Drunks

by Christopher Finan

  It is unknown how Plain Dealer reporter Elrick B. Davis became acquainted with AA. Snyder later claimed that he found Davis on a bar stool and helped him get sober. Some AA members accused Snyder of sneaking the reporter into their meeting under the pretense of alcoholism. If Davis wasn’t an alcoholic, he must have been a terrific reporter, because the series of five stories that he wrote in late October showed a deep understanding of both alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous.

  The writing was also remarkable. Because the stories appeared on the editorial page, Davis was freed of the necessity for objectivity. In an informal style flavored by the natural cynicism of a veteran reporter, Davis announced the arrival of something new. “Alcoholics Anonymous has reached the town,” he said. “Every Thursday evening at the home of some ex-drunk in Cleveland, 40 or 50 former hopeless rummies meet for a social evening during which they buck each other up.” Davis accepted the truth of what he saw. “The basic point about Alcoholics Anonymous is that it is a fellowship of ‘cured’ alcoholics,” he wrote. “Repeat the astounding fact: These are cured. They have cured each other. They have done it by adopting, with each other’s aid, what they call a ‘spiritual’ way of life.”33

  Davis’s five short articles appeared on successive days, stressing the simplicity, openness, and disinterestedness of the AA program. In the second article, Davis addressed the religious issue directly. “There is no blinking the fact that Alcoholics Anonymous, the amazing society of ex-drunks who have cured each other of an incurable disease, is religious,” he said. But he insisted that this was no barrier. “Every member of Alcoholics Anonymous may define God to suit himself,” he said. A drunk did not need to believe in God at all. “[A]s far as the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous is concerned, a pathological drunk can call God ‘It’ if he wants to, and is willing to accepts Its aid. If he’ll do that he can be cured.” AA welcomed all kinds:

  The Cleveland chapter includes a number of Catholics and several Jews, and at least one man to whom “God” is “Nature.” Some practice family devotions. Some simply cogitate about “It” in the silence of their minds. But that the Great Healer cured them with only the help of their fellow ex-drunks, they all admit.

  In the articles that followed, Davis explained the physical and mental aspects of alcoholism. As daunting as these are, AA had discovered that there is really only one obstacle to getting sober. “[I]f you are really willing to ‘do anything’ to get well . . . you’ll have to quit lying to yourself and adopt a spiritual way of life. Are you ready to accept help?” According to Davis, it was that simple. “[T]he miracle is that, for alcoholics brought to agreement by pure desperation, so simple a scheme works,” he wrote.34

  Clevelanders responded instantly. Hundreds asked the Plain Dealer to put them in touch with the local group, while others wrote to AA headquarters in New York. In the first month, five hundred requests were forwarded to Snyder, who divided them with the other members of the group. “I would hand them out on Monday mornings like a sales manager—tell them to follow up and to report to me on Wednesday,” he said. “Nobody had a job at that time, so it was all right.” His wife, Dorothy, remembered being overwhelmed. “Within the space of about two weeks, our meetings grew from 15 to 100,” she said. There were only thirteen men who had been sober long enough to call on people who had asked to meet with an AA member. Each was handling as many as eight calls every evening, and the telephone kept ringing. “People couldn’t get me on the phone, because the line was busy, so they’d come beating down the doors,” Dorothy said.35

  Snyder welcomed the chaos, but what was happening in Cleveland frightened the earliest members, including Wilson and Smith. “Had it not taken us four whole years, littered with countless failures, to produce even 100 good recoveries,” Wilson recalled. “How could they manage?” There seemed to be a better chance that the onslaught of alcoholics would get the Clevelanders drunk than they would get the newcomers sober. A year later, there were thirty groups and several hundred members in Cleveland. AA had proved that it could grow quickly. It was the dawn of the “era of mass production of sobriety.”36

