Onto the stage strode a tall (five-foot, eight-inch), handsome, elegant, self-assured woman, her carriage erect and graceful. As one reporter said, “Any woman would have known that her gown of soft gray wool combined with knit came straight from an exclusive designer.” Wearing a dramatic hat in the fashion of the day, her short blondish hair in a stylish cut, blue-green eyes snapping, Marty stepped to the microphone.
The woman was a lady.9
Mann had also been a terrible drunk. She had always been a handful. “Anyone who knew me could testify that I had been afflicted with a little too much of that commodity known as willpower,” she said. In her late teens, Mann turned her enormous energies to drinking. Like all alcoholics, she initially enjoyed a high tolerance for alcohol that allowed her to drink her friends under the table and then drive them safely home at the end of the evening. She married and divorced, moved to New York where she started a career in magazine journalism, and two years later, left for London where she opened and ran a successful photography studio.10
By 1932, however, Mann was an alcoholic who was drinking up to two quarts of scotch a day when she could afford it. She attempted suicide once and may have been trying again when she fell out of a second-story window onto a stone terrace, suffering injuries to her face and hip that would bother her for the rest of her life. On her return to the United States, she was carried from the Queen Mary on a stretcher because she was too drunk to walk. She spent two years in hospitals and sanitariums seeking a cure for her problem before a psychiatrist gave her a manuscript copy of Alcoholics Anonymous. On April 11, 1939, at the age of thirty-four, she attended her first AA meeting at the Wilsons’ Brooklyn home. Although she wasn’t the first woman member of AA and suffered several brief relapses, Mann was the first AA woman to stay sober.
Mann learned a lot about alcoholism over the next two years. Like most AA members, she did not have a job when she got sober. So following her release from the sanitarium, she had a lot of time on her hands. AA newcomers were given a sponsor who guided them through the twelve steps. Later, AA would recommend that sponsors be the same sex as the persons they sponsored. With no woman available to sponsor Mann, Bill Wilson took on the job. Mann spent a lot of time with Wilson and accompanied him on a trip to Akron where she met Bob Smith. She also worked with more than a hundred women alcoholics during her first year of sobriety but failed to help any of them get sober. Mann was not discouraged, but she had fewer hours to give to AA after she finally found a job as a publicist at Macy’s in the fall of 1940.
A chance meeting during lunch with her coworkers started Mann thinking about leading a campaign to educate the public about alcoholism. She noticed Grace Allen Bangs of the New York Herald Tribune sitting at a table nearby. Bangs had tried to help Mann get a job during her drinking days, but she did not recognize the young woman who walked over to say hello. “What in heaven’s name has happened to you?” Bangs asked. “You have lost at least twenty pounds and you look ten years younger.”11
Bangs listened closely as Mann told her story. Her son was an alcoholic, and she had searched in vain for information about what was wrong with him. “It’s fabulous how little I know,” Bangs said. “There must be thousands of mothers and wives like me. Marty, you must tell them.” Bangs was a woman of considerable influence. As the head of the Herald Tribune‘s Club Service Bureau, she knew the leaders of all the women’s clubs in the city, including women of great wealth and position. “We should have a primer on alcoholism, pamphlets, an information center. We should organize a committee that will find a way to finance it,” Bangs said. Mann did not encourage her at first. She was just getting back on her feet and would soon leave Macy’s for another job.12
As time passed, Mann began to give serious consideration to the idea. She was aware of a number of favorable developments. In 1940, she and Wilson attended a meeting of a new group, the Research Council on Problems of Alcohol (RCPA). Founded five years after the repeal of Prohibition, the original goal of the RCPA was to undertake scientific research on a broad range of problems created by alcohol. By 1940, however, it had narrowed its focus to “the disease of alcoholism and the alcoholic psychoses.” At the same time, it indicated that it would advocate solutions as well as conduct research. “The Research Council on Problems of Alcohol hopes to take a place with the public health agencies now combating tuberculosis, syphilis, poliomyelitis, cancer, and other major diseases,” the RCPA director Harold H. Moore declared. These words had special meaning for Mann. She had contracted tuberculosis when she was fourteen and knew that prejudice against TB patients was once widespread. Mann was familiar with the important role that the National Tuberculosis Association had played in eliminating the stigma.13
