Even some drunks were swept away by the promise of Prohibition. “I felt quite safe,” Dr. Bob Smith, who would cofound Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935, recalled many years later. His plan was to lay in a supply of alcohol to carry him through the first few months and then quit drinking like the rest of America. On willpower alone, he had managed to stay sober for years at a time during several periods of his life. He expected to do it again. Once the alcohol was gone, he wouldn’t have a choice.55
Prohibition did significantly decrease drinking in the United States for several years. Estimates vary, but they chart a decline of between 30 and 50 percent in the amount of alcohol consumed. The difficulty of obtaining liquor appears to have improved the health of alcoholics significantly. There were fewer hospitalizations for alcoholism, and the incidence of alcoholism-related diseases like cirrhosis of the liver also declined. A New York psychiatrist who examined the admissions records of New York state hospitals discovered that the number of alcoholics had fallen by more than 80 percent between 1909 and 1920. “With the advent of prohibition the alcoholic psychoses as far as this country is concerned have become a matter of little more than historical interest,” he concluded. Even at Bellevue Hospital, the number of drunks admitted daily had fallen to just two or three.56
The lives of alcoholics and their families also appeared to improve. The number of arrests for drunkenness declined, and there was evidence that the money that was not being spent on drink was allowing poor families to improve their standard of living. A survey of Salvation Army hotels and industrial homes revealed that men who had formerly been unable to support themselves were saving money. In one hotel, twenty-five men had bank accounts worth between one hundred and five hundred dollars. Evangeline Booth believed that it was children who were benefiting most from these changes. “Better pre-natal care for the mother, more money, and above everything else, the absence of inebriation’s brutalities are all in evidence, telling in the life’s chances of these infants,” she said. These results were confirmed by a more comprehensive survey of social workers.57
But the benefits produced by Prohibition did not last. The country’s thirst for liquor had never disappeared, and there were many ways to get alcohol. Doctors were allowed to prescribe alcohol as medicine, and Bob Smith was soon writing scripts for fictitious patients that he had filled by pharmacies. By 1925, an illegal industry had been born. Smith stopped drinking pharmacy liquor when bootlegging was well established. His supplier hid the booze near the back steps of the Smith home, more to elude detection by his wife than by the police.
As lawbreaking increased, the attitude of many prohibitionists hardened toward drinkers, who they blamed for undermining reform. Some wanted to make drinking a felony. An extremist proposed confining drunks in concentration camps on islands off the coast of Alaska. These measures were never enacted. However, when bootleggers started stealing millions of gallons of industrial alcohol and turning it into liquor, the federal government responded by adding chemicals to the alcohol. Some merely added an unpleasant taste, but others were toxic.
A decision by the Calvin Coolidge administration in 1926 to require an increase in the amount of one additive, methyl alcohol, had deadly effects. On Christmas Eve, poisoned drinkers began to appear at emergency rooms in hospitals all over New York City. Twenty-five died. There were more than four hundred deaths due to alcohol poisoning in New York that year and the number would grow to seven hundred in 1927. The city’s medical examiner, Charles Norris, strongly condemned the government decision to use poison. Most of the victims were poor people “who cannot afford expensive protection and deal in low grade stuff,” Norris said. Wayne Wheeler, the head of the Anti-Saloon League, felt no sympathy for the victims. “The person who drinks this alcohol is a deliberate suicide,” he said.58
Alcoholics were probably among the casualties caused by the poisoned liquor. But even more tragic for drunks was the disappearance of the institutions that had been helping them get sober. Even before the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified, government officials were arguing that there was no need to continue to spend money on drunks. All of the government facilities for treating alcoholism closed in 1919 and 1920. Some had been in operation for only a few years. The Minnesota Hospital Farm for Inebriates opened its doors in 1912 but began adding mentally ill patients in 1917. The inebriate farm in Connecticut closed after five years; the New York farm lasted six. The two largest institutions also shut down. Few patients mourned the loss of the Iowa State Hospital for Inebriates with its wheelbarrow therapy. But the closing of the Norfolk State Hospital in Massachusetts must have been a blow. Norfolk was the successor to the Foxborough facility, where the drunks had been forced to share quarters with mental patients. It was specializing in alcoholism treatment. Irwin Neff was still in charge. The drunks had finally found a home, but their celebration was short-lived.
