Two Drunks
ON A COLD SPRING morning in 1925, Lois Wilson cracked the throttle on her war-surplus Harley Davidson motorcycle and set off on a yearlong journey that she hoped would save the life of her husband, Bill. As they pulled away from her parents’ home in Brooklyn, New York, Bill’s six-foot, two-inch frame was crammed into the sidecar. Stuffed around him were a tent, a mattress, seven army blankets, a gasoline stove, a hamper of food, a small trunk of clothes, a radio, and some large books containing financial statistics. It looked like “we were bound for the Arctic with presents for all the Eskimos,” Lois said. The trip was Bill’s idea, and Lois had great confidence in Bill and his dreams. She was also desperate to find a way to help him stop drinking.1
Bill Wilson had always been ambitious. He once planned to be an engineer but decided to become a lawyer instead. Now that he had completed all of his course work for a law degree, he had changed his mind again. He had his heart set on working on Wall Street, which had become the destination of many ambitious young men as the country experienced the fourth straight year of strong economic growth. Stocks had started what appeared to be an unstoppable rise, and fortunes were being made on “the Street” every day. Bill’s dream wasn’t wishful thinking. He had a definite plan. He wanted to visit the factories of companies whose stock was traded on Wall Street to find out everything he could about their prospects. Those facts could help stockbrokers invest in unknown companies when their stock was cheap, making themselves and their customers rich when other investors discovered them. Bill was sure of success. All he needed was one sponsor willing to invest a few hundred dollars to cover his travel expenses.
But Bill was in trouble now. From the time of his first drink at age twenty-one, he never drank like other people. That first drink was a Bronx cocktail—a gin martini with a splash of orange juice—a refined cocktail served in 1917 during a reception for Bill and other young army officers at a private home in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The country was at war, and the drink helped Lieutenant Wilson forget his fear of facing enemy fire for the first time. It made him feel as if he deserved the attention of New Bedford’s finest citizens and its prettiest young ladies. For an evening, it made him invincible. He quickly lost control. On a visit to her fiancé, Lois found Bill in the barracks, facedown on his bed, a bucket within easy reach on the floor. Bill had become a daily drinker by the time they were married in 1918. He returned safely from the war, only to face a new enemy. When Lois suffered a miscarriage in 1923, Bill was nowhere to be found. He had skipped law school to drink. He was half drunk when he showed up at the hospital.
One morning in March 1925, Bill told Lois he wanted to try his research idea on his own. The night before, he had come home so drunk that he couldn’t make it to bed. He was badly hung over as he sat with Lois in the kitchen. “Would you take the chance with me, Lo?” he asked. “I finally realized . . . I just can’t go on like this anymore.” Neither could she. “I was so concerned about Bill’s drinking that I wanted to get him away from New York and its bars,” Lois said.2
William Griffith Wilson was born in 1895 in East Dorset, Vermont, a town of three hundred that had complete faith in Protestant religion and the Republican Party. His family was solidly middle class on both sides. His father, Gilman, was a fun-loving man who was superintendent at a marble quarry. Gilman married the town’s most eligible girl, Emily Griffith, whose father, Fayette, owned much of the land in town as well as the East Dorset Water Company. A Civil War veteran who had driven an ambulance at Gettysburg, he was an industrious and keen-eyed Yankee who had started life as a farmer and then went into the lumber business. Although he was wealthy by local standards, he believed in hard work and independence. These qualities were handed down. Emily studied to become a teacher before her marriage, and Bill and his sister, Dorothy, grew up doing chores on their grandfather’s dairy farm.
Bill grew up in a country that believed deeply in its self-made men. John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford were changing the face of America. Electricity was beginning to light the nation’s cities, and horses were starting to share the road with cars. Bill was imbued with the spirit of his age, but the young man suffered from a severe handicap. At the age of nine, he began to develop a deep sense of inferiority. That was when his father told him that he was leaving Vermont and that it was Bill’s responsibility to take care of his mother and sister. It would be nine years before he saw his father again. The next blow fell even before his parents’ divorce became final. At a picnic on Dorset Pond the following year, Emily told her children that she was moving to Boston to study medicine. Dorothy would live with her part of the time, but Bill would stay with Fayette in East Dorset. “To this day, I shiver every time I recall that scene on the grass by the lakefront,” Wilson said. “I hid the wound, however, and never talked about it with anybody, even my sister.”3
Bill Wilson grew up believing he had done something to drive his parents away. His insecurity became a driving force in his life as he sought to prove that he could be “the Number One Man.” His success only hid his insecurity. He suffered a nervous breakdown at the age of seventeen that only began to lift when he met Lois Burnham.4
In the summer of 1913, Lois was twenty-two years old. The daughter of a prosperous doctor with a practice in fashionable Brooklyn Heights, she was a college graduate with a job. She knew Bill Wilson because her family owned a summer home near East Dorset, and he and her brother had become friends. Lois had no romantic interest in the tall and lanky seventeen-year-old. “After all, I was a young lady and he but a teenager,” she said. Her opinion of Bill improved as she got to know him better. By the end of the summer, “I thought Bill the most interesting, the most knowledgeable and the finest man I knew,” Lois said. “I forgot all about the difference in our ages.” They became engaged in the summer of 1915.5
