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Law of Unselfishness -Reader's Digest, February
1964 |
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ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS - DANGERS OF SUCCESS
by Jerome Ellison
Back
in 1940, the late John D. Rockefeller, Jr., made headlines
(John D. Dines Tosspots) by asking 400 of his wealthy friends
to dine at New York's Union League Club and hear about a
society of impoverished drunks called Alcoholics Anonymous.
At that time the fellowship had been struggling along for
a little more than four years and had about a hundred members.
John D. got sick at the last minute and his son Nelson presided.
About seventy-five people showed up. The former drunks gave
impressive testimony of their suffering, restitution and
recovery. The assembled millionaires were impressed, and
the ex-boozers figured their society's financial troubles
were over. But, winding up the evening, the host expressed
his father's belief that money would not be a good thing
for a movement based on selfless service - "it needs
only our good will." The millionaire went home without
being asked to contribute.
Now,
twenty-four years older and with a membership of 300,000
A.A. is rich in its own right. Despite bylaws prohibiting
gifts larger than $100, money pours in to national headquarters
at the rate of more than $400,000 a year and A.A. doesn't
seem to know what to do with it all. Once a year it spends
$20,000 or so to bring 100 delegates in from the fifty states
for a week-long, all expense paid conference at a New York
hotel. It has leased a floor in a midtown New York office
building, where a dozen recovered housewives and spinsters
answer letters, distribute pamphlets containing material
on alcoholism purchased from free- lance writers, circulate
a monthly bulletin of member's stories, articles, jokes
and cartoons called the Grapevine, print and mail press
releases, and go to meetings.
These workers receive annual salaries of $7,000 to $9,000
and are backed by a staff of stenographers and clerical
employees - nonmembers. Herb M., a member with experience
as a press agent and convention manager is paid $18,000
a year for part-time services (three and a third days a
week). The rest of the money goes into sinking funds, which
have no specific purpose, but are nice to have, since they
produce, in the form of interest, more money for sinking
funds. Bill W., the movements surviving co-founder makes
around $25,000 per year - a sum a grateful membership does
not begrudge - on royalties from three books: Alcoholics
Anonymous, which started it all, Twelve Steps and Twelve
Traditions and A.A. Comes of Age. For a movement that was
born and grew to greatness in the face of ridicule, adversity
and bitter poverty, this is indeed wealth. Even if Nelson
Rockefeller's canny father had never suggested it, the question
would now arise whether the success will prove ruinous.
The
prodigies of selfless service performed by members have
had a stunning impact on a basically me-first society. Press,
clergy and the professions have fallen all over one another
to heap praise on the drunks who found a way out, and for
a long time it has been almost bad manners to speak of A.A.
in any but reverent terms.
Now, however, it is a public institution and subject to
the same scrutiny accorded other community volunteer services.
There are A.A. qroups in every crossroads and neighbourhood
- 10,000 of them. They have become almost as much a part
of the community scene as the visiting nurse and the fire
department, which they somewhat resemble. In a population
containing 80 million users of Alcohol and 6 million cases
of active alcoholism, they perform as necessary a life-saving
function as the Coast Guard. Alcoholism has pressed its
way into public attention as the nation's third deadliest
disease, and A.A. has developed the only method yet found
that produces large numbers of enduring cures, It suddenly
finds that it has public responsibilities, that others besides
its members claim a legitimate interest in how it conducts
its affairs.
Many find the fellowship of interest entirely apart from
its practical work of sobering up drunks. Though itself
nonintellectual and sometimes anti-intellectual, A.A. strikes
both therapists and theorists as being an almost classical
demonstration of the psychotherapeutic theories of Carl
Jung. Jung believed in God and in "spirit." He
devised another vocabulary for transactions with agnostic
professional colleagues, but firmly used these traditional
terms in his correspondence. A good part of his life work
was directed towards reconciling the insights of religion
with those of the new psychiatry. Jung approved Freud's
work as far as it went, but felt that forces unsuspected
by Freud could be summoned to the aid of distressed humanity.
This belief is also at the base of A.A., commonly described
by its members as a "spiritual program."
This
resemblance is not entirely coincidental for, though he
did not know it and though his contribution was inadvertent,
Jung had a hand in founding A.A. Early in the 1930s, Jung
took a patient named Rolland H., a rich American and chronic
alcoholic frantically seeking a cure. After an attempt at
treatment, Jung told Rolland H. that psychiatry couldn't
help him. Then, asked the desperate patient, what could?
Perhaps a religious conversion of some kind, Jung said.
