, but one of the most potent demonstrations of it that has ever been made, I guess the most potent.
Twenty years ago, come this fall, my friend Debbie had been released from a prison. He thought of me. He knew the awful shape I was in. And he thought he'd like to tell me his story, to hand down what had been handed to me. So he got himself on the subway and marked it. He had to drop a nickel in the turnstile, otherwise he never got to me. And he arrived and he handed down a story. My legacy, which has three parts.
He handed down to me an opportunity to recover from one of the most terrible maladies known to man. From one of the most terrible maladies known to man. He handed down to me the opportunity
[00:04:59]
of getting myself and my affairs and my family and my whole life
[00:05:04]
unified in one piece. He gave me an opportunity by which I could be rendered whole. And above all, he gave me the greatest opportunity that anybody living on Mars has. He gave me the opportunity to do for others what he had done for me. So you see, that in that original conversation over at the kitchen table there in our home in Brooklyn, the three legacies were handed to me. The legacy of recovery, the legacy of wholeness and unity, and the legacy of action or service.
Those were the three legacies which I received from my sponsor, Edison. And I, in turn, have been trying to pass those three legacies along. And yours, Eric, is exactly the same. The legacy of recovery, number one. Number two, of wholeness or unity. And number three, of service. Which means action. Which means function. Function. Now, the third legacy, in reality, takes in a hell of a lot more than a foundation or an office.
It takes in our whole concept of action or service. It takes in all the means by which we are able to carry this message. Now, whenever he came to me, all that was needed was goodwill on his part and a five-cent fare to get where I was and another one to get back where he was going. But if it hadn't been for that ten cents, he wouldn't have reached me, would he? But it was all as simple as that. The rest of it was communication between him and me over at the kitchen table, handing me these three legacies.
Which all of it, in turn, have been passing along, one to the other. Now then, everybody knows about, well, that. And, of course, that is the great expression of A.A. in action. A.A. in service. A.A. in function. But we had to make the twelfth step possible. Just as Abby's nickel, in the turnstile, made it possible for him to get to me. And as time has passed, and this thing has grown, the problem of communicating with each other, with the drunk and his wife coming in the door, with the millions who don't know at all about it yet, has got to be more complex, maybe a little bit more expensive, if we are to serve well.
So that service in A.A. is just not a matter of talking to the next gun. It's getting in touch with it. Getting in communication with it. Providing him with what he has to have to get well. And he doesn't get well just on talks. As we shall presently see. I suppose that one of the very earliest services was in Dr. Bob's apartment. When Abby went out of the kitchen and brewed a pot of coffee, and brought it into that early two or three hours in that living room, that was a service, a small sacrifice, that made our meetings better.
It helped make the twelfth step work fine. The house we sat in was a part of the service. We don't often do this on the curfew problems. Well, when the meetings got too big for that house in Ackland,
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they moved to a bigger house, and the people at Medicabin, who were non-alcoholics, were providing us with a service, a place to meet. Well, by and by that got too small, and then we had to move out into Omaha. Well, when we moved out into Omaha, we couldn't get a free one. We were up against Winsor. At that time, you must remember, there was nothing in AA but talk, and easy communication one with the other.
But we know that we had to meet together to give ourselves the best chance to stabilize and to give the drunk coming in his opportunity to begin the process. So we had to have meetings. Well, meetings meant cleaning places. Up to this moment, there wasn't a cent of money concerned in the process. He said what a fellow took out of his own pocket to help the next guy or to get to him. But now there came a brand new element into our affairs.
We started to pay rent on meeting halls, and we started to pay that rent as a group. We dropped money in the hands and started to pay rent. Well, at that point, being drunk, a good many of us started to groan. We said, well, the goddamn landlord should give halls free for such a noble purpose. But the landlord didn't agree. They said if you want the halls, you can pay up. So we needed the halls as a service, so we paid up.
Now there was another kind of a service performed in those days, and it still is. The folks who started the group not only had to carry the message and talk to the drunks who came along, but they just found what soon found them. We had to make hookups with the hospital. Make hookups with the hospital. And somebody had to look after them. It was found when A.A. entered the town, but we needed to communicate with the other drunks in town.
So the old timers in the group went to the doctors and to the nurses and finally wrote the newspaper off. And they got a piece for the paper that A.A. had got the time. That was more a service that made communication possible with the drunks who still didn't know it. After a while, a local founder and his friends, being a self-appointed committee to arrange for the public relations and the halls and the hospital whatever we needed to have in order to function.
