THE unity
of Alcoholics Anonymous is the most cherished quality our Society has. Our
lives, the lives of all to come, depend squarely upon it. We stay whole, or A.A.
dies. Without unity, the heart of A.A. would cease to beat; our world arteries
would no longer carry the life-giving grace of God; His gift to us would be
spent aimlessly. Back again in their caves, alcoholics would reproach us and
say, “What a great thing A.A. might have been!”
“Does this
mean,” some will anxiously ask, “that in A.A. the individual doesn’t count for
much? Is he to be dominated by his group and swallowed u~ in it?”
We may
certainly answer this question with a loud “No!” We believe there isn’t a
fellowship on earth which lavishes more devoted care upon its individual
members; surely there is none which more jealously guards the individual’s right
to think, talk, and act as he wishes. No A.A. can compel another to do
anything; nobody can be punished or expelled. Our Twelve Steps to recovery are
suggestions; the Twelve Traditions which guarantee A.A.’s unity contain not a single “Don’t.” They repeatedly
say “We ought ...“ but never “You must!”
To many
minds all this liberty for the individual spells sheer anarchy. Every newcomer,
every friend who looks at A.A. for the first time is greatly puzzled. They see
liberty verging on license, yet they recognize at once that A.A. has an
irresistible strength of purpose and action. “How,” they ask, “can such a crowd
of anarchists function at all? How can they possibly place their common welfare
first? What in Heaven’s name holds them together?”
Those who
look closely soon have the key to this strange paradox. The A.A. member has to
conform to the principles of recovery. His life actually depends upon obedience
4 to spiritual principles. If he deviates too far, the penalty is sure and
swift; he sickens and dies. At first he goes along because he must, but later he
discovers a way of life he really wants to live. Moreover, he finds he cannot
keep this priceless gift unless he gives it away. Neither he nor anybody else
can survive unless he carries the A.A. message. The moment this Twelfth Step
work forms a group, another discovery is made—that most individuals cannot
recover unless there is a group. Realization dawns that he is but a small part
of a great whole; that no personal sacrifice is too great for preservation of
the Fellowship. He learns that the clamor of desires and ambitions within him
must be silenced whenever these could damage the group. It becomes plain that
the group must survive or the individual will not.
So at the
outset, how best to live and work together as groups became the prime question. In the world about us we saw personalities
destroying whole peoples. The struggle for wealth, power, and prestige was
tearing humanity apart as never before. If strong people were stalemated in the
search for peace and harmony, what was to become of our erratic band of
alcoholics? As we had once struggled and prayed for individual recovery, just so
earnestly did we commence to quest for the principles through which AA itself
might survive. On anvils of experience, the structure of our Society was
hammered out.
Countless
times, in as many cities and hamlets, we reenacted the story of Eddie Rickenbacker and his courageous acted company when their
plane crashed in the Pacific. Like us, they had suddenly found themselves saved
from death, but still floating upon a perilous sea. How well they saw that their
common welfare came first. None might become selfish of water or bread. Each
needed to consider the others, and in abiding faith they knew they must find
their real strength. And this they did find, in measure to transcend all the
defects of their frail craft, every test of uncertainty, pain, fear, and
despair, and even the death of one.
Thus has it
been with A.A. By faith and by works we have been able to build upon the lessons
of an incredible experience. They live today in the Twelve Traditions of
Alcoholics Anonymous, which—God willing—shall sustain us in unity for so long as
He may need us.
“For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority—a
loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are
but trusted servants; they do not govern.”
‘W’HERE
does A.A. get its direction? Who runs it? This, too, is a puzzler for every
friend and newcomer. When told that our Society has no president having
authority to govern it, no treasurer who can compel the payment of any dues, no
board of directors who can cast an erring member into outer darkness, when
indeed no A.A. can give another a directive and enforce obedience, our friends
gasp and exclaim, “This simply can’t be. There must be an angle somewhere.”
These practical folk then read Tradition Two, and learn that the sole authority
in A.A. is a loving God as He may express Himself in the group conscience. They
dubiously ask an experienced A.A. member if this really works. The member, sane
to all appearances, immediately answers, “Yes! It definitely does.” The friends
mutter that this looks vague, nebulous, pretty naive to
them. Then they commence to watch us with speculative eyes, pick up a fragment
of A.A. history, and soon have the solid facts.
What are
these facts of A.A. life which brought us to this apparently impractical
principle?
John Doe, a
good A.A., moves—let us say—to Middle-town, U.S.A. Alone now, he reflects that
he may not be able to stay sober, or even alive, unless he passes on to other p
alcoholics what was so freely given him. He feels a spiritual and ethical
compulsion, because hundreds may be suffering within reach of his help. Then,
too, he misses his home group. He needs other alcoholics as much as they need
him. He visits preachers, doctors, editors, policemen, and bartenders . . .
with the result that Middletown
Being the
founder, he is at first the boss. Who else could be? Very soon, though, his
assumed authority to run everything begins to be shared with the first
alcoholics he has helped. At this moment, the benign dictator becomes the
chairman of a committee composed of his friends. These are the growing group’s
hierarchy of service—self-appointed, of course, because there is no other way.
In a matter of months, A.A. booms in Middletown
The founder
and his friends channel spirituality to newcomers, hire halls, make hospital
arrangements, and entreat their wives to brew gallons of coffee. Being on the
human side, the founder and his friends may bask a little in glory. They say to
one another, “Perhaps it would be a good idea if we continue to keep a firm hand
on A.A. in this town. After all, we are experienced. Besides, look at all the
good we’ve done these drunks. They should be grateful!” True, founders and their
friends are sometimes wiser and more humble than this. But more often at this
stage they are not.
Growing
pains now beset the group. Panhandlers panhandle. Lonely hearts pine. Problems
descend like an avalanche. Still more important, murmurs are heard in the body
politic, which swell into a loud cry: “Do these oldtimers think they can run this group forever? Let’s have
an election!” The founder and his friends are hurt and depressed. They rush
from crisis to crisis and from member to member, pleading; but it’s no use, the
revolution is on. The group conscience is about to take over.
Now comes the election. If the founder and his friends have
served well, they may—to their surprise—be reinstated for a time. If, however,
they have heavily resisted the rising tide of democracy, they may be summarily
beached. In either case, the group now has a so-called rotating committee,
very sharply limited in its authority. In no sense what-ever can its members
govern or direct the group. They are servants. Theirs is the sometimes thankless
privilege of doing the group’s chores. Headed by the chairman, they look after
public relations and arrange meetings. Their treasurer, strictly accountable,
takes money from the hat that is passed, banks it, pays the rent and other
bills, and makes a regular report at business meetings. The secretary sees that
literature is on the table, looks after the phone-answering service, answers the
mail, and sends out notices of meetings.
Such are
the simple services that enable the group to function. The committee gives no
spiritual advice, judges no one’s conduct, issues no
orders. Every one of them may be promptly eliminated at the next election if
they try this. And so they make the belated discovery that they are really
servants, not senators. These are universal experiences. Thus throughout A.A.
does the group conscience decree the terms upon which its leaders shall
serve.
This brings
us straight to the question “Does A.A. have a real leadership?” Most
emphatically the answer is “Yes, notwithstanding the apparent lack of it.” Let’s
turn again to the deposed founder and his friends. What becomes of them? As
their grief and anxiety wear away, a subtle change begins. Ultimately, they
divide into two classes known in A.A. slang as “elder statesmen” and “bleeding
deacons.” The elder statesman is the one who sees the wisdom of the group’s
decision, who holds no resentment over his reduced status, whose judgment,
fortified by considerable experience, is sound, and who is willing to sit
quietly on the sidelines patiently awaiting developments. The bleeding deacon
is one who is just as surely convinced that the group cannot get along without
him, who constantly connives for reelection to office, and who continues to be
consumed with self-pity. A few hemorrhage so badly that—drained of all A.A.
spirit and principle—they get drunk. At times the A.A. landscape seems to be
littered with bleeding forms. Nearly every oldtimer in
our Society has gone through this process n some degree. Happily, most of them
survive and live to become elder statesmen. They become the real and permanent
leadership of A.A. Theirs is the quiet opinion, the sure knowledge and humble
example that resolve a crisis. When sorely perplexed, the group inevitably turns
to them for advice. They become the voice of the group conscience; in fact,
these are the true voice of Alcoholics Anonymous. They do not drive by mandate;
they lead by example. This is the experience which has led us to the conclusion
that our group conscience, well-advised by its elders, will be in the long run
wiser than any single leader.
When A.A.
was only three years old, an event occurred demonstrating this principle. One of
the first members of A.A., entirely contrary to his own desires, was obliged to
conform to group opinion. Here is the story in his words.