The end of government support did not mean that treatment disappeared entirely. The number of drunks in state institutions was never large. But most private facilities also closed. They had seen a significant decline in the number of patients during the war years, and they anticipated further losses as Prohibition took hold. Individual therapists still met with their patients. Elwood Worcester and Courtenay Baylor continued to counsel alcoholics. The Jacoby Club remained open. So did four Keeley Institutes. But the start of Prohibition was the end of almost a century of optimism about curing alcoholism. Once again, drunks found themselves in a lonely place. Between 1920 and 1935, Bob Smith sought help more than a dozen times in “rest homes” whose only goal was to put drunks back on their feet until their next binge. Smith remembered these years as “a nightmare.”59
CHAPTER SIX
Two Drunks
ON A COLD SPRING morning in 1925, Lois Wilson cracked the throttle on her war-surplus Harley Davidson motorcycle and set off on a yearlong journey that she hoped would save the life of her husband, Bill. As they pulled away from her parents’ home in Brooklyn, New York, Bill’s six-foot, two-inch frame was crammed into the sidecar. Stuffed around him were a tent, a mattress, seven army blankets, a gasoline stove, a hamper of food, a small trunk of clothes, a radio, and some large books containing financial statistics. It looked like “we were bound for the Arctic with presents for all the Eskimos,” Lois said. The trip was Bill’s idea, and Lois had great confidence in Bill and his dreams. She was also desperate to find a way to help him stop drinking.1
Bill Wilson had always been ambitious. He once planned to be an engineer but decided to become a lawyer instead. Now that he had completed all of his course work for a law degree, he had changed his mind again. He had his heart set on working on Wall Street, which had become the destination of many ambitious young men as the country experienced the fourth straight year of strong economic growth. Stocks had started what appeared to be an unstoppable rise, and fortunes were being made on “the Street” every day. Bill’s dream wasn’t wishful thinking. He had a definite plan. He wanted to visit the factories of companies whose stock was traded on Wall Street to find out everything he could about their prospects. Those facts could help stockbrokers invest in unknown companies when their stock was cheap, making themselves and their customers rich when other investors discovered them. Bill was sure of success. All he needed was one sponsor willing to invest a few hundred dollars to cover his travel expenses.
But Bill was in trouble now. From the time of his first drink at age twenty-one, he never drank like other people. That first drink was a Bronx cocktail—a gin martini with a splash of orange juice—a refined cocktail served in 1917 during a reception for Bill and other young army officers at a private home in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The country was at war, and the drink helped Lieutenant Wilson forget his fear of facing enemy fire for the first time. It made him feel as if he deserved the attention of New Bedford’s finest citizens and its prettiest young ladies. For an evening, it made him invincible. He quickly lost control. On a visit to her fiancé, Lois found Bill in the barr
acks, facedown on his bed, a bucket within easy reach on the floor. Bill had become a daily drinker by the time they were married in 1918. He returned safely from the war, only to face a new enemy. When Lois suffered a miscarriage in 1923, Bill was nowhere to be found. He had skipped law school to drink. He was half drunk when he showed up at the hospital.
One morning in March 1925, Bill told Lois he wanted to try his research idea on his own. The night before, he had come home so drunk that he couldn’t make it to bed. He was badly hung over as he sat with Lois in the kitchen. “Would you take the chance with me, Lo?” he asked. “I finally realized . . . I just can’t go on like this anymore.” Neither could she. “I was so concerned about Bill’s drinking that I wanted to get him away from New York and its bars,” Lois said.2
William Griffith Wilson was born in 1895 in East Dorset, Vermont, a town of three hundred that had complete faith in Protestant religion and the Republican Party. His family was solidly middle class on both sides. His father, Gilman, was a fun-loving man who was superintendent at a marble quarry. Gilman married the town’s most eligible girl, Emily Griffith, whose father, Fayette, owned much of the land in town as well as the East Dorset Water Company. A Civil War veteran who had driven an ambulance at Gettysburg, he was an industrious and keen-eyed Yankee who had started life as a farmer and then went into the lumber business. Although he was wealthy by local standards, he believed in hard work and independence. These qualities were handed down. Emily studied to become a teacher before her marriage, and Bill and his sister, Dorothy, grew up doing chores on their grandfather’s dairy farm.
