Not-God (22 page)

Other final stances, apparently ultimate but far less inevitable, required as long to be hammered out. The first hints of the medical profession’s acceptance of Alcoholics Anonymous as a respectable therapy occurred in 1943 and 1944. Within an eighteen-month period, Bill Wilson addressed: at the invitation of the Mental Hygiene Commission of the State of Maryland, the Neuropsychiatric Section of the Baltimore City Medical Society meeting at Johns Hopkins University; through the good offices of A.A.’s Rockefeller-connected friend Dr. Foster Kennedy, the Section on Neurology and Psychiatry of the Medical Society of the State of New York; and at the urging of Dr. E. M. Jellinek, the experts newly assembled at Yale University’s Summer School of Alcohol Studies.
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A.A.’s pride in its ideas and its founder momentarily swelled only to be immediately deflated. Such acceptance, the fellowship and its co-founder quickly learned, threatened its just then budding principles of anonymity and of non-involvement in outside enterprises. In 1944 came the first faint hint of the potential major problem. Within a month of Wilson’s presentation before the Medical Society of the State of New York, Towns Hospital began advertising the claim: “Our outstanding contribution to the medical profession is Alcoholics Anonymous.” With gingerly tact, Bill protested in his own name this distortion of history as he understood it; and he breathed a sigh of relief when the current director of Towns, Dr. John Bullard, agreed that such publicity was inappropriate.
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The aftermath of the Yale experience proved more difficult to contain. In January 1944, inspired largely by the efforts and connections of Marty Mann, Dr. E. M. Jellinek, America’s premier researcher into alcoholism, joined with Dr. Howard W. Haggard, outstanding medical authority on alcoholism, and Dr. Selden D. Bacon, leading sociological investigator of alcohol-related problems, to announce the “Yale Plan for Alcohol Studies,” “Yale Plan Clinics for the Treatment of Alcoholism,” and the formation of the “National Committee for Education on Alcoholism.” Behind each endeavor — research, treatment, and public education — lay the desire to bring “to the forefront two momentous discoveries about alcoholism:
FIRST
that alcoholism is a
sickness
, not a moral delinquency.
SECOND
that when this is properly recognized
the hitherto hopeless alcoholic can be completely rehabilitated.”
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Carefully side-stepping the wet-dry controversy, the Yale group even flirted with accepting funds from both the alcoholic beverage industry and militant temperance advocates. Such support seemed at first a veritable
coup
. Each side, convinced of the truth of its own stand, was confident of enlisting Yale’s prestige for its own point of view. The New Haven group soon discerned the danger to its credibility in such financial dependence and drew back, but the problem of funding remained.
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Finances, however, were not the only problem. The educators also feared being mistaken for the kind of ivy-covered ivory tower academics whom drinkers such as Bill Wilson habitually scorned — “pantywaist[s]” whose nearest exposure to alcoholism had been going “wild one night on too many sherries at a Junior League cotillion.” The surest way to demonstrate that they really knew about real alcoholism was clearly to advertise a
“real
alcoholic.” Such had been Mann’s idea in the first place, and she herself became “Exhibit A,” a move that involved anonymity. Despite the subtle distinction between proclaiming oneself an alcoholic and revealing oneself to be a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, almost everyone at that time understood that only members of Alcoholics Anonymous possessed enough comfort about their “disease” to label themselves publicly “alcoholic.”
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+

Bill Wilson and most A.A.s realized this. Yet inspired by their zeal to teach the truth and to reach still other alcoholics by following out the mandate of the Twelfth Step of their program, most not only accepted Mann’s activities as “for the greater good,” but “William Wilson” and “Robert Smith, M.D.,” became members of the Advisory Board of the N.C.E.A., their names (but not their relationship to Alcoholics Anonymous) thus appearing on its letterhead. Marty Mann, meanwhile, embarked on a nationwide tour telling her story to newspapers and eventually readily acknowledging membership in Alcoholics Anonymous. She had shed her anonymity, the “lady ex-lush” explained to reporters puzzled at the apparent contradiction, “for the sake of others.”