Such an experience could never be guaranteed, but one could
seek the company of those who had had them, and hope. Roland
H. went to England, joined the Oxford movement, got sober
and returned to New York. There he continued his association
with the Oxford movement, taking particular interest in
other inebriates. One of these Edwin T., carried the news
to Bill W., a Wall Street broker, then prostrated by alcohol.
After undergoing a shattering subjective experience of religious
enlightenment, Bill W got sober and began looking for other
alcoholics who were interested in drying out by the new
method. He found one - again through the Oxford movement
- on a business trip to Akron, Ohio. His new friend was
a down-and-out alcoholic physician, Dr. Robert S. The two
founded Alcoholics Anonymous and led the movement jointly
until Robert S. died, sober in 1950.
A.A.
was not completely without precedent. More than a century
ago, a remarkable similar organization, The Washington Temperance
Society, sprang up in Washington, D.C. and soon had branches
in most big cities. Lincoln, concerned about alcoholism
through the suffering of his law partner, Herndon, encouraged
the members whenever he could, and even addressed them on
one occasion. The Washingtonians had all the main features
of A.A. – alcoholics helping one another, weekly alcoholics
meetings, shared experience, readily available group fellowship,
reliance on “the Higher Power.” Bill W. and
Bob S., added a spiritual regimen designed to produce personal
improvement, a rule of anonymity, the practice of exchanging
speakers between groups, and a membership restricted to
those who confessed a problem with alcohol. The Twelve Steps
of surrender, confession, self-examination, restitution
and service were taken with only slight changes from the
Oxford movement. The anonymity and alcoholics only rules
were innovations.
AAs
great expansion began with the publication of an article
by Jack Alexander in the Saturday Evening Post of March
1, 1941. Ten years later the membership was up to 150,000:
in ten more years it doubled that. America was suffering
from the hangovers of a national binge begun with the repeal
of Prohibition and not yet ended. By aggressive lobbying,
the liquor industry cleared away the remaining restraints
on the sale of booze. Saturation advertising disfigured
the approaches to the major cities with five story whiskey
bottles and bombarded the populace with reminders to drink.
Consumption rose until it reached the present figures of
a billion quarts of spirits, 2 billion quarts of wine and
12 billion quarts of beer a year. The industry employs a
million people and pays them $5 billion a year-more than
we spend on the combined crude oil, natural gas, coal and
ore-mining industries, and nearly twice what we spend on
education.
Trouble
arose along with sales figures. Those who drink consume,
on the average, a quart of whiskey, two quarts of wine and
four gallons of beer a month. Some, of course drink far
less than this, others-especially the 6 million chronic
alcoholics-much more. Excessive drinking costs the nation
$35 million annually in medical care, $30 million in jail
maintenance, $100 million in accidents, $500 million in
wage losses, according to estimates based on a Public Affairs
Committee pamphlet. About a million people a year are admitted
to be treated for alcoholism. One in twelve drinkers becomes
an alcoholic: 14,000 deaths and 40,000 injuries a year result
from the mixture of alcohol and traffic. 21,000 people die
annually from cirrhosis, 6 million families are shadowed
by alcohol and 12 million children suffer from their parents
excessive drinking.
In
the light of such figures, it is not surprising that A.A.
seemed an answer to prayer in hundreds of thousands of families.
A household devastated by booze is an isolated unit, plagued
by debt, ridden by internal strife, with little hope, few
friends, many enemies and a skeleton grown too big for the
closet. AA replaces despair with hope. The family has friends
again, understanding friends, people who have been through
the mill, ready at any time for a cup of coffee and a chat.
The necessity of total abstinence, and the means for attaining
it, are made clear. The transformations are so impressive,
and so often enduring, that the word “miracle”
is frequently and understandably employed. Even physicians
and psychiatrists, conditioned by occupation to disregard
the claims of laymen, sought to learn from AAs source of
clinical information on the management of a syndrome that
had baffled their professions.
Alcoholics,
even sober ones, are only human, and can tolerate only limited
amounts of adulation without becoming dizzy. Effective speakers
were in great demand to tell their “stories,”
not only at AA weekly meetings in distant places, but at
convocations of professional groups, civic associations
and service clubs. Big city groups stage annual banquets
drawing up to a thousand people and costing up to $10 a
plate. Resort hotels are taken over for State and regional
conventions. All this has gone to the head of many a reformed
booze fighter, and a type of paragon known in the local
groups as “Mr. AA” pushed himself into key positions
in the committee structure.
