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Source: 1955 St. Louis International Convention – BILL WILSON – HOW WE LEARNED TO STAY TOGETHER – RS 05769.mp3 File: 1955-st-louis-international-convention-bill-wilson-how-we-learned-to-stay-together-rs-05769.mp3 Duration: 01:19:24
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And it is with great pleasure that I present your chairman for the evening, Itty Sheridan of Dallas, Texas. Applause And she said, pinch hit, she says, I hope he don't strike out. She didn't tell you, though, that my name is Icky and I'm a drunkard. And through trying to follow the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and with the help of God and the help of everyone of you here today, I am at a drink of any kind of alcoholic beverage of any kind or any narcotics.
In three days and six months and nine years, thank God. Applause I would like to welcome each and every one of you wonderful people to your 20th anniversary. To me, it is an oddity of one drunk welcoming another drunk to his own anniversary. But that's what they asked me to do. Because it is this wonderful meeting here tonight that we are going to hear and learn how we in AA have learned to stay together.
And at this time, I would like each one of you here to do something for me. I'm afraid maybe that some drunk here or friend might not know his neighbor. Will you turn to your neighbor and shake hands and introduce yourself? I'm just afraid maybe some old lonesome drunk from South Texas up here don't know how to talk to these Easterners and I want to be too. Applause Thank you every so much. Bill just told me something that I didn't know was happening.
He said that there was a complaint from the audition department of this loudspeaker that there was a great similarity here in this auditorium of some skeletons shooting dice on a tin roof. And I would like to correct that. That is my knees. One knee is saying to the other, let me go by and I'm a little knock-kneed anyway. And they're having quite a time back of this thing. At this time, I'm sure that I'm reminded of the story that is quite prevalent in our section of the country.
It could apply to any of us. In a small town of Maheo, they were rebuilding the courthouse where the local Bastille was and they didn't have the place to put the town drunk. So they made arrangement with the ice house there in case somebody got slightly tight, they'd have a place to restore him to his sanity. And as usual, the town drunk showed up Saturday afternoon and they literally threw him in the cooler.
And that night, the sheriff was sitting at home looking at the radio and television. He snapped his fingers and turned to his dear wife and says, you know, says old Joe's down there in that ice house. And he jumped in and ripped down his car and opened up the ice house door and cuddled over way in the back corner was a future member of Alcoholics Anonymous. And as he opened the door and the light came in, the drunk said, good night.
And as I closed that door, I am freezing to death.
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And I know I feel exactly the same way. I'll sell my ice water concession and you know where to get out there with you folks. But in all seriousness, this is a momentous occasion. But somewhere in the new book as well in the old, it is known all over our fair country of the levity as well as the seriousness of the members of Alcoholics Anonymous. And while we were there at the side, while we heard a new story that I know that the groups will want to take back.
Because I think the grapevine of stories in AA can travel faster than any known media, including radar. This family down in East Texas practically is the same as in before the Civil War. One of the colored members of the plantation there came to this man and asked him about how to hold communion services. And I thought this was so appropriate for we drunks at this time. So he explained to him exactly how to hold this wonderful service.
And it came to the part of whether they would use wine or just grape juice. And his friend told him, he says, well, in our services, if we have wine, we use it. If we don't, we use grape juice. He says it's just a symbol. He didn't see his friend for several days and I passed him on the street one day. He said, Sam, what did you all do in your new services? Did you use wine or grape juice? He said, no, sir.
He said, you know, we voted and said we voted to use gin. I think that's the church that I was looking for for a great number of years. But thanks to the man that's here and you and all the wonderful people in AA all over this world, you have given to we drunks something that I would like to pass on to you. Where it came from, I do not know, but it has a great to do with the way we stay together. And prior to reading our wonderful twelve traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous, I would like to say these few wonderful words which symbolize to me our wonderful kinship.
And this little simple meditation is as follows. We thank you now, dear Lord, for home and friends and food, and may we live this day to show our gratitude. To me that is symbolic of the twelve traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous, who the author of same will discuss with you. And they are as follows. Quote, one, our common welfare should come first. Personal recovery depends upon AA unity. Two, for our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority, a loving God as he may express himself in our group conscience.
Our leaders are but trusted servants. They do not serve. The only requirement for AA membership is a desire to stop drinking. Four, each group should be autonomous, except in matters affecting other groups or AA as a whole. Five, each group has but one primary purpose, to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers. Six, an AA group ought never endorse, finance, or lend the AA name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property, and prestige
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divert us from our primary spiritual aim. Seven, every AA group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions. Eight, Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever non-professional, but our service centers may employ special workers. Nine, AA as such ought never to be organized, but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve. Ten, Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues.