“One day I
was doing a Twelfth Step job at a hospital in New York
hospital used to make back in the 1920’s. Thousands of dollars a month. It should be doing just as well
now, and it would—if only you’d help me. So why don’t you move your work in
here? I’ll give you an office, a decent drawing account, and a very healthy
slice of the profits. Three years ago, when my head doctor, Silkworth, began to tell me of the idea of helping drunks by
spirituality, I thought it was crackpot stuff, but I’ve changed my mind. Some
day this bunch of ex-drunks of yours will fill Madison Square Garden
“I was
bowled over. There were a few twinges of conscience until I saw how really
ethical Charlie’s proposal was. There was nothing wrong whatever with becoming a
lay therapist. I thought of Lois coming home exhausted from the department store
each day, only to cook supper for a houseful of drunks who weren’t paying board.
I thought of the large sum of money still owing my Wall Street creditors. I
thought of a few of my alcoholic friends, who were making as much money as ever.
Why shouldn’t I do as well as they?
“Although I
asked Charlie for a little time to consider it, my own mind was about made up.
Racing back to Brooklyn on the subway, I had a
seeming flash of divine guidance. It was only a single sentence, but most
convincing. In fact, it came right out of the Bible—a voice kept saying to me.
‘The laborer is worthy of his hire.’ Arriving home, I found Lois cooking as
usual, while three drunks looked hungrily on from the kitchen door. I drew her
aside and told the glorious news. She looked interested, but not as excited as I
thought she should be.
“It was
meeting night. Although none of the alcoholics we boarded seemed to get sober,
some others had. With their wives they crowded into our downstairs parlor. At
once I burst into the story of my opportunity. Never shall I forget their
impassive faces, and the steady gaze they focused upon me. With waning
enthusiasm, my tale trailed off to the end. There was a long silence.
“Almost
timidly, one of my friends began to speak. ‘We know how hard up you are, Bill.
It bothers us a lot. We’ve often wondered what we might do about it. But I think
1 speak for everyone here when I say that what you now propose bothers us an
awful lot more.’ The speaker’s voice grew more confident. ‘Don’t you realize,’
he went on, ‘that you can never become a professional? As generous as Charlie
has been to us, don’t you see that we can’t tie this thing up with his hospital
or any other? You tell us that Charlie's proposal is ethical. Sure, it’s
ethical, but what we’ve got won’t run on ethics only; it has to be better. Sure,
Charlie’s idea is good, but it isn’t good enough. This is a matter of life and
death, Bill, and nothing but the very best will do!’ Challengingly, my friends
looked at me as their spokesman continued. ‘Bill, haven’t you often said right
here in this meeting that sometimes the good is the enemy of the best? Well,
this is a plain case of it. You can’t do this thing to us!’
“So spoke
the group conscience. The group was right and I was wrong; the voice on the
subway was not the voice of God. Here was the true voice, welling up out of my
friends. I listened, and—thank God—I obeyed.”
“The only requirement for A .A. membership is a desire to stop
drinking.”
To
establish this principle of membership took years of harrowing experience. In
our early time, nothing seemed so fragile, so easily
breakable as an A.A. group. Hardly an alcoholic we approached paid any
attention; most of those who did join us were like flickering candles in a
windstorm. Time after time, their uncertain flames blew out and couldn’t be
relighted. Our unspoken, constant thought was “Which
of us may be the next?”
A member
gives us a vivid glimpse of those days. “At one time,” he says, “every A.A.
group had many membership rules. Everybody was scared witless that something or
somebody would capsize the boat and dump us all back into the drink. Our
Foundation office* asked each group to send in its list of ‘protective’
regulations. The total list was a mile long. If all those rules had been in
effect everywhere, nobody could have possibly joined A.A. at all, so great was
the sum of our anxiety and fear.
“We were
resolved to admit nobody to A.A. but that hypothetical class of people we
termed ‘pure alcoholics.’ Except for their guzzling, and the unfortunate
results thereof, they could have no other complications. So beggars, tramps,
asylum inmates, prisoners, queers, plain crackpots, and fallen women were
definitely out. Yes sir, we’d cater only to pure and respectable alcoholics! Any
others would surely destroy us. Besides, if we took in those odd ones, what
would decent people say about us? We built a fine-mesh fence right around
A.A.
“Maybe this
sounds comical now. Maybe you think we oldtimers were
pretty intolerant. But I can tell you there was nothing funny about the
situation then. We were grim because we felt our lives and homes were
threatened, and that was no laughing matter. Intolerant, you say? Well, we were
frightened. Naturally, we began to act like most everybody does when afraid.
After all, isn’t fear the true basis of intolerance? Yes, we were
intolerant.”
How could
we then guess that all those fears were to prove groundless? How could we know
that thousands of these sometimes frightening people were to make astonishing
recoveries and become our greatest workers and intimate friends? Was it
credible that A.A. was to have a divorce rate far lower than average? Could we
then foresee that troublesome people were to become our principal teachers of
patience and tolerance? Could any then imagine a society which would include
every conceivable kind of character, and cut across every barrier of race,
creed, politics, and language with ease?
Why did
A.A. finally drop all its membership regulations? Why did we leave it to each
newcomer to decide himself whether he was an alcoholic
and whether he should join us? Why did we dare to say, contrary to the
experience of society and government everywhere, that we would neither punish
nor deprive any A.A. of membership, that we must never
compel anyone to pay anything, believe anything, or conform to
anything?
The answer,
now seen in Tradition Three, was simplicity itself. At last experience taught us
that to take away any alcoholic’s full chance was sometimes to pronounce his
death sentence, and often to condemn him to endless misery. Who dared to be
judge, jury, and executioner of his own sick brother?
As group
after group saw these possibilities, they finally abandoned all membership
regulations. One dramatic experience after another clinched this determination
until it became our universal tradition. Here are two examples:
On the A.A.
calendar it was Year Two. In that time nothing could be seen but two
struggling, nameless groups of alcoholics trying to hold their faces up to the
light
A newcomer
appeared at one of these groups, knocked on the door and asked to be let in. He
talked frankly with that group’s oldest member. He soon proved that his was a
desperate case, and that above all he wanted to get well. “But,” he asked,
“will you let me join your group? Since I am the victim
of another addiction even worse stigmatized than alcoholism, you may not want me
among you. Or will you?”
There was
the dilemma. What should the group do? The oldest member summoned two others,
and in confidence laid the explosive facts in their laps. Said he, “Well, what
about it? If we turn this man away, he’ll soon die. If we allow him in, only God
knows what trouble he’ll brew. What shall the answer be—yes or no?”
At first
the elders could look only at the objections. “We deal,” they said, “with
alcoholics only. Shouldn’t we sacrifice this one for the sake of the many?” So
went the discussion while the newcomer’s fate hung in the balance. Then one of
the three spoke in a very different voice. “What we are really afraid of,” he
said, “is our reputation. We are much more afraid of what people might say than
the trouble this strange alcoholic might bring. As we’ve been talking, five
short words have been running through my mind. Something keeps repeating to me,
‘What would the Master do?’” Not another word was said. What more indeed could
be said?
Overjoyed,
the newcomer plunged into Twelfth Step d work. Tirelessly he laid A.A.’s message before scores of people. Since this was a
very early group, those scores have since multiplied themselves into thousands.
Never did he trouble anyone with his other difficulty. A.A. had taken its first
step in the formation of Tradition Three.
Not long
after the man with the double stigma knocked for admission, A.A.’s other group received into its membership a salesman
we shall call Ed. A power driver, this one, and brash as any salesman could
possibly be. He had at least an idea a minute on how to improve A.A. These ideas
he sold to fellow members with the same burning enthusiasm with which he
distributed automobile polish. But he had one idea that wasn’t so salable. Ed
was an atheist. His pet obsession was that A.A. could get along better without
its “God nonsense.” He browbeat everybody, and everybody expected that he’d soon
get drunk—for at the time, you see, A.A. was on the pious side. There must be a
heavy penalty, it was thought, for blasphemy. Distressingly enough, Ed proceeded
to stay sober.
At length
the time came for him to speak in a meeting. We shivered, for we knew what was
coming. He paid a fine tribute to the Fellowship; he told how his family had
been reunited; he extolled the virtue of honesty; he recalled the joys of
Twelfth Step work; and then he lowered the boom. Cried Ed, “I
can’t stand this God stuff! It’s a lot of malarkey for weak folks. This
group doesn’t need it, and I won’t have it! To hell with
it!”
