Not-God (17 page)

Perhaps because of the very confusion over how each group got started, the early Clevelanders found it useful to rotate leadership — even for the simple functions of selecting speakers, choosing discussion topics, and putting those who requested information or help in touch with currently active members. Six months became the usual term on a committee, one of whose members dropped off and was replaced each month, and membership on which was determined only by seniority within the group. Everyone thus had an equal opportunity to hold office, the criterion being sobriety rather than the popularity rewarded by election. Responsibility to the program became more important than pleasing any individual, faction, or group: no one could be kept either in or out of this modest and shared role. And insofar as the sobriety of all was deemed due to faithful practice of the A.A. program, the program received first loyalty. Thus the ideals of “trusted servants” and “principles before personalities” became enshrined and safeguarded in practice.
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Again several factors — some peculiar to the Cleveland situation of the early 1940s, and others inherent although latent at the time in Alcoholics Anonymous — combined to produce the unique A.A. phenomenon of “sponsorship.” The factors peculiar to Cleveland were rapid numerical increase, brisk fission into new groups, the divergent understandings of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous that arose from differing attitudes to anonymity, and the members’ differing attitudes to Oxford Group ideas and principles. The core A.A. ideas mediated from latency into practical expression were the importance of “identification” as the main, if not the sole route, to “getting the program;” the deep sense that “this simple program” could be “gotten by anybody,” but that the “anybodys” concerned were very different in accidental ways; and a profound awareness concerning sobriety that “you keep it only by giving it away,” an especially impelling conviction of the need for “working with others.”
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And so, “sponsorship” came into practice. The official Alcoholics Anonymous pamphlet entitled
Sponsorship
began in typical A.A. style: “What Is Sponsorship?” a question answered by an historical narration of Bill Wilson’s contacts with Ebby T. and Dr. Bob Smith in 1934-1935. Only after this story was an analytical description of sponsorship offered. “Essentially, the process of sponsorship is this: An alcoholic who has made some progress in the recovery program shares that experience on a continuous, individual basis with another alcoholic who is attempting to attain or maintain sobriety through A.A.”
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“Shares.” The Oxford Group-derived term at first shunned by Alcoholics Anonymous was reinstated at the very heart of the continuity of the A.A. program. The ready, easy, open-housed “fellowship” of A.A. — especially as it had bloomed in Akron — could not be maintained as Alcoholics Anonymous grew and expanded; nor could the life-style of “communal living” which pre-1942 Cleveland alcoholics cherished in recollection of their earliest days in the program. To the east, New Yorkers and groups derived from New York experimented briefly with “A.A. clubhouses” — a trace of which long remained in the ever-full coffee urn surrounded by overstuffed chairs at A.A.’s central offices in larger cities. But clubhouses in general did not work out nor did the primitive feeling of “fellowship” survive.
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At a most profound level, then, early Cleveland Alcoholics Anonymous — largely enabled by its very self-conscious, explicit rejection of the Oxford Group connection — reached back into the womb from which it and all A.A. had issued to seize for its own practice the means that transmitted the continually evolving key to life as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous: the achievement of honesty and identification by “sharing.”

The first national publicity given Alcoholics Anonymous had preceded that in the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
, but it had not produced a similar effect. In the summer of 1939, Fulton Oursler, editor of
Liberty
magazine, had agreed to a proposal by feature-writer Morris Markey for an article on Alcoholics Anonymous. The piece appeared in the 30 September 1939 issue under the somewhat unwelcome title, “Alcoholics and God.” Although they desired publicity, most members of Alcoholics Anonymous — wary of being labeled a “religious” group — winced at both this heading and the article’s content. The title and Markey’s almost cravenly apologetic insistence that “the root of this new discovery is religion,” explained for many of the new fellowship’s members the failure of the coverage to attract many to their program. Markey’s failure to grasp or to present adequately the experience and sense of “bottom,” and especially the way in which he did present the alcoholics’ need to work with other alcoholics, proved unlikely to make the program attractive to Americans.
