Drunks

BILL WILSON AND BOB SMITH were sure they were onto something. Yet they were making progress “at the snail’s pace,” Wilson acknowledged. Most of the men they approached rejected their assistance. While many were not ready to stop drinking, others did not want to admit that they were alcoholics. The prejudice against drunks was ancient. It had been challenged briefly by the Washingtonians, the campaigns led by Reynolds and Murphy and later by the Keeley League. But most drunks remained closeted. The stigma of alcoholism may even have worsened in the twentieth century, when most people thought the alcoholic was someone incapable of measuring up to the demands of modern life and pictured a skid-row bum. The little band of drunks who gathered around Wilson and Smith were adamant about protecting their anonymity. Most of them were looking for work, and no one would hire a drunk. But how could a group of anonymous men hope to grow?¹

Having thanked God for their success, Wilson and Smith began to lay plans for the future. Always the promoter, Wilson made several suggestions. First, it seemed clear that someone would have to be paid to promote the organization. Wilson and Smith were broke: Bill was unemployed and Bob was in danger of losing his home to foreclosure. What were needed were paid missionaries who would travel around the country establishing new groups. In addition, there was a desperate need for medical treatment for alcoholics. Most hospitals had closed their doors to these troublesome patients, who were sometimes violent when they were admitted, resentful and demanding as they sobered up, and too broke or forgetful when it came time to pay their bills. Wilson suggested creating a chain of hospitals that would specialize in drunks. Obviously, this meant there would have to be a large and energetic fund-raising campaign. Finally, he proposed the publication of “a book of experience” that would “carry our message to distant places we could never visit ourselves.”²

Smith liked the idea of the book, but he was dubious about the rest. He suggested moving slowly. “Why don’t we call the Akron boys together,” he asked. “Let’s try these ideas out on them.” Wilson probably didn’t welcome the suggestion. Earlier in 1937, he had been offered a paid position at Towns Hospital. Owner Charlie Towns saw a future in this still unnamed group of drunks and believed it might help restore some of the profits his business had lost during the Depression. Wilson wanted desperately to take the job, but the small group of sober alcoholics that had begun meeting at his Clinton Street home was opposed. Everyone agreed that one of the keys to their success was that a sober alcoholic could establish a rapport with someone who was still drinking because he had also suffered. In sharing his story, he offered the hope of recovery. The alcoholics in Wilson’s group were convinced that this special bond would be destroyed if drunks suspected they were being recruited as part of a money-making scheme. Wilson turned down the job offer, but now he was preparing to pitch to eighteen members of the Akron group a plan that called for paid missionaries and a chain of hospitals.³

Wilson used his considerable powers of persuasion in his presentation. Smith spoke in favor of the plan despite his doubts. “Dr. Bob” was loved and respected by the men whose lives he had helped save. They flatly rejected Wilson’s proposal:

The moment we were through, those alcoholics really did work us over! They rejected the idea of missionaries. Paid workers, they said, would kill our good will with alcoholics; this would be sheer ruin. If we went into the hospital business, everybody would say it was a racket. Many thought we must shun publicity; we would be swamped; we could not handle the traffic. Some turned thumbs down on pamphlets and books. After all, they said, the apostles themselves did not need any printed matter.

Wilson and Smith tried to answer the objections. When a vote was taken, Wilson’s plan was approved “by the barest majority.” The controversy revealed some of the divisions that would emerge as the small groups of sober alcoholics in Akron and Brooklyn began to grow. The most important part of Wilson’s plan would be the publication in 1939 of Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism. Before that could happen, the organization that would take its name from the book would have to resolve its attitude toward religion.⁴

Their membership in a religious group had brought Wilson and Smith together in 1935. The Oxford Group was not organized in the conventional sense. It had no bylaws, members, officers, or dues. Its leader, Dr. Frank Buchman, was a Lutheran minister from Pennsylvania, but the Oxford Group appealed to Protestants of all denominations and sought to maintain good relations with other religions as well. Buchman’s goal was ambitious. “The Oxford Group is a Christian revolution for remaking the world,” he said.⁵

In the 1920s, Buchman started a religious movement in England by organizing “house parties” at Oxford University and other prestigious locations—wealthy homes, fashionable hotels, resorts, and summer camps. In 1933, five thousand people attended an International House Party at Oxford that filled six of its colleges for seventeen days. The following year, Buchman and a team of twenty-nine led a crusade in Norway that packed the meeting halls of Oslo with more than fourteen thousand eager listeners.⁶

Buchman believed the revolution would come by changing one person at a time. He had served as a missionary in China, giving speeches to large audiences. He was unimpressed with the results. It was “like hunting rabbits with a brass band,” he said. Even the most powerful sermons did not produce conversions, because they did not change hearts. Only God could do that.⁷

Buchman’s own conversion occurred only after his ordination. Suffering from a deep depression after a dispute with some of his parishioners forced him to resign from his first job as a minister, he traveled to England in search of spiritual guidance. In church one day, Buchman asked God to release him from the anger he felt at members of his congregation. “He told me to put things right with them,” Buchman said. “It produced in me a vibrant feeling, as though a strong current of life had suddenly been poured into me.”⁸

The experience convinced the minister of the importance of establishing a personal relationship with God. He began to urge others to make time to listen for God to tell them what to do. It became the basis for his successful ministry as a chaplain at Pennsylvania State University, and Buchman was sure that it wouldn’t stop there. “The secret lies in that great forgotten truth, that when man listens, God speaks; when man obeys, God acts; when men change, nations change,” he said. Buchman was so convinced that listening to the voice of God would produce world peace that he made two unsuccessful attempts to meet with Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s.⁹

While Buchman sometimes appeared childishly naive, there is no doubt that the Oxford Group was helping people, including alcoholics. Buchman had distilled his experience into four practices that he urged his followers to adopt:

1. The sharing of our sins and temptations with another Christian.

2. Surrender of our life past, present and future, into God’s keeping and direction.

3. Restitution to all whom we have wronged directly or indirectly.

4. Listening for God’s guidance and carrying it out.

Members of the Oxford Group met regularly to help one another fulfill these spiritual goals. A planning committee would meet to choose a speaker to expound on some aspect of the Oxford Group’s program, and there was a period in which the members sat in silence listening for God’s guidance. Once a newcomer had experienced a spiritual awakening, he or she was encouraged to seek out others who would benefit.¹⁰

In keeping with the Oxford Group’s ambition to change the world, “groupers” were particularly anxious to recruit people of wealth and influence to help them carry their message to the highest echelons of society, business, and government. Drunks were not at the top of their list, but the members of the Oxford Group were confident that their program would work for all kinds of people with problems. Unlike most Americans, they were willing to give alcoholics a chance.