Even that service underwent a change. Meanwhile, the group was growing and growing and finally there were bigger and better screwballs down in the bottom of the pyramid than there were on the top. And they began to look at us old timers and say, how the hell long are you going to be running these services? When do we get in here? So if the old timers were wise, they kind of stepped off to the side and the wise ones became elder statements and thought it was a crisis.
Those who weren't wise felt connived for election and sometimes they were cast into outer darkness where they bemoaned their faith and became what we call the bleeding deacons. And on top of this pyramid, which was not quite soft, there was this circle going round and round very fast and furiously called the rotating committee. Well now the rotating committee members were all those individual folks that worked but they were doing things that enabled that group to function in the community.
The tie-up with the hospital, the tie-up with the newspaper, the priesthood, the doctor, the employer. Arranged for the halls, we had to have a guy called a secretary, usually a gal. We had to have somebody who would account for the money. And we damn well made an account of it, too.
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In other words, we couldn't fund it. Unless we had services that made close-deal funds possible. communications possible, and protection for the society possible. We had to get our right foot forward in front of the public. We had to get the stories printed in those papers. We had to have a public meeting and have speakers that could really put it all, all services that enabled us to grow and function.
So we have always been the inheritors and the practitioners of the Third Legacy. And if the Third Legacy hadn't been practiced, except for one drunk to talk to another whenever he had to run across one, we wouldn't be sitting here at all. This thing would have been an inheritance. No hand or tail to reward us. So we owe what we have to the practice of the Twelve Steps and to the provisions of those services that made the Twelve Steps possible.
The individual putting the nickel in the turnstile, the coin in the hand, the committee at work, that's the group service. Well, in a large city, there began to be another problem. Group after group formed. Every student in a hospital in town would say, my God, is there no head or tail to this thing at all? The blinds come down here reading the blinds. They tell us how to run the hospital. You can't get this damn thing on the telephone.
Isn't there any head or tail to AA in this city? Well, little by little, it was found in big places that we had to have some way to call AA on the telephone, by a frantic wife or a husband or whatnot, to go and find out about this. So we began to have what was called integral bars. And the surrounding groups out of their prejudices, which they got from past tensions, were quietly cut them off. And then we came to another terrible problem that was on the floor.
We found that because men owned offices, entirely with volunteers, they'd come down and they'd paint the paper and they'd be enthusiastic to help, but a woman would sit there morning, noon, and night at the end of this telephone, and the thing stood. So then our policy numbers actually had to hire somebody. And that's where the money began to spin. Money wasn't spiritual at all. Money was damn spiritual when it was coming into our pockets, folks.
But when it was going out to pay some poor little gal to hang on this telephone and listen to all these wails all day long, it was real bad. It was a little distorting. But we were forced into it. And it was a good thing we were. So as a primary, we began to get a little head or tail in this thing. It's not a problem if you understand it. But we had to have the right hookup with the public, the outlets, the world around us.
We had to have a place where we could be found. We had to have hookups in hospitals. So that the folks that couldn't perform, so that we could communicate, so that we could carry the message. We found, too, that we liked clubs. At first, some communities loved clubs. Others didn't. They wouldn't have a club under any condition. Because the club was a place to spin. There was the poker, and the Little Red Riding Hood, and there aren't just numbers.
And most dreadful things went on in a club. And a lot of places wouldn't have them. But then we began to wake up to the fact that if people got in trouble in clubs, they were going to be getting into it anywhere. So they might just as well get into trouble in clubs. In all the wrong rules of it. And we began to find that these clubs were a great adjunct to some people.
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Well, they were a kind of service. And at first, they were the function of the group. But that was the group that was too damn much business. And finally, they became the function of the people who were interested in having clubs. They were separately incorporated and kind of put up on each side. But this clubhouse, and the contributions there, and the people who look at it, are performing a service that helps people get close.
Not only gets close, but saves them. That's this clubhouse. It's a part of the legacy of this service. This club's legacy. People learn many things from experience and hard biology. Meanwhile, we continue to do these things without creating a professional class. I don't know that today there is a single AA member who is paid exclusively to do club set work in the sense that I'm probably somebody to help him.
He can hire a cook in the club who's frying hamburgers. Well, that makes a good club set work client. He can hire a secretary in an office. Not to do club set work, but to communicate with people, to bring people together, to get people hospitalized. So this is a club set work sponsor. Now then, we come to a little bit of a stir. It's all a part of a little stir, ladies and gentlemen. We realized long ago that this movement would have to have some kind of leadership.
Otherwise, it would run miles off the track. 69 versions up. We'd get trouble. We'd get rid of Joe. Indeed, the story of the preparation of our first piece of literature, the book I call it Anonymous, I will tell you in detail and honest. It was an effort to provide experience. Because the book I call it Anonymous. And all our parents were literate, Joe. Not only from foundation, but any piece of writing that's done in the FAA, whether by an individual, a group, a foundation, or a name, is part of the third leg.
