Editor’s Note: As thousands of people converge June 9-11 on Akron, the birthplace of Alcoholics Anonymous, to celebrate Founders Day, we thought it would be interesting to reprint the Beacon Journal’s first published account of A.A. Here is what Akron journalist Keyes Beech reported Oct. 29, 1939.
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In an unidentified Akron mansion each Wednesday night there gather about 60 people who sit and talk. They talk about their experiences. They form by far the most unusual gathering in the city, for every man among them once was a hopeless alcoholic.
Their little group is known to a few outsiders as the Society of Alcoholics Anonymous. The chances are 20 to 1 or better that you never heard of it, and it is just as well that you haven’t. Alcoholics Anonymous prefers to remain anonymous.
You probably know some of them and you may have wondered, if familiar with their drinking habits, why overnight they changed from despairing soaks to decent, industrious citizens. The answer is Alcoholics Anonymous, but the story is much more than that.
To understand Alcoholics Anonymous you must first understand that alcoholics are different from other people. They may be perfectly normal in every other respect, but where alcohol is concerned they are not. Some drinkers may drink to excess and make spectacles of themselves or wrap their automobiles around telephone poles and kill somebody. Still, they are not necessarily alcoholics.
You may go to a party and get drunk and wake up the next day with a horrible hangover and your wife not speaking to you. You will swear “never again,” reach for one of the assorted brands of hangover “cures” and wish you didn’t have to go down to the office.
But the alcoholic will reach for a bottle of a bromo and the chances are he won’t even go to the office. He will stay at the home, or wherever he happens to be, and get drunk all over again. He will stay drunk as long as he can physically stand it, and then he will go to a hospital or sanitarium for a “rest cure.” As soon as his “cure” is completed he will go out and repeat the procedure.
He simply cannot stop drinking. He may writhe in the hellish despair that only an alcoholic knows. His wife may leave him, his friends may give him up as a hopeless case, his employer may fire him. His children may turn against him.
But he still will refuse to admit that alcohol is his master. In a period of sobriety he may resolve never to drink again, or if he does drink, to handle his liquor “like a gentleman.” He’ll show them! — but he never does.
When an alcoholic has suffered enough, when he is ready to admit that no earthly power he knows can cure him of his craving for alcohol, when his whole life is a seemingly hopeless wreck, and if he is still alive — then he is ready for Alcoholics Anonymous.
Members of Alcoholics Anonymous cured themselves and each other by undergoing what they call “a vital spiritual experience.” The phrase may mean absolutely nothing to you. It means nothing to anybody who has never had such an experience, but we will try to explain it later.
Remember, alcoholism is not a moral vice. It is a disease. Medical science knows no cure for the real alcoholic. Your doctor will tell you this. He may make a drunk feel better physically, but he can never cure him. Nor can psychiatry.
If a dipsomaniac quits drinking he does so not because of some treatment, but because his mental outlook has undergone a complete transformation.
Alcoholics Anonymous has been quietly functioning in Akron for the past four years. There are other such societies in Cleveland and New York. One is being launched in Chicago.
The society maintains a “blind” address. It is the Alcoholic Foundation, Box 657, Church St. Annex Postoffice, New York City.
During the four years Alcoholics Anonymous has been operating in Akron it has handled about 150 alcoholics. Some of them came from out of town. One of them flew here from California last spring. He couldn’t wait to take a train. An alcoholic would go to Tumbuctoo if he thought he would be cured, and this is important, wanted to be cured.
Of these 150 ex-rummies about 15 are still going on “benders.” The reason the cure hasn’t worked with them is because they haven’t followed directions. They thought they had conquered the liquor habit to the extent that they could “drink like gentlemen.” This, they found, was not true.
It is axiomatic with Alcoholics Anonymous that “once an alky always an alky.” The alcoholic is cured only as long as he doesn’t take a drink, meaning anything with the faintest touch of alcohol. Once cured, he must remember that where alcohol is concerned he is not like other people.
To keep from backsliding, a member of Alcoholics Anonymous must find another alcoholic to help. Or start a new one on the way to a cure. That is the way the Akron society, from which the Cleveland fellowship was formed, came into being.