The Oxford Group first came to public attention in Akron when it helped Russell Firestone get sober. His grateful father, Harvey Firestone, the president of the Goodyear Rubber Company, invited Buchman to Akron to lead a crusade in 1933. Launched at a formal banquet in the ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel, Buchman’s campaign was hailed as the “dinner-jacket revival” by the local press and drew thousands to its meetings. Several Oxford Group meetings were established at the time, including the group that Bob and Anne Smith began attending.¹¹

Although Smith was still leery of religion, he was attracted by the people he met there “because of their seeming poise, health and happiness.” “I was self-conscious and ill at ease most of the time, my health was at the breaking point, and I was thoroughly miserable,” he said. One of the most striking features of the meetings was the public sharing about personal weaknesses. “These people spoke with great freedom from embarrassment, which I could never do,” Smith explained. Although he attended meetings regularly, he continued to conceal his alcoholism. “I at no time sensed that it might be an answer to my liquor problem,” he said.¹²

Things began to change the day when Henrietta Seiberling learned from a friend about Smith’s problem. “I immediately felt guided that we should have a meeting for Bob Smith,” Seiberling said. She asked T. Henry and Clarace Williams whether they would host the meeting in their home. When they agreed, she approached Anne Smith. Seiberling believed that neither Anne nor Bob had ever fully shared their weaknesses during a meeting. While Bob was hiding his drinking problem, Anne was unwilling to discuss feelings or behavior that might be criticized by group members, Seiberling said. Without telling Anne the purpose of the new group, she warned that it would be demanding. “Come prepared to mean business,” she said. “There is going to be no pussyfooting around.” In the Williams’ living room, Seiberling and the other members kicked things off:

We all shared very deeply our shortcomings and what we had victory over. Then there was a silence, and I waited and thought, “Will Bob say anything?” Sure enough, in that deep, serious tone of his, he said, “Well, you good people have all shared things that I am sure were very costly to you, and I am going to tell you something which may cost me my profession. I am a secret drinker and I can’t stop.”

God was very much on their minds as Smith and Wilson began their pursuit of drunks in the summer of 1935. The first dinner at Henrietta’s was shortly after Smith’s confession at the meeting. Wilson’s “white light” moment at Towns Hospital had occurred six months earlier. As soon as a man told them he wanted to stop drinking, they asked whether he believed in God. Clarence Snyder, an alcoholic from Cleveland, learned this when he found himself in Akron City Hospital in 1938. By then, there were more than a dozen alcoholics who had stopped drinking with the assistance of “Dr. Bob,” and most of them had visited Snyder. After a week of listening to their stories, Snyder told Smith he was ready to quit. “Young feller, do you believe in God? Not a God, but God!” Smith asked. Snyder was not ready to say that he did but was afraid Smith would walk out of the room if he admitted it. “Well, I guess I do,” he replied. Smith stood up, pointing a finger at Snyder. “There’s no guessing about it. Either you do or you don’t!” he said. Snyder surrendered. “Yeah, I do believe in God,” he said.

That’s fine. Now we can get someplace. . . . Get down out of that bed. . . . You’re going to pray. . . . You can repeat it after me, and that will do for this time. . . . Jesus! This is Clarence Snyder. He’s a drunk. Clarence! This is Jesus. Ask Him to come into your life. Ask Him to remove your drinking problem, and pray that He manage your life because you are unable to manage it yourself.

The two men rose from the concrete floor where they had been praying. “Young feller, you’re gonna be all right,” Smith promised.¹⁴

The Oxford Group believed that surrendering to God was essential for spiritual growth. Acknowledging that desires are often selfish and corrupt makes it possible to hear what God desires. It is not surprising that the alcoholic members of the Oxford Group were particularly insistent on the importance of surrender, for they knew only too well that they were in the grip of a force they could not control. They believed that the only path forward was to admit they were unable to control their drinking and that they required divine help to stay sober. The surrender was considered so important that it became a prerequisite. “You couldn’t just go to a meeting—you had to go through the program of surrender,” recalled Bob E., a drunk who got sober in the Oxford Group in 1937. If a drunk wasn’t ready to surrender, he was shown the door. One newcomer who failed to make the grade returned later to try again. “Jeez—when you guys say ‘Take it or leave it,’ you meant it,” he said.¹⁵

The recovering drunks who met in growing numbers in the Williams’s home were proud of their membership in the Oxford Group. Smith was deeply loyal to Henrietta Seiberling and the other members of the group who had helped him get sober, and the alcoholic men he had helped felt the same way toward him. They did not attempt to turn the meeting into something else. Most of the men and women who attended were not alcoholics, and the meetings continued to be conducted like other Oxford Group meetings. There was a heavy emphasis on applying the four absolutes to their everyday lives. Much of the meeting time was devoted to silent reflection as the members sought the guidance of God. It remained a religious meeting.

The Oxford Group could never be the home of a movement that was intent on saving drunks. Buchman was striving for a grander goal. “I’m all for drunks being changed, but we also have drunken nations on our hands,” he said. Many of the alcoholics in the Oxford Group recognized that their goals were different from those of the nonalcoholic members of the group. Their priority was getting sober, and while they appreciated the hospitality of the Oxford Group, they had difficulty grasping its principles. Some of its practices drove them crazy. Newly sober, they found it difficult to sit still during the long periods of “quiet time” when others were listening to God and writing down their guidance. “The guidance thing the groupers had never went down well with the drunks,” Ernie, an alcoholic, said. He explained:

It seemed to be getting a little too technical and detailed. Sometimes I felt like they were using a Ouija board. Me and some of the other alkies felt they put these things down on paper and it was their own personal idea for you. . . . But out of respect for T. Henry, we didn’t kick.