It's part of our system of communicating what we know to the next generation. Or the one who don't know about us. Now then, when we first realized in Dr. Bob's living room one autumn afternoon in 1937 that enough time had elapsed on enough tape to make it plain as can be that a new life had entered our dark world without a hope, this same question came up again. Only this time it came up with relation to A.A. as a whole.
Up to this time, sure, we've been hiring these boys. Up to this time, sure, we've been dropping money at hand. Up to this time, we've had millions in the books. But how was this money going to be carried to the millions who didn't know without it just getting garbled to all the people? So we had to meet. At that time, we thought all this was going to take a lot of money. Somebody else's money, preferably, from the non-alcoholics.
We thought that we'd have to subsidize a lot of old timers and flan them around in various places. We thought that we'd probably have to get some financing to bring a drunk bank or high school, which in turn would make more money, which would hire more missionaries. But we knew we'd also have to have a book. Also, when this thing got published, someday, the minute it did, and the news got over the country that alcoholics were really in the book, there would be any number of eager and frantic people who would say, but how? But where?
To whom shall I turn? Where shall I write? How can I talk? So it became obvious way back there in 1937 that certain things would have to be done for AA as a whole, just as the individual, then for the next individual, just as the group, then it's for the group in the community,
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just as the area, later began to function, solving AA as a function, as a whole, and provide services for the benefit, not only of us here, but primarily for the benefit of those who haven't got here yet. So, in 1938, there were friends who had been very much interested in us, got together, and we formed this so-called foundation. It was a corporate committee, it was really run in New York, Akron, and some people in New York, most of them friends of Mr. Rockefeller.
I said, sorry, I'll come up with nothing. How we did is get the money from Mr. Rockefeller. But at any rate, we have a board of trustees. By this time, we have a book, and now, sure enough, the public. The first one is mentioned in the talk here. Just a stand there last night. After Hollingson's God, Liberty May, instantly, then with public inquiries, began pouring into Liberty May. I think eight or nine hundred of them hit like that all over the country.
Where do I find it? Who do I get in touch with? Now, supposing that we hadn't had any foundation, and we hadn't had any literature, and we hadn't had any office, what would those poor fighting people have done? If we kept AA so damn simple, and we hadn't been willing to spend any money, and nobody had been willing to take any service responsibility, maybe some people right in this audience wouldn't be alive.
You only need to draw a generation or two back to go back to alcoholics in New York, and the 800 inquiries that we rode through and sent pamphlets through, way back there in books, sometime back in 1939. Well, as I said, Mr. Rockefeller got arrested. He didn't give us money, but he gave us a big dinner to tell the world that this was good. And boy, that story got on the United Twice Wire, the AB Wire, it went around the world like light.
Mr. Rockefeller and his twins say alcoholics are not a malicious drug. Another horrific plot of inquiry. Why did they come? For it was hectic. No. There's got to be a group here. Where would they have gone if we hadn't sought to provide a service so that AA could function as a whole? Another plot of inquiry is coming. We write all those things. And then in 1941 comes the big fail. The Saturday Post, through Jack Alexander, does a feat of peace for us.
And thousands of inquiries are called. And our office is absolutely swamped. Now, up to this time, we've been running the office entirely on the faultiness of the sale of the books. A little roosting hot, and one crisis in there. We three people, all of a sudden, and the board of trustees, have met sometimes. So three people get 7,000 inquiries. Well, at about that time, we said, well, after all, what we're doing here is for the benefit of everybody.
And these inquiries come from all over the world, principally North America. So why shouldn't we go out to you people and say, look, are we going to throw these inquiries in the wastebasket? Because we can't hire the help to answer them all? We did get some volunteers, but you know how they languish. They got tired. Why are we doing this? Post money won't do it. Everybody's bogged. They ain't giving us any money in that foundation.
That's still empty. But we're going to get it. So we came to you. And in that time, you consisted of a couple of thousand people. And got to do the work. And we said to you, look, will you help us answer these inquiries? Well, how much would we ask you to send in? Well, we would like to write out and tell this group how much they ought to pay us.
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We're, you know, drunk better than that. So we said, well, look… If each group down in existence would send us, voluntarily, the equivalent of a dollar a member a year, we would ask to be generous. What do you do? That money plus some book money. What do you do? Telling people to manage his critics. And that's how the dollar a year got started. To maintain that office was his first, I think. Focused on answering all these inquiries, and then getting in touch with traveling men and salesmen going around the country, giving them lists of the people in these towns that could be visited.
