Not-God (21 page)

Perhaps because of the Traditions’ focus upon the
fellowship
of Alcoholics Anonymous, the decade from 1945 to 1955 was characterized by discovery of a not particularly welcome implication of one of its maxims. Alcoholics Anonymous — and especially Bill Wilson — learned that if indeed, on the one hand, in every “problem” lay hidden an “opportunity,” so, on the other hand, could large opportunities and even apparent successes at first disguise but then reveal ominous problems. Between 1945 and 1950, the happy opportunity of increased social acceptance inclined Wilson and others to think of Alcoholics Anonymous more as
adequate
to its task than as
limited
in its mission. A problem arose when the focus on adequacy led some to forget that this sufficiency itself sprang from limitation — that precisely as “fellowship,” A.A. was first
community
rather than even diluted organization.

But Alcoholics Anonymous and Wilson learned from the unwelcome results of social acceptance and first strivings to organizational autonomy. Between 1950 and 1955, “Bill W.” as sole surviving co-founder turned his attention back to the roots of the A.A. program, analytically as well as historically. Both the opportunity and the problem surfaced in the presentation to Alcoholics Anonymous by the American Public Health Association of its 1951 Lasker Award for “a great venture in social pioneering which forged a new instrument for social action; a new therapy based on the kinship of common suffering; one having vast potential for the myriad other ills of mankind.”
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The tribute contained a subtle but severe threat to the sense of wholeness in limitation to which Wilson had begun to retreat. In largely unconscious response to this threat, influenced also by what had been learned from the problem-opportunities of the previous five years, Bill Wilson and Alcoholics Anonymous devoted the half-decade between 1951 and 1955 to a self-conscious quest for the “Coming of Age” of the fellowship, with attention directed to whatever was deemed immature and alienating in the group’s experience more than to its strengths or possible extension of its competence. Bill set out to write a second book. In it, he portrayed and explained Alcoholics Anonymous as “a way of life” to be ever open-ended and so to be ever more deeply grasped. On the tenuous organizational level, meanwhile, Wilson pushed step by step the changes that would give Alcoholics Anonymous the qualities of a mature, democratic society: representation, election, and — ultimately — responsibility.

Mid-1941 found Alcoholics Anonymous moving its offices uptown to a location near Grand Central Station. Wilson and his helpers welcomed not only the additional space but also the opportunity to be of more ready and handy service to the many travelers who came to New York City. Slowly, listening to a variety of stoppers-by, Wilson and the people assisting him “began to see Alcoholics Anonymous as a vision for the whole world.”
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The fellowship’s growth continued by almost geometric progression. The two thousand members, largely in the northeastern United States, who had witnessed the
Saturday Evening Post
publicity in 1941 had by 1945 grown to over fifteen thousand. Most were American citizens, but because of wartime circumstances, a small percentage of their number were scattered around the globe. Especially in Anglo-Saxon cultures, these “loners” began to find native alcoholics ready and eager to hear their message.
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As the membership increased, so proportionately grew the correspondence directed to the New York City office. Most of the letters requested literature or information about other local anonymous alcoholics, but many also contained questions of procedure, practice, and on occasion, theory. Doggedly, Wilson devoted hours on end to answering these queries: “If I understand correctly, your problem sounds similar to.… On that occasion, these good people, now years sober, tried. … Of course, it is for you and your group to work this out: I can only relate to you what we seem to have learned from past experience. Perhaps you and your group will choose to follow this, but whether you do or not, please let us know how it comes out.”
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The “Twelve Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous” emerged directly from this correspondence. By 1945, some of the questions had become noticeably repetitious, which suggested that “all this mass of experience might be codified into a set of principles which could offer tested solutions to all our problems of living and working together and of relating our society to the world outside.” Such matters as “membership, group autonomy, singleness of purpose, nonendorsement of other enterprises, professionalism, public controversy, and anonymity in its several aspects” certainly seemed settled by consistent — and at times painful — experience. Yet Wilson hesitated. He feared loss of the personal touch that also added to his own and A.A.’s larger reservoir of experience. Slowly, however, writer’s cramp, the scantness of staff assistance, and the repetitive nature of some concerns won out. Stressing that “a code of traditions could not, of course, ever become rule or law [,] but might serve as a guide for our Trustees, Headquarters people, and especially for groups with growing pains,” Wilson first published “Twelve Suggested Points for A.A. Tradition” in the fellowship’s recently inaugurated journal,
The A.A. Grapevine
, in April of 1946.
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This first publication was in a “long form.” Its text was soon reduced, more closely and memorably to parallel the precisely two hundred words of the Twelve Steps which comprised the constitution of the A.A. program. In this now hallowed “short form,” the Twelve Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous read:

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

Two:  For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority — a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern.

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

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

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

Six:  An A.A. group ought never 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.

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

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

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

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

Eleven:  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.

Twelve:  Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our Traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.
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These twelve traditions served the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous well, perhaps because two of the major problems the organization faced were being resolved at the very time of their formulation.