A great
wave of outraged resentment engulfed the meeting, sweeping every member to a
single resolve: “Out he goes!”
The elders
led Ed aside. They said firmly, “You can’t talk like this around here. You’ll
have to quit it or get out.” With great sarcasm Ed came back at them. “Now do
tell! Is that so?” He reached over to a bookshelf and took up a sheaf of papers.
On top of them lay the foreword to the book “Alcoholics Anonymous,” then under
preparation. He read aloud, “The only requirement for A.A. membership is a
desire to stop drinking.” Relentlessly, Ed went on, “When you guys wrote that
sentence, did you mean it, or didn’t you?”
Dismayed,
the elders looked at one another, for they knew he had
them cold. So Ed stayed.
Ed not only
stayed, he stayed sober—month after month. The longer he kept dry, the louder he
talked—against God. The group was in anguish so deep that all fraternal charity
had vanished. “When, oh when,” groaned members to one another, “will that guy
get drunk?”
Quite a while later, Ed got a sales job which took him out of
town. At the end of a few days, the news came in. He’d sent a telegram
for money, and everybody knew what that meant! Then he got on the phone. In
those days, we’d go 4 anywhere on a Twelfth Step job, no matter how
unpromising. But this time nobody stirred. “Leave him alone! Let him try it by
himself for once; maybe he’ll learn a lesson!”
About two
weeks later, Ed stole by night into an A.A. member’s house and, unknown to the
family, went to bed. Daylight found the master of the house and another friend
drinking their morning coffee. A noise was heard on the stairs. To their
consternation, Ed appeared. A quizzical smile on his lips, he said, “Have you
fellows had your morning meditation?” They quickly sensed that he was quite in
earnest. In fragments, his story came out.
In a
neighboring state, Ed had holed up in a cheap hotel. After all his pleas for
help had been rebuffed, these words rang in his fevered mind: “They have
deserted me. I have been deserted by my own kind. This is the end.., nothing is
left.” As he tossed on his bed, his hand brushed the bureau near by, touching a
book. Opening the book, he read. It was a Gideon Bible. Ed never confided any
more of what he saw and felt in that hotel room. It was the year 1938. He hasn’t
had a drink since.
Nowadays,
when oldtimers who know Ed foregather, they exclaim,
“What if we had actually succeeded in throwing Ed out for blasphemy? What would
have happened to him and all the others he later helped?”
So the hand
of Providence
*In 1954, the name of the Alcoholic Foundation, Inc., was changed to the General Service Board of Alcoholics
Anonymous, Inc., and the Foundation office is now the General Service
Office.
“Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other
groups or A.A. as a whole.”
AUTONOMY is
a ten-dollar word. But in relation to us, it means very simply that every A.A.
group can manage its affairs exactly as it pleases, except when A.A. as a whole
is threatened. Comes now the same question raised in Tradition One. Isn’t such
liberty foolishly dangerous?
Over the
years, every conceivable deviation from our Twelve Steps and Traditions has been
tried. That was sure to be, since we are so largely a band of ego-driven
individualists. Children of chaos, we have defiantly played with every brand of
fire, only to emerge unharmed and, we think, wiser. These very deviations
created a vast process of trial and error which, under the grace of God, has
brought us to where we stand today.
When A.A.’s Traditions were first published, in 1946, we had
become sure that an A.A. group could stand almost any amount of battering. We
saw that the group, exactly like the individual, must eventually conform to
whatever tested principles would guarantee survival. We had discovered that
there was perfect safety in the process of trial and error. So confident of this
had we become that the original statement of A.A. tradition carried this
significant sentence: “Any two or three alcoholics gathered together for
sobriety may call themselves an A.A. group provided that as a group they have no
other affiliation.”
This meant,
of course, that we had been given the courage to declare each A.A. group an
individual entity, strictly reliant on its own conscience as a guide to action.
In charting this enormous expanse of freedom, we found it necessary to post
only two storm signals: A group ought not do anything
which would greatly injure A.A. as a whole, nor ought it affiliate itself with
anything or anybody else. There would be real danger should we commence to call
some groups “wet,” others “dry,” still others “Republican~~ or “Communist,” and
yet others “Catholic” or “Protestant.” The A.A. group would have to stick to its
course or be hopelessly lost. Sobriety had to be its sole objective. In all
other respects there was perfect freedom of will and action. Every group had the
right to be wrong.
When A.A.
was still young, lots of eager groups were forming. In a town we’ll call Middleton, a real crackerjack had started up. The townspeople
were as hot as firecrackers about it. Stargazing, the elders dreamed of
innovations.
They
figured the town needed a great big alcoholic center, a
kind of pilot plant A.A. groups could duplicate everywhere. Beginning on the
ground floor there would be a club; in the second story they would sober up
drunks and hand them currency for their back debts; the third deck would house
an educational project—quite noncontroversial, of
course. In imagination the gleaming center was to go up several stories more,
but three would do for a start. This would all take a lot of money—other
people’s money. Believe it or not, wealthy townsfolk bought the idea.
There were,
though, a few conservative dissenters among the alcoholics. They wrote the
Foundation*, A.A.’s headquarters in New York
Of course,
there was a promoter in the deal—a super-promoter. By his eloquence he allayed
all fears, despite advice from the Foundation that it could issue no charter,
and that ventures which mixed an A.A. group with medication and education had
come to sticky ends elsewhere. To make things safer, the promoter organized
three corporations and became president of them all. Freshly painted, the new
center shone. The warmth of it all spread through the town. Soon things began to
hum. To insure foolproof, continuous operation, sixty-one rules and regulations
were 4 adopted.
But alas,
this bright scene was not long in darkening. Confusion replaced serenity. It was
found that some drunks yearned for education, but doubted if they were
alcoholics. The personality defects of others could be cured maybe with a loan.
Some were club-minded, but it was just a question of taking care of the lonely
heart. Sometimes the swarming applicants would go for all three floors. Some
would start at the top and come through to the bottom, becoming club members;
others started in the club, pitched a binge, were hospitalized, then graduated to education on the third floor.
It was a
beehive of activity, all right, but unlike a beehive, it was confusion
compounded. An A.A. group, as such, simply couldn’t handle this sort of project.
All too late that was discovered. Then came the
inevitable explosion—something like that day the boiler burst in Wombley’s Clapboard Factory. A chill chokedamp of fear and
frustration fell over the group.
When that
lifted, a wonderful thing had happened. The head promoter wrote the Foundation
office. He said he wished he’d paid some attention to A.A. experience. Then he
did something else that was to become an A.A. classic. It all went on a little
card about golf-score size. The cover read: “Middleton Group #1. Rule #62.” Once the card was unfolded, a single pungent
sentence leaped to the eye:
“Don’t take
yourself too damn seriously.”
Thus it was
that under Tradition Four an A.A. group had exercised its right to be wrong.
Moreover, it had performed a great service for Alcoholics Anonymous, because it
had been humbly willing to apply the lessons it learned. It had picked itself up
with a laugh and gone on to better things. Even the chief architect, standing in
the ruins of his dream, could laugh at himself—and that is the very acme of
humility.
*In 1954,
the name of the Alcoholic Foundation, Inc., was changed
to the General Service Board of Alcoholics Anonymous, mc, and the Foundation
office is now the General Service Office.
“Each group has but one primary purpose
—to carry its message to the alcoholic who still
suffers.”
“SHOEMAKER,
stick to thy last!” . . . better do one thing supremely well than many badly.
That is the central theme of this Tradition. Around it our Society gathers in
unity. The very life of our Fellowship requires the preservation of this
principle.
Alcoholics
Anonymous can be likened to a group of physicians who might find a cure for
cancer, and upon whose concerted work would depend the
answer for sufferers of this disease. True, each physician in such a group might
have his own specialty. Every doctor concerned would at times wish he could
devote himself to his chosen field rather than work only with the group. But
once these men had hit upon a cure, once it became apparent that only by their
united effort could this be accomplished, then all of
them would feel bound to devote themselves solely to the relief of cancer. In
the radiance of such a miraculous discovery, any doctor would set his other
ambitions aside, at whatever personal cost.
Just as
firmly bound by obligation are the members of Alcoholics Anonymous, who have
demonstrated that they can help problem drinkers as others seldom can. The
unique ability of each A.A. to identify himself with, and bring recovery to,
the newcomer in no way depends upon his learning, eloquence, or on any special
individual skills. The only thing that matters is that he is an alcoholic who
has found a key to sobriety. These legacies of suffering and of recovery are
easily passed among alcoholics, one to the other. This is our gift from God, and
its bestowal upon others like us is the one aim that today animates A.A.’s all around the globe.
