Audio
Transcript
Source: 1955 St. Louis International Convention – 1955 St. Louis Bill W How We Learned to Serve.mp3 File: 1955-st-louis-international-convention-1955-st-louis-bill-w-how-we-learned-to-serve.mp3 Duration: 00:59:34
============================================================
Of the 20th Anniversary Convention of Alcoholics Anonymous, and on behalf of the delegates of the 1955 conference, together with other conference members, from the service agencies of the General Service Board, we welcome you. There are just a couple of brief announcements that I should like to make. A reminder that dinner will be served in the cafeteria until 6.30 this evening. In the event that any might be driving off for home this evening, it would be pointed out that many cafeterias and restaurants are closed in St. Louis.
Immediately following this session, the second edition of the book Alcoholics Anonymous will continue to be available until about a half hour after the session is closed. I should like myself to take this opportunity of extending a tremendous debt of gratitude to all who have worked with us in making this convention the success that we hope you think it has all been. And as the opening session starts, I have a very great pleasure to introduce a man who has given so very much, not of his time necessarily, there has been much of that, but who has given so much of his heart to all of us.
He is not an alcoholic, but we love him so very dearly. And so I should like to introduce to you the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of your General Service Board, who will discuss for us the material which he has entitled, The Paradoxes of AA. And with that remark, I'm very happy. Now, look at this. Look at this. I have completely messed up everything. I had them before me and I didn't put them on.
I now feel that this convention is more of a success than perhaps anyone has thought it ever could be. What, of course, should be the introduction? Just Bill. Above us we see a banner, and that banner shows a circle, which is AA circumscribing the world. And within it is a triangle. And the base of the triangle is the ground of recovery on which we stand. The left of the triangle symbolizes our unity, and the right of the triangle our arm of service.
Such is the symbol of AA. I first saw it in Norway in 1950.
[00:05:02]
But this symbol is not new with us. We have attributed this particular significance to it, but in actuality its significance is very old. Students of ancient days tell me that centuries ago it was regarded by priests and witch doctors alike as the symbol by which evil spirits could be kept away. And may that symbol ever stand guard over the society of alcoholics and non-alcoholics. We have already considered what the essence of our recovery has been.
We have turned back the pages of history and watched the various channels of influence and of help coming through to many to form this confluence, which is AA. Last night we told of our frantic experience in trying to learn to work and to live together and to relate ourselves in harmony with the world about us. Today our topic has to do with service, with the twelfth step in all its implications. It is not odd to us of AA that the AA book long ago said, with us, action is the magic word.
So this is our inheritance, the legacies of recovery, of unity, and service, which we now see in their main outline. I think there has been some confusion as to what the third legacy of service really consists. Of course, its great essential is carrying this message to the other alcoholics. But the moment we begin to carry the message, something else is involved. For example, when it occurred to my dear sponsor, Abby, that he wanted to come over to Brooklyn and see me, he was at the time in New York.
So he had to drop a nickel in the subway turnstile to reach me. Otherwise his good intentions would have been in vain. Something had to be done, something had to be paid to make his twelfth step work possible. So it was, in those many meetings in that first summer in Akron, we gathered in Annie Smith's living room. There was shelter over our heads, the hospitality of a home. I have no doubt the drunk cigarettes burned up her carpet, and the coffee bill was pretty high.
But that shelter and that coffee, even those cigarettes if I may say so, no doubt facilitated carrying this message one to another. And I can't forget T. Henry and Clarissa Williams, non-alcoholics, whose home was thrown wide open to us strange people. They were strict church folks. I think from their point of view we were a little uncouth. Our language was not always of the most desirable. But they forgot all about that in the spirit of the enterprise.
[00:10:00]
And they spent a great deal on food. And they brought in chairs from the local undertaker when the house began to fill up. And I make no doubt we burned their carpet. So there was a cost each time this message was carried. Well, after a while, homes got too small. We had to move into halls. And we can all smile as we think of the great cries that went up from us drunks when landlords actually had the nerve to charge us money for those halls.
The heartless thing, why, we said to the landlords, we can't mix money with spirituality. The landlord said, well, that's all right for me, but you don't get the hall. So it cost a little something, and we began to drop money in the hat. Then when AA grew very, very thick in an area, and it was just a great sprawling anarchy, sometimes benign and sometimes not so benign, and there was no head or tail to things at all, simplicity had been carried too far.