In the earliest history of A.A., those who sobered up and “got the program” had tended to be “grim and utterly hopeless cases, almost without exception.” Such had been the type of alcoholics sought out by the earliest members: people who, they thought, could readily identify with the degradation they themselves felt. Further, “the experience of bottom” had fostered such selectivity. Felt-degradation was rooted in a perceived falling from ideals — and usually quite high ideals in the days of the Oxford Group connection and the religious press publicity. The common explanation offered for anyone’s failure to grasp the program of Alcoholics Anonymous ran, “He hasn’t reached bottom yet;” and thus those primarily seeking “success” in their Twelfth Step work had tended to search out their “pigeons” literally in the gutter.
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The aftereffects of the
Saturday Evening Post
story began to change this. “Now younger folks began to appear. Lots of people turned up who still had jobs and homes and health and even good social standing. These in their turn were able to persuade others like themselves of the need for A.A.” The concepts of “bottom,” however, and of “surrender” and “conversion” remained. The idea of
limited control
both clarified and was clarified by this development: “bottom” could be raised, but the
necessity
of the bottom experience perdured. As Wilson himself continued his explanation:

The “conscious technique” developed was the stark portrayal of the early symptoms of alcoholism as these were understood by Alcoholics Anonymous, joined with a dreadful stress on the inevitability of the “progression” of these symptoms. The safeguarding of the A.A. vision, the acceptance of “not-God,” was meanwhile guaranteed by the now-formalizing Third Tradition: to seek out Alcoholics Anonymous would ever imply the desire to stop drinking
plus
felt inability to do so without assistance and support. To approach Alcoholics Anonymous was necessarily to proclaim publicly, “I need help.” This proclamation lay at the root of “the only requirement for membership.”
¹⁰

“With my
drinking
[of alcohol]” was of course implicitly understood as subjoined to the “I need help,” according to the Third, Fifth, and Tenth Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous. The question of “other problems” remained latent through most of this period, and was finally resolved only laboriously over the next twenty-five years. Yet as early as the autumn of 1945, Bill Wilson took notice in two
A.A. Grapevine
articles of what in time became a seductive invitation to extend the scope of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. “Evidence on the Sleeping Pill Menace” and “Those ‘Goof Balls’” treated the “Pill Problem” as it affected alcoholics. As awareness of the parallels and especially of the mutually enhancing relationship between alcohol and more esoteric mood-changing chemicals deepened, A.A. experienced pulls from both within and without its own membership to include in its program all “mood-altering drugs,” and in its fellowship all those apparently addicted to them.
¹¹

The invitation was attractive, for the understanding of the taking of psychoactive drugs as “chewing your booze” — and so inevitably a step to the drinking of actual “booze” — came more and more to be verified by the sad, painful, and at times fatal experience of too literally fundamentalist members. Further, many
individuals
accepted the invitation. Expanding the notion of alcoholism to a concept of “chemical dependency,” they began to apply the precise program of Alcoholics Anonymous to other chemical addictions. By the 1960s, this practice provided a pathway for A.A. ideas to infuse treatment techniques aimed at an astounding diversity of problems and people in the larger culture for whom alcoholism, strictly speaking, was only a very remote bogey.
¹²

But Alcoholics Anonymous itself, faithful to its traditions, remained aloof. Generously, the fellowship shared its ideas and literature with any who found them helpful. More cautiously, it declined to accept responsibility for other ideas and literature that reached further than the precise problem of alcoholism. A.A.’s final formulation of its stance on “chemical dependency” occurred only after 1955, but the Traditions hammered out in the experience of the early 1940s rendered that ultimate posture inevitable.
¹³

Helpful to this process of resolution was the fellowship’s discovery of an aptly guiding larger history. On the front page of the August 1945
A.A. Grapevine
, Bill Wilson — two months before his first calling of attention to the “Pill Problem” and eight months before the formal publication of the Twelve Traditions — offered under the title “Modesty One Plank for Good Public Relations” his understanding of the then just century-old history of the Washingtonian movement. A.A.’s co-founder began by praising the phenomenon, to which his attention had been called by a member-submitted article in the previous
Grapevine
, for its success in motivating “about 100,000 alcoholics who were helping each other stay sober.” His pointed lament was “that today the influence of this good work has so completely disappeared that few of us had ever heard of it.”
¹⁴

Always one to point a moral and here explicitly conscious of seeking support for the Traditions he was formulating, Wilson listed four flaws that had led to the demise of the Washingtonians: “Overdone self-advertising — exhibitionism;” “Couldn’t learn from others and became competitive, instead of cooperative with other organizations in their field;” “The original strong and simple group purpose [the reclamation of drunkards] was thus [by prohibition zealotry] dissipated in fruitless controversy and divergent aims;” and “Refusal to stick to their original purpose and so refrain from fighting anybody.”
¹⁵

The lessons drawn by Wilson were many-sided. Yet buried within them lay but one essential principle: “[A.A. must] make everlastingly certain that we always shall be strong enough and single-purposed enough from within, to relate ourselves rightly to the world without.” This simple equation of strength with singleness of purpose guided Alcoholics Anonymous through perilous cross pressures in the following twenty-five years. Wilson concluded his article with the exhortation: “May we always be willing to learn from experience!” A.A.’s ability to learn from the experience of others as well as from its own development was tested in many ways over these twenty-five years.
¹⁶