There is
another reason for this singleness of purpose. It is the great paradox of A.A.
that we know we can seldom keep the precious gift of sobriety unless we give it
away. If a group of doctors possessed a cancer cure, they might be
conscience-stricken if they failed their mission through self-seeking. Yet such
a failure wouldn’t jeopardize their personal survival. For us, if we neglect
those who are still sick, there is unremitting danger to our own lives and
sanity. Under these compulsions of self-preservation, duty, and love, it is not
strange that our Society has concluded that it has but one high mission—to carry
the A.A. message to those who don’t know there’s a way out.
Highlighting the wisdom of A.A.’s single
purpose, a member tells this story:
“Restless
one day, I felt I’d better do some Twelfth Step work. Maybe I should take out
some insurance against a slip. But first I’d have to find a drunk to work
on.
“So I
hopped the subway to Towns Hospital
“I was soon
sitting beside a big hulk of a man. Decidedly unfriendly, he stared at me out of
eyes which were slits in his red and swollen face. I had to agree with the
doctor— he certainly didn’t look good. But I told him my own story. I explained
what a wonderful Fellowship we had, how well we understood each other. I bore
down hard on the hopelessness of the drunk’s dilemma. I insisted that few
drunks could ever get well on their own steam, but that in our groups we could
do together what we could not do separately. He interrupted to scoff at this
and asserted he’d fix his wife, his partner, and his alcoholism by himself.
Sarcastically he asked, ‘How much does your scheme cost?’
“I ‘was
thankful I could tell him, ‘Nothing at all.’
“His next
question: ‘What are you getting out of it?’
“Of course,
my answer was ‘My own sobriety and a mighty happy life.’
“Still
dubious, he demanded, ‘Do you really mean the only reason you are here is to try
and help me and to help yourself?’
‘Yes,’ I
said. ‘That’s absolutely all there is to it. There’s no angle.’
“Then,
hesitantly, I ventured to talk about the spiritual side of our program. What a
freeze that drunk gave me! I’d no sooner got the word ‘spiritual’ out of my
mouth than he pounced. ‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Now I get it! You’re proselyting for some damn religious sect or other. Where do
you get that no angle” stuff? I belong to a great church that means everything
to me. You’ve got a nerve to come in here talking.
“Thank
heaven I came up with the right answer for that one. It was based foursquare on
the single purpose of A.A. ‘You have faith,’ I said. ‘Perhaps
far deeper faith than mine. No doubt you’re better taught in religious
matters than I. So I can’t tell you anything about religion. I don’t even want
to try. I’ll bet, too, that you could give me a letter-perfect definition of humility. But from what you’ve
told me about yourself and your problems and how you propose to lick them, I
think I know what’s wrong.’
“‘Okay,’ he
said. ‘Give me the business.’
“‘Well,’
said I, ‘I think you’re just a conceited Irishman who thinks he can run the
whole show.’
“This
really rocked him. But as he calmed down, he began to listen while I tried to
show him that humility was the main key to sobriety. Finally, he saw that I
wasn’t attempting to change his religious views, that I wanted him to find the
grace in his own religion that would aid hi~ recovery. From there on we got
along fine.
“Now,”
concludes the oldtimer, “suppose I’d been obliged to
talk to this man on religious grounds? Suppose my answer had to be that A.A.
needed a lot of money; that A.A. went in for education, hospitals, and
rehabilitation? Suppose I’d suggested that I’d take a hand in his domestic and
business affairs? Where would we have wound up? No place, of course.”
Years
later, this tough Irish customer liked to say, “My sponsor sold me one idea, and
that was sobriety. At the time, I couldn’t have bought anything
else.”
“An A.A. group ought never endorse, finance, or lend the A .A.
name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money,
property, and prestige divert us from our primary purpose.
THE moment
we saw that we had an answer for alcoholism, it was reasonable (or so it seemed
at the time) for us to feel that we might have the answer to a lot of other
things. The A.A. groups, many thought, could go into business, might finance any
enterprise whatever in the total field of alcoholism. In fact, we felt
duty-bound to throw the whole weight of the A.A. name behind any meritorious
cause.
Here are
some of the things we dreamed. Hospitals didn’t like alcoholics, so we thought
we’d build a hospital chain of our own. People needed to be told what alcoholism
was, so we’d educate the public, even rewrite school and medical textbooks. We’d
gather up derelicts from skid rows, sort out those who could get well, and make
it possible for the rest to earn their livelihood in a kind of quarantined
confinement. Maybe these places would make large sums of money to carry on our
other good Works. We seriously thought of rewriting the laws of the land, and
having it declared that alcoholics are sick people. No more would they be
jailed; judges would parole them in our custody. We’d spill A.A. into the dark
regions of dope addiction and criminality. We’d form groups of depressive and
paranoid folks; the deeper the neurosis, the better we’d like it. It stood to
reason that if alcoholism could be licked, so could any problem.
It occurred
to us that we could take what we had into the factories and cause laborers and
capitalists to love each other. Our uncompromising honesty might soon clean up
politics. With one arm around the shoulder of religion and the other around the
shoulder of medicine, we’d resolve their differences. Having
learned to live so happily, we’d show everybody else how. Why, we
thought, our Society of Alcoholics Anonymous might prove to be the spearhead of
a new spiritual advance! We might transform the world.
Yes, we of
A.A. did dream those dreams. How natural that was, since most alcoholics are
bankrupt idealists. Nearly every one of us had wished to do great good, perform
great deeds, and embody great ideals. We are all perfectionists who, failing
perfection, have gone to the other extreme and settled for the bottle and the
blackout. Providence
Whereupon
we tried A.A. hospitals—they all bogged down because you cannot put an A.A.
group into business; too many busybody cooks spoil the broth. A.A. groups had
their fling at education, and when they began to publicly whoop up the merits of
this or that brand, people became confused. Did A.A. fix drunks or was it an
educational project? Was A.A. spiritual or was it medical? Was it a reform
movement? In consternation, we saw ourselves getting married to all kinds of
enterprises, some good and some not so good. Watching
alcoholics committed willy-nilly to prisons or asylums, we began to cry, “There
oughtta be a aw!” A.A.’s commenced to thump tables in legislative committee
rooms and agitated for legal reform. That made good newspaper copy, but little
else. We saw we’d soon be mired in politics. Even inside A.A. we found it
imperative to remove the A.A. name from clubs and Twelfth Step
houses.
These
adventures implanted a deep-rooted conviction that in no circumstances could we
endorse any related enterprise, no matter how good. We of Alcoholics Anonymous
could not be all things to all men, nor should we try.
Years ago
this principle of “no endorsement” was put to a vital test. Some of the great
distilling companies proposed to go into the field of alcohol education. It
would be a good thing, they believed, for the liquor trade to show a sense of
public responsibility. They wanted to say that liquor should be enjoyed, not
misused; hard drinkers ought to slow down. and problem
drinkers—alcoholics——should not drink at all.
In one of
their trade associations, the question arose of just how this campaign should be
handled. Of course, they would use the resources of radio, press, and films to
make their point. But what kind of person should head the job? They immediately
thought of Alcoholics Anonymous. If they could find a good public relations man
in our ranks, why wouldn’t he be ideal? He’d certainly know the problem. His
connection with A.A. would be valuable, because the Fellowship stood high in
public favor and hadn’t an enemy in the world.
Soon they’d
spotted their man, an A.A. with the necessary experience. Straightway he
appeared at New
York
At first
glance, it did look like a good thing. Then doubt crept in. The association
wanted to use our member’s full name in all its advertising; he was to be
described both as its director of publicity and as a member of Alcoholics
Anonymous. Of course, there couldn’t be the slightest objection if such an
association hired an A.A. member solely because of his public relations ability
and his knowledge of alcoholism. But that wasn’t the whole story, for in this
case not only was an A.A. member to break his anonymity at a public level, he
was to link the name Alcoholics Anonymous to this particular educational
project in the minds of millions. It would be bound to appear that A.A. was now
backing education—liquor trade association style.
The minute
we saw this compromising fact for what it was, we asked the prospective
publicity director how he felt about it. “Great guns!” he said. “Of course I
can’t take the job. The ink wouldn’t be dry on the first ad before an awful
shriek would go up from the dry camp. They’d be out with lanterns looking for an
honest A.A. to plump for their brand of education. A.A. would land exactly in
the middle of the wet-dry controversy. Half the people in this country would
think we’d signed up with the drys, the other half would
think we’d joined the wets. What a mess!”
“Nevertheless,” we pointed out, “you still have a legal right to take
this job.”
