San Francisco — Eve of the Lasker Award, 1951

Now, for those of us who are not A.A.’s here tonight, or who may be new to this society, I’d like to say very, very briefly that the child who was born in the year in which A.A. began is still going to school. He’s only 16 years old. A.A., also 16 years old, is a young, vigorous, healthy giant, attacking and conquering one of the worst evils of mankind, a thief that is truly an Herculean task of the 20th century. Just think of it for a moment, ladies and gentlemen. A short 16 years ago, A.A. had a membership of two men who were drunkards. One of the co-founders has made the program. The surviving co-founder is here with us tonight. He needs no introduction to A.A.’s. The rest, let me tell you, you will hear now from one of the great humanitarians of our time, a man who is truly inspired, a man to whom so many of us owe so very much our very lives. Let’s give Bill a real San Francisco welcome. Bill, what do you say? When one day the annals of Alcoholics Anonymous are set to paper, no brighter page will be seen than those on which will be inscribed the deeds of the friends of this movement who have helped create it and make it great. You have just heard one of those friends. In this opera house last spring, on behalf of A.A.’s everywhere, I presented you with the legacy of service. And this gentleman has headed our overall services. But he has done more. He, of all the men on that board, had the consistent vision of the need of this movement to look after its own affairs, of the need for that conference. And his steadfastness and his devotion to our cause has resulted in the happy outcome which culminated last April. So great thanks to you, Bernard. I think when we inscribe our annals, there will be no doubt what we shall say on page one. For there we shall inscribe the name of the Father of Life, the God by whose grace we have survived, who has granted us this wholesale miracle that the world now calls Alcoholics Anonymous. And then will come a succession of bright pages which will portray all of those channels of human inspiration and help which we have enjoyed over the years. And it seems to me, on the eve of our receipt of this great award, that it would be very fitting if I took each of you by the hand and we stepped back to the beginning. And we reviewed our short history in the terms of what our great friends have done for us. You know, one time, when A. A. was very young, it was like a single small candle burning in a great darkness where dwelt we children of the night. And off in a great distance there was a rampart, and that rampart was inscribed Science. And off at another great distance, another bastion, and that was called Religion. And it all seemed very far from us, we were alone and without friends. We were in a no-man’s land, halfway between Science and Religion. Well, as time wore on, one after another of our friends, first on the one side and then on the other, began to lend us a hand. Let’s see how that all started. I won’t reveal who was my wife as an alcoholic. I will merely say that in the summer of 1934, Lois Wilson, my wife, heard a doctor pronounce what seemed to be my doom. I lay upstairs in a drying-out joint, knowing well that I had come to the end of my tether. And downstairs, my wife was asking that age-old question. She was saying to the doctor, Why can’t he stop, Doctor? He seems like a man of such great will in other matters. Why can’t he stop? Well, that doctor was something more than a doctor. He was a gentle soul, a very great human being as it turned out. Gently as he could. He showed her how my habit of drinking had become a veritable obsession, an obsession that condemned me to drink against my will. And then he showed how I was victimized by a physical sensitivity, perhaps an allergy, that ensured very serious consequences. So my wife looked at him, as many another woman had, and she said, Doctor, what do you mean by serious consequences? He said, My dear, I fear that he is going to be like the rest who pass this way with few exceptions. In his case, now well advanced, unless you lock him up somewhere, he may die or go mad within the year. Without knowing it, that doctor was injecting an invaluable ingredient into A.A. Now let me take you forward into November 1934. I’m alone in my kitchen. My wife is at work supporting me. I’m drinking there. The telephone rings. An old school friend is on the wire. He’s sober. I had known him for an alcoholic. Heard he’d been locked up for alcoholic insanity. There he was in New York sober. Suddenly he comes in the door. He sits across the table from me. And then he brings me a set of very simple principles by which he thought I might live and be relieved of my obsession. As he claimed he had been. What were these principles? He pointed out to me that I was helpless, hopeless, and I agreed, as many an alcoholic has been. He suggested that I make a moral inventory of my character defects, got honest with myself as I had never been before. He suggested that I stop this accursed business of living alone, that I talk these things out with another in concert, make a confession. He suggested that I survey my broken relations, that I go to the people I had harmed and make restitution. He thought I ought to undertake a new kind of giving, the giving that demands no reward, either of money or