 |
| Another drunk on the bed. |
When a
farmer in Aroostook County, Maine
announces that he is going to bake a
cake, he is speaking figuratively.
What he means is that he is bored
with the loneliness of Aroostook
vast reaches, with the county's most
famous product, potatoes, and with
life in general; and that, to
relieve his boredom, he is going on
a vanilla-extract bender. In order
to buy liquor he might have to drive
as much as a hundred miles over
drifted or rutted roads, to reach a
town uninhibited by local option. He
tipples on vanilla, which is rich in
alcohol, because it is easily and
legally obtainable, in quantity, at
the nearest grocery store. Grocers
in local-option towns ordinarily do
a thriving vanilla business with
alcoholically inclined agrarians,
but of late the strange society
known as Alcoholics Anonymous has
taken root in Aroostook and a
disturbing effect on the vanilla
turnover has been observed.
"You wouldn't believe it,
Ned," one storekeeper lamented
to a drummer on a gray day last
November, " but my vanilla
sales is almost down to
normal."
The impact of Alcoholics
Anonymous upon a community is not
always that striking, but it is
doing quite well at its
self-appointed task, which, as
almost everyone knows by now, is
that of helping confirmed drunks to
quit drinking. The help is provided
solely by alcoholics who, through
adhering to a specified program of
living, have managed to arrest their
own disastrous drinking habits. (A.
A. members never call themselves
ax-alcoholics, regardless of the
length of their sobriety, the theory
being that they are ineradicably
alcoholics by temperament, and are
therefore always vulnerable to a
relapse.)
During the past few years
Alcoholics Anonymous has extended
its influence overseas, and one of
its more dedicated workers is the
honorable secretary of the Dublin
group. A Sandhurst graduate and a
veteran of twenty-six years in the
British Army, he is still remembered
in some portions of the Middle East
for his inspired work with the
bottle. Now an abstainer, he lives
off his major's pension and the
profits of a small retail business.
Like all faithful members of A.A.,
he spends much of his spare time in
shepherding other lushes toward
total abstinence, lest he revert to
the pot himself.
The honorable secretary is a man
of few spoken words, but he carries
on a large correspondence within the
fraternity. His letters, which are
notable for their eloquent
understatement, are prized by fellow
A.A.'s in this country and are
passed around at meetings. One of
his more fascinating communiqués,
received here in October, described
a missionary trip to Cork, in
company with another A.A. gentleman.
The purpose of the trip was to bring
the glad tidings of freedom to any
Corkonians who might happen to be
besotted and unshriven, and to
stimulate the local group, which was
showing small promise.
This was the honorable
secretary's chronological report:
8 P.M. The chairman and myself
sat alone.
8:05 One lady arrived, a
nonalcoholic.
8:15 One man arrived.
8:20 A County Cork member
arrived to say he couldn't stay,
as his children had just developed
measles.
8:25 The lone lady departed.
8:30 Two more men arrived.
8:40 One more man arrived, and
I decided to make a start.
8:45 The first man arrival
stated that he had to go out and
have a drink.
8:50 He came back.
8:55 Three more arrived.
9:10 Another lady, propped up
by a companion, arrived, gazed
glassily around, collected some
literature and departed
unsteadily.
9:30 The chairman and I had
finished speaking.
9:45 We reluctantly said good
night to the new members, who
seemed very interested.
In summing up, the secretary
said: "A night of horror at
first, developing quite well. I
think they have good prospects, once
the thing is launched."
To a skeptic, the honorable
secretary's happy prognosis in the
face of initial discouragement may
sound foolishly hopeful. To those
already within the fraternity and
familiar with the sluggardly and
chaotic character of A.A. Iocal-group
growth in its early stages, he was
merely voicing justifiable optimism.
For some years after its inception,
in 1935, the Alcoholics Anonymous
movement itself made slow progress.