Those who couldn't be visited, we set up a correspondence with. And that is how A.A. began his spread of hoaxes. Not because A.A. was functioning in Amsterdam or New York City, or Cleveland, but because somebody had his hands up. What I knew was the group cost. My God, we thought this movement was entirely going to blow up. One group seceding from another. People kicking the founders out. Red riding hoods, triangles, quadrangles, sometimes they were hexagons.
Then we found that a lot of them were mad at us because it was a big racket in New York. Oh my God. This was in the hectic time of our adolescence when the A.A. tradition began to be written. Well, what did we start to do? A few of us in that little office in New York. We started to say, look, we can't run this, we know. But what we can do is to retell you the experience that they're having in other places.
With clubs, with committees, with functioning, group problems, public relations problems, all those kind of things, we began to retell the experience of the older group to the group just born. So we became retailers and transmitters of experience through the mail, through traveling people who called upon us, and then some of us began to get out on the road. Some of the A.A. could grow, others it could function.
Well, then we had another problem of public relations. After the post-publicity, we were besieged with all kinds of offers. What kind of teachers should be written? What kind of a presentation should be made with A.A.? So writers began to send in their manuscripts for us to check up so that the message wouldn't get scarred. Then we began to have the type of A.A. who wanted to take publicity into his own hands.
I know we had a fellow down in Florida, wonderful A.A. guy, but he thought anonymity was harsh and buggy and he started a group down there on the radio. So all of a sudden he says, well, he said, I got a contract from the Gulf Life Insurance Company and they're going to put me on for twelve radio appearances and I'm going to tell the world who I am and what alcoholic anonymity is. And he sent us up some of his scripts.
Well, he was a good old Bible Belt boy and he had a good deal of straight religion mixed up with A.A. and we knew that the script wouldn't sit very well on the membership. It meant well, but we knew it wouldn't do. Well, there wasn't any law against his getting up in front of a microphone, was there? What could you do about it? So we wrote in and said, well, now it's time to Saturday Post piece and publish the latter and we spent a long time with Jack Alexander trying to get this story straight.
And we agreed upon certain things. We begged him not to do it publicly as an A.A. because if he went back there with the gang expenses, we'd have a lot of public big shots and this thing would get all garbled pieces again. Every man with his script. So what we finally did was this. We had to go to him and say, now look, we're afraid that one man's public relations job for A.A. as a whole is going to set a very bad precedent.
Not everybody ought to be able to talk for A.A. as a whole. Besides, I think you're going to get into trouble with your script
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and you say to hell with the trustees and to hell with Bill Wilson. I'm going to do this. Well, we defend your right to say those things. But at the same time, how has the job life insurance got it if it's got a lot of what the hell mail from all the drunks over the country who didn't like it? And we'll see to it that they get the mail. So we quieted them down. Now the office has been doing that sort of thing for years and years.
Radio, television, literature written on the outside. We don't want any monopoly of those things, but we just like to keep the check them up with them. So to keep this thing in the group so that the public gets the right impression on it. So that we don't create public big shots. A public relations job has to be done. And because a public relations job was done for A.A. as a whole, the public has a hell of a good impression.
In fact, our reputation with the public is much better than our character. And a part of it is due to the fact that A.A. was functioning as a whole in public relations. And I ask the trustees to write all you folks who were then around and say, where do you want to write? This board of trustees threw its office to handle public relations. Well, then A.A. began to get overseas and over there they talked a different lingo.
We still had to turn on the cage. Well, these translations didn't get made all by themselves. Somebody had to look after them. So we're in all these other languages. So now you read a piece of publicity and say, gee, that was good. You don't know that our office may have spent hours and days on that. You hear that A.A. is in Japan. You hear that A.A. is in Norway and Denmark and 52 other countries.
How do you put it down into those languages? And who checked it up to see whether those translations were good or not? Well, that was A.A. functioning as a whole in the foundation of it. And so it goes with all of these copies. By and by we found that we had to have them up and have a magazine. Well, a magazine sprung up in New York. They called it Grapevine. I didn't have anything to do with it. It got some local circulation.
People liked it. It was an awful good job. It began to get a national circulation. So I wrote you fellas and said, well, this has already got a national circulation. Would you like to hook it up to this board of trustees, the foundation, like the office, and hook it up and make it your magazine? The reflector of our current thoughts and actions. A primary means of communicating one with the other. A means of communicating with the world outside.
Firing the gun, coming in the door. Would you like to have such a magazine? Okay, then the foundation will guarantee its solvency and we'll hitch it up to the foundation. So you've got a magazine. Well, that took a lot of work from a lot of people. Now, meanwhile, I got paid. Not for doing any of these public relations jobs. Not for organizing publishing companies. Not for looking after that office for the last 10, 12 years, 15 years.