“I know
that,” he said. “But this is no time for legalities. Alcoholics Anonymous saved
my life, and it comes first. I certainly won’t be the guy to land A.A. in
big-time trouble, and this would really do it!”
Concerning
endorsements, our friend had said it all. We saw as never before that we could
not lend the A.A. name to any cause other than our own.
“Every A.A. group ought to be fully
self-supporting, declining outside contributions.”
SELF-SUPPORTING alcoholics? Who ever heard of such a thing?
Yet we find that’s what we have to be. This principle is telling evidence of
the profound change that A.A. has wrought in all of us. Everybody knows that
active alcoholics scream that they have no troubles money can’t cure. Always,
we’ve had our hands out. Time out of mind we’ve been dependent upon somebody,
usually money-wise. When a society composed entirely of alcoholics says it’s
going to pay its bills, that’s really news.
Probably no
A.A. Tradition had the labor pains this one did. In early times, we were all
broke. When you add to this the habitual supposition that people ought to give
money to alcoholics trying to stay sober, it can be understood why we thought we
deserved a pile of folding money. What great things A.A. would be able to do
with it! But oddly enough, people who had money thought otherwise. They figured
that it was high time we now—sober—paid our own way. So our Fellowship stayed
poor because it had to.
There was
another reason for our collective poverty. It was soon apparent that while
alcoholics would spend lavishly on Twelfth Step cases, they had a terrific
aversion to dropping money into a meeting-place hat for group purposes. We were
astounded to find that we were as tight as the bark on a tree. So A.A., the
movement, started and stayed broke, while its individual members waxed
prosperous.
Alcoholics
are certainly all-or-nothing people. Our reactions to money prove this. As A.A.
emerged from its infancy into adolescence, we swung from the idea that we
needed vast sums of money to the notion that A.A. shouldn’t have any. On every
lip were the words “You can’t mix A.A. and money. We shall have to separate the
spiritual from the material.” We took this violent new tack because here and
there members had tried to make money out of their A.A. connections, and we
feared we’d be exploited. Now and then, grateful benefactors had endowed
clubhouses, and as a result there was sometimes outside interference in our
affairs. We had been presented with a hospital, and almost immediately the
donor’s son became its principal patient and would-be manager. One A.A. group
was given five thousand dollars to do with what it would. The hassle over that
chunk of money played havoc for years. Frightened by these complications, some
groups refused to have a cent in their treasuries.
Despite
these misgivings, we had to recognize the fact that A.A. had to function.
Meeting places cost something. To save whole areas from turmoil, small offices
had to be set up, telephones installed, and a few full-time secretaries hired.
Over many protests, these things were accomplished. We saw that if they weren’t,
the man coming in the door couldn’t get a break. These simple services would
require small sums of money which we could and would pay ourselves. At last the
pendulum stopped swinging and pointed straight at Tradition Seven as it reads
today.
In this
connection, Bill likes to tell the following pointed story. He explains that
when Jack Alexander’s Saturday Evening Post piece broke in 1941, thousands of
frantic letters from distraught alcoholics and their families hit the
Foundation* letterbox in New
York
“To my
surprise, the response of the groups was slow. I got mighty sore about it.
Looking at this avalanche of mail one morning at the office, I paced up and down
ranting how irresponsible and tightwad my fellow members were. Just then an old
acquaintance stuck a tousled and aching head in the door. He was our prize slippee. I could see he had an awful hangover. Remembering
some of my own, my heart filled with pity. I motioned him to my inside cubicle
and produced a five-dollar bill. As my total income was thirty dollars a week at
the time, this was a fairly large donation. Lois really needed the money for
groceries, but that didn’t stop me. The intense relief on my friend’s face
warmed my heart. I felt especially virtuous as I thought of all the ex-drunks
who wouldn’t even send the Foundation a dollar apiece, and here I was gladly
making a five-dollar investment to fix a hangover.
“The
meeting that night was at New
York 24th Street
“I heard
all this quite plainly, as I was piously trying to convert a newcomer who sat
next to me. The hat came in my direction, and I reached into my pocket. Still
working on my prospect, I fumbled and came up with a fifty-cent piece. Somehow
it looked like a very big coin. Hastily, I dropped it back and fished out a
dime, which clinked thinly as I dropped it in the hat. Hats never got folding
money in those days.
“Then I
woke up. I who had boasted my generosity that morning was treating my own club
worse than the distant alcoholics who had forgotten to send the Foundation their
dollars. I realized that my five-dollar gift to the slippee was an ego-feeding proposition, bad for him and bad
for me. There was a place in A.A. where spirituality and money would mix, and
that was in the hat!”
There is
another story about money. One night in 1948, the trustees of the Foundation
were having their quarterly meeting. The agenda discussion included a very
important question. A certain lady had died. When her will was read, it was
discovered she had left Alcoholics Anonymous in trust with the Alcoholic
Foundation a sum of ten thousand dollars. The question was: Should A.A. take the
gift?
What a
debate we had on that one! The Foundation was really hard up just then; the
groups weren’t sending in enough for the support of the office; we had been
tossing in all the book income and even that hadn’t been enough. The reserve was
melting like snow in springtime. We needed that ten
thousand dollars. “Maybe,” some said, “the groups will never fully support the
office. We can’t let it shut down; it’s far too vital. Yes, let’s take the
money. Let’s take all such donations in the future. We’re going to need
them.”
Then came the opposition. They pointed out that the Foundation
board already knew of a total of half a million dollars set aside for A.A. in
the wills of people still alive. Heaven only knew how much there was we hadn’t
heard about. If outside donations weren’t declined, absolutely cut off, then the
Foundation would one day become rich. Moreover, at the slightest intimation to
the general public from our trustees that we needed money, we could become
immensely rich. Compared to this prospect, the ten thousand dollars under
consideration wasn’t much, but like the alcoholic’s first drink it would, if
taken, inevitably set up a disastrous chain reaction. Where would that land us?
Whoever pays the piper is apt to call the tune, and if the A.A. Foundation
obtained money from outside sources, its trustees might be tempted to run things
without reference to the wishes of A.A. as a whole. Relieved of responsibility,
every alcoholic would shrug and say, “Oh, the Foundation is wealthy—why should I
bother?” The pressure of that fat treasury would surely tempt the board to
invent all kinds of schemes to do good with such funds,
and so divert A.A. from its primary purpose. The moment that happened, our
Fellowship’s confidence would be shaken. The board would isolated, and would fall under heavy attack of criticism from
both A.A. and the public. These were the possibilities, pro and con.
Then our
trustees wrote a bright page of A.A. history. They declared for the principle
that A.A. must always stay poor. Bare running expenses plus a prudent reserve
would henceforth be the Foundation’s financial policy. Difficult as it was, they
officially declined that ten thousand dollars, and adopted a formal, airtight
resolution that all such future gifts would be similarly declined. At that
moment, we be-eve, the principle of corporate poverty was firmly and finally
these facts were printed, there was a profound re-embedded in A.A.
tradition.
To people
familiar with endless drives for charitable funds, A.A. presented a strange and
refreshing spectacle. Approving editorials here and abroad generated a wave of
confidence in the integrity of Alcoholics Anonymous. They pointed out that the
irresponsible had become responsible, and that by making financial independence
part of its tradition, Alcoholics Anonymous had revived an ideal that its era
had almost forgotten.
* In 1954, the name of the Alcoholic Foundation, Inc., was changed to the General Service Board of Alcoholics
Anonymous, Inc., and the Foundation office is now the General Service
Office.
“Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever nonprofessional, but
our service centers may employ special workers.”
Alcoholics
simply will not listen to a paid twelfth-stepper. Almost from the beginning, we
have been positive that face-to-face work with the alcoholic who suffers could
be based only on the desire to help and be helped. When an A.A. talks for money,
whether at a meeting or to a single newcomer, it can have a very bad effect on
him, too. The money motive compromises him and everything he says and does for
his prospect. This has always been so obvious that only a very few A.A.’s have ever worked the Twelfth Step for a
fee.
Despite
this certainty, it is nevertheless true that few subjects have been the cause
of more contention within our Fellowship than professionalism. Caretakers who
swept floors, cooks who fried hamburgers, secretaries in offices, authors
writing books—all these we have seen hotly assailed because they were, as their
critics angrily remarked, “making money out of A.A.” Ignoring the fact that
these labors were not Twelfth Step jobs at all, the critics attacked as A.A.
professionals these workers of ours who were often doing thankless tasks that no
one else could or would do. Even greater furors were provoked when A.A. members
began to run rest homes and farms for alcoholics, when some hired out to
corporations as personnel men in charge of the alcoholic problem in industry,
when some became nurses on alcoholic wards, when others entered the field of
alcohol education. In all these instances, and more, it was a
that A.A. knowledge and experience were being claimed however, a plain
line of cleavage could be seen old for money, hence these people, too, were
professionals. between professionalism and nonprofessionalism. When we had agreed that the Twelfth Step
couldn’t be sold for money, we had been wise. But when
we had declared that our Fellowship couldn’t hire service workers nor could any
A.A. member carry our knowledge into other fields, we were taking the counsel of
ear, fear which today has been largely dispelled in the light of
experience.