Newly sober drunks found it difficult to tolerate criticism of any kind, but criticism from nonalcoholics, even the constructive kind, was particularly hard to take.¹⁶

The alcoholic members of the Oxford Group in New York were the first to leave the group. They had been meeting separately for some time. At first, they gathered at a nearby cafeteria following the meetings at the Calvary Church. Later, they met on Tuesday evenings at the Wilsons’ home. By then, it was obvious to the nonalcoholic members of the Oxford Group that Wilson was spending all of his time recruiting alcoholics instead of the social leaders whose support would help the group expand. The Reverend Sam Shoemaker, the pastor of the Calvary Church, was a leader of the Oxford Group in America who had become a good friend of Wilson’s. But a young priest took advantage of Shoemaker’s absence on vacation to preach a sermon condemning the “divergent work” of a “secret, ashamed subgroup.” Drunks in the mission were told to stop attending the meetings at Wilson’s home. When Shoemaker was unable to repair the damage, Wilson and his friends left the Oxford Group in May 1937 and continued to meet in Brooklyn.¹⁷

A different problem troubled the Oxford Group meeting in Akron that was home to Bob Smith’s “alcoholic squadron.” Smith had no idea what a dynamo Clarence Snyder would become. Snyder was a born salesman, and he proved it by quickly making himself the top man at one of the largest Ford and Mercury dealerships in Ohio. No less impressive was his ability to sell drunks on sobriety. His first convert was a man he discovered in an abandoned house in a Polish section of Cleveland that was occupied by more than a dozen drunks. The man, Bill H., was lying paralyzed on the floor, but he told Snyder he wanted to get sober. A couple of drunks helped him get to Snyder’s car, and he was driven to Akron City Hospital, where he recovered his health.

Snyder and his wife, Dorothy, drove down to Akron every Wednesday to attend the Oxford Group meetings at T. Henry Williams’s home. The car quickly filled with drunks he had recruited in Cleveland. Soon, thirteen people were cramming into two cars. They called themselves the “Cleveland Contingent,” and they differed in important ways from the Akron alcoholics. There was a woman alcoholic among them—Sylvia K., who would become a founder of the first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Chicago. The Clevelanders also included the first Catholic members of the alcoholic squadron. A majority of them were Irish Americans.

Women alcoholics made the rest of the drunks nervous. The sad story of Lil, the first woman that Wilson and Smith had tried to help, convinced many that mixing the sexes was a threat to their sobriety. But it was the Catholic alcoholics who posed an immediate problem. While the Oxford Group claimed to be an ecumenical movement, its members were overwhelmingly Protestant. Their meetings featured readings from the King James Version of the Bible, which was used only in Protestant churches, and periods of “sharing” during which members were encouraged to admit their sins, which in Catholic churches occurred only in the confessional.

These aspects of the Oxford Group were enough to convince some priests in Cleveland that their alcoholic parishioners were participating in Protestant rituals that threatened their immortal souls. Snyder attempted to intercede with the priests, arguing that membership in the Oxford Group was helping their people stay sober and actually making them better Catholics. “The Church didn’t buy this line, not one bit,” Snyder said. When he took the problem to Smith, Dr. Bob saw only two alternatives. “Remain with the Oxford Group and probably risk excommunication, or, very simply leave the Church,” he said. If the Catholics wanted to stay sober, they had to be prepared to abandon their religion.¹⁸

Conflict was about to erupt in the Akron and New York groups. Wilson’s expansion plans had not made much progress by the spring of 1938. There was no money to pay missionaries, much less to open hospitals. The only project that was making progress was the “book of experience” that would describe how to get sober. Although he had never written a book, Wilson became the principal author. As he finished each chapter, he sent the draft to Smith, who shared it with members of the Akron group. Wilson read the chapters aloud during meetings of the New York group. It was a painful process. Nobody could argue much with Wilson’s story in the first chapter, but the New Yorkers had a lot to say about the next three. “[T]he chapters got a real mauling. I redictated them . . . over and over,” Wilson said. It took him six months to satisfy everyone.¹⁹

As he began outlining the fifth chapter, “How It Works,” he was dreading the reaction of the other alcoholics. It would be the most consequential part of the book. “[A]t this point we would have to tell how our program for recovery from alcoholism really worked,” Wilson said. The “program” would be the steps that Wilson and his friends had taken to get sober. Wilson wasn’t sure he could do it. “The hassling over the four chapters already finished had really been terrific. I was exhausted. On many a day I felt like throwing the book out the window,” he said.²⁰

There was already a “word of mouth program” that was based on the four spiritual practices of the Oxford Group: making a “moral inventory” of your defects of character; sharing these shortcomings with another person; making restitution to those you had been harmed; and praying to God for the power to undertake these tasks. As Wilson lay in bed with a pencil and a pad of paper, these steps did not seem detailed enough for alcoholics. They would have to be clear enough to provide guidance to people in places where there were no members of the group to advise them. They would also need to be unequivocal. “There must not be a single loophole through which the rationalizing alcoholic could wiggle out,” Wilson said.²¹

“Finally, I started to write,” Wilson recalled. “I relaxed and asked for guidance.”

With a speed that was astonishing, considering my jangling emotions, I completed the first draft. It took perhaps a half an hour. The words kept right on coming. When I reached a stopping point, I numbered the new steps. They added up to 12. Somehow this number seemed significant. Without any special rhyme or reason I connected them with the 12 apostles. Feeling greatly relieved now, I commenced to reread the draft.

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that God could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our wills and our lives over to the care and direction of God.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely willing that God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly on our knees asked Him to remove these shortcomings—holding nothing back.