Simplicity was getting complicated. So we had to organize some sort of service so that the area could function. And this consisted of getting somehow a committee out of this mass of alcoholics, a very painful process, who in turn would hire a little cubicle of an office and usually sat there in a very frightened little AA girl who was promptly told she was professionalizing AA by taking our telephone calls and relating us to the hospitals and listening to the complaints of the alcoholics.
So the third legacy really involves everything inside or outside of AA that legitimately helps it to function. For example, when St. Thomas Hospital in Akron threw itself open to us, took Dr. Bob on its staff, an indispensable aid to recovery. You know the work that he and Sister Ignatia did there, 5,000 alcoholics treated. And when they were through, there were a lot of bills that weren't paid. The area made up the deficit, and the drunks who could pay for hospitalization did so.
It cost something to get within reach of the 12th step. Same thing out in Knickerbocker Hospital. Dr. Silkworth and that beloved red-headed nurse, Teddy, processed 10,000 drunks. Well, there was a hospital involved, there was medical service involved, and a little dog, and an intergroup office. Therefore, we have found that while AA is never to be organized in the sense of being governed, and while each of us has more freedom than there is in any society on earth, if we are to carry the message, we must organize services to the extent that they will work.
We have to organize the services to a certain degree to keep AA simple, because anarchy is a very complicated thing. Now, we have directly inherited from Francis of Assisi a tradition of corporate poverty. We say that this movement should be as poor as it can be. But after all, even a poor man must eat, be fed, or else the blood ceases to flow through his arteries. Now then, only three times in the history of Alcoholics Anonymous…
Have we had to indulge in prophecy? Nearly every development in our society has come
[00:15:11]
as a result of an infinite and painful experience. But on three occasions, we have had to depart from this. We have had to anticipate a need that might come. The first anticipation was the AA book. Everybody said at the time, what do we need a book for? Our friends helping Dr. Bob and me establish a center down there in New York, a board of trustees. What do we need these people for? And again, when we sought to link that board of trustees to AA as a whole, so that it could belong to you, what need of that? Well, the prophecy on the AA book made good, and I'm sure that any who have benefited by the services of our trustees know that that one has come true. And now we have been conducting a four-year experiment to see whether our board of trustees will maintain services for the whole world, can be successfully linked to you, and you will take responsibility for seeing that they do their duty and giving them a cross-section of AA opinion at all times. And can this conference, now sitting on this stage, be trusted to become the guardian of the AA tradition, the perpetuator of these priceless services, and the succession to the old-timers and the founders of AA? That is the third venture in prophecy upon which we are now to embark. Now let me take you back to Dr. Bob's living room. As was observed last night, it was a long way from Dr. Bob's living room to the Jesuits and the Hindu and the cow.
It took a lot of unity and it took real-life blood, the grace of God coursing in our world arteries, to make that letter from India possible. We sat there on that day and we said to ourselves, what shall we do? So Bob suggested, well, let's call a meeting down at T. Henry's. So we called the meeting. I think there were 18 there. At that time, Smiths and Wilsons were very hungry, particularly the Wilsons. I had some visions of earning a good living being an AA. The Cleveland groups hadn't yet proved we could grow in size, so we thought we needed some paid missionaries.
But above all, it seemed we needed a literature so this thing wouldn't run off the track, so the message couldn't be got. So our experience could be presented to the AA at a distance. And Dr. Bob and I agreed upon those things and we presented them to the meeting. Well, the meeting was beset by the same fears that we now have in some quarters of this conference. At least eight of those present said, no, let's not change anything. Let's not get into professionalism. We're going to quarrel over what goes into this book. Let's keep AA simple, said eight of them. But then we advanced the same argument. We promoters, we said, but if you try to get it as simple as that, it won't get anywhere. The message will get garbled. We'll be ridiculed. It'll get more complicated. So by the
[00:20:05]
narrowest of margins, when the vote came, that little group decided that I ought to go back to New York and raise money. Wasn't much money in Akron, but there was plenty in New York. For paid missionaries, probably a chain of hospitals out of which we could make a lot of money and certainly some kind of a book or pamphlet about our operation. Well, you know, I spent years down Wall Street and feeling now that we had the answer for alcoholism. Why raising money like this for this thing would be like shooting fish in the barrel. So I tried a number of rich people. There wasn't any result. Tried and tried. We had some other high pressure salesmen around New York. We tried and tried. Absolutely nothing happened. I began to be very disconsolate. I remember Lois was still in that department store. And one day I was in my brother-in-law's office. Leonard Strong, he's a physician. I was bellyaching how stingy the rich were on this matter of money for this new development that doubtless would sweep the world. Well, he'd heard a lot of this before and somewhat wearily he said, well, he said, when I was in high school, I used to know a girl and I think that girl had an uncle. And it seems to me his name was Richardson. And if my memory serves me right, he has something to do with John D. Rockefeller's charity. I think he must be connected with the Rockefeller family. I believe he'd remember me if he's still alive. On that slender thread of recollection hung much of the destiny of alcoholics and others. Said he, shall I call him up? Oh boy, yes. He called up the voice of dear old Willard Richardson, now gone for some years, came on the wire and he said, why hello, Leonard. Where have you been all these years? I'd love to see. So my brother-in-law said, well, I have a relative here and there's been some success with alcoholics.