Take the
case of the club janitor and cook. If a club is going to function, it has to be
habitable and hospitable. We tried volunteers, who were quickly disenchanted
with sweeping floors and brewing coffee seven days a week. They just didn’t
show up. Even more important, an empty club couldn’t answer its telephone, but
it was an open invitation to a drunk on a binge who possessed a spare key. So
somebody had to look after the place full time. If we hired an alcoholic, he’d
receive only what we’d have to pay a nonalcoholic for the same job. The job was
not to do Twelfth Step work; it was to make Twelfth Step work possible. It was a
service proposition, pure and simple.
Neither
could A.A. itself function without full-time workers. At the Foundation* and
intergroup offices, we couldn’t employ nonalcoholics as secretaries; we had to have people who knew
the A.A. pitch. But the minute we hired them, the ultraconservative and fearful
ones shrilled, “Professionalism!” At one period, the status of these faithful
servants was almost unbearable. They weren’t asked to speak at A.A. meetings
because they were “making money out of A.A.” At times, they were actually
shunned by fellow members. Even the charitably disposed described them as ‘‘a
necessary evil.’’ Committees took full advantage of this attitude to depress
their salaries. They could regain some measure of virtue, it was thought, if
they worked for A.A. real cheap. These notions persisted for years. Then we saw
that if a hardworking secretary answered the phone dozens of times a day,
listened to twenty wailing wives, arranged hospitalization and got sponsorship
for ten newcomers, and was gently diplomatic with the irate drunk who complained
about the job she was doing and how she was overpaid, then such a person could
surely not be called a professional A.A. She was not professionalizing the
Twelfth Step; she was just making it possible. She was helping to give the man
coming in the door the break he ought to have. Volunteer committeemen and
assistants could be of great help, but they could not be expected to carry this
load day in and day out.
At the
Foundation, the same story repeats itself. Eight tons of books and literature
per month do not package and channel themselves all over the world. Sacks of
letters on every conceivable A.A. problem ranging from a lonely-heart Eskimo to
the growing pains of thousands of groups must be answered by people who know.
Right contacts with the world outside have to be maintained. A.A.’s lifelines have to be tended. So we hire A.A. staff
members. We pay them well, and they earn what they get. They are professional
secretaries, ** but they certainly are not professional A.A.’s.
Perhaps the
fear will always lurk in every A.A. heart that one day our name will be
exploited by somebody for real cash. Even the suggestion of such a thing never
fails to whip up a hurricane, and we have discovered that hurricanes have a way
of mauling with equal severity both the just and the unjust. They are always
unreasonable.
No
individuals have been more buffeted by such emotional gusts than those A.A.’s bold enough to accept employment with outside
agencies dealing with the alcohol problem. A university wanted an A.A. member to
educate the public on alcoholism. A corporation wanted a personnel man familiar
with the subject. A state drunk farm wanted a manager who could really handle
inebriates. A city wanted an experienced social worker who understood what
alcohol could do to a family. A state alcohol commission wanted a paid
researcher. These are only a few of the jobs which A.A. members as individuals
have been asked to fill. Now and then, A.A. members have bought farms or rest
homes where badly beat-up topers could find needed care. The question was—and sometimes still is—are such activities to be
branded as professionalism under A.A. tradition?
We think
the answer is “No. Members who select such full-time careers do not
professionalize A.A.’s Twelfth Step.” The road to this
conclusion was long and rocky. At first, we couldn’t see the real issue
involved. In former days, the moment an A.A. hired out to such enterprises, he
was immediately tempted to use the name Alcoholics Anonymous for publicity or
money-raising purposes. Drunk farms, educational
ventures, state legislatures, and commissions advertised the fact that A.A.
members served them. Unthinkingly, A.A.’s so employed
recklessly broke anonymity to thump the tub for their pet enterprise. For this
reason, some very good causes and all connected with them suffered unjust
criticism from A.A. groups. More often than not, these onslaughts were
spearheaded by the cry “Professionalism! That guy is making money out of A.A.!”
Yet not a single one of them had been hired to do A.A.’s Twelfth Step work. The violation in these instances
was not professionalism at all; it was breaking anonymity. A.A.’s sole purpose was being compromised, and the name of
Alcoholics Anonymous was being misused.
It is significant, now that
almost no A.A. in our Fellowship breaks anonymity at the public level, that nearly all these fears have subsided. We see that
we have no right or need to discourage A.A.’s who wish
to work as individuals in these wider fields. It would be actually antisocial
were we to forbid them. We cannot declare A.A. such a closed corporation that
we keep our knowledge and experience top secret. If an A.A. member acting as a
citizen can become a better researcher, educator, personnel officer, then why
not? Everybody gains, and we have lost nothing. True, some of the projects to
which A.A.’s have attached themselves have been
ill-conceived, but that makes not the slightest difference with the principle
involved.
This is the exciting welter of
events which has finally cast up A.A.’s Tradition of
nonprofessionalism. Our Twelfth Step is never to be
paid for, but those who labor in service for us are worthy of their
hire.
*The work of present-day staff
members has no counterpart among the job categories of commercial organizations.
These A.A.’s bring a wide range of business and
professional experience to their service at G.S.O.
**In 1954, the name of the
Alcoholic Foundation, Inc., was changed to the General
Service Board of Alcoholics Anonymous, Inc., and the Foundation office is now
the General Service Office.
“A.A., as
such, ought never be organized; but we may create
service boards or committees directly responsible to those they
serve.”
WHEN Tradition Nine was first
written, it said that “Alcoholics Anonymous needs the least possible
organization.” In years since then, we have changed our minds about that.
Today, we are able to say with assurance that Alcoholics Anonymous—A.A. as a
whole—should never be organized at all. Then, in seeming contradiction, we
proceed to create special service boards and committees which in themselves are
organized. How, then, can we have an unorganized movement which can and does
create a service organization for itself? Scanning this puzzler, people say,
“What do they mean, no organization?”
Well, let’s see. Did anyone ever
hear of a nation, a church, a political party, even a benevolent association
that had no membership rules? Did anyone ever hear of a society which couldn’t
somehow discipline its members and enforce obedience to necessary rules and
regulations? Doesn’t nearly every society on earth give authority to some of its
members to impose obedience upon the rest and to punish or expel offenders?
Therefore, every nation, in fact
every
form of society, has to be a government administered by human beings. Power to
direct or govern is the essence of organization everywhere.
Yet Alcoholics Anonymous is an
exception. It does not conform to this pattern. Neither its General Service
Conference, its Foundation Board,* nor the humblest group committee can issue
a single directive to an A.A. member and make it stick, let alone mete out any
punishment. We’ve tried it lots of times, but utter failure is always the
result. Groups have tried to expel embers, but the banished have come back to
sit in the meeting place, saying, “This is life for us; you can’t keep us out.”
Committees have instructed many an A.A. to stop working on a chronic backslider,
only to be told: “How I do my Twelfth Step work is my business. Who are you to
judge?” This doesn’t mean an A.A. won’t take advice or suggestions from more
experienced members, but he surely won’t take orders. Who is more unpopular than
the oldtime A.A., full of wisdom, who moves to
another area and tries to tell the group there how to run its business? He and
all like him who “view with alarm for the good of A.A.” meet the most stubborn
resistance or, worse still, laughter.
You might think A.A.’s headquarters in New York
At this juncture, we can hear a
churchman exclaim, “They are making disobedience a virtue!” He is joined by a
psychiatrist who says, “Defiant brats! They won’t grow up and conform to social
usage!” The man in the street says, “I don’t understand it. They must be nuts!”
But all these observers have overlooked something unique in Alcoholics
Anonymous. Unless each A.A. member follows to the best of his ability our
suggested Twelve Steps to recovery, he almost certainly signs his own death
warrant. His drunkenness and dissolution are not penalties inflicted by people
in authority; they result from his personal disobedience to spiritual
principles.
The same stern threat applies to
the group itself. Unless there is approximate conformity to A.A.’s Twelve Traditions, the group, too, can deteriorate
and die. So we of A.A. do obey spiritual principles, first because we must, and
ultimately because we love the kind of life such obedience brings. Great
suffering and great love are A.A.’s disciplinarians;
we need no others.
