One Simple Idea

by Mitch Horowitz

  Ebby Thacher also brought Bill to two additional philosophies that deeply impacted AA’s development: the teachings of the Oxford Group and the spiritual outlook of Carl Jung. In a sense, all of these early influences—William James, the Oxford Group, and Jung—reflected vastly different thought systems. But their unifying core was the principle that the sensitive, searching mind could bring a person to an experience of a Higher Power.

  The Oxford Group was an enterprising and profoundly influential evangelical movement in the first half of the twentieth century. Its teachings brilliantly distilled therapeutic and self-help principles from within traditional Christian thought. So named in 1929 because of its large contingent from Oxford University, the Oxford Group devised a protocol of steps and principles intended to awaken modern people to the healing qualities of God in a manner similar to that experienced by first-century Christians. These steps included radical honesty, stringent moral self-examination, confession, making restitution, daily meditation or “quiet time,” and opening oneself to awakening or conversion experiences. Much of this was later reflected in the twelve steps.

  To facilitate its program, the Oxford Group pioneered the use of group meetings or “house parties.” These took place in an encounter-group atmosphere of confession, shared testimonies, and joint prayer. Mutual help and lay therapy were central to Oxford’s program, and gave rise to a similar structure in AA.

  Yet for some Oxford members, eventually including Bill and Lois Wilson, the group-meeting atmosphere could deteriorate into a browbeating, accusatory climate in which members were singled out for not sufficiently sharing personal intimacies or detailing their moral failings. Oxford’s internal culture demanded a gung-ho approach—converts were often coached to be “maximum” in their commitment. This all-the-way style emanated from the group’s founder, Frank Buchman, an American Lutheran minister who initiated its meetings in the early 1920s. Buchman was the organization’s greatest asset and gravest failing.

  A shrewd and impassioned organizer, Buchman built the group through a strategy of recruiting “key people.” Such a figure might be a celebrity, a banker, or, on a college campus, the captain of the football team. A key person, in turn, attracted others into the fold. Buchman often organized his Oxford meetings at posh hotels or in the homes of well-to-do members—again making the group attractive by its sheen of success. Mary Baker Eddy probably devised a similar strategy in building her Christian Science churches, schools, and reading rooms in high-end neighborhoods. Even the Oxford Group’s informal use of the great university’s name (which it was later asked to discontinue) lent it an air of respectability.

  In 1936 Buchman upset all of his carefully laid plans. The Lutheran minister ignited an international uproar when he apparently set his sights on attracting a unique key person: Adolf Hitler. During the 1930s, Buchman traveled to Germany, where he met with Heinrich Himmler (whose wife was reportedly in sympathy with the Oxford Group). Buchman vocally praised Hitler as a bulwark against atheistic Communism. “… think what it would mean to the world,” he told a reporter for the New York World-Telegram in an interview published August 26, 1936, “if Hitler surrendered to the control of God. Or Mussolini. Or any dictator. Through such a man God could control a nation overnight and solve every last, bewildering problem.”

  The Oxford Group founder went further still, uttering his most notorious words: “I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism.”

  While Bill Wilson had wanted to save drunks, Frank Buchman said he wanted to save “drunken nations.” Buchman’s maximalist worldview held no appeal for Bill and Lois, who, after distancing themselves for some months following Buchman’s announcement, pulled away from Oxford entirely by 1937. By the end of the decade most of AA’s groups had stopped all cooperation with Oxford. Around that time the Buchman organization also lost some of its most thoughtful ministers and organizers, including the Reverend Sam Shoemaker, an Episcopal priest at New York’s Calvary Church, who was a major influence on Bill.

  Yet Bill’s friend Ebby Thacher had also introduced Bill to another, very different stream of ideas: the psycho-spiritual theories of Carl Jung. Bill said the psychologist’s role was “like no other” in the founding of AA. At the same time, Bill also praised William James as “a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.” Bill may have eagerly emphasized AA’s debt to respected figures like Jung and James as a way of exorcising the shadows of Frank Buchman. Yet all of these influences could not be easily separated out, one from the other. As it happens, Ebby had been recruited into Oxford by a former patient of Jung’s, a Rhode Island businessman named Rowland Hazard. Rowland’s experiences, in turn, brought Jung’s influence into AA.

