Not-God (24 page)

Dr. Tiebout, for example, wrote reminding Wilson that loud proclamations of “maturity” were the surest evidence of its opposite. The psychiatrist questioned further whether, given the self-embraced and self-defining “anarchy” of Alcoholics Anonymous, the fellowship could ever hope to be mature, and he cited as further evidence its prolonged “fence straddling” about support of Marty Mann’s N.C.E.A. Wilson’s reply attempted conciliation. On the N.C.E.A., he explained again A.A.’s “policy toward all outside enterprises;” on “anarchy,” Bill conceded the point, but called attention to A.A. as “tightly, and paradoxically, bound together by a common interest.” Before closing with an astute request for his former therapist’s guidance in these matters, Wilson acknowledged that while “in some respects A.A. has doubtless grown up …in many others it hasn’t, and may never,” asking almost plaintively, “Is it necessarily pessimistic to face the possibility that our Society may never be very mature?”
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With his letter to Tiebout, Bill enclosed the manuscript of his coming
Grapevine
article, “Your Third Legacy: … a proposal to form “The General Service Conference of Alcoholics Anonymous’ — a small body of State and Provincial A.A. Delegates meeting yearly, who could assume direct responsibility for the guidance of the A.A. General Service Headquarters at New York City.” The proposing article offered six considerations as impelling to the change. The first four merit
verbatim
recording:

Upon this proposal, rather than the conciliatory letter accompanying it, the psychiatrist pounced: “The note of bestowal is, I am afraid, going to irritate some people. … I hear a note which is a bit Rotarian in its emphasis [and therefore] likely to feed the collective ego a considerable amount of fodder.” The doctor went on to demolish the idea of a General Service Conference: “Any body which meets once a year and only once a year without intervening committee work and responsibility is likely to end up the essence of futility.” Afraid of thus opening the door to continued dependence upon some “benevolent despot … whose feeling of need to keep in touch with the grass roots is completely nil,” Tiebout did offer one positive suggestion: “Set up … a parliamentary body, just as the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association.”
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Wilson’s response revealed stiffened spine and clearer thinking about the uniqueness of Alcoholics Anonymous. Stressing how members of A.A. were “impersonally and severely disciplined from without,” he rejected the earlier charge of “continuous chaos,” and — naming two autocratic former presidents of the A.M.A. about whom Tiebout had apparently complained — pointed out that “I’m pretty sure we shall never see a [name] or a [name] for long, if at all. Here egocentricity works in our favor — the drunks won’t obey them or have them.”
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In response to Bill’s “Third Legacy” call, the first General Service Conference of Alcoholics Anonymous met in New York City in April 1951, its Wilson-chosen theme, “Not to Govern but to Serve.” Throughout the proceedings, the thirty-seven elected delegates were reminded of their limitations — that, for example, they “represented no more than half the territory covered by A.A.” Yet they also were reminded of the exact nature of their privilege. They were to accept “full present and future responsibility for the General Services of Alcoholics Anonymous,” i.e., especially, “the A.A. Book,
The A.A. Grapevine
, and the diverse functions of the Alcoholics Anonymous General Offices.”
⁶⁰