I got paid a run. On and with the alcoholics and non-women, which I earned for writing a book. Not for talking to you, but you're surprised. Just like the gal in the office doing all this office work under office of the secretary, or the guy buying a hamburger at the club. I did a service job. To that extent, I've been paid. But you've never paid me to do a professional post-up job and you never will.
And that's how we all got along then. And your money coming into that foundation kept that office open. And then the book and the literature began to sell better so that we got a little reserve for it. And this thing went building up and building up. And by and by we commenced to lose touch with you people. You got to be too many. Nobody knew the Board of Trustees anymore. And we began to wonder what would become of this center of service.
This office. This literature. This magazine. This Board of Trustees. And suddenly we woke up to the fact that the only link between that center of service
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that had accounted for half of the size of AA, a large amount of its public review and growth, the only link between that and you people was in the jowls of the office who wrote all these letters. Smithy and me. You didn't know these trustees, man. They weren't even responsible to you. They were just an incorporated commission to try and have Smithy and me out to do this job. Well, we saw that this couldn't go on forever.
And one has got evidence that poor old Smithy was going to cash in pretty soon. And we had a couple of breakdowns in the office. People were overworked. Plenty of times we had seen that thing run off with deficits. The groups were responding less and less to our yearly, quite yearly appeals for money. We thought it had to be some kind of a hookup. Finally, at one time, a few years back, the groups were failing to pay the office expenses by $2,000 a month, and the grapevine had got overambitious when they pulled out a lot more pages than I had worked, and they suddenly began to lose $1,000 a month.
Where did they make that $3,000 a month came from? It came out of that foundation reserve fund where, slowly, we'd been accumulating a little money over and above what you folks would tend to spend and what we needed to run the office. In other words, the old book, Alcoholics Anonymous, and its income to the foundation kept that place alive when contributions weren't paid at all. Well, we saw that state of affairs could never go on forever.
We also saw that we old-timers were just like that original committee in Keokuk, and all the founders and their friends who were providing the services. But at some point, you, now a grown-up movement, would say to us, how long are you people going to run these services? When are they going to be ours? Are we ever going to know who the hell you are? Are we going to have the power to throw you out if you don't perform?
And if ever this movement gets into serious trouble, political trouble, religious trouble, money exploitation trouble, catching me in bed with a blonde, when we hit that kind of trouble, what are we going to have to say about it, and how are we going to say it? We knew that those things must be in your mind. We knew that that center of service, which really includes the world, could never be safe nor secure unless it became a function of you, and not a function of the old-timers.
Well, sitting in the center of things, this terrible hammered and old man in our affairs was apparent to me as early as 1945 and 6. That happened to be a period in which things were rocking along comfortably. The contributions almost ran the dumps down there, and the big line wasn't losing much money, and the book money made up the debt. So I go to my friends and trustees and I say, Listen, the gals in the office, and Dr. Bob and I, are the only linkages between you people and these services and all alcoholic phenomenons all over the world.
When we cough or get discredited some fine morning, there won't be any. And when that time comes, you fellas just pull one boner, and this thing is going to collapse right in the middle, and there won't be any way to put it together. This thing, which has been the lifeblood to tens of thousands of alcoholics, and which will be the lifeblood to hundreds of thousands, still is coming. Why don't you let me go out and ask the movement if it doesn't want to take this thing over and look at it.
Well, the movement now looks after its own business. This vital business that we have is what we want. Well, that's it. We're getting along. All right, let's keep it simple. That's what all old-timers say when there is a stirring in the mass.
[00:45:01]
The mass begins to ask, How long are you going to do this? The old-timers say, well, let's keep it simple. No, we don't want any politics around here. Well, I'm coming… I say he's on the air. Well, it's certainly a public problem. There are supposed to be about four million alcoholics in the country. If you know a drinker, you certainly know it's a social problem. In the early days, the doctors used to feel that there was nothing inherited.
Certainly, you don't inherit a craving for grog. We do notice in AA, though, that certain families have a great many alcoholics. And it has been suggested that very likely they get emotionally bunged up and made neurotic and therefore laid wide open to alcohol. Not because it is strictly inherited, it's more of an environmental thing. Of course, you see the parents drinking a lot and people around the home.
And you fall into the habit and you may not have the capacity for evaluation. But it should take that somebody in a family where somebody older is an alcoholic, a youngster, would see the bad effect of the alcohol and thus stay away from it. You're exactly right. They often do. They go to an extreme of great hatred of drinking of all sorts. You're on the one side. Or, later, they themselves fall victim.