personal prestige. And then, knowing my prejudices, he said, well, now in my case I’ve found that to make these simple precepts work, I have needed to ask God to help me. That statement of principle is the basis of those twelve steps we just heard mentioned. It is the core of our recovery program. Did we drunks invent those principles? Oh, no. They have come down to us across the centuries. Where did my friend get them? From other alcoholics? Oh, no. He might have got them in lots of places. But in his case, he found them in the Oxford group all a few years ago. He never became a grouper himself. He disagreed with many of their ideas. But these basics he abstracted, and he, another alcoholic, transmitted them to me. And because he was an alcoholic, they struck me deep, and they set me on the road to recovery. So we owe the principles to non-alcoholics. The drunks never invented those. Well, what do we see next? I’m back at the hospital trying to get sober, thinking I’d better try my friend’s formula. And if there was a great physician, I had best speak him out. Well, I come in the door roaring drunk. You know how we always get stewed on the way to get cured for the last time. Here was my friend Dr. Silkworth, William Duncan Silkworth. He sent me upstairs. He put me to bed. Three days later, I had a tremendous spiritual experience following a visit of my first friend at the kitchen. I had this tremendous sense of being a free man. I was released. I haven’t had a drink to this day. That experience was so cataclysmic that I was afraid I had gone crazy. So I called in Dr. William Duncan Silkworth, told him what had happened, and said, Doctor, tell me, have I gone mad? The little man looked at me quizzically. He asked me a lot of questions. And finally he said, No, my boy, you’re not crazy. And whatever it is that you have got, you’d better hold on to. It’s so much better than the obsession that had you only a brief hour ago. Apparently some profound psychic event has occurred. Maybe you had something they call a conversion experience. Those experiences do sober up alcohol. So you see, there was at my bedside a man of science, a man of medicine, who might have said, Oh, Bill, you’ll be better tomorrow. You’re just hallucinating a little. That man held our destiny in his hands at my bedside right then. William Duncan Silkworth. Well, since this had all come so simply, yet so mysteriously, I was immediately obsessed with the desire to help other alcoholics and rushed about doing so. There wasn’t any success. I went to the Oxford group meetings, but they were rather tired of alcoholics by then and had a right to this. Six months passed. Still no success. I’d called over scores of cases, yet I seemed to be able to stay sober myself. Then this doctor let me come back to his hospital, and at great risk to his reputation, let me talk to cases there that took a lot of courage in those days to bring spiritual experiences into a drying out joint. You bet. And finally, he made this suggestion. He said, Look, Bill, he said, This whole program, as you’re trying to apply it to the drunks, this spiritual program, is one of ego deflation, isn’t it? Yes. Well, he said, Why don’t you hit them with the idea that they have got a fatal and progressive disease? Now all of those people, as most modern men do, rather worship science. Why don’t you get some prominent doctors to tell the truth, which is that not one percent of the alcoholics who wish to get well have ever been able to do so. That this is a compulsive obsession that condemns you people to drink and so to die. Now then, maybe, if you as an alcoholic transmit that idea to the other alcoholic, you will then accomplish the kind of deflation that preceded your own spiritual experience. And you will bring the man to the point where he can say, Out of the depths of his soul, of myself I am nothing. The father will need to do the work. So it was he, this man of medicine, who handed us the tool, the concept of the obsession plus the allergy, those twin ogres of madness and death, by which we describe this strange illness to each other and by which we bring about enough deflation so that the grace of God can flow in and expel our obsession. Therefore, that good man was one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. One of the many founders. Next I set out for Akron on a business trip. You see, my relatives wondered why I was going to quit being a missionary and go to work and support the Lord. So I got into a business deal, kind of a half-baked one. Took me to Akron, Ohio. The deal fell through. I’m broke. Left alone in a hotel. And for the first time in six months, I thought of drinking. Frightened to death, I remembered that though I had not been able to sober up a single alcoholic, working with those other alcoholics had done wonderful things for many. Then I realized, too, that I had been preaching from a kind of a little more lemon. And suddenly I knew the truth. I needed another alcoholic as much as he could need me. How did I reach this other alcoholic? Well, there was a directory of churches. There in the lobby of the hotel, I ran my finger down a list of clergymen until I came to one with an odd name. The name was Walter Tunks. I said, I guess I’ll call up Tunks. He turned out to be an Episcopalian. I said I was a drunk from New York looking for drunks to work