Hence, the AA name ought never to be drawn into public controversy. Eleven, our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion. We need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of the press, radio, and film. Twelve, anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles above personality. I promised my wife I wasn't going to get up here and say without any further ado.
That one is sure worn out. Now how can I introduce Bill to the drums? I can only tell you what AA means to me, very briefly. And who said it, I wish that he were here. But he said, I tried to find where my soul might be. I looked to God and he alluded me. I searched my fellow drunkard out and found all three. The man that gave AA to you and me, Bill W. Well folks, hi. We're in a gay mood tonight. And we certainly have got a right to be.
We are together. We know we're going to stay together. We are at peace with each other. And we are at peace with all those in the world around us. Why shouldn't we be gay? So many troubles are behind us. Our destiny, praise God, seems secure. It was not always this way. It was one thing for a few alcoholics to get well. But this problem of living and working together, that was quite something else.
It was a very uncertain time that we were looking upon from the windows of Dr. Bob's living room when we first realized that alcoholics could get well. But could we hang together when the world around us full of more normal people was being torn apart? Could we carry this message? Could we function? No man knew. Our friends the psychiatrists had said with some cause why the explosive neurotic content of this society is just a mess.
We will be blown to smithereens. Well, when drunk, we knew we could be blown to smithereens. But now that we were sober, yet subject to dry benders, emotional jags, would that rip us apart? Say, speaking of this explosiveness when drunk, I'll have you know… When drunk I'll have you know that our chairman over here is called Icky the
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Dynamite Man. You see, Icky is an expert on explosives, on demolition. I think he was in the rear of the Russian retreat blowing up bridges during the World War and he says that everybody but him come home in a basket. Well, when he got home he started to ply his trade again and I guess he fell under that same error that a poor fellow in London did here the other day. He appeared before the magistrate.
He'd been picked up stiff drunk. The bottle he had was empty. The magistrate said, did you drink it all? Oh yes. Well, why did you drink it all? Well, he says, because I lost the court. Well, it must have been one of those days that Icky lost the court. He was commissioned to blow up a certain pier in Houston Harbor and Icky blew up the wrong pier. So the great question in the early days was this. Would we blow up or would we stay together? Would the grace of God that we already enjoy be sufficient to hold in check the kind of things that were driving wedges all throughout the modern world? That was a terrific question. Well, this meeting here is a testament that we have held together.
However, pioneering in AA hasn't stopped. I hope it never will. And while we feel very secure here today, there are places out on the AA's front, in distant lands, on faraway beachheads, where they are going through all the pangs and worries of our pioneering times. For example, the office in New York got a letter the other day and it was written by a Jesuit priest who was out in an isolated outpost somewhere in India. And he told a remarkable story. It seems that in that place there was a certain Hindu. The Hindu was a schoolteacher. The Hindu owned a cow. The Hindu had a plot of ground. He had a wife who was stone-deaf and he had a sister who, like himself, also drank like a fish. His salary as a teacher was about 50 cents a day. That's why he had to have the cow. The Jesuit had translated our 12 steps and lo and behold, the Hindu, in spite of his poverty, in spite of the deaf wife, in spite of the domineering and drunken sister, was staying sober. But I'll bet that lone Hindu out there is feeling the same worries as Dr. Bob and I felt in our living room. He is probably asking himself, can I hang together myself? Can I carry this message? Will we be able to form a group? Yes, he is asking himself those questions and he'll soon be in communication with our office and we'll try to send him assurance to that distant outpost where pioneering is still going on. I'm kind of old-fashioned and I still call Thailand Siam. I guess the Siamese twins made a great impression on me when I was a kid. Anyhow, another letter came in almost the same day from a Presbyterian minister out there on another pioneering front. And he said,
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you know, for a long time I've been trying to get an age group started among the Thais out here. And we've had a wonderful break. A highly educated one, speaking fluent English, has come along. He's been a really desperate case and desperately wants to get well. He's very fluent in English. I'd like more of the A literature. He's devoured it. He's been sober a good spell. And he wants to translate our entire literature into Siamese. And we are already at work starting groups. Can you give us a hand?