8. Made a complete list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10.Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11.Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our contact with God, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12.Having had a spiritual experience as the result of this course of action, we tried to carry this message to others, especially alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.²²

For a moment, he allowed himself to believe that he had described a program that was unassailable, if not God given. Wilson’s happiness was short-lived. At that moment, he received a visit from Horace C. and another alcoholic who had been sober for only a few months. Wilson read his work to them and waited for their applause. He was shocked by their response:

[Horace] and his friend reacted violently. “Why twelve steps?” they demanded. . . .“You’ve got too much God in these steps; you will scare people away.” And, “What do you mean by getting those drunks down ‘on their knees’ when they ask to have all their shortcomings removed?” And “Who wants all their shortcomings removed, anyhow?”

Seeing the disappointment in Wilson’s face, Horace acknowledged that “some of this stuff sounds pretty good,” but he didn’t back down. “Bill, you’ve got to tone it down. It’s too stiff,” he said. “The average alcoholic just won’t buy it the way it stands.” Wilson responded with a strenuous defense, insisting on the importance of every word. The debate went on for hours. Finally, Lois appeared and suggested they take a coffee break, which ended the discussion for the night.²⁴

The debate over the twelve steps grew during the following weeks. Horace and his friend were right: Wilson had talked about God a lot. God was also mentioned frequently in the chapters that Wilson had already written. While Akron members were generally supportive, the issue divided the New Yorkers into three groups that Wilson later identified as “conservatives,” “liberals,” and “radicals.” Fitz M., the son of a minister, wanted to go even further in identifying the group as religious. He believed that the book should declare its allegiance to Christian principles, “using Biblical terms and expression to make this clear,” Wilson said. The liberals had no objection to the use of the word “God” throughout the book, but they were adamantly opposed to identifying their movement with a particular religion. In their view, the religious missions had failed because drunks were unwilling to accept their beliefs.²⁵

Wilson described the third group as “our radical left wing.” At least one member, James Burwell, was an outspoken atheist. The others were either agnostics or believers who nevertheless opposed any mention of God. Henry Parkhurst had been among the first to see the importance of the book and had developed the fund-raising plan that would make its publication possible. He was also one of the first to express the view that religion should be downplayed. In part, this was an expression of his own religious doubts. But it was also a question of marketing. In a memo about “sales promotion, possibilities,” he expressed concern about alienating the customers:

One of the things most talked about . . . among us is religious experience. I believe this is incomprehensible to most people. Simple and meaning [sic] words to us—but meaningless to most of the people that we are trying to get this over to. . . . I am fearfully afraid that we are emphasizing religious experience when that is actually something that follows.

Wilson was shocked. “What Henry, Jimmy, and company wanted was a psychological book which would lure the alcoholic in. Once in, the prospect could take God or leave him alone,” he said.²⁶

The debate at the New York meeting continued into 1939. In the meantime, members in both Akron and New York were working to address another criticism of Wilson’s draft. There was general agreement that it did not contain enough “evidence in the form of living proof” to convince drunks that they could quit. To meet this need, twenty-eight members contributed short stories describing their experience to a section at the end of the book. The debate over religion was still under way as the final stories were received. To end the impasse, it was agreed that Wilson would be the final judge of what the book said. At the end of January, four hundred copies of the manuscript were sent out for comments from doctors, religious leaders, and others in an effort to identify any problems prior to publication.

The religious debate wasn’t over. Shortly before the book was sent to the printer, Parkhurst pushed his argument one last time. He had been sharing his Newark office with Wilson. It was where Wilson had dictated most of the book to a secretary, Ruth Houck. Fitz, who favored a more religious book, was also present. Parkhurst wanted changes in the twelve steps, something Wilson had been refusing to consider. “He argued, he begged, he threatened,” Wilson said. “He was positive we would scare off alcoholics by the thousands when they read those 12 Steps.” Houck, who was not an alcoholic, was the easiest to persuade. Then, Fitz began to soften. Finally, Wilson agreed to make several changes:

In Step Two we decided to describe God as a “Power greater than ourselves.” In Steps Three and Eleven we inserted the words “God as we understood Him.” From Step Seven we deleted the expression “on our knees.” And, as a lead-in sentence to all the steps we wrote these words: “Here are the steps we took which are suggested as a Program of Recovery.” A.A.’s Twelve Steps were to be suggestions only.

While the changes made by altering a few words appeared superficial at first, Wilson later acknowledged that the radicals had secured their major objective. “They had widened our gateway so that all who suffer might pass through regardless of their belief or lack of belief,” he said.²⁷

One additional change in the manuscript underlined the commitment to inclusiveness. A psychiatrist who had been asked to comment on the final draft thought the tone was often peremptory, addressing the reader as “you” and telling him what he “must” do. “He suggested that we substitute wherever possible such expression as “we ought” or “we should,” Wilson said. He briefly resisted making the change because it would require a lot of editing, but he finally agreed when other outside readers made the same point.²⁸

Though Wilson was forced to make a lot of concessions in completing his book, he won a major victory when it was agreed that it would be titled Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism. A majority of the members had initially favored The Way Out, but a search of the titles copyrighted by the Library of Congress revealed that there were twelve books by that name. The manuscript was finally sent to the printer and was published in April 1939 by the Works Publishing Company, which had been organized by Wilson and Parkhurst. Five thousand copies of the four-hundred-page book were printed on thick paper to help justify its cost—$3.50. It was the bulkiness of the final product that led members to refer to it as the “Big Book.”

The publication of the Big Book had immediate consequences for the Cleveland alcoholics in the Akron group. Snyder had been urging Smith to do something to help the Catholic members. In the days after the release of Alcoholics Anonymous, Snyder approached Smith again and got the same answer:

“We’re not keeping the Catholics out—the church is keeping them out. . . . We can’t do anything about it.”

“Yes, we can,” Clarence said.

“What do you have in mind?”

“To start a group without all this rigmarole that’s offensive to other people. We have a book now, the Steps, the absolutes. Anyone can live by that program. We can start our own meetings.”

“We can’t abandon these people,” Doc replied. “We owe our lives to them.”

“So what?” Clarence replied. “I owe my life to them, too. But what about all these others?”

“We can’t do anything about them,” Doc said.

“Oh, yes, we can. . . . You’ll see.”

