The Sober Truth (3 page)

Contemporaneous with Keeley’s clinics was a rise in so-called
inebriate hospitals
—institutions dedicated specifically to drying out alcoholics. These institutions’ philosophy, not so different from today’s rehabilitation facilities, was that people could detoxify, heal, and eventually flourish if they were deprived of any alcohol for a period of time, often up to one year. But the inebriate hospitals were somewhat different from today’s palatial rehabs in one important way: patients were often subjected to cold showers and typically housed alongside society’s cast-offs—the blind, those suffering from syphilis, the mentally ill, orphans, even prisoners.
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The inebriate hospitals also adopted another new procedure for alcoholism: prefrontal lobotomy. This, painfully, failed to cure the “disease” of alcoholism, with one account famously relating that, “[f]ollowing the procedure, the patient dressed and, pulling a hat down over his bandaged head, slipped out of the hospital in search of a drink.”
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The nation soon lost its appetite for these pernicious facilities, and most of them closed by the end of the nineteenth century. Many alcoholics were consequently forced to seek help wherever they could, often in the “foul wards” of public hospitals as well as insane asylums.

Just as private institutions devoted to specific alcoholism treatment began to disappear, American legislation was seeking new ways to vilify drinking as a moral weakness and societal scourge. Various state laws passed between 1907 and 1913 called for “the mandatory sterilization of ‘defectives’: the mentally ill, the developmentally disabled, and alcoholics and addicts.”
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Then in 1919, a watershed: the Eighteenth Amendment was passed, enshrining into law a nationwide prohibition on the sale of alcohol. Any promising treatments that may have arisen between that day and the amendment’s repeal in 1931 were almost certainly doomed to obscurity, as nobody could legally be said to be purchasing and drinking alcohol on a regular basis. Overnight, a public health issue became a legal one, and the public’s appetite for treatment seems to have collapsed. Even the popular
Journal of Inebriety
shuttered during this era, erasing one of the only scholarly forums on the causes and treatment of alcohol addiction.
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At the threshold of AA’s invention, America carried a population of alcoholics deeply fatigued by many decades of barbaric treatment, imprisonment, and isolation; rattled by errant snake oil “cures”; and suffused with a widespread sense of hopelessness. Bill Wilson was just such an alcoholic.

Although Bill Wilson would later become the primary architect of Alcoholics Anonymous, it was many years before he came to acknowledge his drinking addiction, and even longer before the famous religious conversion experience that led to the creation of AA. Given his essential role, it is useful to consider the man himself—not just for what his life has to teach us about AA, but for its power as an example of one man’s descent into the agony of alcoholism.

William Griffith Wilson was born on November 26, 1895. He came from a moderately well-to-do Vermont family, raised in a home large and impressive enough that it would later become a country inn. But Wilson’s home life was chaotic, and his childhood was scarred by a series of wrenching abandonments.

Nearly every man in Wilson’s family had a drinking problem. Wilson’s grandfather, widely known for his alcohol consumption, struggled with addiction for most of his life, signing popular promises of the day known as “Temperance Pledges” on more than one occasion. Like many men of his time, he was also bamboozled by a series of traveling revival-tent preachers who arrived promising absolution and salvation from drinking via the power of the Lord.

Nothing worked until the fateful day when Wilson’s grandfather had, by his telling, a miraculous conversion experience: “[I]n a desperate state one morning, he climbed to the top of Mount Aeolus. There, after beseeching God to help him, he saw a blinding light and felt the wind of the Spirit. It was an experience that left him feeling so transformed that he practically ran down the mountain and into town.”
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Wilson’s grandfather’s “miracle” became the stuff of legend in town. He never drank again.

Bill Wilson grew up heavily influenced by his grandfather, especially so because his parents divorced and his father moved away when Wilson was just eleven. It would be nine years before Wilson saw his father again. During this period, his mother left him as well, never returning for longer than a short visit.

