The Sober Truth (4 page)

Although Wilson felt indebted to the Oxford Group for many things, he would eventually break from the organization. He was frequently dismayed by the group’s lack of interest in alcoholics, as well as its increasing reliance on fame-seeking stunts. He also bristled at its repeated admonishments of his smoking and at a hierarchical structure that designated certain members “maximum” after they had attained a state of purity and seniority that others lacked.

One bedrock tenet of the Oxford Group, however, would influence AA for years to come: an absolute opposition to medical or psychological explanations for human failings and thus a complete prohibition on professional treatment of any kind.

AA is said to have been born when Bill Wilson met Dr. Bob Smith, who would eventually become Wilson’s first successful sobriety effort. Wilson had tried to help many alcoholics before “Dr. Bob,” but discovered to his exasperation that the story of his own miraculous conversion did not have the effect he desired. When a business trip took him to Akron, Ohio, however, he successfully made the case for spiritual rebirth for the first time to the doctor, whose drinking had shredded his life and practice.

Wilson and Smith soon joined forces to share their sobriety with others. They strongly believed that helping other people get sober had a salutary effect that flowed both ways: it would cure the “target” and it would help to shore up their own recovery. During this early stage in the organization’s history, the two men also developed some theories of their own, including the notion that alcoholics were “in a state of insanity rather than a state of sin.”
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They soon systematized their outreach efforts:

This approach met with tremendous resistance. In one early internal audit, Wilson and Smith calculated their success rate at just 5 percent. Even many of those who seemed willing to listen and try returned to drinking.

Still, after a couple of years the two men felt encouraged: “Among those they had tried to help, the failures were endless, and many of those who seemed sincerely willing to try their approach were struggling. When they were done counting, though, they realized that between Akron and New York there were now forty alcoholics staying sober, and half of them had not had a drink for more than a year. Their program was working.”

Wilson decided it was time to write a book.

When Bill Wilson sat down to write
Alcoholics Anonymous
, he first prayed for guidance. The Twelve Steps themselves reportedly came to him in a single inspiration. (He identified the number twelve with the Twelve Apostles, and felt that this was a fitting number.) Besides enumerating the steps for the first time, the “Big Book,” as it came to be known, included a number of “case studies” describing the lives of early members who recovered with the help of AA. (Throughout his life, Wilson quietly kept track of those members whose experiences had been considered solid enough for inclusion in the book: about half of them had not remained sober.)

Wilson and his early acolytes promoted the book every chance they could. So devoted were AA’s early members to burnishing the reputation of their fledgling organization, in fact, that when one member, Morgan R., secured an interview on a widely popular radio show, members kept him locked in a hotel room “for several days under 24 hour watch” out of fear that he would drink before the show. When the interview went off successfully, another early backer, Hank P., mailed twenty thousand postcards to doctors, urging them to purchase
Alcoholics Anonymous
.
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Despite these efforts, AA would not become widely known until a few years later, when two national articles were published in rapid succession. The first appeared in
Liberty
, a very popular magazine run by Fulton Oursler, an early Oxford Group member who would also later serve as a trustee of the Alcoholic Foundation, AA’s governing body. The article was a glowing account of Wilson’s organization. The writer, Morris Markey, called AA’s method an overwhelming success, despite a notable absence of any evidence that might attest to such success. Subtitled “A Cure That Borders on the Miraculous—and It Works!,” the piece relied heavily on sources of Wilson’s choosing, especially Dr. William Silkworth, the physician at Towns Hospital who had been so impressed by Wilson’s conversion that he gave him free rein to circulate among the patients.

“Within the last four years,” Markey wrote, “evidence has appeared which has startled hard-boiled medical men by proving that the compulsion neurosis can be entirely eliminated.” Describing how the organization approached new members, Markey wrote, “One or another of the members keeps working on him from day to day. And presently the miracle.”

Silkworth, a supporter of AA from its inception, was quoted as well, assembling a motley collection of speculation and anecdote into a theory of his own:

This may have been true of some in the medical profession, but a representative opinion it was not. Yet Wilson and AA would go on to score an even greater public relations coup in the months that followed, when America’s most widely read magazine, the
Saturday Evening Post
, ran a feature on March 1, 1941, written by Jack Alexander and called simply “Alcoholics Anonymous.” It was so effusive and unqualified in its praise that copies are still circulated by AA members.

Alexander’s writing took the form of a skeptic’s journey from doubt to belief, a narrative that practically hums with enchantment—not just with AA’s methods, but with its approach to living generally. (Alexander would also go on to become a trustee of the Alcoholic Foundation.)