As
AA became more prominent this tendency was noted outside
the organization, and drew comment. A group of letters addressed
last year to the editor of Harper’s, was pointed:
“Now that the myth of the Golden-Hearted prostitute
has been laid to rest, let’s tackle the Omniscient
Ex-Lush.” “The fanatics who prevail in some
groups seem bent on making AA into a hostile, fundamentalist
religion.” “The movement needs to recover some
of the good spirit it had before it became proud of its
humility.” These letters were occasioned by an article
in which Arthur Cain pointed out tendencies toward cultism
and narrow orthodoxy that limited the fellowship’s
therapeutic effectiveness.
My
own experience with AA dates back more than 10 years. While
writing a series of articles for a national magazine, I
attended hundreds of AA local meetings and a number of state
and regional affairs, and developed a wide acquaintanceship
in the movement. My articles aroused the interest of Bill
W., and I was invited to evaluate, as a paid consultant,
some of AAs publications and activities.
This
chore consumed a number of months in 1962 and 1963, and
afforded an intimate view of the organization’s national
headquarters and policy making boards. Since my recommendations
were not confidential-“AA has no secrets but the names
of its members” is a hallowed tenet-they can be disclosed.
They contained little more that had not been said before,
some of it by Arthur Cain. Anyone else undertaking a similar
survey would, I think, have reached the same conclusions.
At
headquarters, I missed almost completely the bubbling good
will, the creative open-mindedness, the open and stimulating
swapping of ideas that made so many of the weekly neighborhood
meetings memorable. Everybody was an expert, with a cluster
of ideas closed to amendment. Bill W., The movement’s
traditional leader and a main source of the spiritual inspiration,
had lost out in committee maneuvering to a policy of “putting
the thing on a business basis.” Committee politics
took up half the working day; gossip was venomous. In quick
succession I was told that the co-founder (in my opinion
still sharp-witted at seventy) was senile, that a staff
worker was a hypochondriac and a committeeman a homosexual.
The accused were at pains to assure me, separately and without
encouragement, that the accusers were a nymphomaniac, a
schizophrenic and a megalomaniac, I observed nothing to
substantiate any of these charges. However, there was no
inclination toward the “fearless and searching moral
inventory” recommended by AAs Twelve Suggested Steps.
The
non-alcoholic Board of Trustees responsible for national
policy was ultraconser-vative (one member, Archibald Roosevelt,
had furnished literature for distribution by the John Birch
Society) and this, I reported, had served the movement poorly.
The board’s rigid conservatism was reflected in a
number of unfortunate policies, the most odious of which
was a tact endorsement of racial segregation within the
branches. When a member submitted an article for the monthly
bulletin pointing out that nearly all Southern AA groups
and a great many Northern ones were racially segregated,
and that AAs Negro membership had failed to keep pace with
the growing problem of Negro alcoholism, the article was
turned down on the grounds that it “might disrupt
AA unity.” Local AA groups are free from any national
control other than moral suasion. That even this influence
should be withheld on so fundamental point seemed to me
a serious error. It is, however, in keeping with the fact
that there are no Negroes on the headquarters staff or on
any of the numerous AA national boards and committees.
The
policy on publications, I reported, is likely to cost AA
its once acknowledged leadership in its field. When Alcoholics
Anonymous was first published a quarter of a century ago,
it won universal acknowledgement that AA was well in advance
of the field. But though the medical and psychiatric professions
have been remarkably slow in coming to terms with alcohol
addiction, much progress has lately been made, and the AA
“Big Book” is beginning to have an Out-of-date,
early century, historical sound. The Board, however, has
ruled that no further word shall be spoken. Despite the
fact that the rank and file teems with exciting, relevant,
informed and up-to-the-minute experience, none of it is
permitted to appear in book form. To publish such literature,
it is felt, would be to risk heresy. As a result, AAs official
books, unfertilized by fresh documentation, tend to sound
more archaic each year.
I concluded that AAs headquarters had been captured by an
ultraconservative clique that was doing the society appreciable
harm. This finding, was, of course, received by that clique
without thanks and, despite the efforts of a small free-speech
party, was prevented from reaching the delegates of the
rank and file for whom it was intended. AA, at least in
its national offices, bears heavily the marks of its culture
in its time-affluence and the shortsighted conservatism
that affluence begets.
Fortunately for future generations, the influence of headquarters
on local groups is not decisive. “Oh, those guys!”,
is a typical reaction from a local group secretary. “We
send ‘em their three bucks a year per member and forget
about ‘em.” Many groups make no contributions
to “the national.” In the neighborhoods and
at the crossroads will surely be preserved in living practice
those ideas that give mankind new hope whenever they achieve
a renaissance-candor, humility, friendliness, enlightened
understanding, a good-natured readiness to pitch in at any
hour in any way to help a baffled human being.
(Source:
The Nation, March 2, 1964)
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