As the work of salvaging other
drunks is essential to maintaining
the sobriety of the already-salvaged
brethren, the earnest handful of
early salvagees spent some worrisome
months. Hundreds of thousands of
topers were prowling about in full
alcoholic cry, but few would pause
long enough to listen.
Six years after it all began,
when this magazine first examined
the small but encouraging phenomenon
(Post, March 1, 1941), the band
could count 2000 members, by
scraping hard, and some of these
were still giving off residual
fumes. In the nine years which have
intervened since that report, the
small phenomenon has become a
relatively large one. Today its
listed membership exceeds 90,000.
Just how many of these have
substantial sobriety records is a
matter of conjecture, as the
movement, which has no control at
the top and is constantly ridden by
maverick tendencies, operates in a
four-alarm-fire atmosphere, and no
one has the time to check up. A
reasonable guess would be that about
two thirds have been sober for
anywhere from six months to fifteen
years, and that the rest have
stretched out their periods of
sobriety between twisters to the
point where they are at least able
to keep their jobs.
The intake of shaky-fingered
newcomers, now at its highest in
A.A. history, is running at the rate
of around 20,000 a year. The number
that will stick is, again, a matter
of conjecture. If experience
repeats, according to A.A.
old-timers, about one half will stay
sober from the start, and one fourth
will achieve sobriety after a few
skids; the other one fourth will
remain problem drinkers. A problem
drinker, by definition, is one who
takes a drink for some compulsive
reason he cannot identify and,
having taken it, is unable to stop
until he is drunk and acting like a
lunatic.
How Many of the Four
Million Will Join?
IT is tempting to
become over sanguine about the
success of Alcoholics Anonymous to
date. Ninety thousand persons,
roaring drunk or roaring sober, are
but a drop in the human puddle, and
they represent only a generous dip
out of the human alcoholic puddle.
According to varying estimates,
between 750,000 and 1,000,000
problem drinkers are still on the
loose in the United States alone.
Their numbers will inevitably be
swelled in future years by recruits
from the ranks of between 3,000,000
and 4,000,000 Americans who, by
medical standards, drink too much
for their own good. Some of these
millions will taper off or quit when
they reach the age at which the
miseries of a hang-over seem too
great a price to pay for an evening
of artificially induced elation; but
some will slosh over into the
compulsive-drinker class.
The origins of alcoholism, which
is now being widely treated as a
major public-health problem, are as
mysterious as those of cancer. They
are perhaps even harder to pin down,
because they involve psychic as well
as physical elements. Currently, the
physical aspect is being
investigated by universities and
hospitals, and by publicly and
privately financed foundations. Some
large business and industrial firms,
concerned about reduced productivity
and absenteeism, are providing
medical and psychiatric aid to
alcoholic employees. The firms'
physicians are also digging into the
alcoholic puzzle. The most plausible
tentative explanation that any of
these investigative efforts has come
up with is that alcoholism is a
sickness resembling that caused by
various allergies.
Psychiatry has its own approach
to the problem; it is successful in
only a small percentage of cases.
Clergymen, using a spiritual appeal,
and the beset relatives of
alcoholics, using everything from
moral suasion to a simple bat in the
jaw, manage to persuade a few
chronics to become unchronic. So
does one school of institutional
treatment, which insists that
alcoholism is solely the result of
"twisted thinking" and
aims at unraveling the mental
quirks.
But the Alcoholics Anonymous
approach--which leans on medicine,
uses a few elementary principles of
psychiatry and employs a strong
spiritual weapon--is the only one
which has done anything resembling a
mop-up job. Whatever one's attitude
toward A.A. may be, and a lot of
people are annoyed by its sometimes
ludicrous strivings and its dead-pan
thumping of the sobriety tub, one
can scarcely ignore its palpable
results. To anyone who has ever been
a drunk or who has had to endure the
alcoholic cruelties of a drunk--and
that would embrace a large portion
of the human family--90,000
alcoholics reconverted into working
citizens represent a massive dose of
pure gain. In human terms, the
achievements of Alcoholics Anonymous
stand out as one of the few
encouraging developments of a rather
grim and destructive half century.