It is clear now that we ought
never to name boards to govern us, but it is equally clear that we shall always
need to authorize workers to serve us. It is the difference between the spirit
of vested authority and the spirit of service, two concepts which are sometimes
poles apart. It is in this spirit of service that we elect the A.A. group’s
informal rotating committee, the intercrop association for the area, and the
General Service Conferences of Alcoholics Anonymous for A.A. as a whole. Even
our Foundation, once an independent board, is today directly accountable to our
Fellowship. Its trustees are the caretakers and expediters of our world
services.
Just as the aim of each A.A.
member is personal sobriety, the aim of our services is to bring sobriety
within reach of all who want it. If nobody does the group’s chores, if the
area’s telephone rings unanswered, if we do not reply to our mail, then A.A. as
we know it would stop. Our communications lines with those who need our help
would be broken.
A.A. has to function, but at the
same time it must avoid those dangers of great wealth, prestige, and entrenched
power which necessarily tempt other societies. Though Tradition Nine at first
sight seems to deal with a purely practical matter, in its actual operation it
discloses a society without organization, animated only by the spirit of
service—a true fellowship.
“Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the
A.A. name ought never be drawn into public
controversy.”
N EVER
since it began has Alcoholics Anonymous been divided by a major controversial
issue. Nor has our Fellowship ever publicly taken sides on any question in an
embattled world. This, however, has been no earned virtue. It could almost be
said that we were born with it, for, as one oldtimer
recently declared, “Practically never have I heard a heated religious,
political, or reform argument among A.A. members. So long as we don’t argue
these matters privately, it’s a cinch we never shall publicly.”
As by some
deep instinct, we A.A.’s have known from the very
beginning that we must never, no matter what the provocation, publicly take
sides in any fight, even a worthy one. All history affords us the spectacle of
striving nations and groups finally torn asunder because they were designed for,
or tempted into, controversy. Others fell apart because of sheer
self-righteousness while trying to enforce upon the rest of mankind some
millennium of their own specification. In our own times, we have seen millions
die in political and economic wars often spurred by religious and racial
difference. We live in the imminent possibility of a fresh holocaust to
determine how men shall be governed, and how the products of nature and toil
shall be divided among them. That is the spiritual climate in which A.A. was
born, and by God’s grace has nevertheless flourished.
Let us
reemphasize that this reluctance to fight one another or anybody else is not
counted as some special virtue which makes us feel superior to other people. Nor
does it mean that the members of Alcoholics Anonymous, now restored as citizens
of the world, are going to back away from their individual responsibilities to
act as they see the right upon issues of our time. But when it
comes to A.A. as a whole, that’s quite a different matter. In this
respect, we do not enter into public controversy, because we know that our
Society will perish if it does. We conceive the survival and spread of
Alcoholics Anonymous to be something of far greater importance than the weight
we could collectively throw back of any other cause. Since recovery from
alcoholism is life itself to us, it is imperative that we preserve in full
strength our means of survival.
Maybe this
sounds as though the alcoholics in A.A. had suddenly gone peaceable, and become
one great big happy family. Of course, this isn’t so at all. Human beings that
we are, we squabble. Before we leveled off a bit, A.A. looked
more like one prodigious squabble than anything else, at least on the
surface. A corporation director who had just voted a company expenditure
of a hundred thousand dollars would appear at an A.A. business meeting and blow
his top over an outlay of twenty-five dollars’ worth of needed postage stamps.
Disliking the attempt of some to manage a group, half its membership might
angrily rush off to form another group more to their liking. Elders, temporarily
turned Pharisee, have sulked. Bitter attacks have been directed against people
suspected of mixed motives. Despite their din, our puny rows never did A.A. a
particle of harm. They were just part and parcel of learning to work and live
together. Let it be noted, too, that they were almost always concerned with ways
to make A.A. more effective, how to do the most good for the most
alcoholics.
The
Washingtonian Society, a movement among alcoholics which started in Baltimore
The early
members foresaw that they should dedicate themselves to this sole aim. In many
respects, the Washingtonians were akin to A.A. of today. Their membership
passed the hundred thousand mark. Had they been left to themselves, and had they
stuck to their one goal, they might have found the rest of the answer. But this
didn’t happen. Instead, the Washingtonians permitted politicians and reformers,
both alcoholic and nonalcoholic, to use the society for their own purposes.
Abolition of slavery, for example, was a stormy political issue then. Soon,
Washingtonian speakers violently and publicly took sides on this question. Maybe
the society could have survived the abolition controversy, but it didn’t have a
chance from the moment it determined to reform America
The lesson
to be learned from the Washingtonians was not overlooked by Alcoholics
Anonymous. As we surveyed the wreck of that movement, early A.A. members
resolved to keep our Society out of public controversy. Thus was laid the
cornerstone for Tradition Ten: “Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside
issues; hence the A.A. name ought never be drawn into
public controversy.’’
“Our public relations policy is based on
attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at
the level of press, radio, and films.”
WITHOUT its
legions of well-wishers, A.A. could never have grown as it has. Throughout the
world, immense and favorable publicity of every description has been the
principal means of bringing alcoholics into our Fellowship. In A.A. offices,
clubs, and homes, telephones ring constantly. One voice says, “I read a piece in
the newspapers . . another,
“We heard a radio program . . .“; and still another, “We saw a moving picture .
. .“ or “We saw something about A.A. on television. . . .“ It is no
exaggeration to say that half of A.A.’s membership has
been led to us through channels like these.
The
inquiring voices are not all alcoholics or their families. Doctors read medical
papers about Alcoholics Anonymous and call for more information. Clergymen see
articles in their church journals and also make inquiries. Employers learn that
great corporations have set their approval upon us, and wish to discover what
can be done about alcoholism in their own firms.
Therefore,
a great responsibility fell upon us to develop the best possible public
relations policy for Alcoholics Anonymous. Through many painful experiences, we
think we have arrived at what that policy ought to be. It is the opposite in
many ways of usual promotional practice. We found that we had to rely upon the
principle of attraction rather than of promotion.
Let’s see
how these two contrasting ideas—attraction and promotion—work out. A political
party wishes to win an election, so it advertises the virtues of its leadership
to draw votes. A worthy charity wants to raise money; forthwith, its letterhead
shows the name of every distinguished person whose support can be obtained. Much
of the political, economic, and religious life of the world is dependent upon
publicized leadership. People who symbolize causes and ideas fill a deep human
need. We of A.A. do not question that. But we do have to soberly face the fact
that being in the public eye is hazardous, especially for us. By temperament,
nearly every one of us had been an irrepressible promoter, and the prospect of
a society composed almost entirely of promoters was frightening. Considering
this explosive factor, we knew we had to exercise self-restraint.
The way
this restraint paid off was startling. It resulted in more favorable publicity
of Alcoholics Anonymous than could possibly have been obtained through all the
arts and abilities of A.A.’s best press agents.
Obviously, A.A. had to be publicized somehow, so we resorted to the idea that it
would be far better to let our friends do this for us. Precisely that has
happened, to an unbelievable extent. Veteran newsmen, trained doubters that they
are, have gone all out to carry A.A.’s message. To
them, we are something more than the source of good stories. On almost every
newsfront, the men and women of the press have
attached themselves to us as friends.
In the
beginning, the press could not understand our refusal of all personal publicity.
They were genuinely baffled by our insistence upon anonymity. Then they got the
point. Here was something rare in the world—a society which said it wished to
publicize its principles and its work, but not its individual members. The press
was delighted with this attitude. Ever since, these friends have reported A.A.
with an enthusiasm which the most ardent members would find hard to
match.
There was
actually a time when the press of America
The
Foundation* wrote letters to practically every news outlet in North America,
setting forth our public relations policy of attraction rather than promotion,
and emphasizing personal anonymity as A.A.’s greatest
protection. Since that time, editors and rewrite men have repeatedly deleted
names and pictures of members from A.A. copy; frequently, they have reminded
ambitious individuals of A.A.’s policy. They have even
sacrificed good stories to this end. The force of their cooperation has
certainly helped. Only a few A.A. members are left who deliberately break
anonymity at the public level.
This, in
brief, is the process by which A.A.’s Tradition Eleven
was constructed. To us, however, it represents far more than a sound public
relations policy. It is more than a denial of self-seeking. This Tradition is a
constant and practical reminder that personal ambition has no place in A.A. In
it, each member becomes an active guardian of our Fellowship.
“Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever
reminding us to place principles before personalities..”