^22
+

The ice was thin indeed. No one feared that Marty might drink again, although Dr. Tiebout, who had been her therapist and had introduced her to A.A., expressed to Wilson at least ambivalent concern about “re-inflation.” Yet it was not from this direction that trouble directly struck. To “expand its staff and multiply its facilities,” the N.C.E.A. in 1946 launched a large-scale public appeal for funds. The solicitation not only carried the names of Wilson and Smith on its letterhead and in its substance implied a relationship with
“Alcoholics Anonymous”
(thus emphasized), but it also was mailed to some A.A. groups. As one of A.A.’s trustees observed in a letter to Bill Wilson, who was absent from New York at this time: “If this letter should ever go out to the A.A. mailing list quoting A.A. throughout and soliciting funds on a letterhead that carries both your name and Bob Smith’s as sponsors, no little hell would be popping.”
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The observation proved perceptive. Within hours the New York office of Alcoholics Anonymous was flooded with calls and wires of question and protest, and two days later the office staff telegraphed Wilson: “A.A. can split if Marty carries your backing.” Quickly, Bill wired back to Dr. Bob and the office. His telegram began by lamenting, “What a situation,” and went on for four pages as Bill carefully acknowledged his error in allowing such a use of his name. Three days later, just a week after it all began, the Alcoholic Foundation released a terse statement dissociating itself from the solicitation and noting that “Alcoholics Anonymous looks with disfavor on the unauthorized use of its name in any fund-raising activity.”
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All this took place while Wilson himself was traveling in the Far West. His journey had two purposes. It was an extended vacation at the low point of the depression that haunted him through most of this decade, and it provided an opportunity to discuss with producer Hal Wallis a proposed major motion picture feature about Alcoholics Anonymous, another mark of social acceptance accorded A.A. in this period.
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Early in 1944, a Hollywood producer had sought the help of Alcoholics Anonymous with the intention of devising a feature movie that would dramatize A.A.’s understanding of alcoholism. This project was first sidetracked and then abandoned when the Charles Jackson best-seller,
The Lost Weekend
, was made into a motion picture accomplishing just that. Through 1945 especially, in the wake of the popularity of
The Lost Weekend
, Alcoholics Anonymous received helpful publicity from news-reel coverage and opportunities to carry its message through radio features and even regular programming. The most helpful general publicity came in 1951, when
Fortune
magazine offered an article about Alcoholics Anonymous that the fellowship informally adopted and for well over a decade reprinted and distributed as an effective brief description of its program.
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Not all magazine publicity was so favorable. In 1946,
True Confessions
ran a lead feature titled: “Let Me Tell You About the Miraculous Redemption of a Confirmed Drunkard.” Although overtly positive, this treatment was lurid in details and implication. The nether depths of such journalism were reached in 1954, when
Confidential
magazine offered an “exposé” of “Alcoholics Anonymous: No Booze
BUT PLENTY OF BABES!”
Interestingly, A.A.’s internal response was less outrage than a philosophical “Well,
we
realize it isn’t true, in general; but who knows? Maybe it will move some who need the program to investigate, and these — if they give it a chance —just might get what they need instead of what they want!”
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The mid-1940s witnessed another significant development in the unfolding history of Alcoholics Anonymous, although this growth occurred first in the continuing personal maturation of Bill Wilson. In 1946, as a part of the aftermath of the Mann-N.C.E.A. affair, Wilson attained another insight, one that proximately lifted Bill from the nadir of his depression. This new realization perfectly complemented his decade-earlier intuition of the dangers of excessive dependency: “I suddenly realized the extent to which I have been trying to dominate … others; also the extent to which I have been indulging in fruitless self-accusation … everything swinging in the direction of
control
of something or somebody.” This insight was very healthy for Wilson, and it eventually proved very productive for Alcoholics Anonymous. But from 1945 to 1950, Bill had to struggle to make it operative in his own life within the A.A. fellowship. Only then could he share its wealth with his fellow alcoholics by publishing the deeper understanding of the A.A. program to which this insight had led him.