Ten years later, Lois was determined to help Bill succeed. A woman who loved the outdoors, she was excited about the prospect of spending as long as a year on the road, sleeping in a tent. Their first stop was the General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York. After setting up camp in a field on a nearby farm, Bill put on his only suit and introduced himself in the office of the GE plant as a small investor seeking a tour. He failed to get the tour, but he discovered that the farm where he was staying was adjacent to GE’s radio research laboratory. He made friends with some of the workers, who admitted him to the lab. “I got a preview of the whole radio industry five and ten years away,” Wilson said. A month later, Bill and Lois discovered another promising company, Giant Portland Cement, in Egypt, Pennsylvania. Bill’s reports on GE and Giant Portland convinced Frank Shaw, a stockbroker with the J. K. Rice Company, that Bill was onto something. The company agreed to help bankroll the rest of the trip, purchasing two thousand dollars of Giant Portland stock for Bill’s account and allowing him to borrow against its rising value. When Bill and Lois returned to New York in the spring of 1926, Bill was given a job at fifty dollars per week.6
Lois hoped that the trip had been a turning point in Bill’s drinking as well. There had been setbacks on the road, but Bill had enjoyed a long period of sobriety for the first time in several years. His drinking was under control until they returned to the road to search for fresh prospects. Driving a used Dodge this time, they revisited Giant Portland and then headed north to Massachusetts and Canada. On their way back to the United States, they stopped on the Canadian side of the International Bridge at Sault Ste. Marie. Bill told Lois that he wanted to buy cigarettes. She was instantly suspicious because cigarettes were more expensive in Canada, but Bill had been sober throughout their trip. She sat in the car in the bridge plaza awaiting his return. Two hours later, Lois began looking for Bill in the local bars. When she found him in the very last saloon, he was almost too drunk to walk. Bill was always quick to apologize when he sobered up. This time he told Lois he would stop drinking, and he put it in writing. “There will be no booze in 1927,” he promised.7
Back in New York, Bill and Lois created a life for themselves that would have been the envy of most Americans. They had more money than they knew what to do with. Besides Bill’s salary, there was an unlimited expense account and a $20,000 line of credit for buying stocks. As the bull market raged, Bill and Lois rented two apartments in one of the toniest buildings in Brooklyn Heights, tearing out the dividing wall to create a large living room that soon boasted a $1,600 grand piano. Prohibition was the law of the land, but New York was a city with a thousand speakeasies. Every day at the ringing of the bell that ended trading at the New York Stock Exchange, Bill began drinking his way uptown. “I’d be pretty much out of commission at 14th Street and completely lose my wits at 59th. Start out with $500 and then have to crawl under a subway gate to get back to Brooklyn,” Bill said. On the mornings after, Bill searched for the reason he had once again failed to control his drinking. “I’m halfway to hell now and going strong,” he told Lois in late 1927. On October 29, 1929, “Black Tuesday,” the stock market collapsed, wiping out the paper fortunes of tens of thousands of Americans, including Bill and Lois.8
It was alcohol, not the crash, that ruined the Wilsons. When Bill didn’t come home on Black Tuesday, a frantic Lois called his office and learned that he had been fired for his drinking. Eventually, Bill turned up looking worse than Lois had ever seen him: his head was cut, and his jacket and pants were torn. He still enjoyed a reputation as a champion stock picker, and he got another job in Montreal. He drank himself out of that in six months. Lois pleaded with him to quit. She even left him for a week to show that she was serious. Finally, in September 1930, having lost two jobs in less than a year, Bill wrote a pledge not to drink in the family Bible. He had promised before. He had even written his promise in the Bible before. This time, for the first time, he made a real effort to quit. It didn’t matter. Three months later, he fell off the wagon and was fired from his job as an assistant bookkeeper after losing the company books in a speakeasy. Lois’s mother, Matilda, was dying of cancer at that time. Although he loved his mother-in-law, Bill was drunk when she died and stayed that way for days after.
In desperation, Lois took him to Vermont, where alcohol was less available. The Vermont cure seemed to work as Bill stayed sober through the summer of 1933, but he started drinking again when they returned to New York. It began to seem that Bill might meet the fate of so many alcoholics—confinement in a state mental hospital. There was one place they had not tried—the Charles B. Towns Hospital for the Treatment of Drug and Alcoholic Addictions, which was located on the corner of Eighty-First Street and Central Park West in New York. Founded in 1901 by the forceful Charles Towns, a businessman from Georgia, the Towns Hospital specialized in treating wealthy alcoholics and drug addicts. Towns claimed to have discovered a drug that could cure up to 95 percent of his patients in as few as four or five days. Medical supporters of the Towns treatment acknowledged that the cure rate was much lower—perhaps 20 percent. But they defended the Towns regimen, which included both detoxification and “recuperative treatment” consisting of special diets, exercise, massage, and hydrotherapy, as far more effective than any other methods. Bill and Lois might have turned to Towns sooner if it hadn’t been for the cost. But in the fall of 1933, a family member offered to pay, and Bill became a patient.
At Towns, Bill finally found someone who understood him. Dr. William D. Silkworth, the medical superintendent, was a contrarian. The medical profession had turned its back on drunks, but Silkworth believed that alcoholism was an “allergy” that made it impossible for people to have even one drink without triggering uncontrollable cravings. The doctor had to admit that his theory wasn’t helping many people get sober. Even an institution like Towns was little more than a place where alcoholics were “purged and puked.” Nevertheless, Silkworth’s patients loved the short, bald doctor. Silkworth felt deep compassion for their suffering, and he relieved some of their guilt by assuring them that they were not to blame for what was happening to them. He also offered hope. It didn’t happen often, but some people did recover. He estimated the cure rate at only 2 percent. When Silkworth delivered this news to Bill and Lois in 1933, they were elated. Now that they understood the nature of Bill’s affliction, they were convinced they knew the cure—not to take the first drink.” I left Towns a new man,” Bill said.
Never shall I forget the first courage and joy that surged in me as I opened the door to enter 182 Clinton Street, Brooklyn. I embraced Lois; our union was renewed. . . . Yes, life would begin again, and oh, how deeply we both believed it.
