Speaking in Memphis, 1947 (2 hrs)

For any convention, the first thing we would pack would be one, two, or three, four bottles. And coming to a convention without the customary bottle is most unusual. I think this whole movement about sports anonymous is one of the most unusual for now. We are having a good time simply because we learned that we don’t need liquor. As your chairman said, we are not opposed to anything. We do not take a religious stand or a stand on prohibition, pro or con. We are merely persons interested in our own problems and those who have a similar one. So it is grand to gather here and prove that we can have a good time without the bottle. You know, introducing a person whom you have known and been rather innocently associated with for some nine years ordinarily shouldn’t be a difficult job, but it is. One reason for that, I can’t help but mix my emotions with this introduction. Because I, like you, are so deeply grateful to the person who made such a glorious change in our lives and caused so much happiness where before there was sorrow and darkness. I am further restricted in knowing that this man, above all else, does not want to be eulogized. His whole attitude is one of modesty and humility, which is so effective. Were that not the case, this man could be a material millionaire, but he chose to be a spiritual millionaire. His modesty is exemplified by the fact that in his association, or since the founding of AA some twelve years ago, only four times, to my knowledge, has this man’s name appeared in the public print, and never once with his consent or permission. Again, I refer to our book called Alcoholics Anonymous. That book is distributed throughout the world today, yet nowhere in it do you find the name of the author, the twelve steps. You don’t know who gave us those, I can tell you. Bill will say that he’s not the founder of AA, he’ll deny it. He’ll deny having written the book, he’ll deny having composed the twelve steps in all his humility. However, I rejoice tonight in being here in Memphis. I’m certainly pleased to be able to present my very good friend, and above all, your very good friend, Bill Wilson. Applause Silence The spirit of this meeting has been welling up to me from where you sit. And it seems to be saying that indeed the grace of God is an infinite abundance which will descend upon anyone who can find the humility to seek God out. If anything, this gathering here is a supreme testimony of that fact. And we AA’s often feel like shouting this ancient charter of man’s liberty from the housetop. This indeed is a time for gratitude, a time for thanksgiving, a time for rejoicing. And coming to the objects of our gratitude in a more special sense, I’m told that there are many of the good citizens of Memphis come here to see and hear a little about this thing Alcoholics Anonymous. And considering how full this house is, and the imminent possibility that you all have of having your homes blown down this evening, I think it is a most wonderful tribute, which is deeply appreciated. You know, we alcoholics, I think, are kind of snobbish. They say it’s the same with the freaks in the circus. We are extremely clannish. But as we grow older in AA, we are coming to appreciate our friends. It is not an uncommon sight at a large AA meeting nowadays to find arranged along the platform on either side a Catholic priest, a psychiatrist, perchance a rabbi, and a good old-fashioned M.D. practitioner. AA has become, in a sense, a meeting place, a common meeting ground for science and religion, whose war is said to be at the root of this neurosis under which our poor old world of today is struggling. And Alcoholics Anonymous has drawn much from medicine and much from religion. In fact, Alcoholics Anonymous can be likened to a farmer’s three-legged milk stool, and fancy that one of the legs is medicine, another is religion, and the third our experience in drinking and in recovering and knowing the grace of God. So on behalf of Alcoholics Anonymous everywhere, I would like to voice this tribute to all of our friends who too have done their part in making this wholesale miracle possible. And speaking from a closer range and a more intimate way, I would like to pay tribute to those who have seen us out of this darkness into light, and I mean by those our good wives and mothers and friends and husbands who have endured With such marvelous loyalty, this terrible malice. And to be a little more intimate still, I would like to pay tribute to Lois, my wife. She saw me through, even down into the pits, and out. And she contributed her part in great measures during the early days of Alcoholics Anonymous. When the going was very, very hard, and none knew what it might not succeed. Her faith never wavered. And to me, she is a symbol of the many women who sit here who have since done likewise. Very special tribute to them and to her. And to, how could one miss saying a great deal about this warm hospitality of you Southern folks. There is nothing like it in the world anywhere. And to those who have worked so hard to make these arrangements, and to the many that have shown us, Lois and me, their great love and affection, we wish to give our very special thanks. Speaking of Southern hospitality, it reminds me of one of the greatest stories ever to come out of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I saw the beginning of that story while enjoying the hospitality of an AA over in Shelby, North Carolina. It was some six years ago. We had made our start. We were getting on firmer ground here and there, but nothing was too certain. And one day our central office in New York, which is merely a service center where we receive inquiries in one thing or another, one day that letter, that office received a letter from a man who was an inmate of the Lexington place for drug addicts. And he went on to tell us in the letter how he had been a physician, had gone on to alcohol, and then on to morphine. And that while there in the asylum, someone had written him about AA, and he had been reading this AA book of ours, which is our book of experience. And he said, of course I used to be an alcoholic, but now I’m an addict of some 12 years standing, and you know how hopeless that is. But I do see hope for me in this philosophy of yours, and when I get out of here I’m certainly going to try it. Well, subsequently our office struck up a correspondence with him as he returned home to that little southern hamlet. And he told us in his quiet way of his various difficulties he’d had, but never in any complaining stance. The girls in the office would write him occasional letters of encouragement. Little by little he began to describe the formation of an AA group in Shelby. By the way, one of the earliest groups that we had formed in the mail, just through mail contact. Well, it was a great thrill to all of us in the office. Meanwhile, other southern centers had started. Atlanta, Jacksonville, in larger places the groups had become larger. And a demand had arisen that I get down among the southerners and pay my respects and see if I couldn’t peddle a little of the older AA experience down there. Well, you see, AA began to look like a success at that time. And as everyone knows, success is a heady wine. And I fear that I was a little bit on the big-shot side, and I spent some little time debating with the folks in the office whether I really would stop off at Shelby. I mean, you know that chap there was a nice chap, and he’d done a nice job, but I really should get where I could get to a lot of people. After some debating with myself, I finally grudgingly conceded that I would stop off there at Shelby. Well, I alighted from the train, and I saw three men approaching me down the platform. Two of my spotted assassins right off the bat, you couldn’t mistake it. They were sober, understand. The third one, well, I wondered who he was. And as he drew nearer, I saw some lines in his face that I didn’t quite place. You know, we folks know each other very well. And as he drew nearer, I saw that his lips were marked. And I learned later, in the agony of his dope hangovers, he had chewed them. And he turned out to be a delightful, soft-spoken little man, who I shall call Dr. Tom. Well, we got in the car and drove from Kings Mountain over to Shelby. And we were sat down at the door of one of your delightful ancestral homes. And we went inside, and there I met Tom’s mother, and a wife of two years, and a child. And you could feel the atmosphere of that home. The meal came and went, and from an A.A. point of view, it was a most unusual meal. I found that Tom was rather reluctant to talk about what he had done in Shelby. So there wasn’t much A.A. shop talk at the table, practically unheard of elsewhere. And I wondered myself if dope had a humbling effect. If so, I think that some of us alcoholics should have taken more of it. At any rate, presently meeting time came. And we got down there, and the meeting place was right under the hotel, right next to the barbershop, very public. And I said, well, now for a small town, that’s really going some. And yes, even over the door, here were two letters, A.A. And I got in there, and here was the usual gay crowd. And then the meeting started. So now up in New York, incidentally, I’m not in New York, so I can say what I’m going to say with impunity, I’m a Vermonter, and therefore one of the damnedest of Yankees. But there is a saying, you know, that New York is not in America. So that our group there is very cosmopolitan. And we have vast numbers of what you might call some bums, and we have a great many sophisticated but very wise people there, or we used to until A.A. tamed them down. In those days, we used to have to have a pussyfoot in New York on the subject of God, lest we scare away some of the intellectuals. So when I got to Shelby, and there was a great long invocation, and the choir girl, I believe, got up and sang a hymn. Well, it was reminiscent of my youth in Vermont, but I said to myself, well, now the New Yorkers wouldn’t call it that. Well, then they called upon me to talk, and I talked too long. By the way, shut me off