Not-God (16 page)

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   The profound depth of this realization was perhaps best testified to in the theme chosen by A.A.’s co-founder on the occasion of his first published “Christmas Greeting to All Members”:

OCTOBER 1939–MARCH 1941

In both New York and Akron, the active presence of a strong personality who was accepted as “co-founder” shaped the development of Alcoholics Anonymous. Because of the respect in which Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith were held, because in the minds of most of their cohorts these two men had brought them sobriety, A.A.’s growth in New York City and Akron waited upon them. But they were only two individuals; and although Wilson still harbored a zest for promotion, at least in comparison with Dr. Smith’s habitual surgical preference for working carefully on one person at a time, Bill’s own respect not only for Dr. Bob but also for the differences among his diverse coterie’s preferences and for the tender sensibilities of newly sober alcoholics inhibited his promotional instinct.

The early Cleveland experience of Alcoholics Anonymous was different, at times weirdly so. Clarence S. arranged for the meeting of his fledgling group to take place each Thursday evening at Abby G.’s home even though Abby himself still languished in the Akron City Hospital. For five months, the Cleveland alcoholics met there in relative calm. Yet many sensed that this new style represented an act of faith. While there was general, fingers-crossed acceptance that the program could be “gotten” through the book rather than by informal transmission through the Oxford Group or by direct contact with Bill Wilson or Dr. Bob Smith, this was but theory and speculation. These were hopes rather than a reflection of Wilson’s and Smith’s actual experience, and thus Cleveland became the testing ground for what Alcoholics Anonymous was to be.
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The Clevelanders met and “Twelfth Stepped” drunks — alcoholics who were still drinking — but growth was slow, not least because of the tendency to ship “really difficult cases” off to Dr. Bob and his new practice at St. Thomas Hospital in Akron. Yet, like the early New York adherents, the Clevelanders were missionary-minded. They not only had a message to carry, they
had to
carry that message. Reinforced by the program as newly published in the Big Book, from the title of which they had seized their self-conscious identity, and acutely conscious of their traumatic separation from the Oxford Group, the early Cleveland A.A.s were especially aware that working with other alcoholics was essential to their own sobriety. Whether through greater effort or by happy chance, the Clevelanders early succeeded in obtaining the publicity that all members of the fellowship craved and strove to obtain. On 21 October 1939, Cleveland’s most prestigious newspaper, the
Plain Dealer
, published the first of an editorially supported series of seven articles by reporter Elrick B. Davis. Both the articles and the editorials calmly and approvingly described Alcoholics Anonymous, emphasizing the reasonable hope this new society held out to otherwise hopeless drunks.
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The most coherent and therefore credible story of how this series came to be written and published tells that early in 1939, while the Clevelanders were still commuting to Akron, Dorothy S., Clarence’s wife, aware of her husband’s problems, uneasiness, and consequent plans, had sought out the city’s most prominent minister, the Rev. Dr. Dilworth Lupton. Lupton, established and beloved pastor of Cleveland’s First Unitarian Church, had himself failed in several efforts at helping Clarence to achieve sobriety. Dorothy, relying on the cleric’s good humor as well as his civic prominence, hoped to obtain from him favorable publicity for the proposed endeavor to bring the “miracle” of Alcoholics Anonymous to Cleveland. The sympathetic minister heard her out graciously and patiently, readily sharing her joy in her husband’s new-found sobriety. But he refused support without personal observation, and further declined even to visit a meeting in Akron, stating that “anything connected with the Oxford Groups” could not “enjoy lasting impact or success.”
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Sometime in the late summer of 1939, the Stillman Avenue group now solidly established, Dorothy S. revisited the Rev. Dr. Lupton with the Big Book in hand and the names of Catholic members Joe D. and Bill S. as evidence that Alcoholics Anonymous was not the Oxford Group. The minister listened, read the book, came to a meeting, and was impressed. “He said ‘Dorothy, you go back to the
Plain Dealer
. You tell these people that I’m going to preach on A.A.’ It was enough for publicity as he was one of the really big Protestant ministers in Cleveland and he was interested in all of the civic affairs. What he said was good copy. We got hold of …a reporter for the
Plain Dealer.”
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Where and how Elrick Davis entered the picture must remain unanswered. Clarence, surely not publicity-shy, claimed to have found him on a bar stool in obvious need of the A. A. program, a claim about which the Cleveland originator became especially adamant when it developed that some of the alcoholics — fearing for their anonymity — objected to the presence of a newspaperman at their meetings. In any case, Davis attended meetings and finally in late October published his series — a glowing report that carefully preserved Clarence’s and all others’ anonymity.