Funding problems prevented the RCPA from fulfilling its ambitious mission, but it attracted others with the same goal. One was Dwight Anderson, an expert in the new field of public relations who became a consultant to the RCPA and the head of its committee on publicity. Anderson was an alcoholic who had stopped drinking in 1932. When he was admitted to the psychiatric clinic of New York Hospital, he was fifty and addicted to the barbiturates that he took to keep from drinking. The attending physician described him as “a disheveled man of past 60, with a bad heart and an incurable mental disorder.” Only one young psychiatrist, Dr. William B. Cline, believed there was any hope for him. Over the next two months, he helped Anderson identify his psychological problems. Unlike many psychiatrists, however, Cline did not believe that Anderson could begin drinking again. “Sooner or later, you will find yourself on the point of taking a drink,” he warned. “Stop for a moment and answer this question, ‘Just what do I expect to accomplish by taking this drink?’” The question had helped him stay sober for eighteen years.14
In 1942, Anderson wrote an article, “Alcohol and Public Opinion,” that looked at the problem of alcoholism from his perspective as a public relations man and alcoholic. From the PR perspective, things couldn’t be worse. There was no social group that viewed the drunk with any sympathy. Everyone assumed that alcoholism was incurable, including doctors. But as a sober drunk, Anderson knew that this fatal diagnosis ignored the facts. Since the days of Benjamin Rush, there had been doctors who recognized that alcoholism was treatable. Anderson cited recent statistics showing that as many as half of drunks could quit drinking or at least reduce the amount they drank. Society had reached an impasse. “The expert awaits a changed public; the public awaits a change in the expert. The result is a stalemate,” he wrote.15
Anderson believed the stalemate could be broken once the public realized that the alcoholic drank because he was sick. Several key propositions followed:
Sickness implies the possibility of treatment. It also implies that, to some extent at least, the individual is not responsible for his condition. It further implies that it is worth while to try to help the sick one. Lastly, it follow from all this that the problem is a responsibility of the medical profession, of the constituted health authorities, and of the public in general.
The tools for delivering this message were at hand. “When the dissemination of these ideas is begun through the existing media of public information, press, radio and platform, which will consider them as news, a new public attitude can be shaped,” Anderson wrote. It had been done before in the fight against other “incurable” illnesses, including TB, cancer, syphilis, and mental illness. He continued, “Once the opposite concepts were established, it became a thrilling adventure to help to save the health, lives or minds of people by participation in these enterprises.”16
Mann was stirred by Anderson’s words, but she hesitated to answer his call to action. She had found a job writing radio scripts for the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers and was quickly promoted to director of research. After years of joblessness, she was reluctant to give up security, and it seemed clear that it would be necessary to start a new organization. The prospects of such a group seemed shaky at best considering the RCPA’s fin
ancial struggles. On the other hand, there was an opportunity to do for alcoholics what Dorothea Dix had done for the mentally ill.
One night in February 1944, Mann found herself unable to sleep. At 3 a.m., she went to her typewriter and wrote the first description of the NCEA. She discussed the plan with Wilson, who was supportive, but told her that obtaining the sponsorship of a scientific organization was crucial. She also consulted a small group of supporters that included Anderson, Bangs, and Dr. Ruth Fox, who had turned to Mann for advice about her alcoholic husband. The committee suggested that she approach the RCPA. The group was willing to hire her as a speaker, but Mann had set her sights higher.