any time you get tired tonight. I have that habit. And then I believe there was another long prayer, and the meeting was over. And I began to notice with some amazement that there were an awful lot of AAs there. I mean, twenty, thirty of them in this small place, and they told me there was an equal number out in the defense industry. And I was wonderfully and favorably stirred by the whole thing. But the crux of my story turned around what happened the following morning. I was to leave on an early train, and somebody called up from the lobby and said, do you mind, Bill, I’d like to drop up and tell you a few things about Dr. Tom. And a man came up and he said, I’ve got some things you should know. Speaking of myself, I once organized a string of banks in these southern states. I was on the high road to success. I was cut down by alcohol, and then I was cut down by morphine. And I have been in the asylum with Dr. Tom. And when he heard that I was leaving for one of my many trips there, he asked me to come here. And I have stayed here to work with him. And I have been all right myself now a year, and he about three. And he said, you know, I’m very gladly sweeping out the Masonic Temple just so I can have time to help my friend Dr. Tom. Now that enough of me, let me tell you about Dr. Tom. Do you realize that when that man came back here to this little town, you possibly comprehend what the stigma was upon him? The stigma of both alcohol and morphine. And he had dishonored his profession of medicine and his highly placed family and distinction. People were so afraid that they hardly spoke to him on the street. And he said, I am sorry to say that even the drunks of Shelby were snobbish, saying that they weren’t going to be sobered up by no damn drug addict. Well, little by little he started to work, and little by little he began to succeed. And the group grew. Well, said this man, you’ve been at Tom’s home, you’ve seen that happy mother of his, you’ve seen the new wife, and you’ve seen the new baby, but you still don’t know the whole story. Tom now has been made the head of our local hospital. He probably has the largest medical practice in this county today. All of this accomplished in three years from a start way behind the line. And we have a yearly custom in this town in which all of its citizens take a vote on which one of them has been the most useful individual to the community in the year past. And last spring, Dr. Tom was almost unanimously nominated as the most useful citizen of the town of Shelby. And when he had finished his recital, I sat there and I said to myself, well, you were the man, Bill Wilson, who was too important to go by Shelby. Indeed, what hath God wrought? I think among other things, this evening might be a time of reminiscence. Some will be our friends here who will want to be informed on what alcoholism is, as some of us see it. They will want to know something about our early days, perchance. They will want to know what sort of an outfit it is as an organization. They will want to know something of our principles, our philosophy of life. And I had thought perhaps the best plan of presenting that material would be to spin just a few yarns. You know, the doctors, the psychiatrists, call us alcoholics all of the old type. And by old, they refer to the mouth. And they say the thing about alcoholics is that they either want to give or take by the mouth. And most usually, if they’re giving with the mouth, they wish to talk about themselves. So with that introduction, I’ll spin a little yarn or so about myself, which will give an indication as to what a drunk is and how he got that way. It really starts a long way back. I didn’t drink anything until the First World War. But I think that the soil had become very fertile before then. I suppose a half of the members of AA, had they not been drinkers, would have passed in the community for perfectly average, normal citizens. Well, they don’t like me to use that word, average, because every drunk thinks he’s a little brighter than average. But the other half of us are very definitely on the erratic side. And I certainly am in that class. In other words, I belong to what in AA is called the screwball contingent. Some years ago, the doctors began to take a look at Alcoholics Anonymous, and they got about 30 of us together, and they said to themselves, well, now these fellows have got into AA, they won’t lie so badly, and maybe for the first time we’ll get a good look at what the interior of a drunk is like. So a number of us were examined at great length by psychiatrists and all sorts of measurements, things taken, and the object of this particular inquiry was to see whether alcoholics as a class differed from other people. And if they did, just why and how much. And a couple of us were invited to attend a conclave, and a number of learned papers were read, and finally one of these physicians, a very noted one, the meeting took place at the New York Academy of Medicine, began to sum up. And that he thought the conclusion which they had arrived at was this, that the alcoholic is emotionally on the childish side. That the alcoholic is a person who is more sensitive emotionally than the average person. And then they had another quality which they ascribed to us. They used the word grandiosity. They were grandios, meaning by that that as a type we were what you might call all or nothing people. Someone has since described it by saying, well, all alcoholics hanker for the moon, when perhaps the stars would have done just as well. And as the class were like that, said the doctor. Well, now of course some alcoholics are going to debate that, and this is no time for debate, but that description pretty well fitted me. At quite an early age, my mother and father parted company, and I remember that was a profound shock to me. Moreover, I was very gangling and awkward and overgrown as a kid. Still am, but I don’t care so much now. These things made me very, very sensitive about myself. I was extremely sensitive of the gossip of the neighbors in this small town about my mother and father. And I suppose those were some of the things that lay at the root of what was later to come to ail me. Well, I also had another trait. These things that I’m telling you, I kept very much to myself. They were locked deep down. And when I was about ten, I went to live with my grandfather, and he observed that I had developed a tremendous amount of persistence in doing whatever I set out to do. That was a very marked childhood trait. Well, of course, persistence as such is a laudable quality, and my grandfather found that that could be tremendously stimulated if he would propose to me impossible tasks. So one day he came around to me, and he said, Will, he said, I’ve been reading a book, and it’s a book about Australia. It seems the natives down there have a weapon they call a boomerang. And when they throw it, if it misses its mark, it circles and swoops and comes back to the person who cast it. But Will said he, in his most challenging manner, he also says in that book that no white man ever made and throwed a boomerang. Well, immediately my back stiffened and I began to bristle. And I probably said to Grandpappy, the childish equivalent of what the hell you say, immediately I was consumed with the idea of making and throwing a boomerang. Well now, any child of ten can be consumed by such a thing for one day or one week or two weeks. But oh no, not me. It went on for weeks. It ran into months. I got every book out of the public library on Australia. No wood box filled, no schoolwork done, boomerangs, boomerangs, boomerangs, until my grandfather got very sick of the business. In fact, he was made very ill when he found that I had cut the headboard out of my wooden bed and so ruined a nice piece to get just the right timber for the boomerang. And finally, I did make one and called Grandpappy out to witness it. And sure enough, it would actually perform and I threw it around the churchyard and it circled to almost cut poor old Granddad’s head right off. Instantly my whole interest in boomerangs collapsed. I had the slightest interest. Now what was back of all that? That was more than a childish whimsy. That was more than a legitimate perseverance. Did that not look more like a prideful obstinacy? Didn’t that look like a compensation for these inferiorities that were gnawing at me? Didn’t I want to excel to prove to myself that my fears about me were groundless? Oh, I didn’t realize at the time, but that’s what I was doing all along. I remember being sent off to boarding school. I was shy. I was awkward, but I had a tremendous ambition to be an athlete. A boy throws a ball at me on the playing field and I’m so awkward that it hits me in the temple and knocks me down. And it didn’t hurt me. And I remember lying there on the ground and looking up and seeing all those other kids break into a laugh. And a great bitterness welled up in me. And I jumped on my feet and I said, I’ll be the captain of your ball team. Well any child might have reacted like that, but I never stopped reacting. I have a crooked arm here today because of throwing rocks after dark to strengthen my arm to be pitcher of that little team. Yes, I became captain of the team. I was the same way about music. I had no more idea about music than man and the moon. I have very little more now. One day my grandfather said to me, well, your Uncle Clarence, you know, he was a really great musician. He played the harmonica and he played the fiddle and he was very accomplished. He kept egging me on until I finally went up and got Uncle Clarence’s fiddle. Well I couldn’t even begin to carry it. And I actually failed to graduate from high school because of so much practice on that confounded fiddle. I had to be the leader of the high school orchestra and I nearly was in a position of fiddling for a commencement at which I didn’t graduate. Well you see, by now though, people looked at me and said why that young fellow is going to go places. The neighbors were freely predicting it. Well he be muffed that high school thing, but look at his tremendous persistence and drive. Isn’t