Snyder had recently helped hospitalize a Cleveland patent attorney named Abby G. While Abby was still in the hospital, Snyder told Abby’s wife that he was looking for a place to hold a meeting in Cleveland, and she had offered her own large home. In early May, Snyder announced at the Akron meeting that the Clevelanders were leaving the Oxford Group and would begin their own meeting the following week. “Our policy will be mainly this,” Snyder wrote Parkhurst a few weeks later. “Not too much stress on spiritual business at meetings.”²⁹

Some Oxford Group members were outraged at what they saw as a betrayal. They attempted to argue with Snyder after his announcement. When he made the mistake of revealing the location of Abby’s home, some of them showed up at the first meeting to continue their protest. “They invaded the house and tried to break up our meeting,” Snyder said. “One fellow was going to whip me. All in the name of pure Christian love!”³⁰

Smith stayed home. He quickly reconciled himself to the break and began attending the meeting once or twice a month. While he was reluctant to anger his close friends Henrietta Seiberling and T. Henry Williams, he understood the reasons for starting the group in Cleveland, which was soon describing itself as a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. By the end of the year, he was convinced that the Akron alcoholics, too, must find a new home. In December, as many as seventy people began cramming into the living room of the Smiths’ small home on Wednesday nights. “Have definitely thrown off the shackles of the Oxford Group,” he wrote Wilson on January 2, 1940. Alcoholics Anonymous had declared its independence.³¹

Free at last, Snyder threw himself into organizing AA in Cleveland. His wife, Dorothy, shared his missionary zeal:

I felt that nobody in Cleveland should be drunk—or anywhere in the world—as long as there was an A.A. So I was pounding the streets trying to show different bookstores the A.A. book. I went down to the public library and tried to get orders. Nobody would even listen to me, and they looked at me like I was Salvation Nell.

Other members worked on establishing an institutional base in Cleveland. The wife of one of the drunks was a nurse who had many contacts with hospital administrators. She suggested that the head of Deaconess Hospital might be willing to work with AA, providing the private rooms where the AA members could work with alcoholics. Smith and a local doctor who had only been sober for a few weeks persuaded the administrator to take the question to his board of trustees. Despite opposition by the medical staff, the trustees agreed, and Deaconess began accepting alcoholics without any guarantee of payment. The hospital was expecting only a handful of admissions, but in the fall of 1939, a series of stories in the Cleveland Plain Dealer produced a sudden boom in AA membership.³²

It is unknown how Plain Dealer reporter Elrick B. Davis became acquainted with AA. Snyder later claimed that he found Davis on a bar stool and helped him get sober. Some AA members accused Snyder of sneaking the reporter into their meeting under the pretense of alcoholism. If Davis wasn’t an alcoholic, he must have been a terrific reporter, because the series of five stories that he wrote in late October showed a deep understanding of both alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous.

The writing was also remarkable. Because the stories appeared on the editorial page, Davis was freed of the necessity for objectivity. In an informal style flavored by the natural cynicism of a veteran reporter, Davis announced the arrival of something new. “Alcoholics Anonymous has reached the town,” he said. “Every Thursday evening at the home of some ex-drunk in Cleveland, 40 or 50 former hopeless rummies meet for a social evening during which they buck each other up.” Davis accepted the truth of what he saw. “The basic point about Alcoholics Anonymous is that it is a fellowship of ‘cured’ alcoholics,” he wrote. “Repeat the astounding fact: These are cured. They have cured each other. They have done it by adopting, with each other’s aid, what they call a ‘spiritual’ way of life.”³³

Davis’s five short articles appeared on successive days, stressing the simplicity, openness, and disinterestedness of the AA program. In the second article, Davis addressed the religious issue directly. “There is no blinking the fact that Alcoholics Anonymous, the amazing society of ex-drunks who have cured each other of an incurable disease, is religious,” he said. But he insisted that this was no barrier. “Every member of Alcoholics Anonymous may define God to suit himself,” he said. A drunk did not need to believe in God at all. “[A]s far as the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous is concerned, a pathological drunk can call God ‘It’ if he wants to, and is willing to accepts Its aid. If he’ll do that he can be cured.” AA welcomed all kinds:

The Cleveland chapter includes a number of Catholics and several Jews, and at least one man to whom “God” is “Nature.” Some practice family devotions. Some simply cogitate about “It” in the silence of their minds. But that the Great Healer cured them with only the help of their fellow ex-drunks, they all admit.

In the articles that followed, Davis explained the physical and mental aspects of alcoholism. As daunting as these are, AA had discovered that there is really only one obstacle to getting sober. “[I]f you are really willing to ‘do anything’ to get well . . . you’ll have to quit lying to yourself and adopt a spiritual way of life. Are you ready to accept help?” According to Davis, it was that simple. “[T]he miracle is that, for alcoholics brought to agreement by pure desperation, so simple a scheme works,” he wrote.³⁴

Clevelanders responded instantly. Hundreds asked the Plain Dealer to put them in touch with the local group, while others wrote to AA headquarters in New York. In the first month, five hundred requests were forwarded to Snyder, who divided them with the other members of the group. “I would hand them out on Monday mornings like a sales manager—tell them to follow up and to report to me on Wednesday,” he said. “Nobody had a job at that time, so it was all right.” His wife, Dorothy, remembered being overwhelmed. “Within the space of about two weeks, our meetings grew from 15 to 100,” she said. There were only thirteen men who had been sober long enough to call on people who had asked to meet with an AA member. Each was handling as many as eight calls every evening, and the telephone kept ringing. “People couldn’t get me on the phone, because the line was busy, so they’d come beating down the doors,” Dorothy said.³⁵

Snyder welcomed the chaos, but what was happening in Cleveland frightened the earliest members, including Wilson and Smith. “Had it not taken us four whole years, littered with countless failures, to produce even 100 good recoveries,” Wilson recalled. “How could they manage?” There seemed to be a better chance that the onslaught of alcoholics would get the Clevelanders drunk than they would get the newcomers sober. A year later, there were thirty groups and several hundred members in Cleveland. AA had proved that it could grow quickly. It was the dawn of the “era of mass production of sobriety.”³⁶