Bill and Lois disagreed about when his drinking started again. Bill said it was four months later. Lois said it was four weeks.9
Silkworth was almost as disappointed as Bill and Lois, but he wasn’t surprised. His hope had hung on his belief that Bill was strongly motivated. When Bill came back to Towns a few months after his first hospitalization, Silkworth could see his future clearly. Lois tried again to rescue her husband by taking him away to the country, but he got drunk anyway. They returned to Brooklyn. “Not long after we reached Clinton Street, my husband, who had been my daily companion in Vermont, became a drunken sot,” Lois said. Bill had not completely given up the fight, but the battles were growing shorter:
I’d work through hangover after hangover, only to last four or five days, or maybe one or two. In the night hours, I was filled with horror, for snaky things infested the dark. Sometimes by day, queer images danced on the wall.
Bill began to think of suicide. “I swayed dizzily before an open window, or the medicine cabinet where there was poison, cursing myself for a weakling,” he said. “Then came the night when the physical and mental torture was so hellish I feared I would burst through the window, sash and all.” His mattress was moved to a lower floor. The third time Bill was hospitalized, Lois confronted Silkworth and demanded the truth. The doctor told her that Bill was hopeless and would probably not last another year. Silkworth urged her to commit him to a mental hospital.10
Bill stayed sober for a couple of months after leaving Towns in September 1934. He knew his life depended on it, but he had no confidence in his ability to continue. In a bar on Staten Island, he began another spree, surrounded by other veterans of the Great War on Armistice Day, November 11. He had no intention of stopping again. But a few days later, he got a phone call from an old friend, Ebby Thacher, another big drinker. He and Ebby had once humiliated themselves by arriving drunk in a small plane at the airport in Manchester, Vermont. Because the airport was new, a small greeting party approached the plane as it rolled to a stop. When the door of the plane opened, Bill and Ebby fell to the ground, unable to rise.
Bill knew that he and Ebby were on the same road to hell, and he prepared for his friend’s arrival by making a pitcher of pineapple juice and gin. (Bill preferred to drink straight gin, but he was afraid Lois might come home.) He was thunderstruck when he opened the door for his old friend and found someone else entirely. He couldn’t put his finger on it immediately, but Ebby had stopped drinking. He refused the offer of the pineapple juice. Bill finally asked him what had happened. “I’ve got religion,” Ebby said.11
Bill was instantly on his guard. He was not an atheist. He believed that only God could have created a natural world that operated according to natural laws. “With ministers, and the world’s religions, I parted right there,” Bill said. “When they talked of a God personal to me, who was love, superhuman strength and direction I became irritated and my mind snapped shut against such a theory.”12
Probably sensing Bill’s resistance, Ebby didn’t dwell on religion. He brought him up to date on his recent arrest for drunkenly discharging a shotgun in a residential neighborhood. Facing a possible prison term, Ebby was rescued by the friend of a friend, Rowland Hazard, who promised the judge that he would take him in hand. Rowland was an alcoholic who had found sobriety through the Oxford Group, an organization of Protestants of different denominations who were dissatisfied with conventional religion. Rowland took Ebby to New York. He was currently living in a mission on East Twenty-Third Street that was run by the Calvary Episcopal Church, whose rector was a leader in the Oxford Group.
Ebby spoke briefly about the program of the Oxford Group, which was built around the practice of four “absolutes”—absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love. The Oxford Group stressed the importance of taking a complete moral inventory of your life, making restitutions to those you had hurt, and then helping others. “Then, very dangerously, he touched upon the subject of prayer and God,” Bill said. Bill did not explode. Whatever Ebby was doing, it obviously was working. It was not just that he had been sober for four months or that he looked good. “I saw that my friend was much more than inwardly reorganized. He was on a different footing. His roots grasped a new soil,” Bill said. Ebby was not just sober. He was happy.13
One morning, Bill decided he wanted to see the Calvary mission for himself. By the time he had walked the three blocks from the subway to the mission, he was drunk and dragging a new friend, Alec, a homeless Finn who had once been a sailor. The two men made so much noise that they were ejected. Later, Ebby appeared and forced beans and coffee down their throats until they were sober enough to attend the daily service. Still drunk, Bill rose to his feet and swore that he would try to follow Ebby’s example. When Lois returned from work that evening, she found Bill sitting at the kitchen table, sober and deep in thought. He told her he was going to give the Oxford Group a try. “I remember how I hugged him and cried in his arms,” she said.14
For several days, he did try. The sudden withdrawal of alcohol caused Bill to shake so badly that Lois wanted to call the doctor, but he refused. When he did get drunk again, he and Lois had a fight that ended with Bill throwing her sewing machine against a wall. The next day, Bill checked himself into Towns Hospital. He had managed to buy four beers on credit and had consumed them on the way, so he was feeling better when he encountered Silkworth in the hall. Waving a bottle, he told the doctor that he had “found something.”15
As his detoxification progressed, however, Bill fell into a deep depression. His spirits rose briefly when Ebby visited, then sank again. He knew that death was near. “I again thought of the cancer of alcoholism which had now consumed me in mind and spirit, and soon in body,” he said. Ebby had promised that God would save him if he asked for help, but this flew in the face of everything he believed. It would be admitting defeat. At last, in agony, he cried out, “I’ll do anything, anything at all. If there be a God, let Him show Himself!”
Suddenly, my room blazed with an indescribably white light. I was seized with an ecstasy beyond description. Every joy I had known was pale by comparison. The light, the ecstasy—I was conscious of nothing else for a time. Then, seen in the mind’s eye, there was a mountain. I stood on the summit, where a great wind blew. A wind, not of air, but of spirit. In great, clean strength, it blew right through me. Then came the blazing thought, “You are a free man.” . . . I became acutely conscious of a Presence which seemed like a veritable sea of living spirit. I lay on the shores of a new world. “This,” I thought, “must be the great reality. The God of the preachers.”