Drunks are prolific of excuses
for their excessive drinking, and
the most frequent alibi is that no
one really understands what a
struggle they have. With more than
3000 A.A. groups at work in the
United States, and every member a
veteran of the struggle, this excuse
is beginning to lose its validity,
if it ever had any validity. In most
cities of any size the fraternity
has a telephone listed in its own
name. A nickel call will bring a
volunteer worker who won't talk down
to a drunk, as the average
nonalcoholic has a way of doing but
will talk convincingly in the jargon
of the drunk. The worker won't do
any urging; he will describe the
Alcoholics Anonymous program in
abbreviated form and depart. The
drunk is invited to telephone again
if he is serious about wanting to
become sober. Or a drunk, on his own
initiative or in tow of a relative,
may drop in at the A.A. office,
where he will receive the same
non evangelistic treatment. In the
larger cities the offices do a
rushing trade, especially after week
ends or legal holidays. Many
small-town and village groups
maintain clubrooms over the bank or
feed store; in one Canadian town the
A.A.'s share quarters with a
handbook operator, using it by night
after the bookie has gone home. Some
of these groups carry a standing
classified advertisement in the
daily or weekly newspaper. If they
don't, a small amount of inquiry
will disclose the meeting place of
the nearest group; a local doctor,
or clergyman, or policeman will
know.
To some extent, the same easy
availability obtains in the
twenty-six foreign countries where
A.A. has gained a foothold. This is
especially true of the nations of
the British Commonwealth,
particularly Canada, Australia and
New Zealand, which together list
more A.A. members than the whole
movement could boast nine years ago;
and of the Scandinavian countries,
where membership is fairly strong.
At a recent A.A. banquet in Oslo,
Norway, 400 members celebrated their
deliverance, drinking nothing
stronger than water. Throughout
Scandinavia the members bolster the
program by using Antibuse, the new
European aversion drug. This
practice is deplored by some A.A.
members as showing a lack of faith
in the standard A.A. program, but,
of course, nothing is done, or can
be done, about it, since the program
is free to anyone who thinks he
needs it and he may adapt it in any
way that suits him.
More often than not, though,
disregard of the standard
admonitions backfires. A bibulous
Scottish baronet found this out
when, returning from London, where
he caught the spark from a local
group, he set out ambitiously to dry
up Edinburgh, a hard-drinking town.
But he tried it by remote control,
so to speak, hiring a visiting
American A.A. to do the heavy work.
This violated the principle that the
arrested drunk must do
drunk-rescuing work himself in order
to remain sober. Besides, the
Scottish drunks wouldn't listen to a
hired foreign pleader. In no time at
all, and without getting a convert,
the baronet and his hireling were
swacked to the eyeballs and crying
on each other's shoulders. After the
American had gone home, the baronet
stiffened up, abandoned the
traditions of his class and started
all over again, cruising the gutters
himself, visiting drunks in their
homes and in hospitals and prisons.
Edinburgh is now in the win column,
and there are also groups in
Glasgow, Dundee, Perth and
Campbeltown, all offshoots of
Edinburgh.
Alcoholism on a large scale seems
to be most common in highly complex
civilizations. These tend to breed
the basic neuroses of which
uncontrolled drinking is just one
outward expression. A man in a more
primitive setting, bound closely to
earthy tasks and the constant battle
with Nature, is apt to treat his
frustrations by ignoring them or by
working them off.
Alcoholics Anonymous has
nevertheless caught on in some
out-of-the-way places. A liquor
salesman for a British firm, who was
seduced by his own merchandise,
started a group in Cape Town, South
Africa, which now has ninety
members. There are also groups in
Johannesburg, Pretoria, Bloemfontein,
Durban and East London, and in
Salisbury and Bulawayo, Southern
Rhodesia. The group at Anchorage,
Alaska, which started in a blizzard,
has a dozen members, including one
slightly puzzled Eskimo, and there
are small groups in Palmer and
Ketchikan. There is a small group in
the leper colony at Molokai,
nurtured by A.A.'s from Honolulu,
who fly there occasionally and
conduct meetings.