THE
spiritual substance of anonymity is sacrifice. Because A.A.’s Twelve Traditions repeatedly ask us to give up
personal desires for the common good, we realize that the sacrificial
spirit—well symbolized by anonymity—is the foundation of them all. It is A.A.’s proved willingness to make these sacrifices that
gives people their high confidence in our future.
But in the
beginning, anonymity was not born of confidence; it was the child of our early
fears. Our first nameless groups of alcoholics were secret societies. New
prospects could find us only through a few trusted friends. The bare hint of
publicity, even for our work, shocked us. Though ex-drinkers, we still thought
we had to hide from public distrust and contempt.
When the Big
Book appeared in 1939, we called it “Alcoholics Anonymous.” Its foreword made
this revealing statement: “It is important that we remain anonymous because we
are too few, at present, to handle the overwhelming number of personal appeals
which may result from this publication. Being mostly business or professional
folk, we could not well carry on our occupations in such an event.”
Between
these lines, it is easy to read our fear that large numbers of incoming people
might break our anonymity wide open.
As the A.A.
groups multiplied, so did anonymity problems. Enthusiastic over the spectacular
recovery of a brother alcoholic, we’d sometimes discuss those intimate and
harrowing aspects of his case meant for his sponsor’s ear alone. The aggrieved
victim would then rightly declare that his rust had been broken. When such
stories got into circulation outside of A.A., the loss of confidence in our
anonymity promise was severe. It frequently turned people from us. Clearly,
every A.A. member’s name—and story, too— had to be confidential, if he wished.
This was our first lesson in the practical application of anonymity.
With
characteristic intemperance, however, some of our newcomers cared not at all for
secrecy. They wanted to shout A.A. from the housetops, and did. Alcoholics
barely dry rushed about bright-eyed, buttonholing anyone who would listen to
their stories. Others hurried to place themselves before microphones and
cameras. Sometimes, they got distressingly drunk and let their groups down with
a bang. They had changed from A.A. members into A.A. show-offs.
This
phenomenon of contrast really set us thinking. Squarely before us was the
question “How anonymous should an A.A. member be?” Our growth made it plain that
we couldn’t be a secret society, but it was equally plain that we couldn’t be a
vaudeville circuit, either. The charting of a safe path between these extremes
took a long time.
As a rule,
the average newcomer wanted his family to know immediately what he was trying to
do. He also wanted to tell others who had tried to help him—his doctor, his
minister, and close friends. As he gained confidence, he felt it right to
explain his new way of life to his employer and business associates. When
opportunities to be helpful came along, he found he could talk easily about A.A.
to almost anyone. These quiet disclosures helped him to lose his fear of the
alcoholic stigma, and spread the news of A.A.’s
existence in his community. Many a new man and woman came to A.A. because of
such conversations. Though not in the strict letter of
anonymity, such communications were well within its spirit.
But it
became apparent that the word-of-mouth method was too limited. Our work, as
such, needed to be publicized. The A.A. groups would have to reach quickly as
many despairing alcoholics as they could. Consequently, many groups began to
hold meetings which were open to interested friends and the public, so that the
average citizen could see for himself just what A.A. was all about. The response
to these meetings was warmly sympathetic. Soon, groups began to receive requests
for A.A. speakers to appear before civic organizations, church groups, and
medical societies. Provided anonymity was maintained on these platforms, and
reporters present were cautioned against the use of names or pictures, the
result was fine.
Then came our first few excursions into major publicity, which
were breathtaking. Cleveland
As this tide
offering top public approval swept in, we realized that it could do us
incalculable good or great harm. Everything would depend upon how it was
channeled. We simply couldn’t afford to take the chance of letting
self-appointed members present themselves as messiahs representing A.A. before
the whole public. The promoter instinct in us might be our undoing. If even one
publicly got drunk, or was lured into using A.A.’s
name for his own purposes, the damage might be irreparable. At this altitude
(press, radio, films, and television), anonymity— 100 percent anonymity—was the
only possible answer. Here, principles would have to come before personalities,
without exception.
These
experiences taught us that anonymity is real humility at work. It is an
all-pervading spiritual quality which today keynotes A.A. life everywhere. Moved
by the spirit of anonymity, we try to give up our natural desires for personal
distinction as A.A. members both among fellow alcoholics and before the general
public. As we lay aside these very human aspirations, we believe that each of us
takes part in the weaving of a protective mantle which covers our whole Society
and under which we may grow and work in unity.
We are sure
that humility, expressed by anonymity, is the greatest safeguard that Alcoholics
Anonymous can ever have.
(The Long Form)
Our A
.A. experience has taught us that:
One—Each member of Alcoholics Anonymous is but a small part of
a great whole. A.A. must continue to live or most of us will surely die. Hence
our common welfare comes first. But individual welfare follows close
afterward.
Two-For our group purpose there is but one ultimate
authority—a loving God as He may express Himself in our group
conscience.
Three—Our membership ought to include
all who suffer from alcoholism. Hence we may refuse none who wish to recover.
Nor ought A.A. membership ever depend upon money or
conformity. Any two or three alcoholics gathered together for sobriety may call
themselves an A.A. group, provided that, as a group, they have no other
affiliation.
Four—With respect to its own affairs, each A.A. group should
be responsible to no other authority than its own conscience. But when its plans
concern the welfare of neighboring groups also, those groups ought to be
consulted. And no group, regional committee, or individual should ever take any
action that might greatly affect A.A. as a whole without conferring with the
trustees of the General Service Board. On such issues our common welfare is
paramount.
Five—Each Alcoholics Anonymous group ought to be a spiritual
entity having but one primary purpose—that of carrying its message to the
alcoholic who still suffers.
Six—Problems of money, property, and authority may easily
divert us from our primary spiritual aim. We think, therefore, that any
considerable property of genuine use to A.A. should be separately incorporated
and managed, thus dividing the material from the spiritual. An A.A. group, as
such, should never go into business. Secondary aids to A.A., such as clubs or
hospitals which require much property or administration, ought to be
incorporated and so set apart that, if necessary, they can be freely discarded
by the groups. Hence such facilities ought not to use the A.A. name. Their
management should be the sole responsibility of those people who financially
support them. For clubs, A.A. managers are usually preferred. But hospitals, as
well as other places of recuperation, ought to be well outside A.A.—and
medically supervised. While an A.A. group may cooperate with anyone, such
cooperation ought never to go so far as affiliation or endorsement, actual or
implied. An A.A. group can bind itself to no one.
Seven—The A.A. groups themselves ought to be fully supported
by the voluntary contributions of their own members. We think that each group
should soon achieve this ideal; that any public
solicitation of funds using the name of
Alcoholics Anonymous is highly dangerous, whether by groups, clubs, hospitals,
or other outside agencies; that acceptance of large gifts from any source, or of
contributions carrying any obligation whatever, is unwise. Then, too, we view
with much concern those A.A. treasuries which continue, beyond prudent reserves,
to accumulate funds for no stated A.A. purpose. Experience has often warned us
that nothing can so surely destroy our spiritual heritage as futile disputes
over property, money, and authority.
Eight—Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever
nonprofessional. We define professionalism as the occupation of counseling
alcoholics for fees or hire. But we may employ alcoholics where they are going
to perform those services for which we might otherwise have to engage nonalcoholics. Such special services may be well
recompensed. But our usual A.A. Twelfth Step work is never to be paid
for.
Nine—Each A.A. group needs the least possible organization.
Rotating leadership is the best. The small group may elect its secretary, the
large group its rotating committee, and the groups of
a large metropolitan area their central or intergroup
committee, which often employs a full-time secretary. The trustees of the
General Service Board are, in effect, our A.A. General Service Committee. They
are the custodians of our A.A. Tradition and the receivers of voluntary A.A.
contributions by which we maintain our A.A. General Service Office at New York
Ten—No A.A. group or member should ever, in such a way as to
implicate A.A., express any opinion on outside controversial issues—particularly
those of politics, alcohol reform, or sectarian religion. The Alcoholics
Anonymous groups oppose no one. Concerning such matters they can express no
views whatever.
Eleven—Our relations with the general
public should be characterized by personal anonymity. We think A.A. ought to
avoid sensational advertising. Our names and pictures as A.A. members ought
not be broadcast, filmed, or publicly printed. Our
public relations should be guided by the principle of attraction rather than
promotion. There is never need to praise ourselves. We feel it better to let our
friends recommend us.
Twelve—And finally, we of Alcoholics
Anonymous believe that the principle of anonymity has an immense spiritual
significance. It reminds us that we are to place principles before
personalities; that we are actually to practice a genuine humility. This to the end that our great blessings may never spoil us; that we
shall forever live in thankful contemplation of Him who presides over us
all.