AA was reaching into new areas of the country. The drunks who had traveled to Akron to put themselves under Smith’s care were returning home and starting new groups. There were few overnight successes. It took Earl T. two years to make any progress in Chicago. Archie T. was struggling to reestablish himself in Detroit when a nonalcoholic friend offered to let him hold a meeting in the basement of her home. Some of the most successful AA ambassadors were traveling salesmen. The New York office thought long and hard about whether to turn over a list of contacts in the South to Irwin M., a large and volatile salesman of venetian blinds. But the urgency of answering these calls for help finally persuaded Wilson to give Irwin his chance. “Then we waited—but not for long,” Wilson recalled. “Irwin ran them down, every single one, with his home crashing tornado technique. . . . He had cracked the territory wide open and had started or stimulated many a group.” A newspaperman known only as Larry J. arrived in Houston from Cleveland and wrote a series of stories about AA for the Houston Press. The Houston group included several members who later helped start new groups: Ed, who launched a meeting in Austin; Army Sergeant Roy, who made a beginning in Tampa and Los Angeles; and Esther, who started a group in Dallas.³⁷

In February 1940, John D. Rockefeller Jr. announced his support for AA. He had long had a deep interest in the alcohol problem and had been a strong supporter of Prohibition, until it became clear that it was not the solution. When he had first learned of AA in 1938, he had agreed to contribute $5,000, which was used to provide financial support for Wilson and Smith, who were both nearly insolvent. But he had refused to go further out of concern that a large influx of money would undermine the voluntarism that he believed was AA’s greatest asset. He may also have been reluctant to link his name with AA at a time when it was far from clear that the organization would survive.

With AA growing strongly in the wake of the Plain Dealer articles, Rockefeller invited four hundred of his business associates to attend a dinner at the Union League Club in New York to hear AA’s story. Both Wilson and Smith spoke, as did several eminent nonalcoholics who were familiar with AA. Wilson also made sure that there was an AA member at every table. “What institution are you with?” a banker asked Morgan R. “Well, sir, I am not with any institution at the moment,” he answered with a smile. “Nine months ago, however, I was a patient in Greystone Asylum.”³⁸

The AA members were disappointed when Nelson Rockefeller, who filled in because his father was ill, ended the dinner without making a strong pitch for contributions. A bank had recently foreclosed on the Wilsons’ home, and they were living with friends. The Smiths were also facing the possibility of eviction. But Rockefeller announced he was donating only a thousand dollars. Far more important than money, however, was the publicity that followed the Rockefeller dinner. The Rockefellers put Wilson in touch with their public relations firm, which released a statement endorsing Alcoholics Anonymous that was carried in newspapers in the United States and around the world. One headline read “John D. Rockefeller dines toss-pots.”³⁹

A few weeks later, AA made national headlines again when Rollie Hemsley, a catcher for the Cleveland Indians baseball team, revealed that he was a member of AA. After Hemsley’s drinking had led several teams to fire him, he was introduced to Smith in 1939 and had been attending meetings of the Akron group for about a year. When he made his announcement, he was already the focus of national attention as the catcher for the rookie sensation Bob Feller. The effect of the Rockefeller endorsement and the Hemsley revelation became apparent in a jump in the sale of Alcoholics Anonymous. There were also hundreds of letters from alcoholics seeking help. Their names were added to the growing list of correspondents who would later become the backbone of a national organization.

But the most important publicity was still ahead. In November 1940, Bill and Lois Wilson were living in a small room in an AA clubhouse in Manhattan when they learned that one of the country’s biggest magazines, the Saturday Evening Post, was planning a story about AA. The news was tremendously exciting, but they had been disappointed before when a promised story in Reader’s Digest never came to fruition. There was also a danger that the publicity might be bad. The reporter, Jack Alexander, was very skeptical after his first encounter with AA members. The four men were “good-looking and well-dressed,” and he was not sure he believed their “horrendous” drinking stories. “I had a strong suspicion that my leg was being pulled. They had behaved like a bunch of actors sent out by some Broadway casting company.”

Alexander didn’t know what to make of Wilson’s excessive candor as he talked about his drinking and his many errors of judgment since. “We gave him our records, opened the books . . . fixed up interviews with A.A.s of every description, and finally showed him the A.A. sights from New York and Philadelphia all the way to Chicago via Akron and Cleveland,” Wilson recalled. At first, Alexander believed that Wilson was “either incredibly naive or a bit stupid.” By the time he finished his research, he was convinced that AA was what it purported to be, and his article was set to run as the lead story on March 1, 1941.⁴⁰

The March issue of the Saturday Evening Post created a nearly instantaneous response when it became available at newsstands on February 24. The appeals for help exceeded even Wilson’s expectations. “By mail and telegram a deluge of pleas for help and orders for the book Alcoholics Anonymous, first in hundreds and then in thousands, hit Box 658,” Wilson wrote.

Pawing at random through the incoming mass of heartbreaking appeals, we found ourselves crying. What in the world could we do with them? . . . So we rounded up every A.A. woman and every A.A. wife who could use a typewriter. The upper floor of the Twenty-Fourth Street Club was converted into an emergency headquarters.

(At a time when all secretaries were women, it was assumed that no man could type.)

New people started showing up at AA meetings. In New York, the attendance at the clubhouse swelled to 150 just ten days after the Alexander article appeared, and additional meetings were scheduled for the newcomers. The first New Jersey group saw its membership double by the end of March. New groups were forming every day, and every night AA members set out to meet with the men and women who had asked for help. The membership of AA had reached two thousand in early 1941, more than doubling in the previous year. “We thought this was good going,” Wilson said. But six thousand alcoholics joined over the next ten months.⁴¹

There were still important issues to be resolved. The Big Book provided a twelve-step program of recovery, but it did not say how AA would be organized. What it did say seemed to invite chaos: “We are not an organization in the conventional sense of the word. There are no fees or dues whatsoever. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.” AA was not entirely without structure. To encourage the fund-raising envisioned by Wilson’s plans, a nonprofit organization, the Alcoholic Foundation, was organized in 1938. Because a board of trustees made up of alcoholics would not inspire confidence in potential donors, it was agreed that a majority of the board would be nonalcoholics. This decision would cause problems later, when Wilson and Smith decided that AA members must control the future of the organization.⁴²

