Drunks

by Christopher Finan

  In April 1946, Wilson used the AA Grapevine to outline twelve “traditions” to guide AA. He described them as traditions because they had emerged from seven years of experience in dealing with the conflicts encountered by AA groups and the organization as a whole. “Nobody invented Alcoholics Anonymous. It grew. Trial and error has produced a rich experience. Little by little we have been adopting the lessons of that experience,” Wilson said. He emphasized that he was not proposing rules. AA should always be pragmatic:

  Should we ever harden too much the letter might crush the spirit. We could victimize ourselves by petty rules and prohibitions; we could imagine that we had said the last word. We might even be asking alcoholics to accept our rigid ideas or stay away. May we never stifle progress like that!

  On the other hand, Wilson thought the development of AA had reached a point where it needed to adopt guiding principles to address issues that would arise in the future. “They involve relations of the A.A. to his group, the relation of his group to Alcoholics Anonymous as a whole, and the place of Alcoholics Anonymous in that troubled sea called Modern Society,” he said. “Terribly relevant is the problem of our basic structure and our attitude toward these ever pressing questions of leadership, money and authority.” Wilson then presented his suggestions, “An Alcoholics Anonymous Tradition of Relations—Twelve Points to Assure Our Future.”50

  Several years later, Wilson wrote a “short form” of the “twelve traditions”:

  1. Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon A.A. unity.

  2. For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority—a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience.

  3. The only requirement for A.A. membership is a desire to stop drinking.

  4. Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or A.A. as a whole.

  5. Each group has but one primary purpose—to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.

  6. An A.A. group ought never to endorse, finance or lend the A.A. name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property, and prestige divert us from our primary purpose.

  7. Every A.A. group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions.

  8. Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever nonprofessional, but our service centers may employ special workers.

  9. A.A., as such ought never to be organized; but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve.

  10.Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the A.A. name ought never to be drawn into public controversy.

  11.Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.

  12.Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.51

  Even as the twelve traditions were published for the first time, one important organizational issue remained. AA was growing quickly in the years after World War II. An average of 17,000 drunks joined annually after 1946, bringing the total to 111,000 members in over 4,000 groups in 1951. But the organization of AA was becoming decrepit and dysfunctional. It was still governed by the Alcoholic Foundation. The board still played an important role: it supervised a growing staff that was soon shipping eight tons of literature monthly, oversaw the AA Grapevine, and acted as the voice of AA on the few occasions that it was necessary (usually stating that AA had no opinion).

  But the board was not accountable to AA members. It nominated and elected its own members. Although AA members served on the board, its charter provided that they would never be the majority. This was not a serious problem as long as Wilson and Smith continued to lead the organization. But what would happen when they were gone? At times, even the founders had struggled to control their tempestuous membership. Wilson doubted AA members would follow the leadership of nonalcoholics. In 1945, he began to push the idea of creating a General Service Conference consisting of alcoholics chosen by the membership to direct the future of AA.

  Wilson’s proposal of a General Service Conference precipitated five years of often vitriolic debate among the leaders of AA. Almost no one except Wilson thought changes were necessary. The board members were nearly unanimous in believing they were doing a good job and were capable of meeting the challenges ahead. The alcoholic members were the most adamant in their views. The board was supported by many of the old-timers in the major cities who were still in control of AA affairs there and did not welcome the creation of a conference that they might not be able to influence. Matters were made worse by Wilson’s characteristically bullheaded approach, which alienated potential allies. The bitterness between Wilson and his critics grew so great in 1948 that his announcement that he was undertaking a tour of AA groups around the United States led the board and its supporters to suspect he was recruiting for a potential coup d’état. It convened a meeting of old-timers from around the country who reaffirmed their support for the status quo. Even this show of strength would probably not have been enough to stymie Wilson if he had had the support of Smith. But Dr. Bob was dubious about the idea of the conference. He urged Wilson not to force the issue.

  A peaceful resolution of the conference issue was finally reached in 1950, when AA held its first convention in Cleveland. More than three thousand sober alcoholics traveled to the city that had played such an important role in the growth of AA. Cleveland was also close to Akron, and Smith, who was suffering from advanced prostate cancer, would have been unable to attend if the convention had been held anywhere else. Cleveland cab drivers sang the praises of the sober conventioneers, and the good feeling carried through the three days of proceedings. On the second day, Wilson presented the Twelve Traditions for a vote of the membership. Although he asked for debate, there was none, and the traditions were adopted by a unanimous standing vote. The next day, both founders delivered addresses. Smith’s weakened condition was apparent, and his close friends knew that his short speech would be his last. “There are two or three things that flash into my mind on which it would be fitting to lay a little emphasis,” he said.

  Let’s not louse it all up with Freudian complexes and things that are interesting to the scientific mind, but have very little to do with our actual A.A. work. Our Twelve Steps, when simmered down to the last, resolve themselves into the words “love” and “service.” We understand what love is and we understand what service is. So let’s bear those two things in mind.