The figures perhaps give too rosy
a picture of the turbulent little
world of Alcoholics Anonymous. Most
of the members of any standing seem
to be exceptionally happy people,
with more serenity of manner than
most non alcoholics are able to
muster these jittery days; it is
difficult to
believe that
they ever lived in the drunk's
bewitched world. But some are still
vaguely unhappy, though sober, and
feel as if they were walking a tight
wire. Treasurers occasionally
disappear with a group's funds and
wind up, boiled, in another town.
After this had happened a few times,
groups were advised to keep the
kitty low, and the practice now is
to spend any appreciable surplus on
a cake-and-coffee festival or a
picnic. This advice does not always
work out; last year the members of a
fresh and vigorous French-Canadian
unit in Northern Maine, taking the
advice to heart, debated so
violently about how to spend their
fifty-four dollars that all hands
were drunk within twenty-four hours.
It is difficult at first for the
recruit to achieve serenity.
As most groups are mixtures of
men and women, a certain number of
unconventional love affairs occur.
More than one group has been thrown
into a maelstrom of gossip and
disorder by a determined lady whose
alcoholism was complicated by an
aggressive romantic instinct. Such
complications are no more frequent
than they are at the average country
club; they merely stand out more
baldly, and do more harm, in an
emotionally explosive society.
Special A.A. groups in sixty-six
prisons around the nation are
constantly trickling out graduates
into the civilian groups. The
ex-convicts are welcomed and are,
for some reason, usually models of
good behavior. A sanitarium or
mental-hospital background causes no
more stir in an A.A. group than a
string of college degrees would at
the University Club; the majority of
A.A.'s are alumni of anywhere from
one to fifty such institutions. Thus
Alcoholics Anonymous is something of
a Grand Hotel.
The ability of the arrested drunk
to talk the active drunk's language
convincingly is the one
revolutionary aspect of the A.A.
technique, and it does much to
explain why the approach so often
succeeds after others have failed.
The rest of the technique is a
synthesis of already existing ideas,
some of which are centuries old.
Once a community of language and
experience has been established, it
acts as a bridge over which the rest
of the A.A. message can be conveyed,
provided the subject is receptive.
Across the bridge and inside the
active alcoholic's mind lies an
exquisitely tortured microcosm, and
a steady member of Alcoholics
Anonymous gets a shudder every time
he looks into it again. It is a
rat-cage world, kept hot by an
alcohol flame, and within it lives,
or dances, a peculiarly touchy,
defiant and grandiose personality.
There is a sage saying in A.A.
that "an alcoholic is just like
a normal person, only more so."
He is egotistical, childish,
resentful and intolerant to an
exaggerated degree. How he gets that
way is endlessly debated, but a
certain rough pattern is discernible
in most cases. Many of those who
ultimately become alcoholics start
off as an only child, or as the
youngest child in a family, or as a
child with too solicitous a mother,
or a father with an over severe
concept of discipline. When such a
child begins getting his lumps from
society, his ego begins to swell
disproportionately--either from too
easy triumphs or, as a compensation,
from being rebuffed in his attempts
to win the approval of his
contemporaries.
He develops an intense power
drive, a feverish struggle to gain
acceptance of himself at his own
evaluation. A few of the power-drive
boys meet with enough frustrations
to send them into problem drinking
while still in college or ever while
in high school. More often, on
entering adult life, the prospective
alcoholic is outwardly just about
like anyone else his age, except
that he is probably a little more
cocky and aggressive, a little more
hipped on the exhibitionistic charm
routine, a little more plausible. He
becomes a social drinker--that is,
one who can stop after a few
cocktails and enjoy the experience.