Bill grew up in a country that believed deeply in its self-made men. John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford were changing the face of America. Electricity was beginning to light the nation’s cities, and horses were starting to share the road with cars. Bill was imbued with the spirit of his age, but the young man suffered from a severe handicap. At the age of nine, he began to develop a deep sense of inferiority. That was when his father told him that he was leaving Vermont and that it was Bill’s responsibility to take care of his mother and sister. It would be nine years before he saw his father again. The next blow fell even before his parents’ divorce became final. At a picnic on Dorset Pond the following year, Emily told her children that she was moving to Boston to study medicine. Dorothy would live with her part of the time, but Bill would stay with Fayette in East Dorset. “To this day, I shiver every time I recall that scene on the grass by the lakefront,” Wilson said. “I hid the wound, however, and never talked about it with anybody, even my sister.”3
Bill Wilson grew up believing he had done something to drive his parents away. His insecurity became a driving force in his life as he sought to prove that he could be “the Number One Man.” His success only hid his insecurity. He suffered a nervous breakdown at the age of seventeen that only began to lift when he met Lois Burnham.4
In the summer of 1913, Lois was twenty-two years old. The daughter of a prosperous doctor with a practice in fashionable Brooklyn Heights, she was a college graduate with a job. She knew Bill Wilson because her family owned a summer home near East Dorset, and he and her brother had become friends. Lois had no romantic interest in the tall and lanky seventeen-year-old. “After all, I was a young lady and he but a teenager,” she said. Her opinion of Bill improved as she got to know him better. By the end of the summer, “I thought Bill the most interesting, the most knowledgeable and the finest man I knew,” Lois said. “I forgot all about the difference in our ages.” They became engaged in the summer of 1915.5
Ten years later, Lois was determined to help Bill succeed. A woman who loved the outdoors, she was excited about the prospect of spending as long as a year on the road, sleeping in a tent. Their first stop was the General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York. After setting up camp in a field on a nearby farm, Bill put on his only suit and introduced himself in the office of the GE plant as a small investor seeking a tour. He failed to get the tour, but he discovered that the farm where he was staying was adjacent to GE’s radio research laboratory. He made friends with some of the workers, who admitted him to the lab. “I got a preview of the whole radio industry five and ten years away,” Wilson said. A month later, Bill and Lois discovered another promising company, Giant Portland Cement, in Egypt, Pennsylvania. Bill’s reports on GE and Giant Portland convinced Frank Shaw, a stockbroker with the J. K. Rice Company, that Bill was onto something. The company agreed to help bankroll the rest of the trip, purchasing two thousand dollars of Giant Portland stock for Bill’s account and allowing him to borrow against its rising value. When Bill and Lois returned to New York in the spring of 1926, Bill was given a job at fifty dollars per week.6
Lois hoped that the trip had been a turning point in Bill’s drinking as well. There had been setbacks on the road, but Bill had enjoyed a long period of sobriety for the first time in several years. His drinking was under control until they returned to the road to search for fresh prospects. Driving a used Dodge this time, they revisited Giant Portland and then headed north to Massachusetts and Canada. On their way back to the United States, they stopped on the Canadian side of the International Bridge at Sault Ste. Marie. Bill told Lois that he wanted to buy cigarettes. She was instantly suspicious because cigarettes were more expensive in Canada, but Bill had been sober throughout their trip. She sat in the car in the bridge plaza awaiting his return. Two hours later, Lois began looking for Bill in the local bars. When she found him in the very last saloon, he was almost too drunk to walk. Bill was always quick to apologize when he sobered up. This time he told Lois he would stop drinking, and he put it in writing. “There will be no booze in 1927,” he promised.7