Bill had experienced a spiritual awakening. He was convinced that no matter how wrong things seemed, “there could be no question of the ultimate rightness of God’s universe.” “For the first time, I felt that I really belonged. I knew that I was loved and could love in return,” he said.16
Silkworth recognized that something profound had happened and urged Bill not to question what it was. “You are already a different individual,” he said. “[W]hatever you’ve got now, you’d better hold on to. It’s so much better than what you had only a couple of hours ago,” he said. Lois was also convinced. “The minute I saw him at the hospital, I knew something overwhelming had happened,” she said. “His eyes were filled with light. His whole being expressed hope and joy. . . . I walked home on air.”17
Bill Wilson left Towns Hospital on December 18, 1934, and immediately embarked on a mission to change the world. “I was soon heard to say that I was going to fix up all the drunks in the world, even though the batting average on them had been virtually nil for 5,000 years,” he said. It was a crazy idea, but Wilson thought he had discovered the secret of success in the writings of William James, a professor of philosophy and psychology at Harvard College. He had been given a copy of James’s best seller, Varieties of Religious Experience, and had read how spiritual experiences can transform people:
Some were sudden brilliant illuminations; others came on very gradually. Some flowed out of religious channels; others did not. But nearly all had the great common denominators of pain, suffering, calamity. Complete hopelessness and deflation at depth were almost always required to make the recipient ready. The significance of this burst upon me. Deflation at depth—yes, that was it. Exactly that had happened to me.
Later, Bill and the early members of Alcoholics Anonymous would describe “deflation at depth” as the experience of “hitting bottom.” Bill was not the first alcoholic to recognize the importance of hitting bottom. Handsome Lake, John H. W. Hawkins, and Jerry McAuley reported that they had been at their lowest point when they discovered a power greater than themselves that made it possible for them to stop drinking.18
But it wasn’t reading a book that had changed Bill’s life. Nor was it Silkworth’s wise counsel. It was Ebby’s visit to Clinton Street. “[W]hen Ebby came along and one alcoholic began to talk to another, that clinched it,” Bill said. Bill believed he had discovered something new:
My thoughts began to race as I envisioned a chain reaction among alcoholics, one carrying the message to the next. More than I could ever want anything else, I now knew that I wanted to work with alcoholics.
Bill was hardly the first recovering alcoholic to try to help other drunks. The search for sobriety was over a century old, and many of its leaders were alcoholics who had shown skill in organizing. But something new and important had been added to the quest. Bill would prove to be the greatest leader yet.19
Bill and Lois began regularly attending meetings of the Oxford Group at the Calvary Church. The Oxford Group believed strongly in the direct intervention of God in the life of every individual and spent time each day quietly listening for his guidance. For Bill, who had just experienced a spiritual epiphany, this made obvious sense. He was also strongly drawn by the Oxford Group’s evangelism. But Bill was only interested in saving alcoholics. There were several sober alcoholics in the group, and they began to meet after the regular meeting at a nearby cafeteria. With Silkworth’s support, he spent long hours talking to the alcoholics who could afford to stay at Towns. He also returned to the Calvary mission to try to save the down-and-out. He brought alcoholics back to Clinton Street for a home-cooked meal. Ebby moved in with Bill and Lois, and he joined Bill in trying to convince the dubious drunks that they could stop drinking if they wanted.20
After several months, however, Bill’s mission was on the verge of failure. No one was getting sober. Lois saw the problem. “He thought a good home-cooked meal plus plenty of inspirational talk about the Oxford Group’s principles of honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love would get them sober,” she said. Ebby wasn’t helping. “[B]etween the two of them, it was obvious to me that all their preaching was only turning off our rather inebriated guests.” When Bill took his problem to Silkworth in April, the doctor told him to change his approach. Alcoholics were tough nuts. They had developed inflated egos that prevented them from seeing the damage that their drinking was doing to themselves and their families.21
Silkworth urged Bill to start by convincing them that they were suffering from an illness that was going to kill them. “Pour it right into them about the obsession that condemns them to drink and the physical sensitivity or allergy of the body that condemns them to go mad or die if they keep on drinking,” Silkworth said. “Coming from another alcoholic, one alcoholic talking to another, maybe that will crack those tough egos down.” It was the imminent prospect of his own death that had made Bill willing to ask for help, and there was no reason to think it would work differently for anyone else.22
Before Bill had a chance to try this new approach, he had to find a job. Lois had gone to work as a salesclerk in the furniture department at Macy’s after Bill was fired in Canada. They lived on Lois’s weekly salary of $22.50, facing foreclosure on their Clinton Street home. The only reason they were allowed to stay was that the mortgage company could not find a buyer and was willing to accept a small rent in the interim. Lois and Ebby opposed Bill’s decision to look for a job. He had been sober only a few months, and they feared that he would start drinking again if he went back to work too soon. Bill felt guilty about the fact that his wife had been supporting him for almost two years. “I want to get Lois out of that damned department store,” he said.23
Bill sought out old friends on Wall Street and was invited to lead a group of investors who were attempting to take over a small machine tool company in Akron. It would mean traveling to Ohio in an effort to line up support among the local shareholders. Bill was scared. Years of failure made him wonder whether he could recapture his early success. On the eve of his departure in May 1935, he was irritable and gruff.