Well, of course we're going to give him a hand, those pioneers out there. And then he went on to add one thing more. A very thrilling thing, it really is. He said, you know, we took the Twelve Steps over to the largest Buddhist monastery in this province. And we got hold of the Padre at the head of it. And he looked over the Twelve Steps and he said, why, these are fine. These are fine. It so happens that our particular branch of Buddhism doesn't understand God just as you do. It might be a little more acceptable if you inserted the word good in the steps instead of God. But nevertheless, you define in those steps that it's God as you understand it. Yes, these steps will be accepted by Buddhists around here. Well, what does this all mean? It means that almost surely there are going to be many A groups in India and in Siam and in every place where alcoholics dwell in their case. Maybe they aren't sure out there, but we're sure here, aren't we? Why, things that would have scared us to death years ago can give us a laugh. We can be gay now about our fears and our troubles of the old days. Speaking about these fears, a cute story turned up down in the office. It seems that AA got a real start in Tokyo.
Naturally, it started among the American drunks there and it spread out to the Japanese, and they got to be quite a Japanese contingent on Tokyo. And we heard very good reports of them. When all of a sudden a Japanese appeared in the office, and he turned out to be the butler of a poor little rich boy down on Long Island. And both he and the poor little rich boy were terrific drunks, and they'd both been in AA together, you know, a couple of years. And the Jap had heard that his fellows in Japan had groups and he'd begun to write them to get the inside track, and he came in in great alarm. And he said, you know, terrible things are going on over there in Japan. Why, he said, do you know that they have two kinds of AA there? He said, of course, they've got the 12 steps, just as we have them here. But he said there is another AA leader there who now has 18 steps, and for those 18 steps he's charging 100 yen. Now that sort of heresy years ago would have scared us to death. Today it's only a laugh. We know they'll soon be infiltrated. We know that the fellow who means well and does badly will mend his ways. For this is a quest for survival, where sometimes the good is the enemy of the best, and nothing but the best can do the trick.
Well, I might go on with a fantasy lasting for hours about AA out on its distant reaches, its pioneering front. Do you know that there is a communication nightly that passes over here
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from tankers in the Atlantic to the Pacific by radio, AA members on each? Do you know of good old Captain S on the standard oil tanker, flying all through the world ports, leaving AA literature, going ashore, looking up bartenders, asking for prospects? A group is just now starting in Florence, Italy, because an AA sailor comes ashore and gets a prospect off a bartender. All the starts of these AA groups are very improbable, seemingly. But it has become literally true that where two or three of us are gathered together in his name, there will a group be. In fact, there doesn't have to be three. There's a wonderful story about that AA group way up toward Point Barrow in Alaska.
Maybe it's part fantasy. I don't know. I think there's some substance to it. But the story runs this way. A couple of prospectors go out, get themselves in a cabin. They got a case of scotch. The weather turns bitter, 50 below. They got so drunk they let the fire out, a most perilous thing. Finally, one of them came to just in time, rekindled the fire, and while prowling around outside, he saw an empty oil drum with some water in it, frozen. Brought the drum in, and when she thawed out, there in the bottom was an AA boat. One of the drunks sobered up, and the legend has it that he was the founder of one of our furthest north groups, probably the one in which we now have so many Eskimos. And I'm told that in Alaska, those furthest north groups are in communication by radio every day with an AA group that's on the north end of the Greenland ice cap among the fellows up there on that air base. And so it goes, fantastically, miraculously, over the world.
Over the world. Dropping back now to some of the foreign groups that are in their adolescence, having severe growing pains which they know they'll overcome, a lot of these come to mind. I think that the mining engineer who some years ago went to London, and he met up with a greens grocer. Today, London is sprawling with groups, and they met such resistance in Britain that at one time, only the Financial Chronicle would publish an advertisement about AA for fear this was a fraud.
I think of the tavern owner from Philadelphia who, with his wife, decided to go on a vacation to Ireland. When they got to Dublin, they said, the Dickens were on a vacation. Let's start an AA group. So they go to the local asylum, one endowed by the author Swift, and they find there their first man, and then a few more. And everybody knows Sackville, who has written hundreds of it in all parts of the world.
He's called the Honorable Secretary. Abroad, they're called Honorable Secretaries, not here. Well, so it goes. In Australia, years ago, the office began to get letters from a psychiatrist in a mental institution and a priest, and they got hold of some AA literature, and pretty much entirely by mail, that whole development started. And Australia today is literally crawling with AA, with the warmest public blessing.
That's a long way from where Dr. Bob and I sat in the living room, our eyes turned toward the future. you The Future. At that moment, in the fall of 1937, there were no Twelve Steps, but we had
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the essence of them in that word-of-mouth program, that little formula that Hebby dished out to me. There wasn't any AA book. We had grown very, very slowly and painfully, and the next terrific development, following the publication of the AA book, was the immense commotion of Cleveland, Ohio. A few Clevelanders had been coming to the Akron meetings, and suddenly the Cleveland plane dealer, bless him, decided to run a series of pieces about alcoholics and onlookers. And I guess the fellow who wrote them must have been a kindred spirit. And they ran ten of those in a row, right in the box, alongside the, in the middle of the editorial page. Ten smashing pieces about this society, and every other day an editorial would appear. Never before or since had there been such a terrific commotion.