  Around 1931 Rowland visited the Swiss psychologist to seek help with his alcoholism. He reported leaving the doctor’s care feeling cured, but suffered a relapse a few weeks later. Rowland returned desperate, pleading to know what could be done. Jung leveled with the American: He had never once seen a patient recover from alcoholism. “I can do nothing for you,” the psychologist said. Rowland begged, surely there must be something? Well, Jung replied, there may be one possibility: “Occasionally, Rowland, alcoholics have recovered through spiritual experiences, better known as religious conversions.” Jung went on: “All you can do is place yourself in a religious atmosphere of your own choosing”—here was the AA principle of pursuing God as we understood Him—and, Jung continued, “admit your personal powerlessness to go on living. If under such conditions you seek with all your might, you may then find …”

  Jung’s prescription matched what Bill had experienced at Towns Hospital. For Bill, it served as further confirmation of the need for a spiritual solution to addiction.

  Years later, Bill finally wrote to Jung, on January 23, 1961, in the last months of the psychologist’s life. Bill wanted to tell him how his counsel to Rowland had impacted the AA program. He also told Jung that “many AAs report a great variety of psychic phenomena, the cumulative weight of which is very considerable.”

  To Bill’s delight, Jung responded with a long letter on January 30. The psychologist vividly recalled Rowland and what he had told him. Jung repeated to Bill his formula for overcoming alcoholism: spiritus contra spiritum. The Latin phrase could be roughly translated as: Higher Spirit over lower spirits, or alcohol. It was the twelve steps in a nutshell.

  Although no vast religion of mental therapeutics ever appeared on the American scene, Alcoholics Anonymous, through its blending of ideas from Swedenborg, James, Oxford, Jung, and New Thought, created a home for the “religion of healthy-mindedness.”

  GLENN CLARK:

  COACH OF THE SOUL

  Mainline churches faced a crisis of mission in the 1920s and ’30s when congregants demanded practical help with the problems of life. An answer came from Glenn Clark, a Presbyterian lay leader who devised a radical theory of prayer drawn from mind-power influences. Although this college educator and athletic coach didn’t strictly consider himself part of the New Thought fold, he brought mental-therapeutic principles into the pews of mainline congregations. He also wrestled with ethical demons, which, at times, gained the better of his judgment.

  Clark was born in 1882 to a large and devout Christian family in Des Moines, Iowa. He became a young literature professor and coach at Macalester College, a Presbyterian liberal arts school in St. Paul, Minnesota. At Macalester, Clark developed ties to Christian Scientists and New-Thoughters, with whom he huddled in study sessions, prayer groups, and discussions.

  Clark grew enamored of the ideas of an English scientist and spiritual seeker named F. L. Rawson, a follower of Mary Baker Eddy. Though Rawson later split with the Christian Science church, the English engineer continued searching for a methodical, even scientific, approach to prayer, an interest shared by Clark. When Rawson visited the United States in the early 1920s, Clark traveled to meet his British hero in Minneapolis. To Clark’s chagrin, however,
Rawson seemed more like a technician of the soul than a man driven by a passion for truth and goodness.

  “I determined then and there not to be a mere follower of his,” Clark wrote, “but to begin where he left off.” This was Clark’s strength: never to settle for an idea but always to look for ways to build on it.

  Clark wanted a method of practical prayer—and he soon found it. In 1924 he realized that for two years straight he had experienced “an almost continuous stream of answered prayer.” What caused it? Clark was an athlete, and he discovered that to pray effectively a person had to prepare for prayer in much the same way a winning athlete trained and drilled before a competition. Clark’s prayer-preparation regimen included meditation, breathing exercises, and preliminary devotionals. With the proper degree of “warm up,” inner reflection, and sincerity, Clark insisted, prayers were almost guaranteed to work. Clark gained a national audience for his ideas in the summer of 1924 when the Atlantic Monthly (a journal rarely given to practical theology) ran his hugely popular article on effective prayer, “The Soul’s Sincere Desire.”