it wonderful? I was going places, but not where they thought. There was one more incident though that goes back to that time and then we’ll move on rapidly. Among my other inferiorities was the feeling that the girls didn’t like me too well. You see, I was awkward and I was ungainly. And in those days I could hardly say two or three words together in a conversation in a company of people. But finally I took a fancy to a girl and she to me and it was my first case. You know how these high school things are. And it was pretty extent, oh I was deliriously happy. Somebody had paid a little attention to me. And then one morning the principal got up in chapel and like a thunderclap came his announcement, dear people, I regret to tell you that Bertha Bamford died last night. A complete shock to me. I was stunned and I stayed stunned for months and months and months. At that age I should have been myself in a few months, but no, I have one of these nervous breakdowns. Now what was the point there? In the other incidents I had been succeeding, but this time I had met my master and the master was dead. There was no argument with that. I couldn’t win. So the frustration was utter and I have a nervous breakdown. Now that is not normality. You see in me the groundwork for a neurosis. All right, then I’m happily married of a sudden and the world war is broken out and I’m stationed over in a little cotton town in Bedford, Massachusetts. And the society people of the town bring us young officers of the fort down there. And again this terrible feeling of awkwardness and do you know the forts and the knives and the napkins? Oh, I was in an awful case. And then somebody handed me a Bronx cocktail and I drank it and the whole face of the universe instantly changed. Why all of those people drew closer to me and I to them. And I who had been tongue-tied could talk freely. And they listened. Ah yes, I was part of life at last. And the point I make is that that drink meant more to me than it does to an average person. Because it released me from myself, from this gnawing sense of inferiority and grocery. Ah, little did I know that right then and there I had taken a left-hand path. For there is one way of describing an alcoholic, by describing as a man who is trying to drink his religion out of a bottle to obtain a spiritual release. And the very first time I drank myself into insensibility. And then that started the usual cycle which so many of you know so well. And the World War came and went and I was returned to New York and I hadn’t completed college. and I had to go to work. Matt Lewis and I were very happy, but I found the going was hard. I wasn’t specially trained for anything. I see these vets today. They’re going through that identical process. Well, I studied law night. I had an enormous ambition to succeed because now I was surrounded by sophisticated city people, and I thought they patronized me a little and even whispered that wife Lois had picked up this fellow off a cracker barrel in front of the country store up there in East Dorsey, Vermont. And again, I fiercely said, I will show them. And in those days, those 20s, those roaring 20s, the era of wonderful nonsense, more than ever in this country of ours was money, a symbol of prestige and power. And I said to myself, money I will have. So the same thing again. We study law night, work like a Trojan, and then to shortcut the business, I get into Wall Street, which was going to be the great shortcut. And after a while, I’m investigating companies for speculative syndicates. And then on a shoestring, as so many of us did, I ran up much too much money for a kid. Meanwhile, drinking, drinking, drinking. And little by little, I commence to suspect that I’m not like other drinkers. In fact, I’m told so. You’re all right around Wall Street, but I saw that people didn’t even want to drink with me. Lois and I got worried. I used to say, well, it’ll be better next time. And so the thing crept up, gradually and gradually. And then I began to get into terrible rows with my business partner. And I finally became a lone wolf. And then in a fit of egotism, ran out on a shoestring, and came the crash, and it was all lost. And still I was so sure of myself. Ah, by this time, I was schooled in the idea of self-sufficiency. And I remember with what disgust I looked upon people who jumped out windows because they had lost their money. Yes, I could do this again. And then comes the long depression. And the drinking catches up and catches up, and I’m a hanger-on in brokerage shops. And Lois had to go to work in a department store and began supporting me, which was pretty hard on the old ego. I guess some of you fellas can testify to that. Ah, and then the thing got much worse, and very rapidly worse. And by 1932, no business associate would have anything whatever to do with it. And Lois became tremendously worried, and occasionally we’d run out of town and try to get away from it all. Then came the struggle to escape. And still I would say to myself, yes, but I can control this thing. I fancied my willpower and persistence, and I said, when this is really applied to the liquor business, it’s going to get under control. But it never was, and I couldn’t understand why. And you people who have come in to be with us this evening have often pondered, why is it that these alcoholics, otherwise seemingly intelligent, seem to be virtually insane when it comes to this matter of drink? Nothing else counts. Why will they commit this slow suicide, taking others with them? Well, finally came an incident in 1932 that made me absolutely determined to put recovery from drinking first. It just simply had to be stopped. And there is a particular providence, I think, for drunks, because an opportunity had opened up to me among strangers downtown in Wall Street, and I had been made the head of a syndicate in which I had a good interest to buy up the securities that were so cheap then. But these people had heard of me from afar, and there was a clause in my contract which said that in case I took one single drink, that my stake in the venture was at an end. Oh, I wouldn’t drink under those conditions. What visions I had of taking Lois out of that department store. What visions I had of making a comeback out of the very bottom of the Depression and the nadir of my own circumstance. Ah, it was so stimulating, it was so wonderful. Here was the chance again. Drink? Of course I wouldn’t drink. And the operation actually started, and we were in precisely at the bottom. And the goose had hung high. And I didn’t drink for a month, maybe two months. Then to show you how fatal this obsession is, let me tell you this little story. One day somebody wanted me to go over and look at a plant over in Jersey, and I went over with a company of engineers and we got there and looked the place over and came back to the little hotel that night, and some of the boys started playing cards, and finally a fella broke out a gallon of Jersey Lightning, they call it, otherwise known as Applejack, distilled cider. And the jug began to go around and the boys began to brighten up and it was passed to me, and I very easily turned to the side. I said, oh, no thanks, no thanks. Then as the evening wore on, though I was a gambler in Wall Street, I cared nothing for cards, strangely, and I began to be bored. My mind started to wander. And then, in a completely inexplicable way, this occurred. The Applejack came around again, and I looked at it and all of a sudden I had a most devastating thought. In all my drinking career, both in Europe and America, at no time had I ever had any Jersey Lightning. And here I was all dried up. Well, you know, that thought kept working on me, and somehow the vision of Lois in that department store and that syndicate just simply faded out. So I said, well, one little jolt of Jersey Lightning wouldn’t hurt anyone, that ancient rationalization of ours. Well, every alcoholic in this audience, and there are many, they know what happens. I wasn’t able to go to work next day. The engineers kept their mouths shut, but they couldn’t stay out there forever because I kept on buying Jersey Lightning, have it brought to my room, laid on the bed in a stupor. And I came to, about four days later, the telephone at my side faintly ringing, and it was word from my associates in New York that my contract was at an end. Under those conditions, drinking alcohol is not a habit, it is an obsession. And in my case, it was as deep-seated as that of a kleptomaniac’s fetus. Just as subtle and far more fatal. And then I came to with the shock that maybe I wasn’t going to control the situation. And two years more of that, and then come hospitalization, one after another. Always one more feeble attempt. Until one evening, a dozen years ago, yes, more, it’s fourteen now, I lay in a drying-out place in New York, and my wife, Lois, was downstairs talking with the doctor. And she was saying to the doctor, why can’t Bill stop? And in his gentle way, for this doctor turned out later to be a medical saint indeed, certainly one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, and one of our dearest friends, good old Dr. Silkworth was explaining to Lois how my habit of drinking, to cure my inferiority, had gradually gone over into an area that might be an obsession. And how that obsession condemned me to drink against my will, which had been a very considerable will, but powerless in the face of this obsession, this neurotic compulsion to drink in spite of any consequence. How this was an obsession that condemned me to drink, and I had already gone so far, he thought, that there would be no use, and that if I kept up at the rate I was going, I might be dead or mad within a year. And if she would keep me with her at all, she had better lock me up somewhere. As gently as he could, the old man told Lois that news. News that many a woman in this audience has heard or suspected in her heart. And I lay upstairs and knew that I was at the end of all my own resources. I had nothing more to fight with. Here I was vanquished at last by John Bartles. When I got out of there, fear kept me sober a while. But