Fox then urged Mann to contact E. M. Jellinek, the director of the new Center of Alcohol Studies at Yale. Jellinek had become interested in alcoholism while working as the director of research for the United Fruit Company in Honduras. Trained as a biometrician, Jellinek’s job was to analyze medical statistics, discerning trends and recommending priorities for treatment. When he discovered that alcoholism was rampant among the employees of United Fruit, he began to collect all the information he could about the problem. This led to a job with the RCPA and then to Yale, where he cofounded the Center of Alcohol Studies. The main work of the center in the early years involved research on alcoholism, including physiological, social, psychological, and historical studies. The center had begun publishing a Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, providing a platform for disseminating scientific studies of alcoholism for the first time since the demise of the Quarterly Journal of Inebriety. It also launched a monthlong summer school to educate anyone whose work involved alcoholics. In its first seven years, a faculty composed of physicians, physiologists, attorneys, clergy, and AA members delivered lectures to over a thousand students.
The Center of Alcohol Studies provided services directly to alcoholics at clinics in Hartford and New Haven. Patients received individual counseling and were encouraged to attend AA meetings. Ray McCarthy, the executive director of the Yale Plan Clinic, had pioneered a new form of therapy in which patients met in small groups to listen to short talks on some aspect of alcoholism and then discuss the issues among themselves. McCarthy, who was a sober alcoholic, had been trained by Richard Peabody, a drunk who worked as a therapist following his recovery at the Emmanuel Church clinic. McCarthy believed that group therapy helped overcome the alcoholic’s isolation and made it possible for him to recognize the nature of his problem. He also believed that sober alcoholics with proper training could play an important role as therapists. The Yale Plan Clinics treated more than five hundred patients in their first two years of operation, a period when government was spending almost nothing on alcoholism.
Jellinek responded enthusiastically when Mann described her plan for an education campaign. He traveled to New York City the next day to meet with Mann, her planning committee, and Wilson. He offered to pay all the expenses of the NCEA for the first two years and to continue to provide support after that. To educate herself about alcoholism, Mann began commuting to New Haven to work with the staff of the Center of Alcohol Studies, living with “Bunky” Jellinek and his wife during the week. In the summer, she joined eighty-eight other students at the second Yale Summer School of Alcohol Studies. Almost half of her classmates were ministers, and not all were sympathetic to alcoholics. Mann overheard a comment by one clergyman during a class trip to an AA meeting in New Haven. “If I had my way, I’d put them all on a boat and sink it,” he said. She spent several evenings trying to convince another student, Mrs. D. Leigh Calvin, that alcoholism was a disease. Finally, Mrs. Calvin, president of the WCTU, agreed. Jellinek had hired the right woman.17
The press release announcing the creation of the NCEA made a big splash in October 1944. All nine New York City newspapers carried the story, and the three national wire services spread the news throughout the country. Within days, editorials began to appear welcoming “A New Rational Solution” to the problem of alcoholism. The favorable publicity that AA received since the publication of Jack Alexander’s 1941 profile in the Saturday Evening Post undoubtedly helped draw attention to the new group, which appeared to be a logical next step toward a broader understanding of the problem. The fact that a novel about alcoholism was currently on the best-seller list didn’t hurt either. A decision by Mann gave the press release extra impact. Although she had adopted Dwight Anderson’s key concepts for a public education campaign, making them the centerpiece of the press release, she believed that his characterization of the alcoholic as a “sick” person was not strong enough. Mann described alcoholism as a “disease” five times in her brief release. She also suggested that there was a consensus among experts supporting this view. “The fact that alcoholism is a disease rather than a moral shortcoming has been known to scientists for years,” the release said.18
Mann was stretching the truth. Benjamin Rush and other doctors had described alcoholism as a disease in the eighteenth century. It was so regarded by the members of the American Association for the Cure of Inebriety beginning in 1870. But the scientists at the Yale Center of Alcohol Studies were unaware of the AACI and were only beginning their own research into the nature of alcoholism. Even Anderson had called it an illness, not a disease.
Mann believed that describing alcoholism as a disease was essential to countering the stigma against it. She explained later:
I want to make alcoholism respectable! So that all those uncounted thousands who are hiding or being hidden by their families like the proverbial skeletons in the closet, may realize that they are simply very sick people and come out for help. . . . The shame of it all is too much for them—they’d literally rather die of this ghastly disease than admit to having it.