  Clark had a gift for blending Biblical and psychological concepts into meaningful self-help formulas. One of Clark’s techniques came to him one day when he had a breakthrough in his understanding of the Biblical verse 2 Samuel 22:34: He maketh my feet like hinds’ feet; and setteth me upon my high places. Clark saw the verse as a psychological allegory: “hinds’ feet”—an animal’s powerful rear legs—are the subconscious mind, which is man’s interior engine and spiritual center. Whoever can coordinate the workings of the subconscious with the strivings of the conscious mind—just as an animal coordinates its rear and front legs—is “most certain to reach the heights in life,” Clark wrote.

  As a college varsity coach, Clark cultivated a backslapping rapport with young people. He wanted to find ways of instructing them in constructive prayer and practical Christianity. This coach of the soul found his answer in opening a network of Christian youth camps, Camps Farthest Out. The idea for the camps came to him in a dream in 1929. He dubbed them “laboratories for experimentation in the art of praying.” After the first camp launched on Lake Koronis in central Minnesota in 1930, Camps Farthest Out set the mold for twentieth-century programs in Christian youth development. They remain popular around the world today.

  Clark’s first camps attracted a wide range of Christians, along with some Jews and nonreligious campers. AA cofounder Bob Smith attended retreats at Camps Farthest Out and spoke of Clark as one of his favorite authors. Clark also maintained ties in the New Thought world, delivering talks at conventions of the International New Thought Alliance.

  Clark believed in the power of prayer to cure illness, manage addictions, improve relationships—and even end war. That last conviction figured into a troubling aspect of his career. During World War II, Clark tended toward a myopic view of using prayer and thought-power to compel Hitler to halt his Blitzkrieg. While this approach was hardly troubling in itself, Clark believed in it so completely that his political outlook verged on appeasement. Clark was convinced that his prayer groups had slowed Hitler’s march into Poland in 1939 (rather than the recent signing of the Polish-British Common Defense Pact). Even after the war, Clark believed in Hitler’s transparently propagandistic demand that Poland could have settled matters “peacefully” by handing over the Danzig Corridor to the Third Reich. “What he [Hitler] asked for,” Clark wrote, “merely the Danzig Corridor and a little more, was a fraction of what, when provoked to war, he finally did take. In other words, all he asked for were territories which many neutral authorities thought it only just for Germany to have. Think what this offer meant!” Such convictions were tempered by neither time nor perspective—Clark wrote this following the war in 1949, seven years before his death.

  Writing in 1940, Clark described having a spiritual vision of Mussolini bending his head and lowering into a devout kneel “until his forehead touches the ground.” Soon after Clark said that, he received a newspaper clipping from his Boston publisher, Little Brown, reporting that Mussolini had written to the company to purchase Clark’s book, The Soul’s Sincere Desire, and had paid for it with “his personal check.”

  One wants to believe Clark when he wrote in the same piece: “I do not believe in appeasement or compromise of any sort” toward the Axis. And in his heart he meant this. But Clark went beyond endorsing the uses of prayer and thoughts of love to influence Hitler; he made concrete and ardently felt policy prescriptions that amounted to the very thing he claimed to be set against. The spiritual visionary was so desperate to see the light that he was blinded to darker realities.

  Other New Thought leaders, who will soon be met, raised their voices against fascism before the war and held rallies for Allied victory. Bill Wilson tried (and was deemed too old) to register for military service at the start of the conflict. Christian Scientists sent chaplains and service members to the front lines. In the positive-thinking culture Clark was a political outlier. Nonetheless, the question stands: Was Clark’s blindness endemic to the positive-thinking philosophies? The final chapter will more fully consider how New Thought and positive thinking responded to evil, or, as in Clark’s case, failed to.