But at some place along the line
his power drive meets up with an
obstacle it cannot surmount--someone
he loves refuses to love him,
someone whose admiration he covets
rejects him, some business or
professional ambition is thwarted.
Or he may encounter a whole series
of rebuffs. The turning point may
come quickly or it may be delayed
for as long as forty or fifty years.
He begins to take his drinks in
gulps, and before he realizes it he
is off on a reeler. He loses jobs
through drunkenness, embarrasses his
family and alienates his friends.
His world begins to shrink. He
encounters the horrors of the
"black-out," the dawn
experience of being unable to
remember what he did the night
before--how many checks he wrote and
how large they were, whom he
insulted, where he parked his car,
whether or not he ran down someone
on the way home. In the alcoholic
world a nice distinction is made
between the "black-out"
and the simple "pass-out,"
the latter being the relatively
innocuous act of falling asleep from
taking too much liquor. He jumps
nervously whenever the doorbell or
telephone rings, fearing that it may
be a saloonkeeper with a rubber
check, or a damage-suit lawyer, or
the police.
He is frustrated and fearful, but
is only vaguely conscious that his
will, which is strong in most
crises, fails him where liquor is
concerned, although this is apparent
to anyone who knows him. He nurses a
vision of sobriety and tries all
kind of self-rationing systems, none
of which works for long. The great
paradox of his personality is that
in the midst of his troubles, his
already oversize ego tends to
expand; failure goes to his head. He
continues, as the old saying has it,
to rage through life calling for the
headwaiter. In his dreams he is
likely to see himself alone on a
high mountain, masterfully surveying
the world below. This dream, or some
variant of it, will come to him
whether he is sleeping in his own
bed, or in a
twenty-five-dollar-a-day hotel
suite, or on a park bench, or in a
psychopathic ward.
If he applies to Alcoholics
Anonymous for help, he has taken an
important step toward arresting his
drink habit; he has at least
admitted that alcohol has whipped
him. This in itself is an act of
humility, and his life thereafter
must be a continuing effort to
acquire more of this ancient virtue.
Should he need hospitalization, his
new friends will see that he gets
it, if a local hospital will take
him. Understandably, many hospitals
are reluctant to accept alcoholic
patients, because so many of them
are disorderly. With this sad fact
in mind, the society has persuaded
several hospitals to set up separate
alcoholic corridors and is helping
to supervise the patients through
supplying volunteer workers.
 |
| Knickerbocker Hospital in Manhatten |
To
the satisfaction of all concerned
including the hospital managements,
which find the supervised corridors
peaceful, more than 10,000 patients
have gone through five-day
rebuilding courses. The hospitals
involved in this successful
experiment are: St. Thomas'
(Catholic) in Akron, St. John's
(Episcopal) in Brooklyn and
Knickerbocker (nonsectarian) in
Manhattan. They have set a pattern
which the society would like to see
adopted by the numerous hospitals
which now accept alcoholics on a
more restricted basis.
Early in the game the newcomer is
subjected to a merciful but thorough
deflating of his ego. It is brought
home to him forcefully that if he
continues his uncontrolled
drinking--the only kind he is
capable of--he will die prematurely,
or go insane from brain impairment,
or both. He is encouraged to
apologize to persons he has injured
through his drunken behavior; this
is a further step in the
ego-deflation process and is often
as painful to the recipient of the
apology as it is to the neophyte
A.A. He is further instructed that
unless he will acknowledge the
existence of a power greater than
himself and continually ask this
power for help, his campaign for
sobriety will probably fail. This is
the much-discussed spiritual element
in Alcoholics Anonymous. Most
members refer to this power as God;
some agnostic members prefer to call
it Nature, or the Cosmic Power, or
by some other label. In any case, it
is the key of the A.A. program, and
it must be taken not on a basis of
mere acceptance or acknowledgment,
but of complete surrender.