Could we come over and talk to you? And lo and behold, we go over to Rockefeller Center, right up to Mr. John D. Rockefeller's private offices, in the front door, and soon we're sitting next to one of the greatest friends that family ever had. They'll tell you so themselves. Well, now for more, this was really getting hot, you know. This kindly but shrewd old man listened to the story. He immediately said, well, shouldn't we have another meeting? By all means, I had lunch with him. And then came a momentous meeting, which actually took place in Mr. John D. Rockefeller's private boardroom. It consisted of Dr. Silkworth and Doc Smith from Akron and a couple of drunks from out there and some of the New York contingent. And by this time, we'd acquired some new friends, friends of Mr. Richard. There was also present Mr. Leroy Chipman, who later became one of the trustees, and our beloved Frank Amos, who is still on the board. I was told soon after I came into Mr. Rockefeller's boardroom that I was seated in a chair that Mr. Rockefeller had just vacated.
Well, now for a promoter, that was really getting things hot. Nothing to it. Upshot of the evening was we tell our story. Mrs. Scott of the Riverside Church, prominent in the New York engineering firm, was there too. And after we told our tale, this perennial question again arose. Won't money spoil this thing? Won't professionalism spoil it? Won't big-property ownership cause quarrel? Isn't it true that the great power of this thing is the carrying of the message, the kind of giving that demands no reward, the carrying of the good news one to the other? Yes,
[00:25:01]
we admitted that it was. But we'd only been able to carry it up to that time to about 40 people in three years. And now we had an answer. Well, they became convinced. They really thought we needed some money and probably quite a lot of it. Frank Amos was sent out to Akron. He looked over that situation, came back with a very enthusiastic report. We sent him out there because Smithy was hardest up for the minute. They were going to foreclose the mortgage on the house. Also, because it was the first group and the best community sort of a deal. Although, of course, by then a group had started in New York. Frank came back with this glowing report, laid it before Mr. Richardson. Mr. Richardson made a digest, went in and placed it before Mr. John D. Rockefeller. Again, Providence, in the person of John D. Rockefeller, determined the destiny of this society. He has since told me and others that he was never so affected or moved by a story. That Alcoholics Anonymous crossing his life was one of its signal events. And yet he turned to his old friend Willard and he said, but Willard, money will spoil this thing. Mr. Richardson wasn't quite so sure. And finally, Mr.
Rockefeller said, well, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll put a few dollars in the treasury of the Riverside Church. Maybe it can help these two men, Dr. Bob and Bill, as you call them, along for a little bit. But please, Dick, money will spoil this thing. Don't ask me for any more. So $5,000 was put in the treasury of the Riverside Church and Bob and I were eased through the year of 1938 by us, and the mortgage was lifted off the Smith home. We were a very long way from hospital chains, paid missionaries and books. Thank God. Perhaps unknowing, John D. Rockefeller had set us in the tradition of Francis of corporate poverty. He really saved us from the perils of property ownership and professionalism. Good for other societies, but very bad for us. Well, we alcoholics still persisted with our new friend. In spite of what Mr. Rockefeller said, we again persuaded them that we needed large sums of money. And it was thought that we could form some kind of a foundation out of this informal committee and have a board of trustees and get it incorporated so that the rich could pour in a slew of dough all tax-free. You know, do a service to the rich at the same time.