The Alcoholic Foundation played no role in the day-to-day operation of the AA office in New York City. Wilson provided the leadership there, staying in close contact with Smith. In their view, the business of the office was to help the people who were organizing groups by offering advice, not telling them what to do. They eventually developed a standard response to all requests for guidance. “Of course, you are at perfect liberty to handle this matter any way you please,” it read. “But the majority experience in A.A. does seem to suggest . . .” The “take it or leave it” attitude of the early Akron group was transformed into an invitation to experiment.⁴³

Wilson and Smith were well aware that there were dangers to such an approach. Their members were drunks, and the overwhelming majority had only just stopped drinking. They were physically shaky and troubled by emotional problems. “[T]he alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot,” the Big Book observed. In the absence of central authority, AA members engaged in many bloody battles over group policies. “A.A. didn’t start or grow in unity. A.A. started in riots,” Snyder said. One of the first fights occurred in the Cleveland group just a few months after its founding, and Snyder was at the center of the controversy. The Cleveland group owed its very existence to his relentless pursuit of new members, but many of the men he had helped were uncomfortable with his efforts to attract publicity.⁴⁴

Snyder was distributing flyers for his talks at social clubs that read, “Clarence Snyder of Alcoholics Anonymous will speak on this new cure for Alcoholism.” He was also trying to get a weekly show on a local radio station. His promotional efforts were so aggressive that some Cleveland AA members believed he was getting paid for his efforts. Things came to a head in the weeks after the publication of the Elrick Davis articles in the Plain Dealer. A secret ballot was taken, and Snyder was expelled from the membership. The vote was not unanimous, however. Forty members joined Snyder in founding a second Cleveland meeting. That meeting was only a few weeks old when some of its members seceded to form a third.⁴⁵

Many groups were also adopting policies that appeared to conflict with AA principles. In its opening pages, the Big Book said, “The only requirement for membership is an honest desire to stop drinking.” When the Alcoholic Foundation asked groups to describe their “protective” regulations, it compiled a list that was “a mile long” and included many restrictions on membership. “We were resolved to admit nobody to A.A. but that hypothetical class of people we termed ‘pure alcoholics,’” an early member explained.

Except for their guzzling, and the unfortunate results thereof, [pure alcoholics] 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!

Early AA members were acutely aware that their lives depended on AA and were prepared to do anything to protect it. “Everybody was scared witless that something or somebody would capsize the boat and dump us all back into the drink,” the “old-timer” explained. “We were grim because we felt our lives and homes were threatened. . . . Intolerant, you say? . . . Yes, we were intolerant.”⁴⁶

But for every member who trembled at the sight of a newcomer who didn’t seem to fit, there was another alcoholic who wanted to save the world. Wilson believed that sober alcoholics were especially prone to crusading:

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, through A.A., had brought us within reach of our highest expectations. So why shouldn’t we share our way of life with everyone?

But that passion often brought them to grief. In one town, one of the super-promoters who appear so often in AA history managed to convince his neighbors that they should build “a great big alcoholic center.” The promoter created three corporations to run the project, making himself president of all. He promulgated sixty-one rules and regulations to ensure that things ran smoothly. For a while, they did, but eventually the initiative collapsed. The repentant promoter proposed a final rule: “Don’t take yourself too damn seriously.”⁴⁷

The fears about the survival of AA slowly disappeared. In seven years, its membership grew from a hundred to twenty-four thousand. Group members still fought, but when their differences could not be reconciled, the group didn’t die. The minority party started scouting for a location, and a new group opened. Members joked that all you needed to start a group was “a grievance and a coffee pot.”

In any other organization, this might have led to disintegration. But the same fear that made early AA members overprotective was also a source of strength. Drunks who wanted to get sober only had one place to go. So few were willing to push their objections to the point where they threatened the organization. As Wilson explained, recognizing the importance of AA in his life, the alcoholic becomes willing to put aside his own views:

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.

This is the reason that the compromise over the role of religion in AA was reached in only a few months. Unity was a matter of life or death for AA members. “We stay whole, or A.A. dies,” Wilson wrote.⁴⁸

As AA’s membership grew, its finances improved. Since AA did not collect dues, the New York office urged members to make voluntary donations. The response was disappointing. “We were astounded to find that we were as tight as bark on a tree,” Wilson said. But following the publication of the Jack Alexander article in the Saturday Evening Post in the spring of 1941, sales of the Big Book began to climb, and it became a reliable source of income for both AA, which had self-published the book, and the cofounders, who were given a share of the royalties. Although Wilson and Smith received only a hundred dollars per month in the beginning, the sales of the book would eliminate their financial woes. AA began to expand its communications. In 1944, six members began publishing a newsletter, the Grapevine, to communicate with other AAs around the country, as well as with those who were serving overseas during World War II. It soon became an official publication, AA Grapevine.⁴⁹

In April 1946, Wilson used the AA Grapevine to outline twelve “traditions” to guide AA. He described them as traditions because they had emerged from seven years of experience in dealing with the conflicts encountered by AA groups and the organization as a whole. “Nobody invented Alcoholics Anonymous. It grew. Trial and error has produced a rich experience. Little by little we have been adopting the lessons of that experience,” Wilson said. He emphasized that he was not proposing rules. AA should always be pragmatic:

Should we ever harden too much the letter might crush the spirit. We could victimize ourselves by petty rules and prohibitions; we could imagine that we had said the last word. We might even be asking alcoholics to accept our rigid ideas or stay away. May we never stifle progress like that!

On the other hand, Wilson thought the development of AA had reached a point where it needed to adopt guiding principles to address issues that would arise in the future. “They involve relations of the A.A. to his group, the relation of his group to Alcoholics Anonymous as a whole, and the place of Alcoholics Anonymous in that troubled sea called Modern Society,” he said. “Terribly relevant is the problem of our basic structure and our attitude toward these ever pressing questions of leadership, money and authority.” Wilson then presented his suggestions, “An Alcoholics Anonymous Tradition of Relations—Twelve Points to Assure Our Future.”⁵⁰

Several years later, Wilson wrote a “short form” of the “twelve traditions”:

1. Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon A.A. unity.