This surrender is described by a
psychiatrist, Dr. Harry M. Tiebout,
of Greenwich, Connecticut, as a
"conversion" experience,
"a psychological event in which
there is a major shift in
personality manifestation." He
adds:
"The changes which take
place in the conversion process may
be summed up by saying that the
person who has achieved the
positive frame of mind has lost his
tense, aggressive, demanding,
conscience-ridden self which feels
isolated and at odds with the
world, and has become, instead, a
relaxed, natural, more realistic
individual who can dwell in the
world on a live-and-let-live
basis."
The personality change wrought
surrender is far from complete, at
first. Elated by a few weeks of
sobriety, the new member often
enters what is known as the
"Chautauqua phase"--he is
always making speeches at business
meetings on what is wrong with the
society and how these defects can be
remedied. Senior members let him
talk himself out of this stage of
behavior; if that doesn't work, he
may break away and form a group of
his own. If he does this, he
gradually becomes a quiet veteran
himself and other Chautauqua-phase
boys either oust him from leadership
of his own group or break away
themselves and form a new group. By
this and other processes of fission
the movement spreads. It can stand a
lot of outstanding foolishness and
still grow.
Drunks, as such, are too
individualistic to be organized, and
there is no top command in
Alcoholics Anonymous to
excommunicate, fine or otherwise
penalize irrational behavior.
However, services--such as
publishing meeting bulletins,
distributing literature, arranging
for hospitalization, and so on--are
organized in the larger centers. The
local offices, which are operated
and financed by the groups
thereabouts, are autonomous. They
are governed by representatives
elected by the neighborhood groups
to a rotating body called the
Inter-group. There are no dues; all
local expenses are met by a simple
passing of the hat at group
meetings.
A certain body of operational
traditions has grown up over the
years, and charged with maintaining
them--by exhortation only--is
something called the Alcoholic
Foundation, which has offices at 415
Lexington Avenue New York City. For
a foundation it acts queerly about
money; much of its time is consumed
in turning down proffered donations
and bequests. One tradition is that
A.A. must be kept poor, as money
represents power and the society
prefers to avoid the temptations
which power brings. As a check on
the foundation itself, the list of
trustees is weighted against the
alcoholics by eight to seven. The
nonalcoholic members are two
doctors, a sociologist, a magazine
editor, a newspaper editor, a
penologist, an international lawyer
and a retired businessman.
Preserving the principle of
anonymity is one of the more touchy
tasks of the foundation. Members are
not supposed to be anonymous among
their friends or business
acquaintances, but they are when
appearing before the public--in
print or on radio or television, for
example--as members of Alcoholics
Anonymous. This limited anonymity is
considered important to the welfare
of the movement, primarily because
it encourages members to subordinate
their personalities to the
principles of A.A. There is also the
danger that if a member becomes
publicized as a salvaged alcoholic
he may stage a spectacular skid and
injure the prestige of the society.
Actually, anonymity has been
breached only a few dozen times
since the movement began, which
isn't a bad showing, considering the
exhibitionistic nature of the
average alcoholic.
By one of the many paradoxes
which have characterized its growth,
Alcoholics Anonymous absorbed the
"keep it poor" principle
from one of the world's wealthiest
men, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The
society was formed in 1935 after a
fortuitous meeting in Akron between
a Wall Street broker and an Akron
surgeon, both alcoholics of long
standing. The broker, who was in
Akron on a business mission, had
kept sober for several months by
jawing drunks--unsuccessfully--but
his business mission had fallen
through and he was aching for a
drink. The surgeon, at the time they
got together, was quite blotto.
Together, over a period of a few
weeks, they kept sober and worked
out the basic A.A. technique. By
1937, when they had about fifty
converts, they began thinking, as
all new A.A.'s will, of tremendous
plans--for vast new alcoholic
hospitals, squadrons of paid field
workers and the literature of mercy
pouring off immense presses. Being
completely broke themselves, and
being promoters at heart, as most
alcoholics are, they set their
sights on the Rockefeller jack pot.