soon, again I relapsed, and the last one took place on Armistice Day on 1934. And I continued to drink for several days. I used to drink home then to keep off the streets, to keep out of the hands of the police, whilst Lois was in the department store. And the phone rang, and it was an old school friend. And he too was an alcoholic, and I had long since pronounced him hopeless. And here he was in New York, cold sober. You know, you can sense those things over the wire. Immediately I had a vision of getting dear old Ebby over to the house, and I had a lot of fists of gin. And Lois was coming home, so I was pitching in a little pineapple juice with that gin to make her think it was cocktails, that I wasn’t drinking it straight. Anyway, Ebby and I’d get together, and we’d reminisce about the good old days. I was in a little bit of a mellow mood that afternoon. And finally the door rang, and I went unsteadily out. And I’ll never forget him as he stood in that door. I think there’s something a little psychic about us alcoholics. Instantly I set eyes on him. I realized a sense in him, a quality that I had never felt before. It was indefinable. I couldn’t put my finger on it. He came in. He sat at the table. I offered him a drink. He said, no, thanks. I said, you on the water wagon? Whoa, no. He said, I’m just not drinking. Finally I said, Ebby, what’s got into you? Come on, out with it. This is unheard of. Well, he looked at me, and simply and smilingly he said, well, I’ve got religion. Well, he might as well have cracked me in the face with a wet mop. Because I thought that religion was only the counsel of the weak, I was pretty militant agnostic. Then, too, I became a little fearful that Ebby would, you know, try to save me or something. Well, Ebby was pretty astute. He described how some friends had come to him and offered him a very simple formula for getting himself straightened out. Well, I said, what is it? Show me. He said, well, they told me that very obviously I couldn’t straighten myself out. I’ve got way beyond that. And I admitted that. And they told me that I had better get thoroughly honest with myself, make a kind of a moral inventory, stocktaking, like a grocer would look over the apple barrel and throw out the rotten. And he thought that I’d better look at my twisted relationships. Who did I fear? Of whom was I jealous? Who had I hurt? And go to those people without confessing their sins and confess my own. And then he described a kind of giving that demanded no return, helping other people for the love of his God. And then in a very gingerly way he talked, he touched on the subject of God and of prayer, and I began to wince and he laid off. Well, during this talk I sensed more deeply that there was a quality in him, and finally he used the word for it. He began to talk about being released from this obsession. It wasn’t a question of being on the water wagon. Oh, no. He was released. It had been taken from him by a power greater than he. And he called that power God. And then very astutely, I think the theologian would call it Christian prudence, he withdrew and left me to think it over. Well, by this time I knew how hopeless my alcoholism was. And yet I still rebelled the idea of dependency upon some intangible God who might not even be there. Oh, if I could swallow it. Oh, how could I? And I went on drinking for a number of days. And gradually, as I got jittery enough to think about the hospital, it came to me of a sudden one day, fool, why should you question how you’re going to get well? Why should beggars be choosers? If you had a cancer and you were sure of it, and your physician said, this is so malignant that we can’t touch it with our eyes. And even if your physician came along with the improbable story that there were many who had got over cancer by standing in their heads in the public squares crying amen. And if he could really make out a case that that was so, yes, Bill Wilson, if you had a cancer, you too would be out in the public square ignominiously standing on your head and crying amen. Anything to stop the growth of those cells, and that would be first. And your pride would have to go. And then I asked myself, in what different case am I now? Have I not a allergy of the body? Have I not a cancer of the emotions? Yes, maybe I have a cancer of the soul, which has resulted in an obsession that condemns me to drink, and an increasing intolerance of liquor that condemns me to go mad as God. Yes, I’m going to try this. And then there was one little more flicker of obstinacy when I said to myself, but now I don’t want any of these evangelical experiences. I mean, it will have to be a kind of an intellectual religion that I’ll get. And so just to be sure that I don’t go into any emotional tizzy, I believe I’ll go up to good old Dr. Silkworth and have him dry me out. Well, as all you boys know, on the way to get cured you always get drunk, so I tie down a dandy. And I appeared up there at the hospital and the doc said I was waving a bottle and in one hand a piece of paper and in the other shouting that I had something. And he said, well, I guess you have. You better go up and go to bed. So I went up and went to bed, and I’d come a little early. It would take me a month to get up to D.T. Point. So inside of a couple of days I was feeling pretty good. That didn’t give me much sadder ending. One fine morning, here’s my friend in the door again, my friend Debbie. Gee, I thought to myself, that fellow really practices what he preaches, doesn’t he? And then I began to wince a little bit. Oh, I said, here is where he is going to turn on the sweetness in life. Now he is going to really put the work on me. He’s going to try this saving version. But oh, no. Debbie again was full of Christian prudence. Oh, no. He put me in the way of asking him again, just how was it, Debbie, you got this relief? Well, I just got honest with myself, and I mean honest, and I talked it out fairly with somebody else, and I went around and made restitution or promised it, and I’m trying my small way to help folks without any anger. Yes, and I pray. I’ve come to believe in God. And he gave me some small talk, gone again. Well, that was my spiritual indoctrination. And from that indoctrination, everything that I have in this world has come. Ah, there are many founders of AA. Twenty people without whom it couldn’t exist. And as it has been with you, so was it with me. A friend came and planted those seeds. So when he’d gone, I lay on the bed and I went into a terrific depression. And in the agony of it, and at the very bottom of the abyss, I think that the last vestige of my prideful obstinacy collapsed. And still I had no faith, nor a little hope. But I did say to myself, oh, now I am willing to do anything, anything, to get release from this obsession, anything. And then I said, and if there is a God, will he show himself? Well, then came one of those spiritual experiences. There are no words to describe these sudden occurrences such as have come to some of us. I can only say that suddenly I was thrown into a great ecstasy. And a great light filled the place. And I was lost in the delirium of that moment. And though it was not at all visual, it seemed to me that I stood on a mountain, and there was a great wind blowing. Not a wind of air, but a wind of spirit. And it flowed around me and finally through me, and I was free. Those were some of the impressions. Ah, yes. And gradually, as the ecstasy abated, of course I found myself on the bed. And a great peace stole over me. And a feeling that I was surrounded and permeated by a presence. And then I began to think more clearly. And I believed my first words to myself were these. Ah, this must be the God of the preachers. And I lay there reveling in that newfound relief. Well, finally I got scared. My legal and scientific mind got busy, and I said, my God, have I gone crazy? And I made haste to call the doctor who was a pretty good alienist, and I told him about this thing as well as I could. And after listening a long time, he said, no, he said, you’re not crazy. I have heard of such things, but you’re not crazy. And whatever you’ve got is a great deal better than that which had you only a few hours ago. Well, I remember lying there the rest of that day, thinking, thinking, thinking about this thing that had happened to me. It was all so simple and yet so tremendous. It was just a cry in the dark out of the depths of an abject humiliation to a God who might be there. And he came. And then I thought, why, how simple. Why haven’t alcoholics recovered by the thousands before now? There was no theology involved. I didn’t have any. No faith as a conditioned president. Why? I said, this will just be a sin. Why I should be able to bring such experiences to other people. And so then the mania for fixing drunks started at that point. About this time, somebody came in the hospital lugging a book, kind of heavy reading for me, but it had a title, and it was James On Ride is a Religious Experience. And I found eagerly through the pages, and sure enough, I found these so-called byte-light experiences like mine, but I found that there were many others, that sometimes these changes came about very gradually, that sometimes they came through regular religious channels. At other times, the agnostic looked out the window and reflected that after all, the tree could grow and make sense, but he couldn’t. And he might make an appeal to the God of nature. And this process of automatic change was setting. And then it became so clear in looking through all of this variety of cases that they had common denominators. And the great common denominator of them all was calamity. Calamity in some controlling area of life. The individual up against the wall that he could not get over, get under. Utter powerlessness, utter defeat, was the base, the springboard off which these experiences started. And I thought to myself, well, the doctors, sure they have taken us apart, they’ve given me a great deal of information about myself, but they may have tried to reconstitute me self-sufficient again. But in these experiences, these were founded on no