Hundreds and hundreds of telephone calls were received. The hospitals overflowed, and a group that had been only twenty mushroomed into several hundred within a matter of months. People were tossed into hospitals. Somebody visited them. They were handed the book. They went to one meeting, and then that newcomer, he was an expert. Up to this moment we had supposed that none but the very spiritual and experienced elders could administer this dose. But they found in Cleveland that the almost new man could make the essential identification and get his brother on his way. So we knew in the fall of 1939 that we could resign. Then came Mr. Rockefeller's dinner in 1940, another avalanche of imports. And the great payoff was in 1941 when Jack Alexander's piece in the Post appeared, and we were deluged with people by the South.
Then we entered a period of tremendous uncertainty. With only casual contact, travelers going from one place to another, a few letters from the office, one pamphlet and one book, could we from that form ourselves into groups that would hang together in unity and function? Well, at times we didn't know. We thought that perhaps we were presenting America with squads, platoons, even regiments of drunks who didn't want to stop drinking. They were tough separately, but if you organized them in a regiment and liquored them up, what would you have then? It really began to look that way. I remember how one of our folks went out from New York, another one of these absurd and improbable beginnings, a fellow by the name of Ray who went to San Francisco to take a sales course. He took the book and some literature with him. He'd been sober maybe a couple of years. And landed out there, we had a list of inquiries in the office which we'd given him. He called these folks up, got a few down to the hotel and said, now boys, this is great stuff, but I don't believe in this God. Read this book, but just don't pay any attention to that. And he went away and left me. And all they had was that book and a few letters from the office. Well, at the end of the year, a little gal appears at the old Vesey Street address, came in, and she was a little tight, and she was crying. She exaggerated a bit because a few of the early people there did stay sober from the time of Ray's visit. But she said, Bill, we've been going a whole year here in San Francisco.
And you know, at Christmastime, we were all drunk.
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Well, I happened to be in the San Francisco Opera House in 1951 three times, a couple of them, AA meetings. And the place was packed, the drunks were practically hanging from the rafters, and that was the start of it. Dropped down the coast to L.A. Just before our book came out, we'd made a pre-publication copy of it so that we could check up on errors. Making a visit to Cleveland, I handed it to a friend who was an attorney, and he said he was a guardian of a wealthy kid on the coast, carrying on awful shape.
And he sent that pre-publication copy to this fellow, who gobbled it up. While he was on the verge of divorce, a divorce which did go through, nevertheless, his wife came back with him to Cleveland. They were taken into Wally's home in Akron, where they had some success in sobering up drunks in those days. The man straightened out. The woman came to New York. She became wildly enthusiastic about AA for her. She had the family group spirit of the day.
And soon she was sailing around to L.A. through the canal. Full of enthusiasm, she goes ashore. She goes to the first newspaper office there and says, well, I've been to both AA's measures, Akron and New York City, and we've got to have an AA group in this town because I won't have women suffer like I've been suffering from these drunks. Won't you put a piece in the paper? And they did. Simultaneously, the office had a fellow sobered up in the name of Mark out in Denver through the book.
And Mark was about to get married, but he got drunk the day before. His bride-to-be departed in the gentle direction of L.A. He followed. Another book hit a fellow on a dune ranch down in Arizona, I guess it was. Soon he was on the way back to L.A., and that was the beginning of L.A. And when I came there in 1943, they had been writing to the office in New York saying, well, we got a lot of people sober here, but are there any people sober east of the Rockies?
We ain't seen one that's sober yet. They're all drunk. They hadn't seen an experienced AA, and yet I'll never forget that night in the Legion Hall there when I peeked out from behind a curtain and saw a thousand people sitting there. And then I knew in my heart that this thing could transcend the mountains and the sea, that there was something inevitable, inexorable about it. But boy, we had our fears, and we had our troubles.
So the tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous has several aspects. Impliedly, we confess in those traditions that our movement has its sins. We confess that we have character defects as a society, which all the time may threaten, which all the time may threaten, and as individuals in a society. It is a confession of defect, impliedly, and it's also a recommendation forged on the anvils of group experience as to how we can live and work and stay together and relate ourselves to the world about us, and so in unity carry on.