  Exhausted, Smith left the stage and was driven back to Akron, leaving Wilson to close the convention.52

  It was Bernard Smith, a trustee of the Alcoholic Foundation, who finally persuaded the other members of the board to turn over control of AA to its members. Smith was a businessman who had been quick to see that Wilson’s plan incorporated the best principles of corporate governance. His appointment as chair of a board committee to consider the creation of a conference put him in a position to persuade others to adopt it on a trial basis.

  One obstacle remained. Wilson knew that Smith’s agreement was essential to win support for the conference from AA members. After the Cleveland convention, he traveled to Akron to make a final pitch. He met Smith in the home where he had been a guest during those crucial months in 1935. There had been a lot of sadness there recently. Anne Smith had died a year earlier, and it was obvious to both men that Bob was in his final days. Wilson spoke plainly about the future of AA after the founders were gone. If they died without endorsing the conference, AA members would assume that they wanted the Alcoholic Foundation to run things. The least they could do was call the first conference and let the representatives decide whether they wanted to take over. Bob Smith agreed. “Bill, it has to be A.A.’s decision, not ours,” Smith said. “Let’s call that conference.”53

  In April 1951, AA members who had been elected by their fellow alcoholics at mass m
eetings around the country gathered in New York as delegates to the first General Service Conference. They were taken on a tour of headquarters and introduced to the trustees of the Alcoholic Foundation. Then, they settled down to business. The conference charter gave the delegates real authority: by a two-thirds vote, they could issue orders to the trustees, and a simple majority could deliver a strong suggestion that would be difficult to ignore. The conference was also given the power to veto nominations to the Alcoholic Foundation. The delegates began to exercise their authority almost immediately, making a number of decisions that were at odds with the views of the trustees and staff. The success of the first conference was reassuring to all. “They were proving as never before that A.A.’s Tradition Two was correct,” Wilson wrote. “Our group conscience could safely act as the sole authority and sure guide for Alcoholics Anonymous.”54

  Smith died before the meeting of the General Service Conference. He and Wilson had said their final good-byes in Akron. Wilson wrote:

  I went down the steps and then turned to look back. Bob stood in the doorway, tall and upright as ever. Some color had come back into his cheeks, and he was carefully dressed in a light gray suit. This was my partner, the man with whom I had never had a hard word. The wonderful, old, broad smile was on his face as he said almost jokingly, “Remember, Bill, let’s not louse this thing up. Let’s keep it simple!”

  Smith had wanted AA to decide its own future. Now it had.55

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Rise of the Sober Drunk

  IN THE WINTER OF 1945, director Billy Wilder took a seat in the back of a theater in Santa Barbara, California, and waited to hear how the audience would react during the first preview of his new film, The Lost Weekend. The movie was based on a best-selling novel by Charles Jackson that told the story of five days in the life of an alcoholic, Don Birnam. Wilder had bought the book at the Chicago train station and had read it twice by the time he arrived home in Los Angeles. “Not only did I know it was going to make a good picture, I also knew that the guy who was going to play the drunk was going to get the Academy Award,” he said later.1 Wilder, who was just beginning his career as one of Hollywood’s leading writers and directors, knew a good story when he saw one. But the movie had been nothing but trouble since its completion. The censorship boards that existed in many states were insisting on cuts to protect the public from what they saw as shocking scenes of alcoholic depravity. Their British counterparts forced Paramount Pictures to delete the film’s climax—Birnam’s attack of delirium tremens. The liquor industry was so fearful that the movie would fuel a resurgence of prohibitionist sentiment that it offered to buy it for $5 million.2

  Wilder and producer Charles Brackett, who had cowritten the screenplay, were nevertheless unprepared for what they heard that night in Santa Barbara. In an early scene, Birnam’s brother, Wick, discovers that Don has hidden a bottle of whiskey by tying a string around the neck and hanging it outside a window. “How did it get there?” Wick demands. “I suppose it dropped from some cloud. Or someone was bouncing it against this wall and it got stuck?” The audience members burst into laughter. Most departed before the end, leaving comment cards that called the movie “disgusting” and “boring.” Sitting in their car later, Wilder told Brackett the film was now his problem—he was moving on. “If they would have given me the five million, I would have burned the negative,” Wilder recalled.3

  That would have been a mistake. The audience was reacting not to the substance of the story but the clash between a temporary score that suggested a lighthearted comedy and the tragedy of the story line. People didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. When new music was added that featured the spooky oscillations of the theremin, one of the first electronic musical instruments, the mood of the film changed dramatically. At a preview in San Francisco that ended well after midnight, no one left early and the audience was “positively limp” by the end. The movie opened to rave reviews, and the box office boomed in response to an ad campaign that promised, “The amazing novel you whispered about rocks the screen with its daring!” Several months later at the Academy Awards, actor Ray Milland received the Oscar for best actor. What Wilder had not foreseen was that Lost Weekend would also sweep the awards for best picture, best director, and best screenplay.4