A report on this first meeting of the General Service Conference of Alcoholics Anonymous in the June 1951
A.A. Grapevine
again roused the ire of Dr. Harry Tiebout. The psychiatrist wrote Wilson an accusing letter, “pointing out the dangers of historical distortion, egotism, and damaging ingratitude.” His special objection was that Bill had unjustly ignored the role of A.A.’s non-alcoholic friends in saving Works Publishing, Inc., in its troubled early days. This particularly irked the doctor because he himself had been an open-pursed purchaser of the apparently worthless stock.
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In rejoinder, Wilson acknowledged that some clarity had indeed been lacking in his brief description of that episode of history, but Bill went on to deny vigorously any intentional “historical distortion” in the interests of making Alcoholics Anonymous appear “self-sufficient” and so more maturely independent than had actually been the case in its early days. He pointed out, in obvious high dudgeon, that “in the past year we’ve tremendously spread information concerning the vital roles played by Silkworth, Tiebout, Dowling, Fosdick, Rockefeller, Richardson, Alexander and a dozen others.”
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The underlying argument between Tiebout and Wilson clearly concerned “maturity” — its meaning, and the accuracy of any claim by Alcoholics Anonymous to it, in the past or in the present. The psychiatrist was asking: “How can a person, or a group of persons, who achieve first identity by proclaiming, ‘I am an alcoholic’ — i.e., ‘I am obsessively-compulsively inclined to addictive dependency’ — and whose greatest danger is the claim to ‘self-sufficiency’ ever claim maturity? Is not that very claim rather the best proof of
immaturity
— the denial of the reality of dependence?” The co-founder heard the questions. In the next four years he attempted to search out the answers. Themes of the succeeding meetings of A.A.’s General Service Conference bear out this interpretation. In 1952, the theme “Progress” was chosen, and the gathering’s keynote was set by Bernard B. Smith, nonalcoholic Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Alcoholic Foundation: “We here must dedicate ourselves to insure that there is never any government in the hearts of Alcoholics Anonymous.” The 1953 theme was “We Are Standing on the Threshold of Maturity,” in the words of Wilson who that year delivered the keynote address himself. “But,” as the
Grapevine’s
“Final Report” itself immediately tacked on, “he was quick to add: ‘No one can say in truth that we are really mature yet. The process of maturing will go on as long as we last.’”
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Yet the effort to cross that threshold of maturity continued. The theme of the 1954 General Service Conference, “Confidence and Responsibility,” set up the 1955 twentieth anniversary convention as truly marking the “Coming of Age” of Alcoholics Anonymous — this time demonstrated rather than merely proclaimed as had been the case in Cleveland five years earlier. The conflicting pressures within and upon Bill Wilson over this endeavor were clear in much of his correspondence. As one writer— eight-and-a-half-years sober— gently rebuked Wilson, striking a sympathetic chord in the co-founder’s own heart: “To my way of feeling A.A. is, and always will be, two drunks talking at the kitchen table over a cup of coffee.” Bill’s response revealed how he had resolved this apparent problem in his own mind: “God knows I believe in keeping A.A. simple. But you can make a thing too simple. So simple in fact that it soon gets complicated.” Wilson listed some of the examples of “plain irresponsibility” that had arisen from the members’ sense of separation from the Trustees of the Alcoholic Foundation. Moved by this perception, in October 1954, Bill pushed through the transformation of the Alcoholic Foundation into the “General Service Board of Alcoholics Anonymous.” Yet the renamed entity remained the same in composition: a majority of the Board were non-alcoholic, and selection continued to be essentially from within, although the elective process was slightly opened and formalized.
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Thus, by the time of its twentieth anniversary gathering at St. Louis in July of 1955, Bill Wilson and Alcoholics Anonymous felt that they had sound basis to label this convention the demonstrative living out of A.A.’s “Coming of Age.” Three convention events earmarked this significance: the fellowship’s acceptance, grasp, and setting forth of its own history — as recalled and understood by William Griffith Wilson; the presentation of the program and fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous in a new and revised edition of its virtually sacred “Big Book;” and the formal handing over to the membership, as represented by the General Service Conference, of the “Three Legacies of Alcoholics Anonymous … Recovery, Unity, and Service.”
⁶⁵

To acknowledge, to accept, and to forgive one’s parents — both what they gave and what they did not give, both one’s dependence upon them and one’s independence of them — is the ultimate hallmark of maturity: a perception as valid for institutions as for individuals. Bill Wilson and Alcoholics Anonymous accomplished this in 1955 in acknowledging and accepting their history.
⁶⁶

One motive impelling Wilson to write
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions
had been the realization that the original text of the “Big Book,”
Alcoholics Anonymous
, had become “frozen” — too “sacred” for even its principal author’s taste. Yet because of the phenomenal success of the original edition, Wilson and virtually all others were wary of change. The modification in one of the early printings that had substituted “spiritual awakening” for “spiritual experience” in the Twelfth Step was made more consistent in other scattered references, and the words
disease, cure
, and
ex-alcoholic
were more carefully avoided, the first generally replaced by “illness” and the second and third by circumlocutions adverting to the persistence of the condition.
⁶⁷