We were actually supplied with lists of prospects, some very notable names on it, men of great wealth. And some of us promoter folks began to solicit money for the foundation all through the summer of 1938. And praise God, we didn't raise one damn cent. But it was pretty discouraging at the time. Early in the summer, this is 38, I had drafted what are now the first two chapters of the AA book. Indeed, we used those rough drafts as a part of the prospectus to persuade the rich to part from their money. So our great ambitions for prestige and wealth and missionaries and hospital chains by now were collapsed. But of one thing we were sure. We had to put the record of this thing into some kind of a book. And the foundation didn't
[00:30:04]
And by this time we were having trustee meetings, and our new friends commiserated with us at each meeting. Guess we had one every month then, for this lack of money. And finally, dear old Frank Amos said, well Bill, why don't you take these two chapters down to Harper's. I know the religious editor down there, Gene Axman, and see what they would like to do about it. I took them in, and to my great delight, Mr. Axman said, well this is very interesting.
Mr. Wilson, could you finish a book written in this style? I wasn't too confident, thought I was lying valiantly, and said, oh yes, of course, of course. Never had written anything before in my life. Well he said, in that case, I could advance you $1,500 in royalty. By this time, $1,500 looked like an immense sum of money. And I came back very excited. And then my spirits fell as people began to remonstrate.
They said, yes, Harper's is a wonderful publishing firm, but there are two bugs in this proposition. If you eat up the whole $1,500 in royalties while the book is being prepared, and a lot of inquiries come in afterward as a result of publicity, how are we going to pay for them? Eating up the royalties in advance. And then there's a still worse bug in the thing. If this book proves to be a textbook for our society, why should it be in the possession of any publisher, however good?
So then we got the insane idea of publishing the AA book ourselves. And thereby hangs a screaming tale. No fool. I had by this time a super promoter. He could put rings around me even though I'd been in Wall Street. Over the objection of the Board of Trustees and everybody else we knew, he and I went to a stationary store and we bought a pad of stock certificates and we marked on them $25 par value, Works Publishing Company.
We never bothered to incorporate the company. We just type wrote on the certificate. And then we tried to peddle the certificates to the alcoholics and their friends around New York. Well, we just got a terrific horse laugh. What did they say? Buy stock in a book not yet written? And we couldn't peddle a share. So we figured that we had to appeal a little more to the profit-making instinct in the alcoholics.
So we went up to the Reader's Digest. We said to the managing editor, well, now here is the budding society. Here is the story. Here are our fine connections, Mr. Rockefeller, Dr. Fosdick, and all these nice people. It's a real good idea. Would you like to print a piece about it? And the managing editor, then Canis Payne, said, why certainly. This is right up the Digest alley. And then we said, well, now we're preparing a book.
It will be out next spring, we hope. And about next spring, could we get an article in the Reader's Digest just mentioning this book? You wouldn't mind putting something in about that? No, that would be fine. He thought that would be just what the Digest would like. We rushed back to the drunks and said, look, this thing is a cinch. In those days, printing costs were very low. We paid no attention to the other publishing costs.
And we said to the drunks, now look, how are you going to miss? Harper says this is going to be a good book. We can sell this book for $3.50, and it's only going to cost us $0.35 to print it. Now, if the Reader's Digest, with a 12 million circulation, tells about this book, they're just going to go out in carloads and, Lord, this stock of yours will be worth, well, you know, maybe millions, you can't tell.
So a trickle of money started to come in from the stockholders, which began to feed the Wilson household and my old friend Hank's household. And we hired a little gal, known and beloved to us old-timers, some of you here will remember her, Ruth Hock.
[00:35:01]
And I began to slowly dictate the chapters of the book to her. But I soon found I was no author. I was only an umpire. I shipped the chapters to Akron. We shipped them to New York. We discussed them in the New York meetings. And the brawls over what was to go into that book were something terrific. There is a sort of an illusion around among the AA's that, you know, there must have been deacons with bright white robes and all was peace and serenity.
Boy, the hassles over that book were something terrific. And they were especially bad the night the Twelve Steps were written. Because the drunks weren't getting up any money on the Works Publishing stock and the larder was running low. And I was having an imaginary ulcer attack. And we got a few chapters done and we figured we got to put a backbone into this book of some sort. And I kind of thought we had to take these six steps in Ebby's formula and blow them up so they'd be a little more concise and so the drunks couldn't wiggle out anywhere between.
And about that time a couple of guys came in with some waffle gripes and I was sick of bed and I was real mad all over. So I guess it must have been an inspired job, but not by me. At any rate, those Twelve Steps were drafted in about 30 minutes, I guess. Afterward, the hassling introduced a couple of other ideas, lifesavers. One idea was God as you understand it. I didn't have that in there. I was still suffering from that sudden spiritual experience of mine.