It usually runs to extremes. Don't you think, Bill, that in the most instance it's a case of someone having a great disappointment or a circumstance that forces them into this? Well, in my own case, there was childhood inferiority. I was very gawky. Kids could push me around in quarrels. And that developed a tremendous power drive to be a number one champ. You see, I had to be leader of everything.
And then when frustrated, I would become depressed. And that pattern in me developed before there was any alcoholism. Well, then, I found that on my first drink, indeed, during World War I, that it cured the social inferiority. People drew near to me. I drew near to them. It was a solvent. It wasn't just a mere relaxation. I had begun to try to cure what you might say is a neurotic pattern. And that is the case with a great many alcoholics.
But generalization is dangerous. Some alcoholics are simple addicts. And there are a great many types. I have to say, this is for the doctors rather than for AAs. I can only speculate a little on my own case. Now, my understanding is that when you go to a party, for instance, you can never have just one drink, you yourself, or alcoholics generally. No, no more than a diabetic can have one spoon of sugar.
And probably he's a lot more sane about sugar than we are about alcohol because we not only have the physical sensitivity, there is this terrible obsession or drive to drink, which has to be released. So if you take one drink, it triggers the whole business. You know, Bill, it's a funny thing how you acquire a pattern. Now, I had a similar experience as a youngster. But I saw someone, a very beautiful woman, get drunk when I was a child.
And you know, I have never had a drink. And my problem with going to parties and with people who do drink, and I have my own little beverage called Water on the Rocks, which I take. But perhaps my resentment is, as you say, as radical as the person who overdrinks. Now, just a second, Virginia. What do you mean you've never had a drink? We have a champagne party right here in this studio. Uh-huh. Listen to this. I'm nailed to the cross for myself.
I had one thimble full of champagne. And she was flying, may I say. Flying out to get rid of it. How, Bill, can you get a person to face up to the fact that he is an alcoholic? In the early days of AA, they only faced up because they laid on their backs and couldn't move. It was do or die. In that period, we dealt with last gasp cases only. But in recent years, more and more people are recognizing that they have this temptation, this compulsion to drink when they shouldn't be drinking, this terrible hangover business.
And it's just as though your doctor came to you and said, I don't like the looks of this store. And he said, well, it's very small, but it's very malignant. It's cancer. You see? Sure. So, likewise, a lot of people are recognizing these symptoms, and they're coming in much earlier. We're getting a lot of young people. We're getting a lot of people not in any great trouble. What is an alcoholic? How do you know if you are an alcoholic?
Well, I would say that the easiest definition hangs around the word control. If when you should control your drinking and you wish to control it and you still do not, that is one of the great warning symptoms.
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It is this compulsive desire to drink against your will and against your interest. If I go to a Legion convention where everybody was supposed to get tight, and I get tight, it's meaningless. On the other hand, if I got a business appointment and I don't need it because I'm tight, or I come in there and ball it up, I may be still a long way from the courthouse. I may not have been in a hospital yet.
We may still be together, but that's the telltale thing, this lack of control when there should be control, when you're trying to control and it won't. When one drink is too much and 14 isn't enough, huh? That's about the story. Now, in the area of activities with AA, how many cures would you say have been effective? Well, I'll correct you. There are recoveries, but we think that we have 150,000 easily.
The movement is spread now into 70 countries and U.S. possessions. It goes on pyramiding. We're in a tremendous period of growth just now, one alcoholic carrying a message to another. Of course, you're not an organization in the full sense of the word, and how does a family reach you? Let's say that somebody wants to discuss a problem with a member of their family who, by the way, is not receptive to AA.
Now, this, to me, is the big problem of getting the offender to a meeting because they have to come voluntarily, don't they? Well, nowadays, doctors and clergymen both are very, very helpful in laying the groundwork for AA. They can raise the bottom and hit the chap with it. And most always, it's best to try the doctor first. If the doctor will say, look, you have the symptoms of this thing, we're not going to force you into AA.
We know that that's no way, but why don't you go and inform yourself more about this? Go to an AA meeting. Sometimes literature falls into their hands, or it can be left around. But you cannot force people, as a general thing, into AA. They need to be attracted to it somehow, and they have to go strictly in their own interest. Your plan is a 24-hour plan, as I understand it. I shouldn't say the entire plan is, but would you explain the 24-hour plan?
Well, that's one of our clichés, which is becoming notable. It simply means that emotionally, we do not live in the past or in the future. We try to live for today. Get through the next 24 hours. Let's go through the next 24 hours without a drink, and that is the springboard that most people take off from at the very beginning, until they have a basic fundamental relief, so that the problem becomes non-existent.