As Lois packed his bag, Bill complained that he had only one good suit; that the collar of his dress shirt was frayed, and the heels of his black shoes were worn. His grievances began to mount: he told Lois that he hated his life, that he’d never amount to anything, and that the trip to Akron was a waste of time. Lois was impatient. She told him he should be grateful for his sobriety. “Sober! You call this sober?” Bill asked. “I’m still a drunk who hasn’t had a drink yet.” When Bill stormed out of the bedroom, Lois was afraid that he would be drunk before he reached Akron.24
Five days passed without a word from Bill. Things were not going well in Akron. Bill had joined a team of men from New York, but by the end of the week, there seemed little hope of taking over the company. The rest of the men returned to New York, leaving Bill alone to see if the deal could be salvaged.
On a Saturday afternoon, he found himself standing in the lobby of a hotel in a strange city not knowing what to do next. The new Mayflower Hotel was the best in the city. Prohibition had been repealed, and the lobby bar had become a gathering place for the town’s business and social elite. From the sound of voices, Bill could tell that the bar was coming to life in anticipation of another busy Saturday night. “Then I was seized by a thought: I am going to get drunk,” Bill said. “Then I panicked.”25
In New York, Bill had made a full-time job of helping drunks get sober. The focus had always been on them. He suddenly realized what they had been doing for him. “I thought, ‘You need another alcoholic to talk to. You need another alcoholic as much as he needs you.’” Bill decided to try to find someone from the Oxford Group in Akron. As Bill later told the story, he picked a name at random from a directory of churches in the lobby: Walter Tunks, an Episcopal minister. Tunks turned out to be a member of the Oxford Group, and he gave Bill a list of ten people he thought might point him in the right direction. The first nine were either unavailable or unable to help.26
The last person on the list was someone who knew Henrietta Seiberling, the daughter-in-law of one of Akron’s richest men. Bill recognized the name and hesitated to reveal his alcoholism, but he had no choice. “I’m from the Oxford Group, and I’m a rum hound from New York,” Bill said. Henrietta knew someone else who needed help badly. “You come right out here,” she said.27
The next day, May 12, Bill Wilson met Dr. Bob Smith at Henrietta’s large home on the Seiberling estate. Smith and his wife, Anne, had been invited for dinner. Bob Smith had no intention of staying. He felt terrible. The previous day, he had arrived home drunk, carrying a large plant as a Mother’s Day gift for his wife. After depositing the plant on the dining-room table, he had collapsed, and it had taken all the strength of his wife and two teenage children to get him upstairs to bed. He hadn’t wanted to come to Henrietta’s at all, but he had been desperately searching for a way to stay sober.
Bob and Anne had joined the Oxford Group in the hope that they might find the answer there, but he was still getting drunk every night two and a half years later. What he had found was a friend—“Henri.” When she learned that Bob had a drinking problem, she arranged a special meeting of Oxford Group members with the goal of getting him to acknowledge his alcoholism, which he did. Seiberling was still trying to help him, and she considered Bill Wilson’s telephone call a godsend. While Bob couldn’t say no when she summoned him, he didn’t have to like it. “On the way, I extracted a promise from Anne that 15 minutes of this stuff would be tops,” Bob recalled. “I didn’t want to talk to this mug or anybody else, and we’d make it real snappy.”28
“I just loved my grog,” Bob said. At first, it was the symbol of his rebellion from the strict morality of the small Vermont town of St. Johnsbury, where he was born in 1879. His parents were leading citizens of the town. His father was not only a lawyer, district attorney, and later a judge, but also the superintendent of schools and a director of two banks. His mother was deeply involved in the activities of the North Congregational Church. Later, Anne Smith would blame her mother-in-law for Bob’s alcoholism. She governed her only son with an iron hand, sending him to bed at five every night. What he hated most was church. “From childhood through high school, I was more or less forced to go to church, Sunday school and evening service, Monday-night Christian Endeavor, and sometimes to Wednesday evening prayer meeting,” Bob said.29
Bob engaged in small acts of protest from his youngest days. After being sent to bed, he often escaped to play outdoors. His failure to make good grades was a continual frustration to his parents. It wasn’t until he left for college that he found alcohol. By the time he reached Dartmouth College, the temperance movement had made major strides in drying up the rural sections of the country. Even where the sale of liquor was legal, as it was in Vermont, it was often discouraged. In St. Johnsbury, it had to be purchased from a merchant licensed by the state, who would sell a pint only if he was convinced it was really needed. Some men avoided prying questions by having their liquor shipped directly from Boston and New York. Everyone knew who they were. They “were looked upon with great distrust and disfavor by most of the good townspeople,” Smith said.30
Like all freshmen, Bob reveled in the freedom of being on his own. He devoted himself to doing “what I wanted to do, without regard for the rights, wishes or privileges of others.” Mostly what he wanted to do was have fun. He became a skilled billiards player and began to develop into a cardsharp. Drinking was what he enjoyed most, and he quickly outstripped the upperclassmen. He amazed his friends by demonstrating the ability to drink a bottle of beer without swallowing. Unlike his friends, he never got sick or suffered a hangover. “Never once in my life have I had a headache,” Bob said many years later. The first sign of trouble occurred only after he graduated. He was working as a salesman and drinking heavily on the weekends, when he discovered that he was shaking on some mornings. The “jitters” would only stop after he had a drink. Bob’s jitters increased after he enrolled in the University of Michigan Medical School. Many days he turned around on his way to class for fear of disgracing himself if he was called on for an answer. His drinking and his shakes continued to worsen until, in the spring of his second year, he withdrew from medical school and moved to a large farm owned by a friend to recuperate.31
After a month of drying out, Bob realized he had made a mistake in quitting school. Although he was given a second chance at Rush University in Chicago, his drinking was out of control. During one of his exams, he submitted three blank examination books because his hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t write. However, some alcoholics are capable of functioning without alcohol for long periods before they start drinking again. Unlike Bill Wilson, who could not stop drinking, Bob, under threat of expulsion, remained abstinent for a year, during which he earned grades good enough to help him secure a prestigious internship at City Hospital in Akron.