So that was introduced by discussion. And then I felt that the drunks really ought to be humbled. And there was one phrase which said that we were going to give our lives to God on our knees. And the drunks said, you take this knee business out of there, which we did. Well, finally the book is done. We make a pre-publication copy of it. We ship it around to everybody, psychiatrists, doctors, clergymen.
Catholic Committee on Publications in New York went through there like a breeze. They said, why, this is swell. Just got to make one change. At the end of your story, Bill, you say that we found heaven right here on this good old earth. You can't have it that way. We're promising the folks something much better later on. Can't you change that to utopia? So everything is all set for the big kill, and the stockholders are waiting for the money to come in.
And we go up to Cornwall Press and we say, well, here we are. We're all ready to go. Well, how many books do you want? Oh, we'll just print a few to start with, say 5,000. At that time, there were only 100 AA members, and there were 28 stories, and they were all going to get a book apiece. And there were 49 stockholders, and they were all going to get a book apiece. So there wasn't any market in AA.
But after all, the Digest was going to print this piece. So we go over to dear old Edward Blackwell. Just died. He wanted so desperately to be out here. President of the Cornwall Press. And by this time, the stockholders' money was pretty well petered out, and we had to shore it up by a loan from old Charlie Towns for 2,500 bucks. And, oh boy, the going was getting tough. I don't know what we gave.
I guess we gave Mr. Blackwell $500 to print 5,000 copies or something like that. So the print order being in, my friend Hank and I went up to Reader's Digest. We got ahold of Mr. Payne. Said, well, Mr. Payne, we're all ready to shoot. Mr. Payne says, excuse me, shoot what? Who are you people anyway? Oh, he said, I remember. You were the fellas in here last fall about that alcoholic enterprise. He said, you know, I'm awful sorry.
I was dead sure the Digest would want to print that piece. But he said, when I talked with the editors, they said, next on it. Too controversial. People don't care anything about drunks. And I should have let you know, but I completely forgot about it. By this time, we had the stockholders on the hook for $4,500. Charlie Towns for 2,500. 5,000 books in the warehouse.
[00:40:02]
No place to go. And in that very month, the landlord pulled the pucker string on 182 Clinton Street and Lois and I got set out in the street. That was the state of Alcoholics Anonymous in the spring of 39. And when we had to face up to those drunks who had been buying this stock on installments, five bucks a month for five months. Oh. Well, we were almost frantic to get some publicity so we could move some books, so we could bring in some more alcoholics.
We shopped around among the magazines. Old Burt Taylor hocked a business that afterwards failed for $1,000 to get us by the summer. And in the fall, Fulton Mouser, then editor of Liberty, printed a piece called Alcoholics and God. And that brought in 800 inquiries. And of course, the entire proceeds of those book sales went to keep little Ruth eating. Meanwhile, we'd been giving her worthless publishing stock as a salary ever since last spring.
But she kept on typing away. She was a non-alcoholic who stuck. Well, we got to get some publicity. There was one big flop I skipped, though, before we got to the Liberty piece. As I told you, my friend in this enterprise, now dead, poor soul, said, I got an idea. We just got a fellow out of an asylum up here by the name of Ryan, and I think that he knows Gabriel here. So we got a hold of Ryan. Yeah, I said, I know Gabriel.
He used to be in the ad business myself. He'll remember me. So over he goes to Heater and comes back with the glad news. Oh, boy. Heater will put us on that heartthrob three-minute program he used to have. Yes, Heater will do it. He's going to interview me on the radio. I said, my promoter friend, we got to get out a little advanced publicity. So we scraped up another $500, the last two, and my friend put it into a shower of postal cards, which went to every doctor east of the Mississippi River, saying, Alcoholics Anonymous, sure cure for alcoholism, buy the big book, 350, listen to an AA member on the Heater program.
$500. Well, he had us so hot on that we could see book orders coming in by carloads. However, we took an extra precaution. As I said, Ryan was just out of Rockland Asylum, and we had to be awful sure that Ryan would get there to that deadline. So with two guards, we actually locked him up in the downtown athletic club until Heater could be reached. And sure enough, the program came off. Ryan pulled out the tremolo stop.