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Markey highlighted the image of required zeal that the group had been so careful to avoid: “Every member of the group — which is to say every person who has been saved — is under the obligation to carry on the work, to save other men.” The
Liberty
treatment offered an analysis of the success of the program that was ill-designed to render it desirable: “Their psychological necessity to drink was being changed to a psychological necessity to rescue their fellow victims.…” Alcoholics Anonymous as organization needed other people, and at this time needed some of them for publicity; but with all the good will in the world this kind was less than adequately helpful.
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Especially galling was the fact that the
Liberty
treatment was the second failure of nationwide publicity. Earlier in the summer of 1939, the irrepressible Morgan R., the vibrant, red-headed Irishman who, a few months before, had used his acquaintance with an official of the Arch-diocesan chancery to mediate between Alcoholics Anonymous and the Catholic Church, remembered still another well-placed friend, and triumphantly reported that the popular radio journalist Gabriel Heatter was willing to interview him on his nationwide broadcast.
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The group was ambivalent — agog but also aghast. Alcoholics Anonymous needed public attention: the Big Book had just been published but had not been noticed. Surely Morgan’s story on the air might evoke interest — and sales. On the other hand, “My God …
Morgan?”
With some recent fiascos in mind, the group had reason for concern. “What if the lately released asylum inmate should be drunk on the day of the broadcast?” Using one A.A.’s membership in the Downtown Athletic Club, they conducted the grumbling Morgan into captivity. For almost a week, members took turns sitting up with him around the clock, never letting him out of their sight. Morgan stayed sober, the broadcast took place, but book orders did not flood in.
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Morgan’s sobriety sustained the re-inflation of personal (but anonymous) national publicity; whether Alcoholics Anonymous itself could survive the subsequent deflation was another question. Hank P., “brandishing his pad of [virtually worthless] Works Publishing certificates,” had extracted from recruits new to the fellowship five hundred dollars with which “to send a shower of postal cards to all physicians east of the Mississippi River,” calling their attention to the importance of the broadcast and including a return order-card for the book
Alcoholics Anonymous
.
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So confident were the New York alcoholics after what they felt was the smashing success of Morgan’s radio appearance that “by a great effort of self-restraint” they stayed away from the post office “for three whole days.” That brief eternity later, armed with “a couple of suitcases to bring home some part of the great influx,” they went to the neighborhood post office. They found exactly twelve cards. This was surely discouraging, but perhaps their alcoholism had prepared the sober alcoholics for what came next, because it got worse. Of the twelve replies, “some ribbed us unmercifully. Others, evidently inscribed by medics in their cups, were totally illegible.” Their painfully scrounged five-hundred-dollar investment and complicated efforts to ensure Morgan’s sobriety had netted a grand total of two orders for the book.
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As the late summer of 1939 passed into autumn, reviewer notice of the Big Book increased. Unfortunately, most of the reviews appeared in the denominational religious press. The Fosdick review had been submitted, “as a matter of first choice,” to the
New York Herald-Tribune
, but this respected, large-circulation newspaper proved uninterested. Percy Hutchison of the
New York Times
had reviewed the book favorably — devoting more attention to “psychology” than to “religion” — in June of 1939. Yet nothing more came of this till after the
Plain Dealer
notice, when the
Washington Post
referred back to the
Times
-Hutchison review as evidence of the new phenomenon’s seriousness and credibility. This fortunate coverage probably helped prepare the public to receive sympathetically the splash of new publicity from the soon-to-come Rockefeller dinner and Hemsley notoriety.