They go on this 24-hour basis, and the intimation is that we mustn't morbidly dwell on the past or daydream about the future. Let's live one day at a time. I wonder if you would be kind enough to repeat for us the serenity prayer used by AA, Bill? 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. Isn't that wonderful?
It sure is, not just for AA. God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things that we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I think the description of the prayer, as Bill said before, is that it's like a tent. It encompasses and covers all of us. Thank you so much, Bill, for being with us this morning. Again, our great thanks to you people. And God bless you and your work.
Tomorrow we start a new guest book series on higher education in America. Our guest at that time is going to be Dr. Eugene Austin, who's the president of Colby Junior College up in New London, New Hampshire. Quick, we could have that new pickle. For the benefit of the March of Dimes, Thursday, April 12th at the Roxy. A good picture for adults. The man in the gray final suit. And now our second program in the series, They Help One Another.
There are no formal introductions today. That is, no last names. I agreed to abide by the rules of Alcoholics Anonymous. But Bill, co-founder of AA, is here, and so is Eve, a member. I find it not too difficult to sit here and call them by their fresh names as they ask me to do because they both seem to be definitely trying to be sure that I'm comfortable about the whole thing. Good morning, Bill. Good morning to you.
Thanks very much for having us on the air with you. I'm glad you're here too, Eve. Well, I'm enjoying it very much. Bill, do you want to just start right out by telling us how and when you founded AA? Yes. If you don't mind, I'll start a little bit in the middle. All right. In the summer of 1934,
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I lay in a drying out hospital on Central Park West, Charles B. Towns Hospital. My wife was downstairs talking to the doctor. I had been there before. It was the end of a long road. And she was asking the doctor why I couldn't stop drinking. And the good man was obliged to tell her that I had an obsession of the mind that condemned me to drink against my will, a sensitivity of the body, which he called an allergy, so that if the drinking was continued, I would be destined to go mad or to die.
In fact, he told her frankly that she would soon have to lock me up if my life was to be saved. It was the end of the road, and I knew it. I was a hopeless alcoholic, and in those days, the chance of recovery was rated at one, two, or three percent. I'd been raised in a small country town, had gone to the World War, had been beset with a lot of inferiorities in the corresponding power drive. Returning here, I got into Wall Street, made money much too fast for one so young.
I suppose in those days, I drank in order to feel more grandiose and to cover up these inferiorities. After the crash, when all was swept away, I tried to start again, and of course could not. I was thoroughly discredited, and therefore, I began to drink for oblivion. And that finally, by progressive stages, brought me to the pass I've just described in the hospital. Meanwhile, my wife stuck. As the wife of many an alcoholic does, we were otherwise happily married.
No one could understand the thing. It was really a deep mystery at that time, the true nature of this malady. Meanwhile, other forces were gathering themselves to create the Society of Alcoholics Anonymous. Perhaps in the early 30s, a certain American businessman was being told by Carl Jung in his office at Zurich after a year's treatment, which was a failure, that nothing could be done for him. That his only possible chance of recovery was through a spiritual experience.
And our friend said, but I'm a good Episcopalian. The great and humble Jung said, no, that isn't enough. I mean a transforming spiritual experience that will eject this obsession to drink that you have. I can do nothing for you. This friend finally found such an experience in the Oxford groups of that time, a society to which AA owes very much, although some of their tenants we have since discarded.
In his turn, he brought some basic ideas to a friend of mine, a schoolmate, who was also in a very bad way, about to be committed for alcoholic insanity. And in turn, this friend, who I shall call Abby, came to me in November of 1934, following this sentence of the summer. And he appeared at my house on Clinton Street, Brooklyn. I was home drinking. Lois was working then in the department store supporting me.
And I was very much open to any way to get out of this thing. He appeared in the door, and I remember how he looked. I can remember it now, even through the haze of gin, which I constantly was. I realized that something had happened to him. He sat down at the kitchen table. I offered him a drink. He said, no, no thanks. And I said, Abby, what's got into you? And smilingly, he looked at me and said, I've got religion.
Well, I was raised in one of these modern schools that teaches that man is God. This was very disappointing. I asked him what brand he'd got. It soon fell out he'd been in touch with the Oxford group. And again, he disclaimed some of their teachings, but said that others had made all the difference. And these, in brief, are what they were. He had been advised to get honest with himself as he had never been before.
He was advised to make an inventory of his defects, confide these to another in confidence. He was advised to make restitution to the people that he had harmed. In other words, a sort of internal and external help.
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Philophile, and I said, well, where does the religion business come in? Well, he said, I had to take that very easily. He said, I had to pray to whatever god there might be. But curiously enough, as soon as I became willing to admit that I was helpless, became willing to follow these simple precepts, which indeed might have been found elsewhere than in the Oxford groups, I was unaccountably released from my drinking as my friend Roland had been before me.