Wilson had his own way of managing the feelings associated with his parents’ dual abandonment. Many accounts of his formative years describe a fierce defensiveness against his peers and an overweening desire to “prove himself”—by force if necessary—whether or not any judgment had been directed his way. If Wilson could be described as an angry person, however, there is one direction in which he seemed never to direct his resentment: “Astonishingly, Wilson never blamed his father for his absence or expressed any anger toward him” for abandoning his family for nine years, without correspondence or child support of any kind.

Wilson’s pain showed itself in other ways. He struggled in school and swung between significant highs and lows in morale. Securing a popular girlfriend in high school began an upward cycle of contentment that saw him named class president, but her death during emergency surgery devastated him, sending him into a deep depression. Wilson also suffered from occasional panic attacks, which left him convinced that he had a heart condition. As a consequence, he failed nearly every physical test he was given after eventually matriculating to military college. He suffered through many years of listlessness and deep melancholy.

Wilson also struggled with controlling his behavior. As his biographer put it, “Bill was compulsive, given to emotional extremes. . . . Even after he stopped drinking, he was still a heavy consumer of cigarettes and coffee. He had a sweet tooth, a large appetite for sex, and a major enthusiasm for LSD and, later, for niacin, a B-complex vitamin.”

Indeed, he was such a heavy smoker that the effects of tobacco would rob him of his mobility and, eventually, his life. One account recalls that he continued to smoke even in his old age when he needed frequent doses of oxygen just to make it through the day. Friends who arrived at the house reported seeing him struggling to decide whether he should take oxygen or smoke another cigarette. The cigarette won every time.

A similar pattern arose around a different behavior: serial adultery. Wilson’s need to sleep with women outside his marriage was legendary—so much so that AA members eventually put together a “Founder’s Watch” committee designed to steer him away from any tempting young women at the numerous events he attended.” Tellingly, one of Wilson’s close friends noted the utter helplessness Wilson evinced in the face of what appears clearly to have been a sexual compulsion: “I think that was the worst part of it,” [the friend] said. “Bill would always agree with me. “‘I know,’ he’d say. ‘You’re right.’ Then, just when I would think we were finally getting somewhere, he would say, ‘But I can’t give it up.’” These multiple compulsive behaviors, including alcoholism, smoking, and sexuality, foreshadow our later understanding of addiction as being a global problem not restricted to any particular substance or behavior.

Throughout his life, Wilson also suffered with bouts of depression. These episodes were frequent and paralyzing and would hound him until his death with overwhelming feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness. Once alcohol was no longer in the picture, Wilson turned to faith as a salve for these feelings. He would find temporary relief under the care of Father Edward Dowling, who “compared Bill’s malaise to that of the saints.” (Dowling would later go on to write the first Catholic endorsement of AA; he was especially impressed by the Big Book’s parallels to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola.) Wilson never wavered from his conviction that his depression was caused by “a lack of faith.”

The question of Wilson’s faith has suffused AA’s history, and has regularly come up as a point of concern and confusion. Some insight may be gleaned from Wilson’s own writings.

Wilson may have experienced ambivalence about the ideal form and structure of his belief system, but unalloyed faith was fundamental to him. Wilson claimed that “God was the source of the goodness and guidance alcoholics could rely on to help them put an end to their drinking and restore wholeness to their lives.” He maintained that people who doubted the existence of God “were standing with their backs to the light.” He never doubted the presence of a miraculous divine spirit in his own famous conversion experience, which closely mimicked his grandfather’s: Wilson “felt lifted up, as though the great clean wind of a mountain top blew through and through.”

Yet if Wilson’s embrace of religion was absolute, it was also eclectic and fungible. He once famously described himself as “a shopper at the theological pie counter.” He dabbled in Christian Science at one point and Catholicism at another. He and his wife, Lois, hosted a number of séances, which they called “spooking sessions,” throughout the 1940s and ‘50s; Lois would later claim with pride that they levitated the table “on a number of occasions.” She also liked to tell about Wilson’s spiritual powers, bragging about gifts such as automatic writing, something that reportedly meant a great deal to him.