Back in New York, Bill and Lois created a life for themselves that would have been the envy of most Americans. They had more money than they knew what to do with. Besides Bill’s salary, there was an unlimited expense account and a $20,000 line of credit for buying stocks. As the bull market raged, Bill and Lois rented two apartments in one of the toniest buildings in Brooklyn Heights, tearing out the dividing wall to create a large living room that soon boasted a $1,600 grand piano. Prohibition was the law of the land, but New York was a city with a thousand speakeasies. Every day at the ringing of the bell that ended trading at the New York Stock Exchange, Bill began drinking his way uptown. “I’d be pretty much out of commission at 14th Street and completely lose my wits at 59th. Start out with $500 and then have to crawl under a subway gate to get back to Brooklyn,” Bill said. On the mornings after, Bill searched for the reason he had once again failed to control his drinking. “I’m halfway to hell now and going strong,” he told Lois in late 1927. On October 29, 1929, “Black Tuesday,” the stock market collapsed, wiping out the paper fortunes of tens of thousands of Americans, including Bill and Lois.8
It was alcohol, not the crash, that ruined the Wilsons. When Bill didn’t come home on Black Tuesday, a frantic Lois called his office and learned that he had been fired for his drinking. Eventually, Bill turned up looking worse than Lois had ever seen him: his head was cut, and his jacket and pants were torn. He still enjoyed a reputation as a champion stock picker, and he got another job in Montreal. He drank himself out of that in six months. Lois pleaded with him to quit. She even left him for a week to show that she was serious. Finally, in September 1930, having lost two jobs in less than a year, Bill wrote a pledge not to drink in the family Bible. He had promised before. He had even written his promise in the Bible before. This time, for the first time, he made a real effort to quit. It didn’t matter. Three months later, he fell off the wagon and was fired from his job as an assistant bookkeeper after losing the company books in a speakeasy. Lois’s mother, Matilda, was dying of cancer at that time. Although he loved his mother-in-law, Bill was drunk when she died and stayed that way for days after.
In desperation, Lois took him to Vermont, where alcohol was less available. The Vermont cure seemed to work as Bill stayed sober through the summe
r of 1933, but he started drinking again when they returned to New York. It began to seem that Bill might meet the fate of so many alcoholics—confinement in a state mental hospital. There was one place they had not tried—the Charles B. Towns Hospital for the Treatment of Drug and Alcoholic Addictions, which was located on the corner of Eighty-First Street and Central Park West in New York. Founded in 1901 by the forceful Charles Towns, a businessman from Georgia, the Towns Hospital specialized in treating wealthy alcoholics and drug addicts. Towns claimed to have discovered a drug that could cure up to 95 percent of his patients in as few as four or five days. Medical supporters of the Towns treatment acknowledged that the cure rate was much lower—perhaps 20 percent. But they defended the Towns regimen, which included both detoxification and “recuperative treatment” consisting of special diets, exercise, massage, and hydrotherapy, as far more effective than any other methods. Bill and Lois might have turned to Towns sooner if it hadn’t been for the cost. But in the fall of 1933, a family member offered to pay, and Bill became a patient.
At Towns, Bill finally found someone who understood him. Dr. William D. Silkworth, the medical superintendent, was a contrarian. The medical profession had turned its back on drunks, but Silkworth believed that alcoholism was an “allergy” that made it impossible for people to have even one drink without triggering uncontrollable cravings. The doctor had to admit that his theory wasn’t helping many people get sober. Even an institution like Towns was little more than a place where alcoholics were “purged and puked.” Nevertheless, Silkworth’s patients loved the short, bald doctor. Silkworth felt deep compassion for their suffering, and he relieved some of their guilt by assuring them that they were not to blame for what was happening to them. He also offered hope. It didn’t happen often, but some people did recover. He estimated the cure rate at only 2 percent. When Silkworth delivered this news to Bill and Lois in 1933, they were elated. Now that they understood the nature of Bill’s affliction, they were convinced they knew the cure—not to take the first drink.” I left Towns a new man,” Bill said.
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