The drunks had got their ears glued to the radios. We could see book orders coming in, carloads of books going out. We couldn't wait those three or four days, hardly, before we went over to Old Box 658 Beasy Street. And we looked in the box, and our hearts fell. Oh, boy. And Hank said very brightly, well, they couldn't put them all in the box, they must have mail bags full out back. So we went to the window, and the clerk bought us exactly 12 postal cards.
And we had exactly two orders for the book Alcoholics Anonymous, and the rest were from doctors, mostly intoxicated, ribbing the dickens out of us. And our enterprise collapsed right then and there. But as I have said, in the fall, there was the Liberty Peace. In 1940, Mr. Richardson came into a trustees meeting with big news. We hadn't heard from Mr. Rockefeller since 1937. He said, Mr. Rockefeller's taking great interest in this thing.
He was very interested in this thing, would like to give a dinner for Alcoholics Anonymous, invite in some of his notable friends.
[00:45:00]
Mr. Richardson produced an invitation list. When we looked at it, we were bug-eyed. It would add up to at least a billion dollars in wealth. Well, we figured Mr. Rockefeller's changed his mind. Their money troubles were all over, nothing to it. So there's a big dinner at the union club. Mr. Rockefeller was sick that night, sent over Nelson. Harry Emerson Fossey came and gave us a big plug, so did Dr. Foster Kennedy, the neurologist.
And of course, the drunks took their turn. This guy Morgan, still sober out of the asylum, was there. And we planted the drunks around at the tables with the bankers to kind of indoctrinate them. One asked Morgan, well, Mr. Ryan, I suppose you're in the banking business. Oh, no, said Ryan, I'm just out of Rockland Asylum, but this AA is wonderful. Ha, ha. Well, at length, the moment for the big touch had come.
You could see they were all softened up. Went up, gets Nelson Rockefeller, and he said, my father is so sorry he can't be here tonight. He is so glad that you people have seen the beginnings of this society of great promise. Few things more affecting than this have ever crossed my father's life. But, dear people, this is a thing that needs no money. It is the work of pure goodwill. Whereupon, the whole billion dollars got up and walked right straight up.
Afterward, Mr. Rockefeller wrote all that came to the dinner and all who didn't. A letter in which he said these same things, and down at the bottom of it, he remarked, I am giving Alcoholics Anonymous $1,000 as temporary aid. At some time, it should become self-support. When the bankers got this letter, they each began to tot up. If John gives $1,000, how much does that make me? So one guy sent us $10.
The highest contribution was $300. And each year, we asked that dinner list to give us a lift. From 1940 to 1945, it averaged about $1,500 a year. And that just barely eased Smithy and me by. Excepting for that, we had to stand on our own feet. And in 1945, praise God, we were able to say to Mr. Rockefeller, we are self-supporting. Good contributions are taken care of our office. The royalties will do for Smithy and me.
Then in 1941 comes the Saturday Post piece. And here was a veritable avalanche. Prior to this, the office, the little cubicle of Deezy Street near the post office box, had been supported just by the book. No AA had been asked for anything. But now with this rush, we found that volunteers couldn't cope with it. So we came to you. And we said, volunteer, using $1 a member a year as a measuring stick, could you help us answer this mail?
So praise God, we answered the mail, 6,000 or 7,000 pieces up, all with a nice personal letter. And the books began to slowly move. And we began to get lists of people in every town all over the country, sometimes in distant countries. And we wrote them. And then out of the established groups, by then, Akron, New York, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, out of established groups, we would give traveling members lists of these prospects.
And so AA began its spread, a thing you understand so well. But shucks, that was only the beginning. As soon as these AA groups began to form, all of their troubles began to pour back onto this office. And we began to retell to them the experience of the older groups. And it was in this period that the AA tradition began to take form, finally published in 1945. The tradition couldn't have been ever thought of or published, I think, unless we'd had the focal point
[00:50:00]
of that headquarters. Meanwhile, the stockholders of the book had been rather hurriedly bought out by a non-alcoholic friend who raised the money to do it. He got some off of Mr. Rockefeller and some off from one of the boys and a few of the dinner guests. And we paid all of the stockholders off at par. Now then, that naturally put Hank and me on the spot. We each had a piece of this, too, you know.
So we gave ours to the foundation. And that gave this board of trustees, then called the Alcoholic Foundation, the title to the book. So they began to own it in trust for our whole society. Well, the Saturday Post beast catapulted us into national attention. So pretty soon, we got a public relations problem, a big one and a delicate one. What attitude would we take toward medicine, toward religion?