sufficiency at all. And yet they did transform people. They changed people’s motivations. Well, with that idea, I began to feverishly work on drugs. And I must confess that that sudden experience had its disadvantages, because I had a little sense of divine appointment. I thought I was going to fix all the drunks in the world. And so I started out. You see there’s a remnant of egotism there, all right. So I started out to do just that. Probably some of the old boomerang impetus was working too. And not one damn drunk got fixed, and I worked for six months. And you know what I was doing? I was preaching to all those folks about this tremendous spiritual experience, and I was trying to give them this same flag, something which the skeptical in AA still call Bill Wilson’s hot flag. Well, nothing happened, and I finally went west on a business trip and came to the town of Akron. And it was a proxy row that I had got into by sitting alongside of some fellow in a brokered shop quite casually, and it might have made me president of a small company out there, and I thought of making this comeback. And the other fellow had more proxies, and our crowd was licked, and here I was left alone in a Mayflower Hotel in Akron, and the hotel bill was unpaid. And I had about $10 in my pocket, and Lois was still home working in the department store, and there weren’t any drunks fixed. And I began to get very jittery, and I started to walk up and down in that hotel lobby, looking in the bar room at one end, and then idly I would gaze at a church directory which stood at the other end. And suddenly I awoke to the fact that I was in danger. And what would I do? And then the thought occurred to me that I might find some alcoholic to work on. For as though there had been no success, I found that when prayer would not abolish my resentment or my uneasiness or my nervousness, that I could easily forget myself by going and working with somebody and taking an interest in their trouble. You could literally lose your life to find it in that way. I’d already discovered that. So I had to find another drunk. So I said, well, now I hear a lot of preachers. Some of these preachers should know some drunks. So I began to run my finger down the church directory, and finally came to a place where this funny name, the preacher’s name was Tunk, T-U-N-K. And I said, well, I’ll call up Tunk. Now, he’s a likely man to know a drunk. Well, he turned out to be a fashionable Episcopal preacher up there and a very nice fellow. But when I stated that I was an alcoholic from New York and that I was looking for another alcoholic to work on, he didn’t quite get that. Nevertheless, he rather bravely gave me a list of people that I might call that if they couldn’t put me in touch with drunks, at least might put me in touch with a little spiritual substance. While I was away… Weekend, and I commence calling up all these people, list of about ten, and I call them, and I call them, and I call them. Well, they see me in church on Sunday, and a drunk who was looking for another drunk to work on. Well, you could see even these good people were skeptical, too. And I went wearily down through that list, and absolutely nothing happened. I wanted to see somebody then. And finally, the last name was that of Cyberling, prominent in the tire business up there in Akron. And I said, my Lord, Mr. Cyberling doesn’t want to see a drunk come strolling in on Saturday afternoon looking for another drunk. I can’t possibly call that one. And I went down and took another look at that bar room, and I said, well, boy, you better get upstairs and call that one, too. So I called that one, and I guess it wasn’t a Mr. Cyberling I expected, for a delightful Southern voice came through the wire, and I explained a little, and she said, I think I understand. She said, I’m not an alcoholic, but I have suffered a good deal of reverse and humiliation in my time, and I think I know what spiritual release is, and you come on out here. So I went out there. And then she began to tell me of a physician in the town of Akron, a Dr. Bob, how he had tried everything, how he desperately wanted to stop and cook, how his wife was an invalid, how his practice had gone. And she thought I’d be just as felt. Well, by this time I wasn’t preaching to any alcoholic, and for the first time in my work with other alcoholics, I realized that I needed that man just as much as he could possibly need me. Well, she called up and was told by Dr. Bob’s wife that Dr. Bob had just come in, that it was Mother’s Day, that he was a big-hearted fellow, and he’d bought a wonderful potted plant, and he’d placed the plant on the table, but he’d fallen on the floor and couldn’t get up. Well, that ended Saturday, but I had hope. At least we had a prospect in sight. So the next day was Sunday, and my friend Henrietta invited me out to dinner, and sure enough overcome Dr. Bob and his wife. Well, he was a pretty jittery gent, and he could only stay about five minutes. Can you imagine why he was in a hurry? Well, for the information of our friends, he was thirsty. He had a hangover, and he wasn’t going to stay long. And we fell talking, and we talked for hours. And that, I think, marked the beginning, really, of Alcoholics to None, because nobody was talking up or down to anybody else. Two desperate, dying people were looking for a raft to float on. Well, I stayed on in Akron, fooled around with a lawsuit, and Dr. Bob and I both agreed that we had simply to work with other alcoholics and die off ourselves. So he promptly called up the city hospital down in Akron, got a hold of the head nurse, and he said, well, we’re looking for nuns to work on. Have you got any good ones? She said, yep, I got a pip. We just brought him in. He was pretty stiff when he got in here, but he managed to get off the stretcher and beat up a couple of nurses. He used to be a lawyer here in town, but everything’s gone to pot, and he doesn’t think he’d get well. He sounds good. Why don’t you come down and try him? We said, we’ll be right down. So we got down there, and we got the fellow put in a private room, and he was too bad to talk to, and Bobby, who was a doctor, got him sober. So we went down, and here lay Alcoholics Anonymous, number three to beat. We didn’t know it then. We didn’t know we could stay sober for sure. Here was the man on the bed, and he was looking at us with his glassy eye. He said, how did I get in this private room? I’m always in the ward before. Well, we said, we got a new cure for alcoholism. We used to call it a cure then. That was a misnomer. He said, there ain’t no cure for alcoholism. I tried everything. I used to be deacon in a church, and I was somebody around here. I tried everything. Don’t talk to me about cures. Well, we began talking to him and explaining to him what an alcoholic was, how he hadn’t been any Gilded Lily, and how he was responsible for it all right, but he’d now got to be an awful sick man and explain this obsession business and so on. Well, he said, that makes some sense, but I don’t know. I guess it’s not for me, fellas like you maybe, but I’m too far gone. The last time I was here, the last four times I was here, I didn’t even get home. I got drunk on the way home. I’m too awfully. Well, we came around the next morning, and we talked to him again. That afternoon his wife came, and we came in too, and she said, why, Bill, what has happened to you? And Bill said, I do feel better. Something is kind of taking a hold of me. I got hope. And Bill, after a while, got up and put on his clothes, and he went out into a political campaign. And his opponents reviled him for his alcoholism, and he lost the fight, but he stayed sober. And that was AA number three. And then he and I and Dr. Bob worked on other cases in the summer of 1935 in Akron. So when I went home in that fall, a few were left behind. And then Lois and I started taking people into our house in Clinton Street. We thought if we had them right close at hand where we could shed our sweetness and light on them, that it would be an additional advantage. Well, actually, over a period of several years, we had 20, 30 in the house, and nobody got well. But some of the people outside of the house, why, they didn’t get so much light, managed to make it. And that’s a little bit of a group started in New York. And very, very slowly and very painfully, this thing grew. And of course, in that pioneering time, to have it slip was a terrible heresy, and the whole thing would just jitter like that, and nobody would know what next. We had to run several years before we could be sure of anything. Well, we kept driving at it and driving at it and driving at it. And little by little, the thing spread over into Cleveland, Ohio, and then down to Washington, D.C. And here are a few fellows spotted here and there. And our little meeting started up. They were all in homes then. This was all done by word of mouth. There was no organization. It was all so very simple. In fact, some of us old-timers wish it now, that it were possible to go back to those days of healthy and simplicity. But little by little, it began to catch on. And in the third year, I went back to work in Wall Street, and another crash came along and I was out again. And by that time, having taken a trip to Akron, Dr. Bob and I got counting noses, we counted up 40 good recoveries. And some of them had real time behind them. And we began to joyfully realize that maybe, maybe, maybe we had something here. Well, if we had something, what were we going to do with it? How were we going to spread it? Would we trust it just to go by this slow word-of-mouth process? Well, it seemed to us that the experienced AAs of that time would have to give up whatever they were doing and somehow get drug-staked and go out to other towns. It seemed to us that we would have to finance some kind of a hospital in Akron where Dr. Bob would preside. Then we began to get very excited about these ideas. You know, our drunks are, as the doctor said, they’re not only childish and sensitive, they’re grandiose. And in no time, in our minds’ eye, we had this enormous plant and hospital in Akron and carloads of