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That Alcoholics Anonymous itself was not God, Wilson seemed acutely aware. As he wrote to a complaining correspondent, “Alcoholics Anonymous is a terribly imperfect society because it is made up of very imperfect people. We are all dedicated to a perfect ideal of which, because we are very human and very sick, we often fall short. I know because I constantly fall short myself.” Institutionally as well as personally, Bill Wilson found many occasions to proclaim: “We’re Not Perfect Yet;” “… we are approaching maturity. … It is clear we cannot forever be immune from the pressures that are tearing modern society apart.”
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On 1 November 1945, Wilson submitted to A.A.’s Trustees a proposal, “Concerning the Future of the Alcoholic Foundation.” After praising the contributions of the non-alcoholic trustees, the co-founder suggested that “we … begin to evolve the ultimate set-up [of A.A.] now.” Pointing out, not accurately given the circumstances, that “functionally I am letting go,” Bill urged the same course of action upon the trustees. “Facing [the] paradox of spiritual principle [,] should they [not] let go of their temporal power to increase their own spiritual influence?”
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Bill Wilson was here striving for acceptance of Alcoholics Anonymous as “a new kind of human society,” one that lived out in daily practice the realization that “our group strength seems to stem from our individual and ever potential weakness.” Perhaps spurred on by political science hobbyist Father Edward Dowling’s comment to his initial proposal — “A.A. has proved that democracy is therapy” — Bill sought to overcome the ancient political and organizational problem of the separation of authority from responsibility. As fellowship rather than organization, Alcoholics Anonymous disclaimed authority. Yet its program seemed to require that precisely as fellowship, Alcoholics Anonymous serve as a model of responsibility for its members. Faced with a flurry of trustee resignations as he pushed his vision in 1948 and momentarily disheartened by Dr. Bob Smith’s 1949 initial refusal to support his concept of A.A. “maturity,” Wilson retreated to re-think — to re-think in terms of “spiritual” as the proper modifier of “maturity,”
of “spiritual
responsibility” as well as of the questions of “authority” and “money” on which his proposals had thus far concentrated.
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Bill was not to begin writing out the results until 1952, when the concepts he revised led Alcoholics Anonymous to the solution of its fellowship-organization difficulties. Wilson achieved this solution by returning again within himself to draw from the one thing upon which ultimately all of his ideas and activities were based: his understanding of alcoholism, and especially his experience of this “malady” in himself. For if to be a sober alcoholic was to find the wholeness of one’s being in the acceptance of limitation and therefore to need others who also accepted their limitation, then Alcoholics Anonymous as fellowship and program of mutual need was first
community
rather than organization. The
fellowship itself
had need of its program, for it also was made whole only by its explicit acceptance of its own limitations.
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The culmination of public medical acceptance of the therapy of Alcoholics Anonymous also came in this period. In 1949, Wilson was invited to address the annual convention of the American Psychiatric Association at its convention in Montreal. The chief medical question concerning alcoholism was the legitimacy of the claim that it was a “disease.” To Wilson, alcoholism, of course, was such. But there was more to the issue, and, importantly for Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill had learned as well as taught, from psychiatric critics as well as from his own experience.
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The significance of understanding alcoholism as “illness,” “malady,”
or
“disease” rather than as
“symptom”
was profound. Alcoholics Anonymous, regarding the controversy as an “outside issue,” did not directly enter the debate. Yet insofar as the disagreement more deeply concerned the meaning of human life, Alcoholics Anonymous as an expression of “spiritual” ideas had something to contribute.
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Medical men understood that the debate was neither an idle pastime nor merely a product of the academic mind, “if … alcoholism is regarded as a symptom, then the treatment program is designed to cure the underlying disease’: [whereas, regarding] addictive drinking itself as an illness [leads to directing efforts] toward ‘the break-up of the sequence of activities involved in addictive drinking.’” The premier example of this latter approach was Alcoholics Anonymous. Yet as the medical debate over alcoholism unfolded, a subtle change in its understanding of alcoholism was taking place within Alcoholics Anonymous, and especially within the mind of Bill Wilson.
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