Rockefeller sent an emissary to
Akron to look into the phenomenon at
work there, and, receiving a
favorable report, granted an
audience to a committee of
eager-eyed alcoholics. He listened
to their personal sagas of
resurrection from the gutter and was
deeply moved; in fact, he was ready
to agree that the A.A.'s had John
Barleycorn by the throat. The
visitors relaxed and visualized
millions dropping into the till.
Then the man with the big money bags
punctured the vision. He said that
too much money might be the
ruination of any great moral
movement and that he didn't want to
be a party to ruining this one.
However, he did make a small
contribution--small for
Rockefeller--to tide it over for a
few years, and he got some of his
friends to contribute a few thousand
more. When the Rockefeller money ran
out, A.A. was self-supporting, and
it has remained so ever since.
Although A.A. remains in essence
what it has always been, many
changes have come along in late
years. For one thing, the average
age of members has dropped from
about forty-seven to thirty-five.
The society is no longer, as it was
originally, merely a haven for the
"last gaspers." Because of
widespread publicity about
alcoholism, alcoholics are
discovering earlier what their
trouble is.
 |
| Women account for 15% of membership |
As A.A.
has achieved wider social
acceptance, more women are coming in
than ever before. Around the country
they average 15 per cent of total
membership; in New York, where
social considerations never did
count for much, the A.A.'s are 30
per cent women. The unmarried woman
alcoholic is slow to join, as she
generally gets more coddling and
protection from her family than a
man does; she is what is known in
alcoholic circles as a "
bedroom drinker." The
married-woman alcoholic has a
tougher row to hoe. The wife of an
alcoholic, for temperamental and
economic reasons, will ordinarily
stick by her erring husband to the
bitter end. The husband of an
alcoholic wife, on the other hand,
is usually less tolerant; a few
years of suffering are enough to
drive him to the divorce court, with
the children in tow. Thus the
divorced-woman A.A. is a special
problem, and her progress in
sobriety depends heavily upon on the
kindliness shown her by the other
A.A. women. For divorcees, and for
other women who may be timid about
speaking out in mixed meetings,
special female auxiliary groups have
been formed in some communities.
They work out better than a cynic
might think.
Another development is the growth
of the sponsor system. A new member
gets a sponsor immediately, and it
is the function of the sponsor to
accompany him to meetings, to see
that he gets all the help he needs
and to be on call at any time for
emergencies. As an emergency usually
amounts only to an onset of that old
feeling for a bottle, it is
customarily resolved by a telephone
conversation, although it may
involve an after-midnight trip to
Ernie's gin mill, whither the
neophyte has been shanghaied by a
couple of unregenerate old drinking
companions. As the membership of
A.A. cuts through all social,
occupational and economic classes,
it is possible to match the sponsor
with the sponsored, and this seems
to speed up the arrestive process.
During the past decade or so, the
society, whose original growth was
in large cities, has strongly
infiltrated the grass-roots country.
Its arrival in this sector was
delayed largely because of the
greater stigma which attaches to
alcoholism in the small town.
Because of this stigma and the
effect it has on his business,
professional or social standing, the
small-town alcoholic, reveling in
his delusion that nobody knows about
his drinking--when actually it is
the gossip of Main Street--takes
frequent "vacations" or
"business trips" if he can
afford it. He or she--the banker,
the storekeeper, the lawyer, the
madam president of the garden club,
sometimes even the clergyman--is
actually headed for a receptive
hospital or clinic in the nearest
large city, where no one will
recognize him.
The pattern of small-town growth
begins when the questing
small-towner seeks out the big-city
A.A. outfit and its message catches
on with him. To his surprise, he
finds that half a dozen drinkers in
towns near his own have also been to
the fount. On returning to his home,
he gets in touch with them and they
form an intertown group; or there
may be enough drinkers in his own
town to begin a group. Though there
is a stigma even to getting sober in
small towns, it is less virulent
than the souse stigma, and word of
the movement spreads throughout the
county and into adjoining counties.