drunks streaming in from all over the country to be cured at Mecca, you know. And we got tremendously excited and we called the local Akron AAs together and a lot of those, they weren’t so excited. They said, here, you begin to get all this money business in here and all these missionaries, this thing’s going to go sour. Well, I countered and said, you see, I was a promoter, being a Wall Street guy, and I said, well, look, on the other hand, if this thing goes word-of-mouth, here are people, thousands of them, dying within a cannon shot of this place. How are they going to know what we’ve found out? How are we going to prevent what we do know getting all garbled? And before the press starts to ridicule us as a new color, as a new movement, shouldn’t we get what we do know somehow down on paper? So maybe we need some missionaries and a hospital and certainly we need some kind of a book. Well, the Akron brethren said, yes, all right, but probably we do need those things. So you build lots of money down in New York, you go down there and raise some dogs. So I came back to New York very much excited, and by this time the build-up had begun. We got to the place where we had one of the greatest religious developers, one of the greatest medical developers of all time, you see, only about 40 drunks at the time, nobody sure keeping sober, but you know how enthusiasm can run among us, we’re grandiose. So I went back to New York all full of enthusiasm, and I started canvassing people who had money, telling them about this great pending development in which they could participate. Well, you know I was a salesman, and you know I couldn’t raise one dime for drunks. Not a dime could you raise for drunks. Nobody wanted drunks, or any part of drunks. And I said, well, why don’t you give your money to the Red Cross and the TB League for drunks? I mean, that’s scraping it up, and besides, they none of them ever got well. Well, it was very discouraging, and one day I was in my brother-in-law’s office. He’s a physician, but he’s one in the family anyway, he wasn’t a drunk. And I was bemoaning our fate, and I got very depressed by this time. I have my ups and downs, as I told you, I’m in the screwball kind of way, eh? And I was very depressed and also suffering from imaginary ulcers in the stomach, and things were getting very low. And I said, well, it’s terrible the way these financiers take no interest in drunks. Well, now he said, I’ve got an idea. He said, I share my office with Shirley Wynn here. He’s the health commissioner in New York, or was. He says, let’s go in and talk to Shirley about this. So I went in and temporarily got teamed up and gave Shirley my pep talk, you know, about this marvelous oncoming development here. And, well, now that fellow listened with a very sympathetic ear, and he said, well, now, he said the Rockefeller Foundation might be just the thing for you. And, well, he said, I don’t know if the foundation would be the thing. They wouldn’t quite pigeonhole it. He said, I don’t think those fellows over there quite get the idea. He said, they feel kind of poor, you know, there’s been a depression. Well, I said, doctor, we wouldn’t need very much. No, he said, I got the best idea yet. He said, the man you want to see is Mr. John D. Rockefeller. Well, I said, doctor, how about the Prince of Wales? Then came one of those providential turning points. On what little event do our lives sometimes turn? My brother-in-law stood by and he was scratching his head and he said, you know, I used to know a girl in high school, and I think he had an uncle, and I think his name was Richardson, and I believe that somehow he was a rather close friend of Rockefeller’s and somehow tied up with their charitable enterprises, and I don’t even know if that old gentleman is alive. But he said, would you like me to call up over there, just call up the Rockefeller offices and see if they know such a man as Mr. W.C. Richardson? Well, I said, that would just be fine. It didn’t sound like a very big probability to me, everything considered, though. So he called up, and bang, on the other end of the wire came the old man’s voice. Why, Leonard, where have you been? I haven’t seen you all these years. Well, my brother-in-law is a very brusque and kind of an abrupt fellow, and he said, well, he said, I’ve got a relative here that’s been fussing around with alcoholics, and I think he’s got quite a number fixed, and we’d like to come over and talk to you about it. Gee, I was jittering. I thought he’d get him all discouraged. No, the old man took him right over. So we go up in the elevator to room 5600, which was Mr. Rockefeller’s private offices, and we walked straight in, and my brother-in-law saw a fellow in the hall, and he said, I hear you’re going to see Mr. Richardson. If you want anything of Mr. Rockefeller, that’s the fellow to see. And so we walked right straight in on a dear old family friend of Mr. John D. Rockefeller’s, just like that. Oh, I thought, now our troubles are over. My lord, we got the truck backed right up. This is just going to hit John D. on every… I mean, he’ll just love this. I mean, it’s sociology, and it’s medicine, and it’s religion, and it’s alcohol all in one package. It’ll just be a thing. Well, Mr. Richardson turned out to be a very kind, liberal, very crude old man, and I told the story, and he said, how would you like to come back and have lunch with me? Well, I’d be delighted. So I go back in a week, and I have lunch with him, and he hears about it some more, and he said, do you mind talking to some of my other friends about this? And I said, certainly not. So he said, well, I’ll get a little gathering together, and you bring in some of the local drinkers, the alcoholics, and we’ll talk things over. So on a winter’s evening in 1937, up in Mr. Rockefeller’s boardroom, we had this meeting, which consisted of three or four of the local New York drunks and a few acronytes, and these friends and Mr. Rockefeller. Well, we each told our story of recovery and regeneration, and at the head of the table, as chairman of the meeting, there was Mr. Albert Scott, then chairman of the Riverside Church in New York. And after we told the stories, I very gingerly led around to the subject of money, and we allowed that we had to have a book, and we probably had to have some people subsidized. But Mr. Scott said, I can appreciate your needs, but are you terribly sure about that? Are you terribly sure you need all this money and you need paid workers? He said, isn’t this a work of goodwill which is gone just from one person to another, not a cent of money involved? Your very power lies in that fact, perhaps. Shouldn’t you be terribly careful this thing is never professionalized? Well, we admitted that we’d had such thoughts, yes. We were fearful, but on the other hand, we were fearful of not doing enough, too. Surely we needed a book, and surely one or two of us, of which I hope one would be me, although I didn’t say that, really had to, you know, get fixed up to worry this thing along. Well, the other people there were very deeply impressed, and one of them volunteered to go out to Akron. And Dr. Bob was the hardest up then. He was just about to lose the house, and being a surgeon, even though he had got sober, no patients were interested to be cut up by him yet. And he was really having a bad time. So the Akron was the typical community, and he’d done rather better. The first group was actually started there. So this friend of the Rockefellers goes out and he comes back and he makes a report, and its contents recommended $50,000 and a rest center in Akron. And we were overjoyed. We heard about the contents of the report. And the report synopsis was made, and Mr. Richardson handed it to Mr. Rockefeller. Well, I’d never heard precisely what transpired, but this was the gist of it. Another very providential thing for alcoholics to know. Oh, how many times, how very many times, have circumstances and people mysteriously molded the course of this thing. People would call me the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous or Smith or any one of the twenty others. No. Here were my desires. I was hungry. I wanted to eat. Here were friends of Mr. Rockefeller who agreed that we should have plant and property and professional people, at least in moderation. And yet, here was Mr. Rockefeller whose every interest was touched by this thing. And when that thing was put on his desk, he looked at it, and I understand that his first words were, like Mr. Scott, aren’t you afraid of professionalizing this thing? Shouldn’t we go very, very slow? That was a great day for Alcoholics Anonymous. If Mr. Rockefeller had done for us as he has done for hundreds of other things, we would have gone professional right then and there. We would have been talking about serapists, plants and property. But somehow that man had the divine wisdom, in our case, not to do it. And a little bit of a fund was set up, out of which Smithy and I drew about $30 a week, and that was all. Now, then, Mr. Rockefeller, as you know, has the habit of saying to his friends that if they think the thing is good, let them go ahead and raise some money. Well, we salesmen still had some of his friends told that we really did need these things. set up a kind of a foundation instead of this informal committee of you gentlemen and ourselves and we incorporate this as a foundation then great big givers can put their money in here and it’ll be all tax-free and that’ll get at least enough money in so that we can do this book Alcoholics Anonymous and a few of these other things. Our idea has begun to contract quite a little by then so we went to work at it and we organized the foundation and a prominent lawyer gave us services free and he said he never saw anything like it had two classes of trustees non-alcoholic trustees and alcoholic trustees and he said as a lawyer how would you know which is which? I mean what legally is an alcoholic and what legally is a non-alcoholic? Well it was finally we got the foundation and the great day had come and we’re all ready to pour in the money and we even got a list of names from