2. For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority—a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience.

3. The only requirement for A.A. membership is a desire to stop drinking.

4. Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or A.A. as a whole.

5. Each group has but one primary purpose—to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.

6. An A.A. group ought never to 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.

7. Every A.A. group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions.

8. Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever nonprofessional, but our service centers may employ special workers.

9. A.A., as such ought never to be organized; but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve.

10.Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the A.A. name ought never to be drawn into public controversy.

11.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.

12.Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.⁵¹

Even as the twelve traditions were published for the first time, one important organizational issue remained. AA was growing quickly in the years after World War II. An average of 17,000 drunks joined annually after 1946, bringing the total to 111,000 members in over 4,000 groups in 1951. But the organization of AA was becoming decrepit and dysfunctional. It was still governed by the Alcoholic Foundation. The board still played an important role: it supervised a growing staff that was soon shipping eight tons of literature monthly, oversaw the AA Grapevine, and acted as the voice of AA on the few occasions that it was necessary (usually stating that AA had no opinion).

But the board was not accountable to AA members. It nominated and elected its own members. Although AA members served on the board, its charter provided that they would never be the majority. This was not a serious problem as long as Wilson and Smith continued to lead the organization. But what would happen when they were gone? At times, even the founders had struggled to control their tempestuous membership. Wilson doubted AA members would follow the leadership of nonalcoholics. In 1945, he began to push the idea of creating a General Service Conference consisting of alcoholics chosen by the membership to direct the future of AA.

Wilson’s proposal of a General Service Conference precipitated five years of often vitriolic debate among the leaders of AA. Almost no one except Wilson thought changes were necessary. The board members were nearly unanimous in believing they were doing a good job and were capable of meeting the challenges ahead. The alcoholic members were the most adamant in their views. The board was supported by many of the old-timers in the major cities who were still in control of AA affairs there and did not welcome the creation of a conference that they might not be able to influence. Matters were made worse by Wilson’s characteristically bullheaded approach, which alienated potential allies. The bitterness between Wilson and his critics grew so great in 1948 that his announcement that he was undertaking a tour of AA groups around the United States led the board and its supporters to suspect he was recruiting for a potential coup d’état. It convened a meeting of old-timers from around the country who reaffirmed their support for the status quo. Even this show of strength would probably not have been enough to stymie Wilson if he had had the support of Smith. But Dr. Bob was dubious about the idea of the conference. He urged Wilson not to force the issue.

A peaceful resolution of the conference issue was finally reached in 1950, when AA held its first convention in Cleveland. More than three thousand sober alcoholics traveled to the city that had played such an important role in the growth of AA. Cleveland was also close to Akron, and Smith, who was suffering from advanced prostate cancer, would have been unable to attend if the convention had been held anywhere else. Cleveland cab drivers sang the praises of the sober conventioneers, and the good feeling carried through the three days of proceedings. On the second day, Wilson presented the Twelve Traditions for a vote of the membership. Although he asked for debate, there was none, and the traditions were adopted by a unanimous standing vote. The next day, both founders delivered addresses. Smith’s weakened condition was apparent, and his close friends knew that his short speech would be his last. “There are two or three things that flash into my mind on which it would be fitting to lay a little emphasis,” he said.

Let’s not louse it all up with Freudian complexes and things that are interesting to the scientific mind, but have very little to do with our actual A.A. work. Our Twelve Steps, when simmered down to the last, resolve themselves into the words “love” and “service.” We understand what love is and we understand what service is. So let’s bear those two things in mind.

Exhausted, Smith left the stage and was driven back to Akron, leaving Wilson to close the convention.⁵²

It was Bernard Smith, a trustee of the Alcoholic Foundation, who finally persuaded the other members of the board to turn over control of AA to its members. Smith was a businessman who had been quick to see that Wilson’s plan incorporated the best principles of corporate governance. His appointment as chair of a board committee to consider the creation of a conference put him in a position to persuade others to adopt it on a trial basis.

One obstacle remained. Wilson knew that Smith’s agreement was essential to win support for the conference from AA members. After the Cleveland convention, he traveled to Akron to make a final pitch. He met Smith in the home where he had been a guest during those crucial months in 1935. There had been a lot of sadness there recently. Anne Smith had died a year earlier, and it was obvious to both men that Bob was in his final days. Wilson spoke plainly about the future of AA after the founders were gone. If they died without endorsing the conference, AA members would assume that they wanted the Alcoholic Foundation to run things. The least they could do was call the first conference and let the representatives decide whether they wanted to take over. Bob Smith agreed. “Bill, it has to be A.A.’s decision, not ours,” Smith said. “Let’s call that conference.”⁵³

In April 1951, AA members who had been elected by their fellow alcoholics at mass meetings around the country gathered in New York as delegates to the first General Service Conference. They were taken on a tour of headquarters and introduced to the trustees of the Alcoholic Foundation. Then, they settled down to business. The conference charter gave the delegates real authority: by a two-thirds vote, they could issue orders to the trustees, and a simple majority could deliver a strong suggestion that would be difficult to ignore. The conference was also given the power to veto nominations to the Alcoholic Foundation. The delegates began to exercise their authority almost immediately, making a number of decisions that were at odds with the views of the trustees and staff. The success of the first conference was reassuring to all. “They were proving as never before that A.A.’s Tradition Two was correct,” Wilson wrote. “Our group conscience could safely act as the sole authority and sure guide for Alcoholics Anonymous.”⁵⁴

Smith died before the meeting of the General Service Conference. He and Wilson had said their final good-byes in Akron. Wilson wrote:

I went down the steps and then turned to look back. Bob stood in the doorway, tall and upright as ever. Some color had come back into his cheeks, and he was carefully dressed in a light gray suit. This was my partner, the man with whom I had never had a hard word. The wonderful, old, broad smile was on his face as he said almost jokingly, “Remember, Bill, let’s not louse this thing up. Let’s keep it simple!”

CHAPTER SEVEN