Bob was able to stay sober for five of the next eight years. He welcomed the long days during his two-year internship because it made it easier not to drink. Soon after he had opened his own office, however, he began drinking again to ease stomach pain. On at least a dozen occasions, he was forced to put himself into private rest homes to dry out. When he collapsed again, his father sent a doctor to bring him back to Vermont. During another period of sobriety, he finally married his longtime sweetheart, Anne. Three sober years followed. But, in 1918, he picked up another drink and kept drinking for seventeen years.
Bob suffered from two major fears. “One was the fear of not sleeping; the other was the fear of running out of liquor,” he said. “Not being a man of means, I knew that if I did not stay sober enough to earn money, I would run out of liquor.” Since he could not drink in the morning, he started using large doses of sedatives to keep him steady. Anne searched his clothes for bottles when he came home from work. But he had dozens of hiding places. Every morning, Bob would appear at the lunch counter in his office building and order Bromo-Seltzer, tomato juice, and aspirin. A waitress noticed Bob because of his shakes. “Does he have palsy?” she asked the owner. “No, he has a perpetual hangover,” the man replied.32
Despite Bob’s strenuous efforts to keep his alcoholism a secret, it was becoming increasingly apparent to his friends and colleagues. He remained well liked. He struck strangers as gruff and abrupt, but his friends knew that he actually cared deeply about people. Unlike many doctors, he wasn’t arrogant or abusive to the staff. Smith naturally sympathized with the underdog and was even willing to accept responsibility for mistakes made by nurses to spare them punishment. He was also popular with his patients. As the nation sank into the Depression, most of his patients became charity cases. “I remember how he’d say, ‘Well, I’ve got three operations this morning—two for the Lord and one for R. H. [Robert Holbrook (Smith)],’” his son remembered. “Not only that but people would come into his office in desperate straits, and he would literally give them his last cent. He might have only 50 cents, but he’d give it to them.”33
Bill Wilson knew that he had found an alcoholic the moment Bob extended his trembling hand. At fifty-five, the doctor was sixteen years older than Wilson. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man with hands that seemed unusually large for a surgeon. Bob was obviously in bad shape. Bill joked that it looked like he could use a drink. The remark embarrassed the doctor, but Bill thought he seemed to brighten a little. Henrietta took the two men to her small library and left them alone.
As Bill started talking, he was determined to follow Silkworth’s advice by steering clear of any discussion of the role that God had played in his recovery. Instead, he spoke about what alcohol had done to him until he was sure that Bob had accepted him as an alcoholic. Then Bill sought to convince Bob of the hopelessness of his condition. He explained Silkworth’s theory that alcoholism was an incurable disease.
“What really did hit him hard was the medical business, the verdict of inevitable annihilation . . .,” Bill recalled many years later. “[I]t was not any spiritual teaching of mine, rather it was those twin ogres of madness and death . . . that triggered him into a new life.” Bill later saw this as the moment when he found the approach that would guide him in the years ahead.34
Bob Smith remembered the encounter differently. He wasn’t particularly impressed by the scientific theory that Bill advanced. “It must be remembered that I had read a great deal and talked to everyone who knew, or thought they knew anything about the subject of alcoholism,” he wrote. What was new was Bill. Bob explained,
[H]e was the first living human with whom I had ever talked, who knew what he was talking about in regard to alcoholism from actual experience. In other words, he talked my language. He knew all the answers, and certainly not because he had picked them up in his reading.
Bob had always pictured alcoholics as Bowery bums. Bill was no bum. It didn’t really matter whether alcoholism was a disease. Bob discovered that he wasn’t alone. The two men talked for hours. Back home, for the first time in years, Bob did not drink himself to sleep.35
Over the next two weeks, Bill Wilson and the Smiths got better acquainted. Anne invited Bill to move into the Smiths’ modest home on Ardmore Avenue. “There I might keep an eye on Dr. Bob and he on me,” he explained.
It took the Smiths some time to adjust to their guest. Bill had only been sober for five months, and he was “jittery as hell,” he admitted. When he woke early and could not go back to sleep, he would go downstairs to make coffee, sometimes waking the family with a start at 6 a.m. The Smiths would find him in the kitchen, sitting in his bathrobe, “draped around this drip coffeepot.”36
Bill also insisted that there be liquor in the house. Believing that alcoholics would have to learn to live among people who drank, he bought two large bottles of liquor and placed them on the Smiths’ sideboard. “That drove Anne about wild for a while,” he said. She was also upset when Bill supported Bob’s desire to attend the American Medical Association convention in Atlantic City during the first week of June. The AMA convention had always been an opportunity for a binge, and Anne feared that the temptation would overpower Bob, who had only been sober for two weeks.37
They didn’t hear from Bob for five days. He had started drinking the moment he got on the train, and he had checked out of his hotel two days later to avoid disgracing himself. He couldn’t remember much about the next three days. He had managed to get back on the train and to call his office nurse when he arrived in Akron. She and her husband picked him up and took him to their home, where he finally began to emerge from his blackout.
Now there was another problem. Bob was scheduled to perform surgery three days later, and there was a good chance that he would not be fit to hold a scalpel. Bill took charge. He and Anne drove over to the nurse’s home, where Bill gave Bob enough scotch to prevent a rapid withdrawal that could trigger delirium tremens. On their arrival back at Ardmore Avenue, Bob was put to bed. For the next three days, they fed him nothing but tomato juice, sauerkraut, and Karo corn syrup, which Bill believed would give Bob energy and vitamins. Anne and Bill took turns nursing Bob around the clock, sleeping in the second bed in the room.