A New York businessman, one of the earliest of the cured rummies, was in Akron on a business mission. It was a stock promotion venture and upon this scheme depended the reestablishment of his economic security. Alcoholism had ruined him financially.
The business enterprise failed. The New Yorker was alone in a strange city, didn’t know a soul in Akron. It was a Saturday and for a despondent ex-rummy it looked like a good time to drown his sorrow.
But he didn’t. He found an Akron church directory framed in the hotel lobby. He chose at random the name of a minister and looked him up. He told the minister about himself and the minister told him of an Akron professional man he knew who got drunk every night without fail.
This man had been a hopeless drunkard for 20 years. Nothing he did helped. He tried all the old dodges, familiar to every alcoholic. Some of the stock devices: Never drink alone; never take anything but wine or beer; not more than half a dozen drinks at a time; never drink with strange people or in strange places; drink only during meals; drink only before meals; drink only after meals; never mix your drinks — the list could cover a whole page. Name them to an ex-drunk and he will grin.
The New Yorker and the Akron man got together. They talked for six hours. The Akronite, braced by what the visitor had told him, stayed on the wagon for three weeks. Then he went to Atlantic City for a convention and staged a whale of a binge.
The New York chap was at his bedside when he came to. That was June 10, 1935. This man hasn’t had a drink since. All the cures in Akron and Cleveland may be traced to his one cure. The man has gone back to his business, but he has devoted more time than he can afford to helping others who were in his own plight.
What happens to effect this cure? This is an attempt to explain. First, the alcoholic must be at a point where he is willing to accept help from anyone or anything. He may be in such a bad physical state that he requires “defogging” in a hospital so that his mind is made capable of receiving thoughts and ideas.
Then a member of Alcoholics Anonymous goes to work on him. The ex-rummy visits him daily. He talks with him, reasons with him, scoffs at the excuses he puts up for drinking and tells him no power on earth can help him.
It must be accepted as fact that nobody can reason with a drunk but an ex-drunk. A drunkard’s wife may give him advice, plead with him that he is wrecking their home. His minister may pray for him. His friends may tell him to “quit making a damn fool of yourself.” His employer may say, “I’m giving you one more chance. Now straighten up and be a man.”
And the drunkard may say, as he reaches for another drink, “What the hell do they know about it?”
But the ex-rummy knows, and when he tells the rummy that no power on earth can help him, he means just what he says.
“You are allergic to alcohol,” says the ex-drunk to the drunk. “That is why you can’t stop drinking. You’ve got to reshape all your values, get rid of all your petty hatreds and resentments. You must have a vital spiritual experience. You must admit to God that only He can help you.
“It doesn’t make any difference whether you believe in an orthodox God. But you believe in some kind of God. Everyone does, no matter how deeply they may conceal it. Define God to suit yourself.”
If the drunk believes in God or some specific religion, the job is easier. But if to him God is only “it,” that too is enough for Alcoholics Anonymous to work with.
There are several hundred different kinds of spiritual experiences recognized by religious psychology. Seldom are the experiences of two members of Alcoholics Anonymous alike. Some of them refuse to believe in an orthodox God. But whatever they may believe, they know that they have been cured.
Members of Alcoholics Anonymous are no blue-nosed temperance workers. They have no objection to people physically and spiritually equipped to take it or leave it alone. But they know that liquor is not for them.
Akron members of Alcoholics Anonymous have lifted some practices from the Oxford Group. But the local fellowship includes in its membership Jews, Catholics and Protestants.
They story of Alcoholics Anonymous may sound fantastic, especially in this cynical day and age. But fantastic or not, it is true, and it is a significant fact that the medical societies have no quarrel with Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholism is a state of mind. There isn’t anything medical science can do about it, at least not yet.
No man, say members of Alcoholics Anonymous, is ready for their cure until he has convinced himself that he can’t “buy” his way back to normalcy. Some of the ex-alcoholics landed in sanitariums or hospitals as many as 70 times before they were willing to admit their helplessness.
Those who want to know more about Alcoholics Anonymous can write the New York address given earlier in the story. But for a complete story, Alcoholics Anonymous have got together and published a book which may be found on local bookstands. Its name is the same as the society’s.