Of course, our first fears in the early days were the slips. Most drunks turned us down flat, wouldn't listen at all. Some would come in, stay sober a little while, then flop. But I'll tell you, when a fellow was sober six months and he flopped on us, that was really a terrible calamity. Would we be destroyed by barley corn? Well, as the group got a little bigger, we began to have domestic relations trouble.
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We began to glimly sense that the drunk in all his drinking years had turned his wife into a mother, that the parental relation was all cock-eyes, that it was very difficult with at least half of us to renew the partnership, and here was a poor gal that had done the best she could. So sometimes the husbands under those conditions would get, let us say, the wandering eye, and occasionally we would have big bad wolves and a little red riding hood, the eternal triangle, if you please.
We might have had some quadrangles and hexagons, I don't know. Quadrangles and hexagons, I don't know. Where would this blow AA up, this awful distortion in the family situation? Oh, I remember the first few incidents. How the self-righteous in the group threw rocks at these who threatened our security. Well, the outcome of all that is something wonderful. I suppose that Alcoholics Anonymous has the lowest divorce rate of just about any society in the world.
Among people solidly grounded in AA, it's really negligible. Negligible. And slowly, those who have been forced to live with us alcoholics began to ask themselves, what has this done to us? How can we point these 12 steps to us? Is it true that we're mothers and alcoholics instead of their wives and husbands? Sure, we did the best we could, but didn't we get bent when we were trying to do it? So this tremendous vacuum that existed in the area of domestic relations is now being filled by a rush.
Think of it. Three years ago, we knew of only 70 family groups, groups composed of the wives and husbands of alcoholics and their friends. And suddenly, in three years, that number has jumped to about 700, many of them already in foreign countries. So our domestic and romantic difficulties haven't been too serious after all. They gave us growing pains, but on these pains, they've grown. Indeed, Alcoholics Anonymous is not a success story.
It is a story of pain capitalized under the grace of God. Well, what other forces might pull us to peace? Well, what other forces might pull us to peace? The terrific desire for security. The terrific desire for money. The desire for glory, for prestige, for power. For more than our share of the world's goods. For more than our share of the credit. These were the traits that always bedeviled us alcoholics.
Would they get on the loose and rend us apart? Well, after some years of truly frightening experience during this strange and weird, yet joyful time of our adolescence, out of all that experience were forged the traditions of AA. I am not the author of those traditions. Our experience is the author. You told me what these traditions ought to be. Well, let's have a look at them. Let's have a look at them.
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AA unity. Well, that's self-evident. If we weren't unified, if we were in dissension, if we were in conflict with the world around us, there would be no Jesuits talking to a Hindu in India, no missionary working on a Siam. People would not be fishing books out of oil barrels. No. Our world arteries would no longer course with the life-giving grace of God if we fell into disunity. So very obviously, the common welfare has to be paramount. As old Ben Franklin, I think, had it, we'll hang together or indeed we shall hang separately.
Now comes a real tough one. For our group purpose, there is but one ultimate authority. A loving God as he may express himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants. They do not govern. It took years to forge that tradition and more years to really believe it myself. No government, no leaders with authority, only God speaking in the group conscience. I remember how I was first spoken to. I vividly remember. Things were pretty tough. It's Clinton Street, Brooklyn. Lodge was in that department store. We had drunks, some of whom were paying no board. There wasn't any dough coming in. Some of the folks that were coming to the meetings, however, had got sober. We sat down in the aid traditions, or we can perish as groups, or perchance as a whole society. John Barleycorn was the leader of that. But we aren't going to perish. Of course we aren't. So each group has the right to be wrong. Each group has but one primary message. Carry the message to the alcoholic who still suffers. Oh, it took a long time to get around that one. Our original foundation down there in New York was originally chartered to do everything but lobby for prohibition. We were chartered for education. We were chartered for research. We could do anything. And we used to think we wanted a lot of money to do all of these things. But as time went on, we found that it was much better to do one thing well, perhaps supremely well, than to do many things badly. So we hold our cooperation to other fields of alcohol enterprise. But for us, we stick to our last, just carrying the message to the other alcoholics if he wants it.