  AA was reaching into new areas of the country. The drunks who had traveled to Akron to put themselves under Smith’s care were returning home and starting new groups. There were few overnight successes. It took Earl T. two years to make any progress in Chicago. Archie T. was struggling to reestablish himself in Detroit when a nonalcoholic friend offered to let him hold a meeting in the basement of her home. Some of the most successful AA ambassadors were traveling salesmen. The New York office thought long and hard about whether to turn over a list of contacts in the South to Irwin M., a large and volatile salesman of venetian blinds. But the urgency of answering these calls for help finally persuaded Wilson to give Irwin his chance. “Then we waited—but not for long,” Wilson recalled. “Irwin ran them down, every single one, with his home crashing tornado technique. . . . He had cracked the territory wide open and had started or stimulated many a group.” A newspaperman known only as Larry J. arrived in Houston from Cleveland and wrote a series of stories about AA for the Houston Press. The Houston group included several members who later helped start new groups: Ed, who launched a meeting in Austin; Army Sergeant Roy, who made a beginning in Tampa and Los Angeles; and Esther, who started a group in Dallas.37

  In February 1940, John D. Rockefeller Jr. announced his support for AA. He had long had a deep interest in the alcohol problem and had been a strong supporter of Prohibition, until it became clear that it was not the solution. When he had first learned of AA in 1938, he had agreed to contribute $5,000, which was used to provide financial support for Wilson and Smith, who were both nearly insolvent. But he had refused to go further out of concern that a large influx of money would undermine the voluntarism that he believed was AA’s greatest asset. He may also have been reluctant to link his name with AA at a time when it was far from clear that the organization would survive.

  With AA growing strongly in the wake of the Plain Dealer articles, Rockefeller invited four hundred of his business associates to attend a dinner at the Union League Club in New York to hear AA’s story. Both Wilson and Smith spoke, as did several eminent nonalcoholics who were familiar with AA. Wilson also made sure that there was an AA member at every table. “What institution are you with?” a banker asked Morgan R. “Well, sir, I am not with any institution at the moment,” he answered with a smile. “Nine months ago, however, I was a patient in Greystone Asylum.”38

  The AA members were disappointed when Nelson Rockefeller, who filled in because his father was ill, ended the dinner without making a strong pitch for contributions. A bank had recently foreclosed on the Wilsons’ home, and they were living with friends. The Smiths were also facing the possibility of eviction. But Rockefeller announced he was donating only a thousand dollars. Far more important than money, however, was the publicity that followed the Rockefeller dinner. The Rockefellers put Wilson in touch with their public relations firm, which released a statement endorsing Alcoholics Anonymous that was carried in newspapers in the United States and around the world. One headline read “John D. Rockefeller dines toss-pots.”39

  A few weeks later, AA made national headlines again when Rollie Hemsley, a catcher for the Cleveland Indians baseball team, revealed that he was a member of AA. After Hemsley’s drinking had led several teams to fire him, he was introduced to Smith in 1939 and had been attending meetings of the Akron group for about a year. When he made his announcement, he was already the focus of national attention as the catcher for the rookie sensation Bob Feller. The effect of the Rockefeller endorsement and the Hemsley revelation became apparent in a jump in the sale of Alcoholics Anonymous. There were also hundreds of letters from alcoholics seeking help. Their names were added to the growing list of correspondents who would later become the backbone of a national organization.

  But the most important publicity was still ahead. In November 1940, Bill and Lois Wilson were living in a small roo
m in an AA clubhouse in Manhattan when they learned that one of the country’s biggest magazines, the Saturday Evening Post, was planning a story about AA. The news was tremendously exciting, but they had been disappointed before when a promised story in Reader’s Digest never came to fruition. There was also a danger that the publicity might be bad. The reporter, Jack Alexander, was very skeptical after his first encounter with AA members. The four men were “good-looking and well-dressed,” and he was not sure he believed their “horrendous” drinking stories. “I had a strong suspicion that my leg was being pulled. They had behaved like a bunch of actors sent out by some Broadway casting company.”