In the memory of Alcoholics Anonymous, this Davis publicity led to an influx of members, which addition, in turn, touched off the brisk multiplication of A.A. groups in Cleveland and vicinity; but this memory is not totally accurate. The number of those interested and attracted did increase substantially, and a split into three groups did develop in the weeks following the
Plain Dealer
series. But the split had less to do with greater numbers than with the Cleveland members’ disagreement with Clarence S. over the publicity itself and so over the fellowship’s yet uncertain understanding of anonymity. Indirectly, the publicity deriving from the Davis series and from a follow-up sermon by Dilworth Lupton on 26 November 1939 — a sermon reprinted in pamphlet form and widely distributed — furnished the occasion for further favorable newspaper treatment into 1940. This, in turn, set the stage for the next episode of Cleveland-based publicity for Alcoholics Anonymous: a celebrity event that in Cleveland at least marked A. A.’s breakthrough to rapid growth with all its attendant problems and opportunities.
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This next publicity was totally unsolicited, and its impact reached far beyond the Lake Erie metropolis just then beginning to flaunt itself as “the best location in the nation.” In a Chicago hotel news conference of 16 April 1940, Rollie Hemsley, erratic star catcher for the Cleveland Indians baseball team, announced that his past eccentric behavior on and off the diamond had been due to “booze,” that he was an alcoholic who had now been dry for one year “with the help of and through Alcoholics Anonymous.”
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In 1940, the revival of economic activity and the ostrich-like American attitude to the European war combined to focus the attention and enthusiasm of very many middle-class Americans on the world of spectator sports, and in 1940 professional baseball ruled triumphant among spectator sports in America. Further, the attention of the baseball world focused — through late 1939 and early 1940 — upon a quintessentially American, raw-boned, eighteen-year-old Cleveland pitcher who could throw a baseball at speeds approaching one hundred miles an hour: Robert William Andrew Feller.
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Most sportswriters played Feller up as a gawky, talented farm boy of amazing ability who needed mature guidance and handling if he were to reach his full potential. A nation of fans would willingly have become the proxy parents of Bob Feller, and there was intense interest in the man assigned that role in actuality. Cleveland Indian manager Oscar Vitt wisely understood that he could not undertake this task himself without endangering his relationship with the rest of the team, so he and Great Lakes shipping magnate Alva Bradley, the team’s owner, sought out and hired an experienced catcher, Rollie Hemsley. Hemsley was considered “experienced” largely because he had played for three teams and in both leagues. Vitt and Bradley either did not know or chose to ignore that Hemsley’s shuttling about was due to the simple fact that wherever he played, the catcher’s bizarre behavior soon revealed him to be the team drunk.
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According to Alcoholics Anonymous legend, some time in 1939, Bradley — who had heard of Dr. Bob Smith’s, Akron activity with hopeless drunks — “offered two hundred thousand if we could dry [Hemsley] up, a great amount of money, and Doc told him he couldn’t buy it.” Yet, as Bob E. relates, Dr. Bob did promise to try to help. “We picked a squad of six to work with him. I was one of the six;” and although Bradley “couldn’t buy it,” one member of the “squad” moved from the gutters of Cleveland to an executive position in the Bradley firm almost as rapidly as Feller’s fastball traveled between the mound and home plate. Somehow catcher Hemsley “got the program. He became one of the staunchest members we ever had, [setting] a terrific example for the children all over the country.” That example was strengthened in 1940 as Bob Feller reached an apparent peak. For with the calm modesty that was one of his hallmarks, the boyish sports hero attributed much of his success to the wisdom, handling, and fatherly care of the “ex-alcoholic” Rollie Hemsley.
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The impact of the Hemsley publicity contributed far more to Alcoholics Anonymous than his service as “a terrific example for the children.” Early Cleveland A.A. had been especially cautious concerning anonymity, and on the matter of A.A.’s relationship to the Oxford Group, its members, despite their eagerness for publicity, remained even secretive. Cleveland was not New York or Akron. In New York, the very size of the city and variety of employment opportunities helped the newly sober alcoholics shed some of the consequences of their drinking histories. In much smaller Akron, the close-knit establishment’s familiarity with Oxford Group practices could even ease a former drinker’s re-entry into that city’s business community. But in Cleveland, fears over the economic effects of being known as an ex-drunk were realistic: personal anonymity had been to the Clevelanders an especially cherished protection.