One of the goals of the NCEA was to establish clinics where medical professionals could diagnose alcoholism and send patients to treatment. Based on her own experience, Mann believed that AA would be far more effective in getting people sober than doctors or psychiatrists. But she thought drunks would find it easier to take their first step toward sobriety by visiting a doctor. The existence of alcoholism clinics would also be a powerful symbol. “I believe that the very presence of a clinic will emphasize and advertise to the uninitiated that alcoholism is a disease,” Mann wrote.19
To get things started, the NCEA planned to form local affiliates led by prominent citizens. The launch of these groups in cities across the country was expected to generate a lot of publicity about the problem of alcoholism. The affiliates would begin by opening information offices to provide the latest facts about alcoholism to anyone who was interested, from newspaper reporters to students writing term papers. The information offices would also be a resource for alcoholics and their families, educating them about the nature of their affliction and suggesting where they might find more help.
Mann planned to spend most of her time traveling around the country making speeches and organizing local affiliates. In the beginning, she and Grace Bangs believed that socially prominent women would play an important role in her work. A women’s organizing committee was formed at the same time as the NCEA to ensure that it connected with the right people in each community.
The club women turned out to be a disappointment, but they were hardly missed. The extensive newspaper coverage of NCEA produced an avalanche of mail. In addition to hundreds of letters seeking help for individuals and requests for information, there were dozens of invitations to speak. During NCEA’s first year, Mann traveled 36,000 miles and delivered 106 speeches in 45 cities to 34,000 people. Fourteen of her addresses were broadcast on radio.
When there was enough support, Mann’s speeches were used as the occasion to launch a local committee. An organizing committee was formed to plan for Mann’s visit, scheduling a press conference soon after her arrival and arranging at least one talk a day. After her speech, Mann met with the organizers and other interested people; a temporary chair was selected and chose an executive committee that then voted to affiliate with NCEA. Five aff
iliates were organized in the first nine months. Mann began delivering more than two hundred speeches annually, and the number of local committees grew to thirty-nine in 1948, including state affiliates in Utah and Rhode Island. A public opinion survey suggested there had been a significant increase in the number of people who believed alcoholism was a disease. “[O]ur campaign of education of the public has helped change the opinion of more than 30 per cent of the adult population,” Mann said.20
The NCEA had certainly had a significant impact, but so had the rapid growth of AA. Between 1945 and 1950, AA membership increased from twenty thousand to over a hundred thousand in twenty-five hundred groups. Mann was counting on their help. She was one of the founding editors of the monthly AA Grapevine, which began publishing shortly before the launch of NCEA. So it was no coincidence when the same issue that announced the new group also included an interview with Mann. “Why, Marty, what about us A.A.s helping?” the interviewer asked. Mann agreed. “There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be. It’s my hope that they will, either as groups or as individuals. After all, we A.A.s are the people who understand best how misunderstood this whole thing is,” she said. Many of the speeches that Mann made every year were delivered to AA groups, and she encouraged AA members to hold open meetings where committees could be formed.21
AA members answered Mann’s call. Sober drunks played an important role on many of the executive committees that organized local committees, and when committees succeeded in opening an information office, they often hired a recovered alcoholic to run it. There were so many AA volunteers that Mann began to worry they would swamp the boat. NCEA was seeking broad support for its goals, and it promoted the fact that local committees were chaired by judges, college presidents, doctors, religious leaders, and businessmen. One AA volunteer was encouraged to take on the job of organizing an affiliate but also warned about being too prominent in the new organization. “We should have the fullest cooperation and support from A.A. members, but in order to get this with the least trouble and misunderstanding we suggested that A.A. members should be ‘on tap and not on top,’” Ralph McComb Henderson, Mann’s assistant, explained. There was also a danger that AA and NCEA would become so closely identified in the public mind that it would lead to confusion. Following a controversy over an NCEA fund-raising appeal in 1946, Wilson and Smith removed their names from the NCEA letterhead, and Mann stopped identifying herself publicly as an AA member.22
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