  Alexander didn’t know what to make of Wilson’s excessive candor as he talked about his drinking and his many errors of judgment since. “We gave him our records, opened the books . . . fixed up interviews with A.A.s of every description, and finally showed him the A.A. sights from New York and Philadelphia all the way to Chicago via Akron and Cleveland,” Wilson recalled. At first, Alexander believed that Wilson was “either incredibly naive or a bit stupid.” By the time he finished his research, he was convinced that AA was what it purported to be, and his article was set to run as the lead story on March 1, 1941.40

  The March issue of the Saturday Evening Post created a nearly instantaneous response when it became available at newsstands on February 24. The appeals for help exceeded even Wilson’s expectations. “By mail and telegram a deluge of pleas for help and orders for the book Alcoholics Anonymous, first in hundreds and then in thousands, hit Box 658,” Wilson wrote.

  Pawing at random through the incoming mass of heartbreaking appeals, we found ourselves crying. What in the world could we do with them? . . . So we rounded up every A.A. woman and every A.A. wife who could use a typewriter. The upper floor of the Twenty-Fourth Street Club was converted into an emergency headquarters.

  (At a time when all secretaries were women, it was assumed that no man could type.)

  New people started showing up at AA meetings. In New York, the attendance at the clubhouse swelled to 150 just ten days after the Alexander article appeared, and additional meetings were scheduled for the newcomers. The first New Jersey group saw its membership double by the end of March. New groups were forming every day, and every night AA members set out to meet with the men and women who had asked for help. The membership of AA had reached two thousand in early 1941, more than doubling in the previous year. “We thought this was good going,” Wilson said. But six thousand alcoholics joined over the next ten months.41

  There were still important issues to be resolved. The Big Book provided a twelve-step program of recovery, but it did not say how AA would be organized. What it did say seemed to invite chaos: “We are not an organization in the conventional sense of the word. There are no fees or dues whatsoever. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.” AA was not entirely without structure. To encourage the fund-raising envisioned by Wilson’s plans, a nonprofit organization, the Alcoholic Foundation, was organized in 1938. Because a board of trustees made up of alcoholics would not inspire confidence in potential donors, it was agreed that a majority of the board would be nonalcoholics. This decision would cause problems later, when Wilson and Smith decided that AA members must control the future of the organization.42

  The Alcoholic Foundation played no role in the day-to-day operation of the AA office in New York City. Wilson provided the leadership there, staying in close contact with Smith. In their view, the business of the office was to help the people who were organizing groups by offering advice, not telling them what to do. They eventually developed a standard response to all requests for guidance. “Of course, you are at perfect liberty to handle this matter any way you please,” it read. “But the majority experience in A.A. does seem to suggest . . .” The “take it or leave it” attitude of the early Akron group was transformed into an invitation to experiment.43

  Wilson and Smith were well aware that there were dangers to such an approach. Their members were drunks, and the overwhelming majority had only just stopped drinking. They were physically shaky and troubled by emotional problems. “[T]he alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot,” the Big Book observed. In the absence of central authority, AA members engaged in many bloody battles over group policies. “A.A. didn’t start or grow in unity. A.A. started in riots,” Snyder said. One of the first fights occurred in the Cleveland group just a few months after its founding, and Snyder was at the center of the controversy. The Cleveland group owed its very existence to his relentless pursuit of new members, but many of the men he had helped were uncomfortable with his efforts to attract publicity.44

  Snyder was distributing flyers for his talks at social clubs that read, “Clarence Snyder of Alcoholics Anonymous will speak on this new cure for Alcoholism.” He was also trying to get a weekly show on a local radio station. His promotional efforts were so aggressive that some Cleveland AA members believed he was getting paid for his efforts. Things came to a head in the weeks after the publication of the Elrick Davis articles in the Plain Dealer. A secret ballot was taken, and Snyder was expelled from the membership. The vote was not unanimous, however. Forty members joined Snyder in founding a second Cleveland meeting. That meeting was only a few weeks old when some of its members seceded to form a third.45

  Many groups were also adopting policies that appeared to conflict with AA principles. In its opening pages, the Big Book said, “The only requirement for membership is an honest desire to stop drinking.” When the Alcoholic Foundation asked groups to describe their “protective” regulations, it compiled a list that was “a mile long” and included many restrictions on membership. “We were resolved to admit nobody to A.A. but that hypothetical class of people we termed ‘pure alcoholics,’” an early member explained.