on. He ventured the opinion that drunks one at a time would be enough. That collectively they would be a bad lot. He apparently knew. Well, I explained myself a little further. He gave me a list of people that I might call. They were people largely who had once been Oxford group members and had rather fallen away, but people of goodwill whom I put me in touch. He gave me a list of about ten. I started calling them. Well, one would see me in church Sunday. The next was going away for the weekend. Some weren’t home. All sorts of excuses were given. Nine of the list had been exhausted. The last name on the list was that of Sibling. Very great name in Akron. Industrial name. Besides, it was a lady. I said Lady Sibling wouldn’t care to hear from a drunk from New York on a Saturday afternoon looking for drunks to work on. No, I can’t call her. I almost went back down to the bar to get tight. When something said to me, you’d better call her. I called her. I told her quickly what I needed. She said, I think I understand perfectly. I’m no alcoholic, but I have been through the emotional wringer. I know what you’re talking about. You come straight out here. So again, a non-alcoholic held our destiny in her hand. Arrived there, she puts me in touch with our beloved Dr. Bob. The next day, he walks into our house, he and Ann, his wife. She puts us aside in the library. He and I talk for hours. And the spark that was to become Alcoholics Anonymous was struck. All because this non-alcoholic had time, understood enough, and above all, cared enough. Well, most of you know this story, how we went to work in the Akron General Hospital that summer, how a small group started in Akron. But too few know the story of our next great friend in the town of Akron. That friend is one every AA within a thousand miles can name. She is Sister Ignatia, a frail nun at the Catholic Hospital in Akron, St. Thomas. The first religious institution ever to open its door to our society. And she had known the doctor in his drinking time. She saw him sober. The city hospital had got kind of tired of this newfangled nonsense. The sister began to slip drunks into beds that other people should have had, all because Smithy wanted her to. And by and by, the staff of the hospital became interested. They asked Dr. Smith to join them, although he wasn’t a Catholic. So Smithy and Sister Ignatia began their classic twelve-step job. And the example of that dear lady has been something of a quality of inspiration I could never describe to you. All we alcoholics talk about how we do our twelve-step work. That frail one rises at five in the morning and she never goes to bed until eleven or twelve, and almost never leaves those premises. And nearly all her waking hours are devoted to alcoholics. And before Dr. Bob died, she and he had ministered to 5,000 cases in that one hospital. Oh, who says AA has only two founders? Well, let’s see what happens next. I go back to New York. A group starts there. Little by little it takes form. Oh, how very slowly. At the end of three years, I’m back in Akron. Smithy and I had been in communication, of course. We commenced to count noses. And to our joy we discovered that a good lot of time was now elapsed on forty tough cases of alcoholism. And suddenly we saw for the first time that a new light was shining upon us children of the night. That out of ancient principle, something new by the grace of God had come into our dark world. So the question was, how could we transmit this message? Within gunshot hours in the city of Akron were hundreds dying of this strange plague. There were said to be a million grim cases in America with another three or four million potentials coming on close behind. How could we forty transmit what we knew? Well, we thought we needed a lot of money. Of course we’d need a lot of money. We’d have to get in the hospital business because the hospitals didn’t want us. Alcoholics never got well. They made a hell of a lot of noise. There were bad pay. You couldn’t blame the hygiene. So we’d have to have a string of hospitals ourselves. We’d have to go into the hospital business. Then it was supposed that only the elder therapists could do this job. So of course some of us would have to be financed, a species of AA missionaries, to go out to other cities and start settings. And then we would need a literature, some kind of a book, a guide rail for this thing to run on. Yes, we’d have to have all of those things. So the decision was taken, a very fateful one, in the fall of 1937 by the Akron Group that I go back to New York and I give up all this money. Well, where was I going to find a lot of money? I certainly wasn’t going to find it among drunks. I had to go to non-alcoholics. So I visited the few well-to-do people I knew, talking loudly about the beginning of one of the greatest developments of all time. You know, there were about 40 of us sober then. And my friends weren’t impressed at all. Those who had money said, well, I’d rather give it to tuberculosis, I’d rather give it to cancer. Don’t you think you’re scraping up the bottom of the barrel here, Bill? Of course, it’s nice that you got well, but no interest. I just cared nothing about drunks. Well, I thought about the Rockefeller Foundation. They’d have a lot of dough. So I got some contacts over there, but, well, there was a depression on them. They