Otherwise, the stated “main purpose” of this first revision of
Alcoholics Anonymous
was “to bring the story section up-to-date, to portray more adequately a cross section of those who found help. In general, one important purpose [was] to show that low-bottom drunks are not the only ones who can be helped.” Accordingly, the thirty-seven stories of the second edition were arranged under three headings: thirteen “Pioneers of A.A.” whose stories were retained from the first edition; twelve “high-bottom” alcoholics whose stories were presented under the heading, “They Stopped in Time;” and twelve “low-bottom” alcoholics whose tales were headed, “They Almost Lost All.”
⁶⁸

These stories and their sources revealed that twenty years after its founding, for all its efforts at and claims to universality, Alcoholics Anonymous had not yet become a microcosm of American society or even of American alcoholics. By city, eight of the story-tellers were from Akron-Cleveland and thirteen from New York; otherwise only Chicago and Los Angeles with two story-tellers each were represented more than once in the collection. The second edition stories described eleven women and twenty-six men, a not significant distortion of A.A.’s roughly one to four female-male ratio in 1955. The distortion that was allowed, indeed, sprang from the editors’ conviction that women were under-represented in Alcoholics Anonymous partially because the historical circumstances of the book’s first edition had led to it not furnishing sufficient models with which they might identify. Occupationally, the analytic breakdown by the second edition’s editors tended to understate employment status. The “patent expert,” for example, had been a powerful attorney on the national legislative scene and in 1955 was generally recognized as an outstanding authority in his own and three neighboring states. Similarly, the “upholsterer” owned his own fairly large firm even though he continued to work as a craftsman; and the “accountant” held a position of great responsibility in a large national firm.
⁶⁹

Impressions revealed a similar picture. In one of his few passing references to his own attendance at A.A. meetings, Wilson remarked that on successive evenings he had “rubbed shoulders” with a “fur-clad countess” and a diminutive, self-effacing man “who turned out to be a former driver for Al Capone.” The claim was clearly to universality, but the impression of both sociologists and casual observers was that most regulars at meetings had hit the rocks of alcoholism from one of two related directions: the frustration of efforts at upward mobility — preeminently a lower middle class affliction; or the pains of perceived downward mobility — a torment of especially the children of the upper middle classes who had not successfully internalized the values (or the luck) of their forebears.
⁷⁰

“Oldtimers” related an interesting change. In their perception, Alcoholics Anonymous in 1955 no longer had so many “low-bottom drunks” among its members. In fact, general A.A. membership had moved from those falling from upper middle-class status to those striving to transcend lower middle-class circumstances. The very rich and the very poor were avidly welcomed at A.A. meetings, largely because they “proved” the universality of “the disease.” Only they usually did not last long within the fellowship. For all the welcome, the sense that they were making others uncomfortable eventually made them also uncomfortable.
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If, then, universality across class lines of actual membership is accepted as a criterion of the “maturity” of Alcoholics Anonymous, the fellowship’s composition in 1955 still left quite a bit to be desired. Whether more in reflection of its Oxford Group origins or as a corollary of how its key concept of “the experience of bottom” had come to be understood, the active membership of Alcoholics Anonymous was skewed to the middle classes and, more significantly, especially to those among the middle classes whose background or aspirations were above the median of even this modal population.

But, thanks in large measure to Wilson’s propagandizing efforts, the main foundation of the maturity claimed by Alcoholics Anonymous in 1955 lay in the fellowship’s acceptance of responsibility — through its indirectly elected General Service Board — for “the Three Legacies of Recovery, Unity, and Service.” The transfer of this responsibility by Bill Wilson was accomplished with significant qualifications. Wilson clearly reminded his followers that although their fellowship “has come of age, … [this] expression does not mean that we have grown up, for that is a lifetime, if not an eternal, process.” Moreover, while praising provisions that “the authority for service [is] spread over many rotating members of [the] Conference” to minimize “the tendency to worship people,” Bill realized that his own role would always be special. Therefore he attempted to delimit it precisely. He would “help in a pinch” but would “no longer continuously act for, or try to protect the movement from itself.” Wilson ran on a continuation of this point to a conclusion that was far more than a mere after-thought: “Neither will the Trustees, nor indeed can they, praise God.”
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