  Except for their guzzling, and the unfortunate results thereof, [pure alcoholics] could have no other complications. So beggars, tramps, asylum inmates, prisoners, queers, plain crackpots, and fallen women were definitely out. Yes sir, we’d cater only to pure and respectable alcoholics!

  Early AA members were acutely aware that their lives depended on AA and were prepared to do anything to protect it. “Everybody was scared witless that something or somebody would capsize the boat and dump us all back into the drink,” the “old-timer” explained. “We were grim because we felt our lives and homes were threatened. . . . Intolerant, you say? . . . Yes, we were intolerant.”46

  But for every member who trembled at the sight of a newcomer who didn’t seem to fit, there was another alcoholic who wanted to save the world. Wilson believed that sober alcoholics were especially prone to crusading:

  How natural that was, since most alcoholics are bankrupt idealists. Nearly every one of us had wished to do great good, perform great deeds, and embody great ideals. We are all perfectionists who, failing perfection, have gone to the other extreme and settled for the bottle and the blackout. Providence, through A.A., had brought us within reach of our highest expectations. So why shouldn’t we share our way of life with everyone?

  But that passion often brought them to grief. In one town, one of the super-promoters who appear so often in AA history managed to convince his neighbors that they should build “a great big alcoholic center.” The promoter created three corporations to run the project, making himself president of all. He promulgated sixty-one rules and regulations to ensure that things ran smoothly. For a while, they did, but eventually the initiative collapsed. The repentant promoter proposed a final rule: “Don’t take yourself too damn seriously.”47

  The fears about the survival of AA slowly disappeared. In seven years, its membership grew from a hundred to twenty-four thousand. Group members still fought, but when their differences could not be reconciled, the group didn’t die. The minority party started scouting for a location, and a new group opened. Members joked that all you needed to start a group was “a grievance and a coffee pot.”

  In any other organizati
on, this might have led to disintegration. But the same fear that made early AA members overprotective was also a source of strength. Drunks who wanted to get sober only had one place to go. So few were willing to push their objections to the point where they threatened the organization. As Wilson explained, recognizing the importance of AA in his life, the alcoholic becomes willing to put aside his own views:

  Realization dawns that he is but a small part of a great whole; that no personal sacrifice is too great for preservation of the Fellowship. He learns that the clamor of desires and ambitions within him must be silenced whenever these could damage the group. It becomes plain that the group must survive or the individual will not.

  This is the reason that the compromise over the role of religion in AA was reached in only a few months. Unity was a matter of life or death for AA members. “We stay whole, or A.A. dies,” Wilson wrote.48

  As AA’s membership grew, its finances improved. Since AA did not collect dues, the New York office urged members to make voluntary donations. The response was disappointing. “We were astounded to find that we were as tight as bark on a tree,” Wilson said. But following the publication of the Jack Alexander article in the Saturday Evening Post in the spring of 1941, sales of the Big Book began to climb, and it became a reliable source of income for both AA, which had self-published the book, and the cofounders, who were given a share of the royalties. Although Wilson and Smith received only a hundred dollars per month in the beginning, the sales of the book would eliminate their financial woes. AA began to expand its communications. In 1944, six members began publishing a newsletter, the Grapevine, to communicate with other AAs around the country, as well as with those who were serving overseas during World War II. It soon became an official publication, AA Grapevine.49