That is our primary purpose, our sole reason for existence. Every AA group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions. Oh boy, that was diligent. I think we can all laugh and say the drunks are funnier about money than they are about love. In our drinking days, we all said, well, I got no troubles that money won't cure. Then we came to AA. We sobered up. And then we thought of all the wasted years. I've got to hustle to make a lot of money. So
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we've had a dickens of a time with this money business. We've had a dickens of a time to pay our own bills. Because each of us has been trying to get on his own feet. Because we were afraid that if we contributed too much, that we would create some giant group of professionals and spoil this way of life. A fear for which at one time there was some substance because I myself thought we needed millions. It wasn't until 1941, after Jack Alexander's piece, that we asked for any money from the office in New York. Up to that time, the little place with two people in it had been run by the proceeds off the book. We had to ask the alcoholics for money. Thousands of inquiries were pouring in. Volunteers couldn't handle it. So in order to carry out a 12-step job, we had to have a little more help. So that dollar-a-year measuring stick was set up. Well, we got it just barely enough to squeak by. And I can tell you a very good story on myself. At that time, I think Lois and I were getting 30 bucks a week. They declined that request, which went to cancer research instead. They declined it because they felt that this society should pay its own small bill, and that the responsibility for doing so would do us all a lot of good. Moreover, it would afford the world outside the strange spectacle of drunks noted for their carelessness, for their irresponsibility, the strange spectacle of drunks paying their own expenses. Whoever heard of a drunk doing that? So we declined that money and confirmed this tradition that AA pays its own bill, doesn't take money from the outside world, and only a little bit from any particular member, lest he buy a vested interest. Well, let's see, where are we? Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever non-professional, but our service centers may employ special workers. Now that's exactly the reverse side of the yarn that I was telling you about myself. You remember how I was told that I couldn't go to work for Charlie Towns, and that was right. So for years, we were trying to figure out what in AA was professionalism and what wasn't. And we finally figured it out like this, that under no condition could an AA be paid for talking or carrying this message to somebody else, person to person and face to face. That was out. If professionalism ever invaded us at that level, we would be doomed. On the other hand, as we grew, we found that we simply had to function. And the first issue of professionalism that I can remember came up back in that number one club out there, Old 24th Street, New York, soon after it was opened. At first, they handed keys to the boys, but the boys had a habit of getting stewed, some of them, and going in there and lying around. Whether they got stewed was the only thing they did, I don't know. Anyway, that wouldn't work. We had volunteers come in, oh, they painted the place, they shined it up. It was great. They'd answer the telephone. But the drunks got very tired of sweeping out the place. And nobody could police it because we were way in the daytime, lots of us. So we just simply have to have somebody. Well, we approached old Tom, a fireman we'd sprung out of
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Rockland Asylum. And we shrewdly approached old Tom because we knew that old Tom had a pension as a fireman. And we said to Tom, how would you like to come over, Tom, and live at the club? Nice room for you there. He says, Tom, what's the angle? What's the angle? Well, Tom, we'll give you a nice room and you could kind of look after this place. Tom says, seven days a week? Yeah. What am I supposed to do? Well, Tom, you ought to make the coffee and, you know, lead the drunks out if they're too bad. And, you know, sweep the place up.
Seven days a week, says Tom. No. Says Tom, what you guys want is a janitor. Well, we said, sure, we want a janitor. Well, Tom says, ain't you going to pay me nothing? Oh, no, we said. That would make you a professional. This is Alcoholics Anonymous. We must not mix money with spirituality. Well, okay, says Tom. No money, no work. What you guys want is a janitor. I'm doing me 12-step work free. But if you're going to have me in here, you're going to pay me, see?
And lots of us were working at that time and earning good money. And, believe it or not, we actually haggled with that old guy to get him down to the least possible cent that we could for doing that damn grubby job. But old Tom was right. In order for A.A. to function, we have got to hire some help. I suppose in all the lengths and breadths of A.A., among the whole 150,000 of us, we haven't got two or three hundred hired help all told.
Cooks frying hamburgers in clubs, janitors sweeping out the floor, gals answering the telephone in the offices. Well, I hope you include me in. I once wrote you some literature. I'm paid a royalty for being a writer. And that's where the line fell. For face-to-face treatment of this drunk, no doctor. But we do have to hire people so that A.A. can function, if they have a legitimate job to do. So that one was settled after many, many years of great trouble.
Now this one is a puzzler and still is to a lot of people. A.A. as such ought never be organized. But we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those that they serve. Well, how can you have a society that's unorganized and without organization and at the same time organized services? Well, we do it. We are not organized in the sense that A.A. has any government. Each individual in this society has greater liberty than even a citizen of the United States. He's a member if he says so. He can't be compelled to pay anything, believe anything, or do anything.
In that sense, we are a sort of a benign entity. In fact, we are so liberal, as someone once suggested, that we put up a sign in the A.A. club. Anything goes here, folks, except you mustn't smoke opium in the elevator. So we are entirely free as a society, but in order to function, we do have to organize to function. Let me illustrate. Joe Bloat goes to Middletown, U.S.A. He's an A.A. member and good standing from another city. In Middleton, there isn't any group. Joe feels lonesome. He's also a little frightened.