these people and again we started calling on prominent people to contribute to this thing and this time we had a real front for it and still not a dime came into the Alcoholics Foundation and that’s always splendid another providence. So then we fellows in New York had to raise among ourselves the money to do the book that is to feed me and hire a girl and we were going by this time to print the book ourselves which was another piece of foolishness people thought. Authors didn’t. So actually I went out to the New York crowd and another fellow and I and we said well now here we just got to keep control of this book and so let’s organize a little company. See I was still in this promoting mode and we’ll organize a little company and we’ll call it the worst publishing company and you put your money in and out of the very first income we’ll pay all you fellows right off quick. Meanwhile two of what are now the first chapters of the book had been roughed out and they had been shown down at Harper’s and Harper’s had indicated that they might pay something like fifteen hundred dollars advance royalty. Well that kind of gave us a clue that they thought that the book might be good although only two chapters were done. Well we realized that if I ate up all the royalties there wouldn’t be any more to answer the inquiries from all the drunk. So that was out and that laid the ground for our publishing book ourselves. So then we went up to a very large national magazine and they said that when the book was done they’d publish a piece about it. So on the strength of this tremendous ad the national magazine was going to run and on the idea that Harper said it was a good book and these drunks were going to get their money back pronto right out of the first earnings. The worst publishing company was launched and we started writing this book. Well some people say I’m the author of the book but I denied I was just the umpire of the differences of opinion out of which it was a role. You know I’d write a chapter and we’d bring it over to meetings and boy they’d pull it all apart so that the book really represented our group experience and little by little and laboriously it was put together and we even made a pre-publication copy to it and we took it to religious bodies the catholic committee on publications and we took it to psychiatrists and doctors and judges and housewives just to be sure that we didn’t have anything that would gripe anyone in there. And finally the great day was come and we had a little money left and we went over to the printer and we said well we’re going to want a lot of these books you’ve got to print up five thousand of them. And the printer looked askance we didn’t have very much money but of course we animated we had this close connection this rock fella so he printed them. And then we went up to the national magazine and we said well folks we’re all ready to shoot now and the editor I talked with they looked at me a little blankly oh yes he said Mr. Wilson Mr. yes yes Mr. Wilson about this uh about that alcoholic work why he said you know I’m so dreadfully sorry he said you were up here I realized eight nine months ago and I said we’d print that piece but he said you know I took that up in a staff meeting and they thought it was all together too controversial and they decided to do nothing about it. Well here we were stuck with five thousand books which weren’t paid for. That year the Wilsons got moved out of their house in Clinton Street because they couldn’t pay the rent and we were in an awful jam and all those drunks that were contributed or wanted or wanted to get the money back. And so really something had to be done. So we knew we thought we’d advertise just a little. So we got a paid ad in magazine in New York Times Book Review and our final money we spent it in this way about five hundred dollars and there’s one fellow who was more promotional mind than I and he he said now the thing to do is to print up a lot of postal cards and and it says I got a fella he’s just come out of one of the asylums here a young Irishman but he knows Gabriel Heater and we’ll get him glory to Gabriel Heater and Gabriel Heater will put on a talk about Alcoholics Anonymous over the radio and we’ll send this shower of postal cards to doctors all over the country for him to listen and also tell them about the book and that’ll move enough books so that we can get some money back and we get this thing straightened out. By this time you know in the back of the book is this post office box which used to be down Beezy Street in New York and we sure enough we were this fellow Morgan Ryan we were very skeptical about him he did get the date with Heater he was going to talk about Alcoholics Anonymous but we were so scared that Ryan would get drunk that we put him in a club at the in a room at the New York Athletic Club under an AA guard so that he wouldn’t escape before the broadcast and the great day came and Gabriel Heater told the world about Alcoholics Anonymous in three minutes and the shower of postal cards went out and then we waited for the great watch day and I can remember little Ruthie Hawk who became our first national secretary some of you will remember receiving letters from her and we go over there after waiting for two or three days and we look in the post office box we see just a few cards there and well we said after all there must be a tremendous sack of mail out back there and we inquired and there was nothing there were a dozen postal cards and about nine of them were from doctors canning us some of them obviously crossed themselves and two book orders so we were absolutely flat broke and thus was Alcoholics Anonymous and the book Alcoholics Anonymous born and little by little we pulled out the liberty article came along and enough books were sold so that we could pay the salary of one girl in an office to answer the inquiry in fact you heard today about one fellow who got the in on that liberty article and then in the spring of 1940 meanwhile we hadn’t heard from Mr. Rockefeller at all and he decided all of a sudden he’d give a dinner to Alcoholics Anonymous tell his friends what it was all about well we were overjoyed we figured well probably our troubles were all over so he gave he gave the dinner and a lot of very wealthy people were invited and Dr. Fajik spoke about Alcoholics Anonymous from the preacher’s viewpoint and Dr. Fajik Kennedy a noted neurologist spoke about it from the from the medical viewpoint and I talked about life among the Anonymous and landshake then we thought there’d be some talk about money and to our consternation Nelson Rockefeller got up his father not being there and said well my father is more deeply impressed with this than almost anything that had cost his life and he wanted his friends to learn about it but fortunately Alcoholics Anonymous is a thing that does not need money and about one billion dollars got up and walked right out the door and we didn’t have a dime well those are some of the yarns of the early days and as everybody here knows little by little this thing spread from one place to another finally Jack Alexander wrote a piece in the Saturday Post and that produced an avalanche of inquiries five six thousand of them and many of them came from these southern towns down here and they began to write the office and we began to ship literature and alcoholics from the Cleveland and Akron and New York groups began to float down through this country and out west it actually traveled over to the west coast in the mail and that was the genesis of Alcoholics Anonymous and that is the process that is kept on so that it can produce the kind of thing we see here tonight indeed what has God wrought well out of this experience of living and working together we have begun to evolve some of the principles of relationship the problem of recovery for any alcoholic who is capable of trying is fairly well settled as this meeting testifies now the thing that concerns us most in Alcoholics Anonymous is what of our future what about our permanent unity for unless we have unity Permanently, there will be little recovery. Now, as you have gathered, you friends of ours, alcoholics are really very explosive material, and they still are, even sober. We are not saints in Alcoholics Anonymous today. We have our group troubled. We have the panhandlers. We have dictators. We have people who want to try to run things. We have all sorts of difficulties. Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf, and then we have the Pharisees who throw stones at them. We’re just human beings trying to get along. So the problem of the future for us is this. Will the mighty forces that now contain us always be able to do so? Or shall we go the way of many another society? Shall we generate somehow within our midst forces strong enough to tear us apart? Now when an alcoholic recovers, it means the forces that hold him together have been greater than those resentments, those fears, those inferiorities, that false pride, that self-pity that’s been tearing them apart. Now will the disruptive influences among us finally disintegrate? I don’t think so. I am supremely confident they won’t. Not because we are a better people, but because we are a weaker people. I believe that as an organization, as well as individuals, we will develop enough humility to receive the grace of God which will prevent that happening. And out of that group conscience, stirred by the guidance of God, I believe will evolve the traditional principles which finally each A.A. will come to know as well as he knows his points of recovery. And a couple of years ago, friends came to me and they said, here, we have had a vast experience of living and working together. Has the time now come, as it once did on recovery, when you put the A.A. book together, has the time now come for us to state traditional principles covering our relationship one with the other, one group with the other, are alcoholics anonymous with the world outside, and our relation to such things as property, money, authority, personal prestige, and other enterprises? In other words, haven’t we evolved principles that will