Group anonymity carried even to secretiveness had also been deemed important as the specter of its Oxford Group origins rose to haunt Cleveland A.A. even in the midst of the Hemsley publicity. On the one hand, Cleveland members feared that advertising the Oxford Group source would alienate respectable supporters such as Lupton and render Catholic participation in Alcoholics Anonymous impossible. On the other hand, fears arose from a concern that explicitly denying A.A.’s Oxford Group roots might provoke those who were Group-inclined to attempt a take-over and make a clear return to Group orthodoxy. Both misgivings had especially pressed after the internal fracas over Clarence’s role in the Elrick Davis affair.
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Through the summer of 1940, the wake of the Hemsley publicity proved not only unthreatening but uniquely beneficial. Despite an un-cautious and even erroneous mention of the Oxford Group in one newspaper story, Hemsley’s example contributed to the sobering of the father of a strategically located and respected Catholic priest. Father N.’s gratitude resulted in the staff of at least one Catholic hospital welcoming Alcoholics Anonymous within its institution. Within Cleveland A.A., some who were more seriously committed to
all
the Oxford Group principles moved off to begin their own group. But the new group saw itself as an expression of Alcoholics Anonymous rather than as a return to the Buchmanites who by now were calling themselves “Moral Re-Armament.” Thus the actual results of the Hemsley publicity soothed diverse anxieties for all A.A.s. Later in 1940, Wilson could and would approve even the use of pictures in the Jack Alexander
Saturday Evening Post
story, but for which concession the story might not have been carried in that pictorially-oriented magazine. More ambiguously, the foundation was laid for the later breaking of anonymity “for the sake of the good of others” by Marty Mann — the next occasion on which Alcoholics Anonymous would face the necessity of re-thinking its understanding of its name.
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Yet despite the importance of these events in Cleveland to A.A.’s membership growth and confrontation with anonymity, the heart of the Cleveland contribution to Alcoholics Anonymous only accidentally had to do with numbers or publicity. Fundamental to the program of Alcoholics Anonymous from its moment of self-conscious origin had been “working with others.” The factors that ultimately shaped this awareness for all A. A.s lay embedded in the Cleveland experience that flowed from the Davis and Hemsley events. Most significantly, the membership influx generated by these events came in the context of special wariness over anonymity and about the Oxford Group connection.

In this precise context, three characteristics that were distinctively to mark the fellowship and program of Alcoholics Anonymous developed. Like everything else in A.A., their workings-out were pragmatic; yet how these characteristics evolved revealed much about the core of Alcoholics Anonymous. Because of the tensions over anonymity and the Oxford Group relationship, but related also to the quick increase in membership and the peculiar geography of Cleveland and environs, groups quickly split up and split off. The passage of time and later developments veiled particular causes in individual cases in the memories of Cleveland “oldtimers,” but as the groups split and grew, each of the four listed factors were operative — often in confused combination.
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