  ERNEST HOLMES:

  NEW THOUGHT AMBASSADOR

  Ernest Holmes was a Maine Yankee who remade himself as a California mystic—and became one of New Thought’s greatest shapers and popularizers. While never widely known, Holmes stood at the center of Hollywood’s mystical scene in the first half of the twentieth century, attracting admirers from Cecil B. DeMille to Elvis Presley. If New Thought had an ambassador, Holmes was it.

  Born in a dingy Maine farmhouse in 1887 and never formally educated, the young Ernest devoured works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mary Baker Eddy, Scottish evangelist Henry Drummond, and British judge Thomas Troward, who published an ambitious series of lectures on the logic behind creative-mind principles.

  Ernest grew especially fond of Transcendentalism, particularly as expressed in Emerson’s classic “Self-Reliance.” Emerson’s most famous essay was also his least understood. While critics saw “Self-Reliance” as a paean to go-it-alone individualism, Ernest perceived its deeper truth: We all have within us a true self, free of conformity and conditioning; to live from this personal core is what alone makes a man great. It set Ernest’s mind on fire.

  At the start of World War I, Ernest relocated from New England to Venice, California, where his older brother, Fenwicke, was already settled. Fenwicke shared his brother’s interests and became Ernest’s intellectual partner. The two began filling lecture halls as early as 1916 with their metaphysical talks. Roundish and twinkle-eyed, Ernest shined before audiences. He exuded an unlikely charisma—as well as a shrewd command of different spiritual philosophies and religious systems. He spoke with clarity and total confidence, rarely using notes. His philosophy held that the images in our mind constantly out-picture into reality; we can direct the mind’s forces and achieve our ideals, or we can passively be pulled along by an undisciplined rush of thoughts; either way we are in the gravitational tug of our ideas.

  The young metaphysician’s following grew as he performed “treatments”—or prayer and mind-power healings—on visitors to the office where he worked as a purchasing agent for the city of Venice. After travels to New York and other cities, where he road-tested his message among different listeners, Ernest molded his ideas into the philosophy called “Science of Mind” or “Religious Science.” His movement developed into a thriving network of positivity-based churches: the United Church of Religious Science. This proved an ill-fated choice of words, which in later decades served to confuse his movement with the more visible and entirely unrelated Church of Scientology. (In 2011 the Holmes congregations reorganized under the new name Centers for Spiritual Living.)

  Ernest Holmes’s comprehensive grasp of Scripture and world religious traditions, and his serious yet personable style, seemed, at least in his person, to nudge New Thought into a territo
ry of intellectual and ethical solidity. His brother and collaborator Fenwicke presented a shakier history.

  In 1929, Fenwicke, then a Congregationalist clergyman and Divine Science minister, came under investigation from the New York state attorney general for a stock-peddling scheme. Fenwicke purportedly pushed worthless mining stocks on congregants at his Divine Science congregation in New York as an adjunct to his prosperity teachings. The attorney general got an injunction barring Fenwicke and another Holmes sibling, William, from selling securities pending trial.

  Watson S. Washburn and Edmund S. De Long, investigators for the attorney general, wrote about the Fenwicke Holmes affair in their 1932 book, High and Low Financiers:

  Five million dollars’ worth of stock was sold by the Holmes brothers during the period commencing in 1920 and ending in 1929 when William and Fenwicke were enjoined from further stock-selling activities … a trial which has not yet been held. None of this stock ever paid a cent in interest or dividends.

  The authors may have been exercising a certain degree of prosecutorial zeal. They worked for the man who pursued Fenwicke, New York State Attorney General Hamilton Ward, to whom they dedicated their book. Washburn and De Long were likely settling a score on a case that never made it through the courts. A trial had been scheduled for May 1930 but apparently never happened. State and federal court records show no decisions with Fenwicke’s name attached. The likelihood is that a plea deal was struck, probably with Ward’s successor, as Ward’s term ended that same year.