At 4 a.m. on the day of the operation, Bill noticed that Bob was wide awake. He was still shaking. “I am going through with it,” Bob said. “I’m going to do what it takes to get sober and stay that way.”38
At 9 a.m. Anne and Bill helped Bob dress. As they drove to the hospital where he would perform rectal surgery, Bob kept raising his hand to see if his jitters had subsided. Just before they arrived, Bill gave him a bottle of beer and “one goofball”—a sedative. Terrified that Bob might make a mistake, Anne and Bill returned home to await his call. Several hours later, Bob telephoned to say the operation had gone well, but he did not immediately return home.
As the hours passed, Anne and Bill began to worry again. Bob was sober when he walked in the door. He had been apologizing to his creditors and promising restitution. The Smiths would remain in debt for years to come, but Bob made good on the one promise that mattered most. The beer that Bill gave him to get him through the operation was his last drink. Alcoholics Anonymous, the organization that the two men were about to launch, dates its origin from that day, June 10, 1935.
Bill Wilson and Bob Smith had started searching for another alcoholic to help, even before Bob took his final drink. Wilson had left Towns Hospital following his spiritual experience determined to save alcoholics everywhere. The Oxford Group was also committed to evangelism, although its goal was to convert the world. But Smith had never embraced the Oxford Group’s idea of converting others until he met Bill. In their first meeting, Smith had felt the power of one drunk talking to another. He also recognized the truth of Wilson’s view that carrying the message of sobriety to alcoholics was essential for the sober drunks, especially for those like him who continued to suffer from strong cravings for alcohol. Wilson and Smith were making little progress in their search to find someone to help when a nurse in the receiving ward at Akron City Hospital told them about a drunk who had been strapped to his bed after assaulting two nurses. It was his eighth admission to the hospital in the last six months.
Smith arranged a meeting with the man’s wife, Henrietta D., who was desperately searching for help for her husband. “You aren’t reaching him,” she had told her pastor. “I’m going to find someone who can if I have to see everyone in Akron.” In her first conversation with Smith, Henrietta sensed the compassion behind his rough exterior. “What kind of bird is this egg when he is sober?” he asked. She decided to give him a chance and agreed to move her husband, Bill D., to a private room so that he could confer with Smith and Wilson. She was waiting for him when he was wheeled into his new room. Bill D. was expecting her to say that she was getting a divorce. “You are going to quit,” she announced.39
Bill D. was relieved that he was still married but skeptical about the rest. After each of his recent hospitalizations, he had emerged with the conviction that he would not get drunk again for at least six months. He had lost hope, and he was not pleased to learn that Henrietta had been talking to Smith and Wilson. He felt better when she said these men were drunks themselves who were staying sober by talking to other drunks. “All the other people that had talked to me wanted to help me, and my pride prevented me from listening to them . . .,” Bill D. said. “[B]ut I felt as if I would be a real stinker if I did not listen to a couple of fellows for a short time, if that would cure them.”40
A short time later, Bill D. met Wilson and Smith. “I looked up and there were two great big fellows over six foot tall, very likeable looking,” Bill D. said. They gained his confidence by talking about their own drinking and then came to the point. Wilson turned to Smith. “Well, I believe he’s worth saving and working on,” Wilson said. “Do you want to quit drinking?” he asked Bill D.
It’s none of our business about your drinking. We’re not up here trying to take any of your rights or privileges away from you, but we have a program whereby we think we can stay sober. . . . Now if you don’t want it, we’ll not take up your time, and we’ll be going and looking for someone else.
“Bill didn’t seem too impressed,” Wilson recalled. He did agree to see them again.41
Over the next five days, Bill D. ate sauerkraut and tomatoes at every meal and met frequently with Wilson and Smith. They told him they were looking for men who recognized that they could not control their drinking and needed God’s help to stay sober. The idea of “surrender,” or turning one’s life over to God’s will, was to become enormously important in developing a program of recovery. Wilson would later describe the life of an alcoholic as “self-will run riot.” The goal of surrendering to God’s will was to reduce the drunk’s inflated ego, making it possible for him to recognize that drinking was the cause of his problems and that he needed help to control it.
Wilson had surrendered at Towns Hospital the night he begged for divine intervention. He had discovered that God could do for him what he could not do for himself, and all he had to do was ask for help. Smith, who had been seeking spiritual answers in the Oxford Group for more than two years, had less difficulty accepting this concept. But how would they explain the importance of surrender to others?