Among other points, Alexander echoed and amplified the same antiprofessional message as the
Liberty
article, underscoring what remains a widely held belief among many AA members: that only an alcoholic can help another alcoholic: “A bridge of confidence is thereby erected, spanning a gap, which has baffled the physician, the minister, the priest, or the hapless relatives. . . . Only an alcoholic can squat on another alcoholic’s chest for hours with the proper combination of discipline and sympathy.” Alexander also waxed poetic about the rosy existence of those saved by AA, highlighting a parade of success stories. One extended passage memorably described the benefits of joining AA’s nationwide brotherhood of bonhomie:

Fabulous life aside, the article also offered some uncited statistics. Over two thousand souls had been “saved by AA” to date, claimed Alexander, and the organization’s success rate was without equal:

Alexander also pointed out one Philadelphia chapter that claimed an 87 percent success rate, once again without any confirmation.

There is but one mention of an opposing viewpoint anywhere in the feature, and it is quickly eclipsed before the author even finds his way to the end of the next sentence: “However, many doctors remain skeptical. Dr. Foster Kennedy, an eminent New York neurologist, probably had these in mind when he stated at a meeting a year ago: ‘The aim of those concerned in this effort against alcoholism is high; their success has been considerable; and I believe medical men of goodwill should aid.’”

Alexander closed the piece with a description of Bill and Lois Wilson’s life that bordered on hagiography: “In a manner reminiscent of the primitive Christians, they have moved about, finding shelter in the home of A.A. colleagues and sometimes wearing borrowed clothing.”

The article was a sensation. It drew six thousand letters from around the world, all of which the
Post
promptly forwarded to the Alcoholism Foundation. By the end of that year, the
Ladies’ Home Journal
had published a similarly glowing piece and AA had been featured in a gushing “March of Time” newsreel shown throughout the nation.
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AA’s members recognized early on that to establish true legitimacy, they would eventually need to earn the imprimatur of the scientific community. The process was hardly smooth. When the Big Book was first published in 1939, the American Medical Association, bewildered by its tone and inflated claims, called the work “a curious combination of organizing propaganda and religious exhortation. . . . [T]he one valid thing in the book is the recognition of the seriousness of addiction to alcohol. Other than this, the book has no scientific merit or interest.”
¹⁷

The
Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases
went even further in 1940, calling AA a “regressive mass psychological method” and a “religious fervor,” writing: “The big, big book,
i.e
. big in words, is a rambling sort of camp-meeting confession of experiences, told in the form of biographies of various alcoholics who had been to a certain institution and have provisionally recovered, chiefly under the influence of the ‘big brothers of the spirit.’ Of the inner meaning of alcoholism there is hardly a word. It is all surface material.”

Undeterred, AA wouldn’t have long to wait before one of its own had discovered a way to influence the establishment from within. Marty Mann, a wealthy Chicago debutante, was among the first women ever to join Alcoholics Anonymous. Her own conversion story describes being struck instantly and irrevocably by a passage in the Big Book, “We cannot live with anger”—a phrase that reportedly produced in her an immediate and life-altering sense of calm. Not content to simply spread the word one-to-one as the twelfth step recommends, Mann became an active force in lobbying for the group on a national stage. Her breakthrough came when she formed the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, an advocacy group that is still active. Under the aegis of this newly formed organization, Mann testified many times in front of medical communities, often without disclosing her status as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous.

In 1943 Marty Mann and Bill Wilson had joined forces with another major figure—E. M. Jellinek—to establish a new institution at one of the nation’s most prestigious schools: Yale University. Wilson himself was placed on the faculty.

Jellinek, an important figure in his own right, is considered the primary author of the “disease theory” of alcoholism, which holds that heavy drinking is in some substantive way different from other behaviors—that rather than being a behavior, it is in fact a gradually progressive disease analogous to other chronic medical illnesses. His model of inevitable deterioration was soon disproven (Jellinek ultimately distanced himself from it), but AA embraced it. Even today, AA members regularly repeat the mantra that continued drinking leads inevitably to insanity and death.

It was perhaps unexpected that AA would fasten onto Jellinek’s view, given that the physician’s model of alcoholism as a medical disease did not precisely comport with the organization’s own model of alcoholism as a spiritual illness. But throughout AA’s history, its members have often embraced any literature that references disease, whether degenerative, genetic, or biochemical. AA favors the term
disease
because it fits with the description of alcoholism as a disease in its own literature. It also supports the foundational notion that an addict’s behavior is uncontrollable (“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol”). Ultimately the mechanism of the disease (and whether it is strictly logical to embrace it, given AA’s own views) has been less important than the word itself.

Jellinek’s landmark paper establishing his ideas was published in 1946.
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It went on to be heavily cited in the years to come—despite the fact that it was based on a study funded by Marty Mann and another backer and employed just ninety-eight questionnaires returned by self-selected members of AA who had seen them in the
Grapevine
, AA’s own magazine.
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