He's also a little frightened. He also wants to carry this message. So maybe he puts a little ad in the paper, says AA's come to town. Maybe he goes to the preacher and the doctor and goes around to the bartenders,
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and he scrapes himself up a few prospects, and pretty soon you've got a little group. And in effect, Joe is the pope and these first guys are the hierarchy, literally. Can't be any other way. So this local founder and his friends naturally teach AA principles and carry the message to still others. So the group grows broader and broader on the base. By and by, something happens. Either Joe and his friends get a falling out, or maybe somebody bigger and better, Screwball, down in the base in the triangle here, begins to murmur, how long are these old-timers going to keep running this thing?
And after a while, the old-timer who is wise and sees that he is no longer the parent of an infant group, but now of a grown group, strolls off the scene and says, I'll give you a hand, folks, if you need me. I'll be at the meetings. But you name your own committee. So the group names a service committee. Maybe just a secretary, maybe a big group, maybe chairman and treasurer. A rotating committee sitting on top of this pyramid with the top cut off.
Now there is a certain type of old-timer, and I've been that too, called the bleeding deacon. If he doesn't walk off, well, the group pushes him off. If he doesn't wean them, they wean him. And he is very sore distressed. And he said, after all the good I've done, look what they've done to me. So he comes back, and he probably tries to get re-elected to office, and he has to bleed until he learns to be a militant.
But meanwhile, the group has begun to function, and the authority for service is coming up from the bottom instead of down through the top. And that is an absolutely uniform pattern that pervades AA from top to bottom. And that is why tomorrow you will see on this very stage your elected delegates in complete control of the trustees of this society. The authority for service after next Sunday will be coming up from all of you to the top instead of going from the top down through to the bottom.
That's the fundamental of AA. Well, now to make these services work, they've got to be organized a little. Take this convention. It just didn't happen. And by the way, this is a pretty nice time to pay a tribute to all those folks that have made this thing such a great success. Days and days and days, of course. Now that brings up this question of simplicity. I suppose there isn't an individual in AA more keen about keeping AA simple than I am.
But what is simplest? It would have been simpler if we hadn't organized this convention at all. You know, we might have sent you all a postal card and said, well, folks, we hear that down in St. Louis they're going to let us have this hall, and well, show up, folks, and when you get there we'll pass the hat and things will be all right. No arrangements made, no nothing. Five thousand people are going to show up in St. Louis and it'll just organize itself, huh?
Would that be simple? No, it would be immensely complicated. In other words, you can simplify a thing so much that it's going to get awful complicated later on. You can build an automobile and you can simplify it by leaving the tires off, but it won't run far on the rim. And even if the tires are on it and you don't put any gas in the tank, it won't get you anyplace.
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So you see, there is such a thing as oversimplification. Therefore, we have to take a responsibility to organize our services so that they will carry the message. And it took us years to get that through our heads. Just imagine what A.A. would have been if nobody had taken the trouble to produce any literature, if you couldn't go into a town and find A.A. in the telephone book, if nobody had been looking after our public relations, which might have gone haywire.
Would A.A. be simple today? No, it would be very small and very confused and very frightening, and we all know that. So we have to organize our services so they'll work. And that is something that caused us untold trouble and agony to find out. But now I think we're down the middle on that one. Now then we come into one which says, Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues. Hence the A.A. name ought never to be drawn into public controversy.
Well, now that's a rough one for drunks. An awful lot of us have really loved controversy. And to deny ourselves the privilege of attacking something or somebody right in public, well, that's real deprivation, isn't it? Yet there was a society much like A.A. a hundred years ago called the Washingtonians. They didn't know that alcoholism was a disease. They didn't have the discourageful basis that we have.
But it was an association of drunks trying to help each other. And one of the reasons for the decay of that society was that it fell into public controversy. At that time the abolition slavery issue was a terrific thing in America. So you had southern Washingtonians on one side of the fence and northern on the other side of the fence. The dry forces were just getting together. And you had wet Washingtonians and you had dry Washingtonians.
And much shouting and lecturing and brandishing of these issues in public. One of the reasons they fell into decay. But happily with us from the very beginning, as by some deep instinct, we have known that controversy of that kind is not for us. Particularly upon those issues that tear the world apart. Issues of religion, politics, reform, government, and the like. Now our public relations policy. That took a long time to formulate, that one.
Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion. We need always maintain anonymity at the level of press, radio, and film. Harry Tebow once told me that I had one of the toughest and most implantable egos that he had ever seen. That my insatiable craving for prestige, for honor, for fame, and for power was positively frightening. Well, a lot of folks in AA are just like me.
There are thousands just like me. If that terrible craving got loose in public, it could alter the whole history of our society. So this tradition of public relations works upon a different principle. We are not to publicize our people by full name and picture and create household names. We are not to accept public honor.
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Our couriers, the friends of the press, we hope they tell people about the work of AA. But we hope they never turn any of us into public figures. Because there is the escape hatch for the terrible forces still latent in us all. This insatiable demand for vainglory, pride, power, wealth. Therefore, we say it's better to let our good friends tell about us. It is good for us to remain anonymous. It is better to attract people to us than to try to promote by public personalities our point of view.
Then we get down to anonymity and its spiritual significance. Of course, anonymity is the protective mantle that covers our whole society. But it is more than that, for the substance of anonymity is sacrifice. And I don't mean the sacrifice of a mournful martyrdom or becoming anonymous because we ought to be anonymous at the public level. I'm talking about anonymity because we want it that way for this society and for each of us in it.
The other day in New York, I was asked by a couple of Texans to come up to their hotel. One of these gals there is a very celebrated singer. As she puts it, I sing in the best of the bar rooms, and I've been doing it for 15 years. Well, about a year ago, I joined AA. And after I joined AA, I lost about 10 pounds, and the bags came out from under my eyes, and I began to look like a human being. And my manager couldn't figure it out.
And at last, I told him what had happened to me. And he said, but Dorothy, my God, aren't we going to tell the public this? Why, this would make great publicity for both AA and for your show. Well, she said, I know that. Other people have proved that. But please, not for me. I think more of the future welfare of this society than I do of any little publicity that I could get for it or for myself. And let no one disparage her profession, for the girl went on to say, I see these people with their heads on the table on my late show, and I wonder how I can help them.
Yes, our traditions are a list of sacrifices, which each of us is willing to make for the welfare of the whole. And because, in a sense, I do symbolize these traditions, and because I have been victimized all my life by this pursuit of prestige, wealth, and power, these traditions have borne down on me with great force. As I showed you back in that living room in Clinton Street, I first obeyed that little group because I had to.
And after a while, I could see that there were why. And I finally obeyed because I wanted to and because it was right, but I still resisted. I hope I have come to a time in my life where I can now personally obey these traditions. These traditions do not apply only to groups. They apply to each one of us, the spirit and the practice of it. Spirit and the practice of it. I hope I can obey them now because I want them for me.
In a sense, each one of these traditions is an expression of the deflation that each of
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us has to take, the sacrifices that we have to make in order to live and work together. Oh, I didn't like these traditions so much. Our common welfare should come first. You mean to say they are more important than I am? And this second tradition. Group conscience? Wiser than I am? Why, when these drunks get mad, they ain't got no conscience at all. No, I'm smarter than they are. Oh, no, but I must obey. I can't say who this AA membership's going to be. Each group is going to be autonomous. I can't run this society. This society has only one single purpose. I can't put it into education and research if I want to. I can't lend this AA name out to other enterprises, good enterprises too. No. Every AA group ought to be fully self-supporting. You mean to say I couldn't get a million dollars off John D.
or somebody for the good of AA? No, I can't do that. You mean to say that I can't professionalize AA and be a world-renowned therapist? No. Do you mean to say that I have to listen to these trustees in this conference? That their will is paramount to mine? Yes. Does this tell me that I can't indulge in public controversy when I so love controversy? Does this tell me that I can't personally employ all the paraphernalia of modern publicity in my behalf, as well as of AAs, and therefore make myself a known figure? Does this mean that I really have to place principles above personalities, my own personality? Yes, it means all of that to me, and I know that to nearly all of you, as you understand these traditions better, it will mean the same to you. This I will give up so that we may stand together in unity.
This I will gladly give up, not as a martyr, but as a willing and joyous sacrifice for the benefit of the whole. You know, Dr. Bob was essentially a far more humble person than I. In some ways, he was sort of a spiritual natural, and this anonymity business came rather easy for him. He couldn't understand why people would want so much personal publicity. And I remember being down in Akron after we knew that he was mortally afflicted, and he laughingly told me of some of the elders coming in and knowing that his end was probably near, and saying, well, Bob, we don't like to bring up this subject, but we think you and Ann ought to be buried befitting your station in this AA world.
You ought to be buried like a founder. I mean, you know, a kind of a mausoleum. I think Bob even told me they had a diagram with him. And Smithy laughed and laughed and laughed.