Once again, Wilson started with the facts about the incurable disease of alcoholism. If Bill D. accepted the fact that he could not stop on his own, did he believe in a higher power that he could ask for help? “I had no problem there because I had never actually ceased to believe in God, and had tried lots of times to get help but hadn’t succeeded,” Bill D. said.42
One night after Wilson and Smith had left, Bill D. reviewed his life and saw for the first time the damage that alcohol had done. “I finally came to the conclusion that if I didn’t want to quit, I certainly ought to want to, and that I was willing to do anything in the world to stop drinking,” Bill D. said. The next day, Bill D. announced his decision. “Yes, Doc, I would like to quit, at least for five, six, or eight months,” Bill D. said.43
Wilson and Smith started laughing. “They said, ‘We’ve got some bad news for you. . . . Whether you quit six days, months, or years, if you go out and take a drink or two you’ll end up in this hospital tied down, just like you have been in these past six months.’” But they offered him hope. “‘You can quit 24 hours can’t you?’” I said, ‘Sure, yes, anybody can do that, for 24 hours.’ They said, ‘That’s what we’re talking about just 24 hours at a time.’”44
They asked Bill D. to kneel by his bed and ask God for help and joined him in prayer. When they finished, Bill D. was ready to leave. “Henrietta, fetch me my clothes. I’m going to get up and get out of here,” he said. The partnership of Wilson and Smith had become a group.45
Meanwhile, Lois Wilson was growing impatient for her husband to return to Brooklyn. He had been in Akron for over six weeks, and there were no signs that he intended to come home anytime soon. In letters and brief telephone calls, Bill had given Lois status reports on the proxy fight that had carried him to Akron in the first place. He had also explained how he had come to live with the Smiths. Lois pressed for his return. “I was nagging him,” she said.46
Then Anne wrote Lois, telling her how grateful the Smiths were to Bill and inviting her to visit. In early July, Lois took a vacation from her job at the department store and traveled to Akron. Bill met her at the bus depot. She wouldn’t see much of him over the next week. He and Bob were making daily visits to the drunks at City Hospital. Although Lois was disappointed, she took an instant liking to the Smiths. “[Bob] definitely wanted to help people in trouble. And he was so excited and enthusiastic about this new thing he and Bill had,” she said.47
Lois spent most of her time with Anne, and although they spoke little about their problems or what was going on, she got a good look at how sobriety had transformed the Smiths. “Mother was a lot less anxious about Dad, and I think he was a lot more satisfied with himself,” the Smiths’ daughter, Sue, said. “The whole family had good laughs, and it was really a happy time.” The change in Bob was particularly important for his teenage son, Smitty. “I never had a chance to know him well during the time he was drinking, but he livened up so much and had such a wonderful time after,” he said.48
By the time Lois got on the bus back to New York, she had a new worry. If being together was so important for Bill and Bob, what would happen when it was finally time for Bill to go home? Could the men stay sober when they were separated?
In the meantime, the trio of sober alcoholics became a quartet when Ernie G. got sober. A fifth man stopped drinking in the late summer, and the new recruits soon began visiting the alcoholics in City Hospital. Following the example of Bill and Bob, they didn’t tell the patients to stop drinking. “They just told me stories for seven days about how they drank,” one of the hospitalized drunks remembered.49
Once a man announced that he wanted to quit drinking, he was told that he would have to surrender his will to God. If this didn’t happen in the hospital, it occurred when he attended his first Wednesday night meeting at the home of T. Henry and Clarace Williams. This was an Oxford Group meeting that Henrietta Seiberling had started to help Smith, and both the drunks and their wives attended. While it included nonalcoholics, the attendees referred to themselves as the “alcoholic squad,” and during each meeting, the sober drunks took the newcomers upstairs where they made their surrender. “After about half an hour or so, down would come the new man, shaking, white, serious and grim.”50
This was a nervous time. “[W]e were people saved from shipwreck,” the wife of one drunk recalled. They drew strength from the presence of other survivors. “Do you think your husband is ever going to drink again?” Bill D.’s wife asked Lois. “I know he isn’t,” Lois said. Bill Wilson had been sober longer than he had ever been in his life—nine months. “We were scared stiff,” one of the drunks later explained. “We’d lost everything and were afraid of drinking. Nothing had worked before, and we weren’t always so sure that this would.”51
The truth was that Wilson and Smith were unable to help most of the men they approached, and there was a danger that repeated failures could bring down the whole enterprise. The threat seemed particularly acute in the summer of 1935 when “Lil,” the first woman they recruited, fell off the wagon and had sex with another recovering drunk on Smith’s examining table. When the man, a former mayor of Akron, tried to take Lil home, she refused, swallowed some pills she had found, and tried to jump out the window. She was finally subdued and taken to the Smiths’ house to sleep it off. The drunks and their wives were scandalized. “As drunks I don’t know why we should have been,” Wilson said. “But we felt that the performance of some of those early people coming in would disrupt us entirely.”52
It was also a joyous time. The drunks and their wives had found new lives. The men were busy staying sober. Almost none of them had jobs. They had drunk their way into unemployment and had emerged from their alcoholic fog in the middle of an economic depression. Many were flat broke. The Smiths were a little better off than the others, but there were nights when all Anne could afford to serve was milk and bread. The new men clung tightly to the coattails of those who were sober just a few weeks or months longer. “It seems to me as though we just lived together when I first came into the group—me and Paul S. and Harold G.,” one man said. “We would go from house to house during the day and wind up one place every night—Bob Smith’s.” At the Smiths’, there was always plenty of strong coffee. Consumption reached nine pounds per week.53
The wives were also remaking their lives. Many had lost their old friends, but under Anne’s prodding, they started to make new ones within the group. In addition to the Wednesday night meetings, everyone got together at somebody’s house on Saturday night. “We had covered-dish suppers and picnics, and later we had a few dances,” Henrietta D. remembered. “But for a long time, we just had coffee and tea and crackers. . . . Everybody was so happy to be together.”54
Wilson returned to New York in August 1935. The proxy fight that had taken him to Akron had finally failed, and he began looking for work again. But his still unnamed group continued to grow. A New York meeting began in the parlor of the Wilson’s home at 182 Clinton Street in Brooklyn Heights in the fall. The Akron group started drawing drunks from the neighboring cities of Kent and Canton. People from Cleveland began to drive down for the Wednesday meetings. In November 1937, Wilson visited the Smiths again as he was passing through on his latest job search. When they sat down to take stock of the progress of their enterprise, they began counting group members and were shocked when the number turned out to be forty. Twenty or more had been sober for more than two years. “As we carefully rechecked this score, it suddenly burst upon us that a new light was shining into the dark world of the alcoholic,” Bill wrote.
[A] benign chain reaction, one alcoholic carrying the good news to the next, had started outward from Dr. Bob and me. Conceivably it could one day circle the whole world. What a tremendous thing that realization was! At last we were sure. There would be no more flying totally blind. We actually wept for joy, and Bob and Anne and I bowed our heads in silent thanks.
Wilson and Smith had started a wave of sobriety. There was no way of knowing how large it would grow.55