  Lost Weekend appeared at a moment when attitudes toward alcohol and alcoholics were in flux. Americans had abandoned their “noble experiment” of banning the sale of alcohol, but they lacked a clear vision for how to deal with the problems that led to Prohibition. The ancient stigma against alcoholics remained strong in the minds of average Americans as well as those of the scientists and medical professionals whose help drunks desperately needed. There were also glimmers of change. A review of popular literature during the opening decades of the twentieth century shows that there was a steady decline in the number of articles reflecting the view that alcoholism was the result of moral weakness. With the rapid growth of medicine and greater popular acceptance of the importance of science for explaining all aspects of modern life, there was an opportunity to reconsider the plight of the alcoholic.

  Lost Weekend contributed to this change. Charles Jackson’s novel portrayed the life of an alcoholic with scalding realism. To ensure its accuracy, he had interviewed doctors at Bellevue Hospital. He wouldn’t have gone to Bellevue at all if he had been able to remember his two previous visits as a patient in the alcoholism ward. He had been sober for six years when he began writing his novel, and it documented in great detail the depths of alcoholism. In its first five years, the book sold almost a half-million copies and was translated into fourteen languages. The movie reached an even wider audience.

  The movie did more than titillate. A poll conducted among New York University students who had seen it revealed that 78 percent believed alcoholism was an illness that required specialized treatment. Two decades later, Selden Bacon, the director of the Rutgers University Center of Alcohol Studies, would look back at the publication of Lost Weekend as a turning point. “Since Charles Jackson wrote the book in 1944, a great change has occurred in the attitude of most Americans toward alcoholism—a change that made possible the first really constructive steps toward control of the problem,” he wrote. Like Jackson, many of the men and women who were responsible for that change were sober drunks.5

  Lost Weekend was still flying off the shelves of bookstores on October 3, 1944, when a new organization, the National Committee for Education on Alcoholism (NCEA), announced that it was opening an office in New York City. It was the first step in what would become a far-reaching campaign to sell the public on three key ideas:

  1. Alcoholism is a disease and the alcoholic is a sick person.

  2. The alcoholic can be helped and is worth helping.

  3. This is a public health problem and a public responsibility.

  In its initial press release, NCEA acknowledged that it had a mountain to climb. “The alcoholic is a perennial problem-child,” it said. “No one knows what ails him or why he acts as he does. He is generally regarded at best as a willful nuisance, at worst as a vicious criminal.” But this idea was mistaken. “Actually, he is suffering from a terrible illness: the disease of alcoholism.” There were at least three million alcoholics in the United States, the NCEA said. An assistant surgeon general had described it as “America’s Public Health Problem No. 4,” and the problem was going to grow. The Allies were now marching toward Berlin, and there was every reason to believe that the disruptions of the postwar period would lead to more drinking. There was a solution. “The phenomenal success of Alcoholics Anonymous, with over 12,000 rehabilitated alcoholics in its membership, proves this point,” the NCEA said.6

  These were bold words for a fledgling organization. Calling alcoholism a disease and pointing to the success of AA, which had been virtually unknown to the public just a few years earlier, was not going to change things. “[P]eople persist in regarding alcoholism as a moral issue rather than as a health problem,” the NCE
A admitted. But it had a plan. “Our specific program includes: lectures on alcoholism, the distribution of literature, the formation of local committees all over the country, and the establishment by them, with the aid of the National Committee, of information centers or clinics in their communities.” It also had institutional support from the Center of Alcohol Studies that had recently been established at Yale University (later at Rutgers) to encourage scientific research into alcohol and the problems that it caused. NCEA boasted an impressive advisory board that included some experienced alcohol researchers, public health officials, religious leaders, and a couple of celebrities—author Dorothy Parker and actress Mary Pickford. “The founder and co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous” were also listed, although they were not identified. The names of Bill Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith appeared further down the list without affiliations.7

  The biggest thing the NCEA had going for it was its executive director, Marty Mann. It was somewhat surprising that the new organization was headed by a woman. While women had been leaders in the fight for Prohibition and female suffrage, the prevailing view in American society was still that women should be wives and mothers. It was probably shocking to many reading the NCEA press release to learn that Mann was “a recovered alcoholic and an early member of Alcoholics Anonymous.” The prejudice against alcoholics was strong, but society judged women alcoholics more harshly than men. Many assumed they were prostitutes.8

  One of Mann’s greatest qualifications for her job was simply that she was the first-born daughter of a wealthy Chicago family that could trace its roots back to the Puritans. She had attended elite girls’ schools, completing her education with a year at Miss Nixon’s School in Florence. When she returned, she was introduced to high society at a debutante ball. Her upper-class breeding was apparent during thousands of public appearances over the next twenty-five years: