100 Heroes and Icons of the 20th Century

THE HEALER BILL W. From the rubble of a wasted life, he overcame alcoholism and founded the 12-step program that has helped millions of others do the same

Second Lieut. Bill Wilson didn’t think businessman, Wilson drank to alleviate his twice when the first butler he had ever seen depressions and to celebrate his Wall Street offered him a drink. The 22-year-old soldier success. Married in 1918, he and Lois toured didn’t think about how alcohol had destroyed his the country on a motorcycle and appeared to be family. He didn’t think about the Yankee a prosperous, promising young couple. By 1933, temperance movement of his childhood or his however, they were living on charity in her loving fiancé Lois Burnham or his emerging parent’s house on Clinton Street in Brooklyn, talent for leadership. He didn’t think about N.Y. Wilson had become an unemployable anything at all. “I had found the elixir of life,” he drunk who disdained religion and even wrote. Wilson’s last drink, 17 years later, when panhandled for cash. alcohol had destroyed his health and his career, precipitated an epiphany that would change his Inspired by a friend who had stopped life and the lives of millions of other alcoholics. drinking, Wilson went to meetings of the Oxford Incarcerated for the fourth time at Manhattan’s Group, an evangelical society founded in Britain Towns Hospital in 1934, Wilson had a spiritual by Pennsylvania Frank Buchman. And as Wilson awakening-a flash of white light, a liberating underwent a barbiturate-and-belladonna cure awareness of God-that led to the founding of called “purge and puke,” which was state-of-the- Alcoholics Anonymous and Wilson’s art alcoholism treatment at the time, his brain revolutionary 12-step program, the successful spun with phrases from Oxford Group meetings, remedy for alcoholism. The 12 steps have also Carl Jung and William James’ Varieties of generated successful programs for eating Religious Experience, which he read in the disorders, gambling, narcotics, debting, sex hospital. Five sober months later, Wilson went to addiction and people affected by other’s Akron, Ohio, on business. The deal fell through, addictions. Aldous Huxley called him “the and he wanted a drink. He stood in the lobby of greatest social architect of our century.” the Mayflower Hotel, entrance by the sounds of the bar across the hall. Suddenly he became convinced that by helping another alcoholic, he “I had to be first in everything because in my could change himself. perverse heart I felt myself the least of God’s Through a series of desperate phone creatures. calls, he found Dr. Robert Smith, a skeptical Bill Wilson, describing his alcoholism drunk whose family persuaded him to give Wilson 15 minutes. Their meeting lasted for William Griffith Wilson grew up in a hours. A month later, Dr. Bob had his last drink, quarry town in Vermont. When he was 10, his and that date, June 10, 1935, is the official date hard-drinking father headed for Canada, and his of A.A., which is based on the idea that only an mother moved to Boston, leaving the sickly child alcoholic can help another alcoholic. with her parents. As a soldier, and then as a

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“Because of our kinship in suffering,” Bill them, he created an enduring blueprint for an wrote, “our channels of contact have always organization with a maximum of individual been charged with the language of the heart.” freedom and no accumulation of power or The Burnham house on Clinton Street money. Public anonymity ensured humility. No became a haven for drunks. “My name is Bill W., contributions were required; no member could and I’m an alcoholic,” he told assorted contribute more than $1,000. houseguests and visitors at meetings. To spread the word, he began writing down his principles Today more than 2 million A.A. members for sobriety. Each chapter was read by the in 150 countries hold meetings in church Clinton Street group and sent to Smith in Akron basements, hospital conference rooms and for more editing. The book had a dozen school gyms, following Wilson’s informal provisional titles, among them The Way Out and structure. Members identify themselves as The Empty Glass. Edited to 400 pages, it was alcoholics and share their stories; there are no finally called Alcoholics Anonymous, and this rules or entry requirements, and many members became the group’s name. use only first names. But the book, although well reviewed, Wilson believed the key to sobriety was a wasn’t selling. change of heart. The suggested 12 steps Wilson tried unsuccessfully to make a include an admission of powerlessness, a moral living as a wire-rope salesman. A.A. had about a inventory, a restitution for harm done, a call to hundred members, but many were still drinking. service and a surrender to some personal God. Meanwhile, in 1939, the bank foreclosed on the In A.A., God can be anything from a radiator to a Clinton Street house, and the couple began patriarch. Influenced by A.A. the American years of homelessness, living as guests in Medical Association has redefined alcoholism as borrowed rooms and at one point staying in a chronic disease, not a failure of willpower. temporary quarters above the A.A. clubhouse on As Alcoholics Anonymous grew, Wilson 24th Street in Manhattan. In 1940 John D. became its principal symbol. He helped create a Rockefeller Jr. held an A.A. dinner and was governing structure for the program, the General impressed enough to create a trust to provide Service Board, and turned over his power. ”I Wilson with $30 a week-but no more. The have become a pupil of the A.A. movement tycoon felt that money would corrupt the group’s rather than the teacher,” he wrote. A smoker in spirit. his 70s, he died of pneumonia and emphysema in Miami, where he went for treatment in 1971. “In the wake of my spiritual experience there To the end, he clung to the principles and power came a vision of a society of alcoholics.” of anonymity. He was always Bill E., refusing to Bill Wilson, writing to Carl Jung in 1961 take money for counseling and leadership. He turned down many honors, including a degree from Yale. And he declined this magazine’s offer Then, in March 1941, the Saturday to put him on the cover – even with his back Evening Post published an article on A.A., and turned. suddenly thousands of letters and requests poured in. Attendance at meetings doubled and Susan Cheever, a novelist and memoirist, is the tripled. Wilson had reached his audience. In author of Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Twelve Traditions, Wilson set down the Drinker. suggested bylaws of Alcoholics Anonymous. In

Source: Time, June 14, 1999

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