It is essentially impossible to separate Wilson’s passion for the spiritual from his founding of AA, despite the organization’s frequent protestations that it is nonreligious in nature. Of course, Alcoholics Anonymous members have every possible view about religion. But the organization is clearly permeated with Wilson’s religious beliefs.

Wilson himself said twenty years following his conversion that he “wanted every alcoholic to be able to say, as he could, that their belief in God was ‘no longer a question of faith’ but ‘the certainty of knowledge [gained] through evidence.’”

The teenaged Bill Wilson was feeling characteristically unhappy when he had his first drink at a reception for Officer Candidate School in Bedford, Massachusetts. The effect, his biographer recounts, was instantaneous: “[A]lcohol produced in him instant feelings of completeness, invulnerability, and an ecstasy that approached the religious.” So began Wilson’s long experience with drinking.

Wilson’s early struggles with alcohol led him to numerous humiliations. He lost several jobs and most of his friends, and checked into a local hospital several times in hopes of shaking his affliction. In 1934, Wilson was approached about joining the Oxford Group, a religious organization bent on creating a moral realignment in America by facilitating spiritual rebirth through miraculous conversion experiences. Wilson’s friend Ebby Thacher, who brought him into the fold, had achieved sobriety through the organization and thought Wilson might do the same.

Wilson debated the merits of joining the Oxford Group over a period of months. His concerns were telling: “To keep drinking meant a certain alcoholic death or institutionalization, but stopping drinking by embracing religion seemed to be trading one odious dependency for another.” Thacher pressed the case, recounting the tale of their mutual friend “Rowland P.,” who had gone to Switzerland to seek care from Carl Jung. The eminent psychoanalyst had assured the man that his only hope lay in religion (Jung was a proponent of the mystical power of conversion experiences). Ebby Thacher also enjoined Wilson to read William James’s
Varieties of Religious Experience
, a work that also endorsed spiritual conversion, stating “the only cure for dipsomania [alcoholism] is religiomania.”
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When Wilson finally attended his first Oxford Group meeting, he approached the altar and pledged his life to Christ. He was back drinking the very next day. Yet a singular moment shortly thereafter would forever change his mind—and alter the history of alcohol treatment in the twentieth century. One day while lying prone and feeling despair during his fourth admission to Towns Hospital, Wilson is reported to have cried out, “I’ll do anything! Anything at all! If there be a God, let Him show Himself!” He described seeing a bright light, feeling euphoric, then a great calm. Armed with the certitude and wonder that this moment produced in him, Wilson never drank again. It was a stark pivot point in his life.
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Wilson’s story was a compelling one, but it wasn’t terribly unusual for the era. Stories of conversion experiences were beacons of hope as the nation twisted in the horrors of the Great Depression. Americans had developed a newfound suspicion of the science that had delivered mechanization and its attendant layoffs, and an invigorated interest in the sublime. Yet Wilson’s vision may have also been informed by more terrestrial factors. He rarely mentioned in retelling this story that he was being treated at the time by the “Belladonna Cure,” a chemical cocktail that included the known hallucinogens atropine and scopolamine.

Perhaps more importantly, we should notice this story’s startling similarity to his grandfather’s. Just like the older man, Wilson claimed that he’d been transported to a mountaintop, where he experienced a nearly word-for-word reenactment of the same sensations—“uplift” and “spirit”—that his grandfather spoke about more or less continuously during Wilson’s childhood.

Despite these clues that more prosaic forces may have been at work, Wilson believed for the rest of his life that he had been touched by God, and he was absolutely certain that divine experience had forever liberated him from the urge to drink.

Wilson rejoined the Oxford Group with evangelical zeal. He soon began to wonder if the organization’s spiritual practices might be adapted as a universal cure for alcoholism. Looking back on this time, Wilson wrote: “The early AA got its ideas of self-examination, acknowledgment of character defects, restitution for harm done, and working with others straight from the Oxford Group and directly from Sam Shoemaker, their former leader in America, and from nowhere else.”
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