felt kind of hard up, they told me. It wasn’t exactly religious, it wasn’t exactly educational. They couldn’t put their finger on it. So they didn’t think they wanted a piece of it. So finally I go to my non-alcoholic relative, who is still today one of our trustees, brother-in-law. I had an imaginary attack of ulcers that day. I’m one of these psychosomatic characters, you know. I was complaining loudly how stingy the rich were, told him how we needed all this money. So he thought of a contact who proved to be one of the dearest friends this movement will ever have, Willard S. Richardson, great friend, almost a member of the Rockefeller family. Soon we were in this dear man’s office. He listened with great attention. He said, Will you have lunch with me tomorrow? Gee, would I have lunch with a friend of Mr. Rockefeller when you’re looking for money? Of course I would. He’s still more interested. He calls together a group of friends. Were they drunk? Oh, no. They’re all non-alcoholics, friends of Mr. Rockefeller’s. So we have a meeting. Smithy comes on from action. We meet in Mr. Rockefeller’s boardroom. I think, well, now things are really getting hot. In fact, I’m told I’m sitting right in a seat just vacated by Mr. Rockefeller. Well, we really were getting close to the money. And then something of a great moment happened. We alcoholics present told our stories. Presently we brought up the subject of our need for a book, for hospitals, for subsidized people. One of the men in a mild way said, But aren’t you afraid in your case of the perils of property, the perils of money, the perils of professionalism? Yes, we said, Those things do frighten us. But we are more frightened to sit here with our knowledge and have it spread only at a snail’s pace among the millions who do not yet know. We must find some way to propagate this thing. We must have some money. So some of Mr. Rockefeller’s friends became convinced. And they carefully looked into the situation, rendered a report to John D. Rockefeller Jr. He saw this report early in 1938. He read it with great interest. He looked up at his old friend Dick, and he said, Dick, somehow I am very strangely affected by this account. This is a deeply moving thing. It may be great someday. But said John D. Rockefeller, whose principal mission in life is the giving of money, said he to his friend Dick, I’m afraid that money will spoil this thing, Dick. I’ll give a little, a very little, to help these two men along a few months. But don’t ask me for any more. I’m afraid that money will spoil it, said the great philanthropist. Oh, that was a faithful decision. Those were great words for alcoholics, you know. Because right then we began to be saved from the perils of professionalism, from the perils of business management that we need not engage in. Well, it was horribly disappointing to us alcoholics. And all during the summer of 1938 we tried to raise sums of money from the rich, having the highest recommendations from our new friends. We had organized this alcoholic foundation of which Bernard is today chairman, tax-free, a nice receptacle for the rich to put their money into to help drunks, you know. Still not a cent, praise God. But these friends stuck with us. We had meeting after meeting. By this time our grandiose ideas of change of A.A.-managed hospitals had vanished. Our idea of a lot of paid missionaries was gone. But we still stuck to the idea that we had to have a book, which would describe our method of approach, which would be documented by case histories of recovery. So, not having raised any money for the foundation, we were obliged to raise the money among ourselves. But a few of those non-alcoholic friends and a few others did come in, and they made all the difference. And our old friend Dr. Silkworth, who had injected the idea of illness into our technique, he scraped us up a sizable sum that made that book possible. And the book appeared in 1939. In all those four or five years, we’d only scraped together 100 A.A. members. Those were the years of flying blind. But now here was a book that described what we had. My friend’s original message over the kitchen table was now amplified into the 12 well-known points of the A.A. recovery program. Well, the Reader’s Digest had promised an article. We thought it would move books and bring us in a lot of prospects. But they changed our mind, and the venture is bankrupt. Who comes to our rescue? Another non-alcoholic. He’s on our Board of Trustees today, Phil Mauser, author of The Greatest Story Ever Told, senior editor of the Reader’s Digest. He was then an editor of Liberty Magazine. And this story somehow appealed to folks. And Liberty printed a piece about us in September 1939 that saved the book and brought in about 800 inquiries. Meanwhile, we’d had plenty of foundation meetings with our new alcoholic friends. No money, but we had begun to spread. We had begun to sense that this message could be transmitted in the mail, one alcoholic writing to another, sending out this book and a pamphlet we’d prepared. Very slowly we began to spread. By 1940, we had got maybe 700 or 800 members, when all of a sudden appears John B. Rockefeller in the picture again. We hadn’t heard from him since 1938. He told our Board of Trustees he wanted to give AA a dinner and invite his friends. And he did give such a dinner. And they came. Lots of them bankers. I figured about a billion dollars’ worth were in there. One billion, not one million. It looked like our money problems were solved. He was sick that night. He sent his son, Nelson. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, who had reviewed this book and had stood up as the first clergyman to say this was good, was present. So was Dr. Foster Kennedy, the celebrated neurologist, who had seen one of his patients miraculously recover under his own eyes. He was there and said good things about it. And, of course, the drunks were there, and they talked too much as usual. When the meeting drew to its close, I figured something would be said about money, and so it was. Nelson Rockefeller Rose said, This growing movement has deeply touched my father. He wanted you people to hear. He is so sorry he cannot be here tonight, but he is very glad that you have seen the promises at the beginning of this very promising thing. But, gentlemen, this is the work of goodwill. It needs no money. Whereupon all the bankers walked out again, a billion dollars worth. Well, the story of that dinner was put on the press wires of the world. What had happened? Mr. Rockefeller had not given of himself. He had given. He had not given of money. He had given of himself. He had stood up before the whole world and said these 800 struggling alcoholics are good men and women and true. And I believed him then. He validated us at risk of personal ridicule before the whole world. Oh, who says AA has but two founders? Let’s jump ahead another year. The impetus of that dinner was considerable. As a matter of fact, Mr. Rockefeller wrote all the diners and they sent in a little money. We had exactly $3,000 a year out of those dinner people for five years, and that’s all the money this society ever had from the outside world at its central headquarters. But then comes another great plan. He’s on the board of trustees too, Jack Alexander, author of the famous Saturday Post article released in March 1941 that made AA a national institution. It all happened this way. Early in that year, the editorial board of the Post began to hear about this AA thing. And they said, well, maybe. There was a lot of talk about it. Wouldn’t it be controversial, religiously or medically? Wouldn’t there be a… Oh, that would be too risky, thought the editors. Maybe we hadn’t better published it. Up steps another non-alcoholic friend, Curtis Box, one of the owners of the Post. He happened to be at the meeting where the decision was to be taken. And he said to his editors, I don’t like to dictate, folks, but I myself have seen two of these miraculous recoveries. And two, just two, are enough to convince me. I think we had better print them. So a piece called Alcoholics Anonymous became the title piece of the March 1st Saturday Post, 1941. Our office in New York was flooded by a frantic blast of inquiry. Alcoholics, their friends, their wives, their employers. And then we began to mushroom. We began to grow madly. The period of flying blind, the infancy was gone. Then we entered the period of adolescence. Could we function as a society? What could hold us together? Rebellious children as we would, under what authority could we operate? Could we live and work together as a society? That was the test that we must now meet. And that was the time of our adolescence, when we developed what is today called the tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous. Well, you’ve seen, perhaps, that some of our tradition was already in formation. For the benefit of our friends here who don’t know about the tradition of AA, let me outline it briefly. AA believes that our common welfare comes first. AA believes that its ultimate authority is God speaking in the group conscience. AA believes that no alcoholic can be excluded from our society. Any man is a member who says that he is. AA believes that each of its groups should be autonomous, unless an action of theirs is going to affect the whole. AA does not believe we ought to have any professional workers ever. AA does not accept any contributions from outside sources. We pay our own bills. AA believes that we should never engage in controversy, nor oppose anything. AA believes that its public relations policy should be based on attraction rather than promotion. We think it is better to let our friends recommend it, as indeed our friends are going to do, 13,000 of them tomorrow night. Yes, we believe in those things. Now you have seen the beginnings of some of these traditions. In the story I have told you about our relation with the Rockefellers, what other great forces were at work? One of the founders of this movement, at least in my way of thinking, is a very great soul who lived about 800 years ago, I think, St. Francis of Assisi. And the idea that this movement should remain corporately poor comes from him, and John B. Rockefeller. So it has gone, down through the years, and these early friends have been joined by God knows how many more who you see have helped create AA and make it what it is. No story of our friends would begin to be complete without that of Ed Dowling, the Jesuit, at the Queen’s Work in St. Louis. You know, when that book first came out, we all trembled. We feared we’d get into denominational difficulty. Soon a letter appeared, or rather a periodical appeared, out