Also, the impact of Dr. Jung, this man of science, saying that he couldn't do anything about Roland's condition had made a deep impression on me. So there I was, opposite my friend, looking at him over the kitchen tape. And then and there, in all probability, the spark that was to be Alcoholics Anonymous was struck. Shortly afterward, I went back to the hospital. The doctor took me off liquor. My friend visited me there.
At first, I was suspicious. I was afraid I was going to be evangelized. Again, I asked him what his simple little formula was. Again, he repeated it. Get honest with yourself. Confess your faults. Make amends to those you've harmed. Try to help other people without any thought of reward. Pray to whatever God you think there is, if only as an experiment. It was just as simple, yet just as mysterious as that. When he had gone, I fell into a terrific depression. And in the bottom of that depression, I cried out, even as a small child might, if there is a God, will he show himself? Instantly, the place lit up electric white.
It seemed to me that I stood on the top of a mountain. The great wind was blowing, which I realized was not of air, but of spirit. When the ecstasy subsided, I lay on the bed. It seemed to me that I was now in a new world, where everything was all right. A great peace settled over me. Well, then my scientific education got busy, and I said, hey, Bill, you're hallucinating. You better get the doctor down here. So in came my doctor, who will be known someday as a medical saint, Dr. William B. Silkworth. Many a physician might have said, well, my boy, you're hallucinating. You better take something. He questioned me very carefully, and at length he said, Bill, something has happened to you. There has been some profound psychic upheaval here. I have read about these things in the books. Whatever it is that you have, you had better hang on to it. It's better than what had you an hour ago. So instantaneously, I was released from this terrific obsession to drink, which would have presently landed me in an asylum, and haven't been seriously tempted to this day.
Immediately, I began to speculate on why this had all happened. I wondered why other alcoholics couldn't have experiences like this, these transforming experiences. Curiously enough, at that time, somebody brought me a copy of William James, a varieties of religious experience. William James, as you may know, is considered one of the fathers of modern psychology. And here was the account of many such an experience as mine. Not all of this brilliance, not all with this speed, but the essence of them all was that they started with calamity, and they ended in a transforming experience that enabled the individual to do that which he just couldn't do on his own motor power. At once, you began to wonder, well, uh, what alcoholics really need is more deflation, perhaps one alcoholic talking to another over this bridge of common understanding, across this kinship of a common suffering. Maybe that's how it happened to me. My friend, Ebi, was an alcoholic. The man who had talked to him, who had been pronounced hopeless by Carl Jung, was one alcoholic talking to another.
So I began frantically working with alcoholics. Briefly, I joined the Oxford group, but those good people were more interested in saving the world than alcoholics, and they'd had rather bad luck with us. And the work kept on. We filled our house in Brooklyn with them, but nothing happened for six months. We had no success whatever. About that time, it was thought I'd
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better get back into business. I went to Akron, Ohio on a business deal. It fell through. I was left with not enough car fare home in Mayflower Hotel there, and then I had one of the few temptations to drink. And suddenly I remembered how much it had meant to me to help another alcoholic. Even those I had tried to help, who hadn't made any recovery, had nevertheless helped me. So I got off my high horse of preaching and of talking so much about this strange experience of mine, and remembered the advice of Dr. Silkworth, who said to me, Bill, you can soften these people up if you will pour it into them how hopeless this really is. An obsession of the mind that condemns one to drink, and an allergy that condemns one to go mad or die. Why don't you throw that dose into them first, and then maybe they will buy this moral psychology of yours. So I remembered that. I called up a preacher in town, saw his name on a directory in the lobby of the hotel. He referred me to some Oxford groupers who I thought might be in touch with some alcoholics, but none would see me except one at the very end.
And she came with a noted family there in town. She was not an alcoholic, but she said, you come right out here. And when I arrived, told her the story, she said, I know just the man. He's a doctor in this town. Used to be a noted one. His house is about to be foreclosed. His wife is a semi-invalid. He's tried everything. He just can't make it stick. Next day, this doctor, who all AAs know as Dr. Bob, now dead since 1950, and my partner in this thing, appeared at my friend Henrietta's house with his wife Ann. And I remembered what Dr.
Silkworth had said. And although my friend Dr. Bob was a physician and surgeon, he knew really nothing about alcoholism. And when I told him the nature of this disease after identifying with him by reciting my own experience and symptoms, apparently that struck him deep. And he was shortly released from his drinking, never to take a drink until 1950. I went to live with that family briefly to pursue this vain business venture. And Dr. Silkworth