If we started to compete with the doctors, they'd be sore. If we turned out to be another religion, well, we'd be in competition, too. How are we going to relate ourselves to prisons? How are we going to relate ourselves to hospitals, to the general public? Was there to be any control of members who could jump up before microphones and represent us? And out of years of struggle, we achieved the public relations idea that our public relations should proceed by attraction rather than promotion.
And one of the results of that is that we are at peace. Up until now, with the whole world, the whole world thinks well of us, almost too well. I think our reputation is rather better than our character. But a sound public relations policy, well administered, was necessary to bring that about. Then problems just multiplied and multiplied. There were questions of translation. There was the question of a whole pamphlet literature.
And little by little, your headquarters grew, all this time under the guidance of a board of trustees consisting of some of these old friends and a few of us alcoholics. And it grew to the point where now books and pamphlets are shipped in tons per month. It grew to the point where letters are written to the tune of thousands per month on all kinds of subjects and to all parts of the world. Your office staff now consists of five gals and part-time hanks.
Meanwhile, the grapevine had come along. That was started quite independently, but it took on nationally. It was attached to the foundation, separately incorporated, but the foundation has its control. And the grapevine took on nationally and internationally and became a current means of communication between us all, a sort of a magic carpet on which we can ride from place to place on the AA circuit.
So the grapevine was born. So was the service office. I wish I could detail for you just what that deal is like down there. You really have to see it to believe it. One of our services is to show visitors around. And since we opened uptown near Grand Central, hundreds, if not thousands, of AA visitors have for the first time got a world vision of AA, AA functioning as a whole worldwide. By the time 1948 or 49 rolled around, though, another terrific problem had presented itself, a problem even more perilous than that of anonymity breaking, which has since been shrunk down to almost nothing.
And the problem was this. Dr. Bob was falling ill, in all probability mortally ill. Some of us woke up to the idea that a few of the girls in the office, and he and I, were the only links to Alcoholics Anonymous as a whole. The trustees were completely unknown to you, inaccessible to you. They were morally responsible to you, and certainly they had lived up to all of that.
[00:55:00]
But you couldn't hold them accountable. They were an independent body. They had your public relations, your money, your literature, your magazines, your books. They owned it all in trust for you. And here were just us few, a linkage. And one of the links was going to go out, Dr. Bob. So we realized that unless we could link the trustees securely to the movement, when the day of trouble came, when the trustees made even one big blunder, and fortunately we have been spared from that all these years, then a collapse in the very center would be inevitable.
And maybe that collapse could never be recouped. And it would mean the collapse of the world services that without question have accounted for half of the size and much of the unity of Alcoholics Anonymous. What would we do? Well, again, the same question arose. Let's keep it simple. Things are going along all right now, but some of us insisted and persisted. And when Dr. Bob came near to the day of his death in 1950, the terrible logic of it all was forced upon us.
We must be linked to this society. And with Dr. Bob's permission, I stumped the country for this so-called third legacy plan, the idea being that these world services are the heart of the third legacy. These services are the primary things that make good 12-step work possible and related to the world outside. So I stumped the country to set up a conference of elected people who could meet yearly with these trustees.
And the dickens of it was, how could a whole state elect somebody and send them down to New York? We all shivered when we thought of the clubhouse and intergroup brawls we'd had on a much smaller scale. How could we do it? And then came this idea of no personal nominations in those assembly meetings. Two-thirds voter lost. The idea that the man was coming to New York not as a love ruler for his area, not as a senator, but as a servant of World AA.
I never forget how I held my breath in Boston when we first tried it on. The Irish came. They looked at the plan before the meeting. One of them was a great political mind, said, Bill, I got a hunch it's going to work, even here. They couldn't elect anybody by a majority vote or a two-thirds vote, and the whole darn committee grew lots to see who'd go to New York. So in came the delegates. The trustees made their report.
We threw the whole place wide open. We adopted a principle that on a two-thirds vote of the conference, the trustees would obey. The trustees, in naming their successors, would not vote. The trustees, in naming their successors, would hereafter consult the conference. We have finished a four-year experimental trial of this conference, and you must see it if you would believe it. The meaning of it is that AA has gone from the level of politics into statesmanship in its principal service affairs.
I feel that the future of Alcoholics Anonymous in this conference is utterly safe, even for me. So I present you the General Service Conference of Alcoholics Anonymous.