of the fidelity there, in which attention was drawn to the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous as being good catholicity as far as they went, a very friendly thing written by this wonderful man. Soon we heard that an AA group was starting in St. Louis, started, strangely enough, by a Jesuit priest, and his new parishioners were 80% Protestant. What do you think of that? One day he came into the club in New York. In fact, it was his ninth, it was a sleeting evening. Our caretaker went down and said, There’s some bum from St. Louis who wants to see you. He came up to my room where I was suffering one of my imaginary ulcer attacks. He drew back his coat collar, and as the sleeves fell off it, I saw he was a clergyman. And as he chatted there, that room filled up with that wonderful aura that comes from him. He was the first Catholic clergyman to say, This is good catholicity. Come and get it, folks. A couple of years later, he took me over to the Sodality as I visited St. Louis. The Jesuits were all around there. I felt a little uncomfortable and out of place. One of them said to me, Mr. Wilson, you must have had a Catholic education. Well, I said, Father, I don’t mean to be facetious, but it was literally true. I knew so little of true religion when that book was written that I thought Catholicism was a superstition of the Irish. Well, you know, the Jebus are a very good-natured people. And they said, But we’re astonished. And then they pointed to the wall. And on the wall there were two big pieces of paper pinned up, and one of them I saw revealed our twelve steps. And the other were some other sort of steps, which they said were the Ignatian exercises for retreat. And then they said, Now, Mr. Wilson, when these points were written, why did you have three up here instead of down there, and why didn’t you have eight where nine is, and so on? Well, I said, I don’t know. I said, We just took that original word-of-mouth program and busted it up in small pieces so the drunks could bite it off a little at a time. And they got more and more puzzled. And they said, Well, now, we have been making a very careful examination of these points, and of the origin, we find that they correspond exactly in principle and in coloring and in ordering with our Ignatian exercises for retreat, which, to be sure, are stated in medieval language and appropriate to the retreat in the monastery. But principle for principle, there it is. How do you explain this? I said, I don’t know. We just busted up the word-of-mouth program in twelve small pieces so the drunks could bite it off a little. Which was the only reason we knew? Well, that wonderful experience went far to validate AA. So far as this. Last year, Lois and I went to Europe. Of course we went to Ireland. There’s a swell AA there now. An Irishman from Philadelphia carried it across about four years ago. When the Irish boys started, the clergy naturally were a little suspicious. They thought, Well, it’s a new Yankee gadget. Maybe we’ve got a competitive religion here. We’d better take a good look at this one. So the Irish drunks, a few of them, was recovered, rolled over, very much disconcerted. And we said, Well, all you’ve got to do is to write to Father Red down in St. Louis. So Father Red sent a couple of letters over to the folks. And when Lois and I arrived in Ireland, we found that the principal church, Periodic, had just about as flat-footed an endorsement of Alcoholics Anonymous as you’d want to find everywhere. And the whole of Ireland was open to us, excepting, of course, the north of Ireland. But up in the north of Ireland, things were good, too. And as our train went from Dublin to Belfast and we stepped down from the platform, some north of Ireland AAs came out to meet the south of Ireland AAs. And one of them, in a very good-natured way, said to the other, Hello, you damn papist, how are you? And the papist from the south of Ireland said, Oh, you’re one of those English lovers. He said, You know what we think of the English in the south of Ireland? We say burn everything that’s English except your damn coat. Now, my dear friends, do you get the tremendous import of that simple tale? Those people were able to say in jest that which draws blood elsewhere in Ireland. And today, AA is one of the very few rooks in that land where men of all races and creeds and political outlooks can meet in true amity. Well, you can charge a lot of that up to Father Ed back there in St. Louis, can’t you, huh? Tell you one more. When AA was about to publish its book, Alcoholics Anonymous, it got cautious. It said, Well, we’d better make a pre-publication copy of this thing. We’d better hand it around to some clergymen and some psychiatrists and some housewives and some fishwives and some cops and, you know, kind of give it a once-over before we go to press. With great trepidation, we took it over to the Catholic Committee on Publications. And although we had only one Catholic to send it by, it got there all right. They looked it over. And when they called in our Catholic friend to hand the book back, they said, Boy, this is wonderful. We’re only going to make one mandatory change in the book, if you please. Right at the end of that first chapter, that fellow who tells his story, that guy Bill, makes a remark at the end of his story, says, He, we have found heaven