cover some of these situations which will become a part of our prediction? For you friends of ours who are estranged to alcoholics anonymous must know that in alcoholics anonymous there are no officials. There are no fees or dues. There are no much. Our program is a suggestive program. Every leadership is by example and largely by rotation. Now how is it that that is possible, that very loose yet potent form of organization containing none of the handicaps of organization? It is because though we are recovered, each alcoholic has at his elbow the specker of John Barleycorn. I am granted too much desire for personal prestige, granted too gossiping a tongue, granted a fresh crop of resentment, granted the presence of too much money, well, we can get drunk again. So actually alcoholics anonymous is on the one hand a species of anarchy in which the rights of the individual are respected to the nth degree. In another respect it’s a beautiful democracy because as Jack Alexander said in his post-article, we’re all blood brothers under the skin. So from professor to paper hanger and from the stumble-bum to the countess, there is a beautiful democracy here. So I don’t think we’re going to fall apart. Nevertheless, some friends of mine asked if I wouldn’t try to state in a tentative way what principles have evolved from this process of living and working together in groups for the last few years. And a year ago I tried to do that and it was published in our magazine, The Grapevine, which then didn’t have a very wide circulation. So here in this gathering I would like to offer for your consideration these tentative principles, which by the way in another meeting tomorrow we can discuss. But I think even our friends are not going to be bored by seeing the unique kind of a structure that our society has begun to have. These principles are no dicta of mine. I have been merely the mirror which has tried to reflect what seemed to me the group opinion about these matters. And here they are. Twelve points to assure our future. A new crop of twelve, by the way. Twelve points to assure our future. An Alcoholics Anonymous tradition of relations. Our AA experience has taught us that each member of Alcoholics Anonymous is but a small part of a great whole. AA must continue to live, or most of us will surely die. Hence our common welfare must come first, but individual welfare follows closely afterward. That, you can see, is almost a self-evident proposition. For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority, a loving God, as he may express himself in our group conscience. And some may ask, is this group conscience a reliable thing? Yes, in the long run I think it is far more reliable than the inspired guidance of the few. And little by little we of AA are finding out that that is a possibility. That we do not need any government here of people. We need a government of principles, which principles are of God. Our membership ought to include all who suffer alcoholism. Hence we may refuse none who wish to recover. Nor ought AA membership ever depend upon money or conformity. Any two or three alcoholics gathered together for sobriety may call themselves an AA group, provided that as a group they have no other affiliation. That is a very large order, and there we differ from most organizations. While membership rules among groups differ, most of the groups are today abandoning them entirely, saying to all who suffer, come on in and try, if that is what you wish to do. You’re a member if you say you’re a member. And any two or three of you who get together and wish to call yourselves members of Alcoholics Anonymous may also call yourselves an AA group, regardless of how much you happen to agree at the moment with our program. Provided, of course, you have no other affiliation. We wouldn’t want the Republican AAs and the Democratic AAs and the Catholic AAs and the Protestant AAs, no. We feel that the name Alcoholics Anonymous should pertain strictly to AA activity. With respect to its own affairs, each AA group should be responsible to no other authority than its own conscience. But when its plans concern the welfare of neighboring groups also, those groups ought to be consulted. And no group, regional committee, or individual should ever take any action that might greatly affect the AAs as a whole without conferring with the trustees of the Alcoholic Foundation. Well, that simply means that as the group is greater than the individual, so are all the groups put together greater than the single group. And in affairs which concern everyone, no one ought to feel privileged to take the bit in his mouth and run with it. Each Alcoholics Anonymous group ought to be a spiritual entity. Having but one primary purpose, that of carrying his message to the alcoholic who still suffers. Well, that is a simple tale. It’s the question of shoemakers stick to your lab. There was a time when I felt that we groups might go into education to research into this and that. But I think most of us are becoming satisfied that as groups, we should stick to our one primary purpose. That while many individual members will surely and should be called to these other enterprises, we had best confine ourselves to the one thing that we seem to do well. Problems of money, property, and authority may easily divert us from our primary spiritual aim. We think, therefore, that any considerable property of genuine use to AA should be separately incorporated and managed, thus dividing the material from the spiritual. An AA group as such should never go into business. Secondary aids to AA, such as clubs or hospitals which require much property or administration, ought to be incorporated and so set apart that, if necessary, they may be freely discarded by the group. Hence, such facilities ought not use the AA name. Their management should be the sole responsibility of those people who financially support them. For clubs, AA managers are usually preferred, but hospitals, as well as other places of recuperation, ought to be well outside AA and medically supervised. While an AA group may cooperate with anyone, such cooperation ought never go so far as affiliation or endorsement, actual or implied. An AA group can bind itself to no one. Seventh, the AA groups themselves ought to be fully supported by the voluntary contributions of their own members. We think that each group should soon achieve this ideal, that any public solicitation of funds using the name Alcoholics Anonymous is highly dangerous, whether by groups, clubs, hospitals, or other outside agencies, that acceptance of large gifts from any sort or contributions carrying any obligation whatever is unwise. Then, too, we view with much concern those AA treasuries which continue beyond prudent reserves to accumulate funds for no stated AA purpose. Experience has so often taught us that nothing can so surely destroy our spiritual heritage as futile disputes over property, money, and authority. Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever nonprofessional. We define professionalism as the occupation of counseling alcoholics for fees or hires. Yet we may employ alcoholics where they are going to perform those services for which we might otherwise have to engage non-alcoholics. Such special services may be well recompensed, but our usual AA twelve-step work is never to be paid for. Nine, each AA group needs the least possible organization. Rotating leadership is best. The small group may elect its secretary, the large group its rotating committee, and the groups of a large metropolitan area their central or intergroup committee, which often employs a full-time secretary. The trustees of the Alcoholic Foundation, who by the way since have become the general service committee for Alcoholics Anonymous, the trustees of the foundation are in effect our service committee. They are the custodians of our AA tradition and the receivers of voluntary contributions by which we maintain our general service office at New York. They are authorized by the groups to handle our overall public relations, and they guarantee the integrity of our principal newspaper, the AA grapevine. All such representatives are to be guided in the spirit of service, for true leaders of AA are but the trusted and experienced servants of the whole. They derive no authority from their titles. They do not govern. Universal respect is the key to their usefulness. No AA group or member should ever, in such a way as to implicate AA, express an opinion on outside controversial issues, such as those of politics, alcohol reform, or sectarian religion. The Alcoholics Anonymous groups oppose no one. Concerning such matters, they can express no views whatever. Our relations with the general public should be characterized by personal anonymity. We think AA ought to avoid sensational advertising. Our names and pictures as AA members ought not be broadcast, filmed, or publicly printed. Our public relations should be guided by the principle of attraction rather than promotion. There is never a need to praise ourselves. We feel it better to let our friends recommend it. And finally, we of Alcoholics Anonymous believe that the principle of anonymity has an immense spiritual significance. It reminds us that we are to place principles before personality, that we are to actually practice a genuine humility. It is to the end that our great blessings may never spoil us, that we shall forever live in thankful contemplation of him who presides over all. You know, in moments of imaginative reflection, Alcoholics Anonymous sometimes seems to me like a great cathedral of infinite dimensions in the building. Instead of those cathedrals of graceful line and stone, our cathedral is built of truthful principles. And now 50,000 of us stand in peace and security on its great floor, whereon are inscribed the 12 steps of our recovery. And its side walls, we hope, will now be buttressed by the 12 points of our AA tradition. And if our conscience be true, and we have so apprehended the will of God correctly, the side walls will be upright, and so will the spot, and may its symbolic finger forever point straight upward toward God.