^23
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At the first 1940 meeting of the trustees of the floundering Foundation, Willard Richardson appeared beaming with ill-concealed mysterious enthusiasm. After the regular business, of which there was precious little, had been settled, Richardson revealed that John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had indicated that he thought the time had come to offer the struggling fellowship encouragement and impetus. Rockefeller had proposed a dinner meeting to which he would invite several hundred of his friends and business associates. First-hand exposure to the program would offer these men of wealth and power the opportunity “to get in on the ground floor” of a worthy enterprise.
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Eagerly, Wilson scanned the list of four hundred proposed names. He found “a veritable constellation of New York’s prominent and wealthy.” Certain from all his own experience that what his program most needed was financial support, Bill noted approvingly “that their total financial worth might easily be a billion dollars,” and he left the trustees’ meeting in high spirits to engineer his side of the preparations: priming the alcoholics invited for the significance of the event and the opportunity of the occasion.
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On the evening of 8 February 1940 the dinner party gathered at the Union Club in New York City, “a club,” Wilson noted almost smugly, “even more conservative than the Union League itself.” Some seventy-five of the invited four hundred were present. During the mingling before dinner, the non-alcoholics were cheerfully supplied their customary cocktails, while the alcoholics nursed the sweetness of the thrill of thus so casually witnessing that they were not anti-alcohol, that their scheme was not to dry up the world. Strategically, Wilson had arranged that the tables be small and that at each was seated one of his sober alcoholics. Though the best was yet to come, especially from the point of view of the non-alcoholic guests, the seating too proved to be a masterstroke: “At one table sat our hero, Morgan, as impeccably dressed as a collar-ad boy. One gray-haired banker inquired, ‘Mr. R., what institution are you with?’ Morgan grinned and replied, ‘Well, sir, I am not with any institution at the moment. Nine months ago, however, I was a patient in Greystone asylum.’ The interest at that table took a sharp upturn.”
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After the dinner (“squab on toast. For a bunch of ex-drunks, we were doing remarkably well”), Bill and Dr. Bob spoke, recounting their stories. Then, to underline the seriousness and worthiness of the project, they were followed by “Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, representing religion, and Dr. Foster Kennedy, the world-renowned neurologist, … for medicine.” John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had been taken suddenly ill, so his son Nelson served as host. Finally it came his turn to speak, in his father’s name. To the alcoholics present, the suspense was almost unbearable as young Nelson went through the formalities of reviewing his father’s interest in this new enterprise. Breathlessly, they awaited “the climax — the matter of money.”
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Nelson Rockefeller obliged. “Gentlemen,” he concluded to the guests representing almost inconceivable wealth, “you can all see that this is a work of good will. Its power lies in the fact that one member carries the good message to the next, without any thought of financial income or reward. Therefore it is our belief that Alcoholics Anonymous should be self-supporting so far as money is concerned. It needs only our good will.”
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The non-alcoholics clapped lustily at the content if not the style of this peroration, rising to express their agreement with and appreciation of the Rockefeller perspicacity. In a stunned disbelief which masked their shattering disappointment, the alcoholics went through the motions of joining in the applause. The dinner over, a fresh cordiality infusing the final handshakes and goodbyes, the guests began to leave. Ruefully, their puzzlement muffling their frustration, Wilson, Smith, and the precisely proper alcoholics watched “the whole billion dollars’ worth of them [walk] out the door.”
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In the week following the dinner, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., expressed interest in sending transcripts of the talks and copies of the Big Book to all who had been invited. Alcoholics Anonymous sold the books to Rockefeller — “and we let him have them at a whopping discount, too: one dollar each.” In an accompanying letter, the world’s richest man “reiterated his high confidence in Alcoholics Anonymous, the satisfaction he had in knowing that many of his friends had witnessed the start of a movement of such great promise, and his deep conviction that our society ought to be self-supporting.” He went on to say, however, that a little temporary assistance was needed, and that he was giving $1,000 to the new group: an amount — it might be noted —just balancing his $2.50 discount on four hundred books. Yet the money was important, and from those who heard a hint in the Rockefeller letter and gift of the book, A.A. realized an additional $2,000.
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