right here on this good old earth. Now, said the Committee on Publications, couldn’t Bill change that a little? He said, After all, we sky pilots are promising folks something much better later on. So the word was changed from heaven to utopia. But the book also fell into the hands of gentlemen of medicine. And the first psychiatrist ever to befriend our society was Harry Thiebaud, a man at Blywood Sanitarium in Greenwich. And he had under treatment, who is a very patient of Dr. Foster Kennedy, the former patient of his. Her name was Marty, lots of you know her. And he showed her the same pre-publication copy of that book. Well, Marty says herself, she was a pretty rebellious individual then. She took one look at that book, stuck with the God business, as she said it was, and she threw it right out the window. Now, did that discourage Harry Thiebaud? No. He waited until she got drunk again, which he did right away. And when her hangover was at the worst, he handed the book back to her. And reluctantly, she opened it again. And her eyes fell on one blazing sentence, which simply stated, we cannot live with resentment. Soon she decided to come to one of our meetings, then held in Wilson’s front parlor down there in Brooklyn. She came back to the sanitarium, almost at once a different woman. And she said to one of the other alcoholics there, who sobered up shortly afterwards, Granny, I have been to one of these meetings. We’re not alone anymore. Well, that was our introduction to Harry Thiebaud. That man has held up our hands through thick and thin ever since. After all, a psychiatrist going for God back in those days kind of jarred some of the boys in the profession. It wasn’t a popular idea. But Harry kept saying, well, all right, here are the results, here are the cases. He began to read papers about us. And it all finally culminated one day when he and Kirby Collier of Upstate New York and Dwight Anderson of the New York State Medical Society got permission from the society to ask me, a layman, to read the New York State Medical Society a paper on Alcoholics Anonymous, which was titled Medicine, Look at Alcoholics Anonymous, of which we have probably distributed a million copies. And after the paper was read, Harry and other doctors got up and made a testimonial for AA, which the society printed in its journal and allowed us to reprint. Friends of science, friends of medicine, reaching down their hands from the ramparts to lift us up to the light. Well, two years ago, that process broadened out. The American Psychiatric Association, at its annual meeting in Montreal, heard another paper written by a layman on the subject of Alcoholics Anonymous. They, too, allowed that paper to be printed in their journal, and they let us reprint it. The next year, Lois and I went to Europe, and when we got from Ireland, where Ed Dowling had given us a boost, we got to Scotland, where Harry Thiebaud had given us a boost, because it was Harry who engineered and helped us get these things done, because he loved us and he believed in us, as a great human being that he is. What did I find in Scotland? Well, the Scots are obstinate. You know, they were hard to convince, even the alcoholics. The newspapers wouldn’t find anything. The doctors haven’t cared much. Which finally comes this paper from America, read before the American Psychiatric, titled The Society of Alcoholics Anonymous. And in Scotland, AA is headed, believe it or not, by a baronet, called Sir Philip. It was supposed that the baronet would only have the best people in AA, but we found that he had a lot of fine dockworkers in Charlemagne and Glasgow. Over in Perth, he had a lot of distilleries, and in Edinburgh, he got the top-shelf stuff. Well, now how did Sir Philip get all this going? By taking this paper, which Harry Thiebaud had made possible, to the Dean of Psychiatry of Edinburgh University. And when the dean saw its auspices and read its contents, he commenced to turn the drunks he knew over to Sir Philip. Oh, my friends, AA has many founders. We would surely have died a mourning without them, and all those that have followed since have really made us what we are. Especially the men of the cloth, the men and women of medicine, the men and women of the press of the world. To those our thanks are boundless. Now, tomorrow night, this all cumulates, culminates, rather, in 13,000 men and women of science, men and women of the American Public Health Association, conferring upon us this great distinction and honor, the Lasker Award. No longer are people reaching down from the ramparts of science and religion into no man’s land to raise it up. American public health has taken our society upon its shoulders, and it says loudly and authoritatively to the whole world, this is good, we believe. Yes, these new friends have seated us at their tables. We break bread to resent. Thank God for those friends, and for Mary and Albert Lasker, who will make tomorrow’s historic hour possible. Thank you. We will close our meeting now in the traditional manner. If you’ll rise, Father Marr will lead us in the Lord’s Prayer. Since many different faiths are represented here, may I ask each one of you to join in the closing prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, according to the formula of your particular creed. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.