The churches and newspapers take it
up and beat the drum for it;
relatives of drunks, and doctors who
find themselves unable to help their
alcoholic patients, gladly unload
the problem cases on A.A., and A.A.
is glad to get them. The usual
intrafellowship quarrel over who is
going to run the thing inevitably
develops and there are factional
splits, but the splits help to
spread the movement, too, and all
the big quarrels soon become little
ones, and then disappear.
Nowhere is Alcoholics Anonymous
carried on with more enthusiasm than
in Los Angeles. Unlike most
localities, which try to keep
separate group membership, for
easier handling, Los Angeles likes
the theatrical mass-meeting setting,
with 1000 or more present. The Los
Angeles A.A.'s carry their
membership as if it were a social
cachet and go strongly for square
dances of their own. Jewelry bearing
the A.A. monogram, though frowned
upon elsewhere, is popular on the
Coast. After three months of
certified sobriety a member receives
a bronze pin, after one year he is
entitled to have a ruby chip
inserted in the pin and, after three
years, a diamond chip. Rings bearing
the A.A. letters are widely worn, as
well as similarly embellished
compacts, watch fobs and pocket
pieces.
Texas takes A.A. with enthusiasm
too. In the ranch sector, members
drive or fly hundreds of miles to
attend A.A. square dances and
barbecues, bringing their families.
In metropolitan areas such as
Dallas-Fort Worth--there are upwards
of a dozen oil-millionaire members
here--fancy club quarters have been
established in old mansions and the
brethren and their families rejoice,
dance and drink coffee and soda pop
amid expensive furnishings. One
Southwestern group recently got its
governor to release a life-termer
from the state penitentiary for a
week end, so that he could be the
guest of honor of the group.
"We had a large open
meeting," a local member wrote
a friend elsewhere in the country,
"and many state and county
officials attended in order to hear
what Herman (the lifer) had to tell
about A.A. within the walls. They
were deeply impressed and very
interested. The next night I gave a
lawn party and buffet supper in
Herman's honor, with about fifty
A.A.'s present. This was the first
occasion of this kind in the state
and to our knowledge the first in
the United States."
Some A.A.'s believe that this
group carried the joy business too
far. Others think that each section
of the country ought to manifest
spirit in its own way; anyway, that
is the way it usually works out. The
Midwest is businesslike and serious.
In the Deep South the A.A.'s do a
certain amount of Bible reading and
hymn singing. The Northwest and the
upper Pacific Coast help support
their gathering places with the
proceeds from slot machines. New
York, a catchall for screwballs and
semiscrewballs from all over, is
pious about gambling, and won't have
it around the place. New England is
temperate in its approach, and its
spirit is characterized by the
remark of one Yankee who, writing a
fellow A.A. about a lake cottage he
had just bought, said, "The
serenity hangs in great gobs from
the trees."
The serene mind is what A.A.'s
the world over are driving toward,
and an epigrammatic expression of
their goal is embodied in a
quotation which members carry on
cards in their wallets and plaster
up on the walls of their meeting
rooms: "God grant me the
serenity to accept things I cannot
change, courage to change things I
can, and wisdom to know the
difference."
Originally thought in Alcoholics
Anonymous to have been written by
St. Francis of Assisi, it turned
out, on recent research, to have
been the work of another eminent
nonalcoholic, Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr,
of Union Theological Seminary.
Doctor Niebuhr was
amused on
being told of the use to which his
prayer was
being put. Asked
if it was original with him, he said
he thought it was, but added,
"Of course it may have been
spooking around for centuries."
Alcoholics Anonymous seized upon
it in 1940, after it had been used
as a quotation in the New York
Herald Tribune. the fellowship was
late in catching up with it; and it
will probably spook around a good
deal longer before the rest of the
world catches up with it.
Jack Alexander
The Saturday Evening Post
April 1, 1950
