
(0:11 – 6:15)
Now that we’re assembled here in full strength and in all the joy of this superb occasion,
I first want to renew my thanks to all who have made it possible, to Jack and his
committee, to each one of you, to the untold miles of travel that you’ve all made, to be
present, to inspire me, to fill me with the warmth of your hospitality, to be with each
other. I am grateful to the governor of this state, the mayor of this town, for their
recognition that we are again not only AA members but citizens of the world. We once
more belong, so these friends have said.
I’m deeply grateful to this hotel and the owners of it who have housed us, especially me,
so superbly. Could you see that apartment I’m in? You’d wonder how the hell anybody
could stay sober in it. It has a bar.
As for me, I came here in great gratitude not only for the many tokens of your generosity
and affection that I have received in the past, but for what you are making possible for
my sponsor, Evie, just as much the founder of AA as I or any of the store without whom
this thing couldn’t have been. So again, I record my deep gratitude and I can find no
better words to say it in. I think I’m on the bill for tonight’s show, with a talk on the
tradition, the 12 traditions of AA.
But you know, drunks like women have the prerogative, or at least seize the prerogative,
of changing their minds, so I ain’t going to make any such damn talk. Since this is a
banquet, something very festive, I think the traditions 1 to 12 would be a little too grim.
Might bore you a little.
As a matter of fact, speaking of traditions, when they were first written back there in
1945 or 6 as a sort of a tentative guide, to help us to hang together and function, nobody
paid any attention except a few ginners who wrote me what the hell mail about them.
Nobody paid the slightest attention. But little by little, as these traditions got around,
and we had our clubhouse squabbles, our group riffs, this difficulty and that, it was found
that the traditions indeed did reflect experience and were guiding principles.
So they took a little more, and a little more, and a little more, so that today the average
AA coming in the door learns at once what they’re about, what kind of an outfit he really
has landed in, by what principles his group and AA as a whole are governing. But as I
say, the dickens with all that. I’d just like to spin some yarn, and there will be a series of
yarns which cluster around the preparation of the good old book, Alcoholics Now.
Some people reading the book now, they say, well, this is the AA Bible, and when I hear
that, it always makes me shudder, because the guys who put it together weren’t the
damn best biblical. I think sometimes, you know, the drunks have an idea that these old-
timers went around with the almost visible halos and long gowns, and they were full of
sweetness and light, oh boy, how inspired they were. Oh, yes.
But wait till I tell you. I suppose the book yarn really started in the living room of Doc and
Annie Smith. As you know, I landed there in the summer of 35, a little group caught hold.
I helped Smithy briefly with it, and he went on to found the first AA group in the world.
And as with all new groups, it was nearly all failure. But now and then, somebody saw
the light, and there was progress.
(6:16 – 6:47)
Pampered, I got back to New York, a little more experienced. The group started there,
and by the time we got around to 1937, the thing had leaked a little over into Cleveland,
and it began to move south to New York. But it was still, we thought in those years of
flying blind, a flickering candle indeed that might at any moment be snuffed out.
(6:49 – 8:30)
So on this late fall afternoon in 1937, Smithy and I were talking together in his living
room, and sitting there by the gas plug, and we began to count notes. How many people
had stayed dry, inactive, in New York? Maybe a few in Cleveland. How many had stayed
dry, and for how long? And when we added up that score, true, it was a handful.
I don’t know, 35, 40 maybe. But enough time had elapsed on enough really fatal cases of
alcoholism, so that when we grasped the importance of these small statistics, Bob and I
saw for the first time that this thing was going to succeed, that God in his providence
and mercy had thrown a new light into the dark caves where we and our kind had been
and were still by the millions dwelt. I never can forget the elation and ecstasy that seized
us both.
(8:33 – 11:37)
And then we fell happily talking and reflecting. We reflected that, well, a couple of score
of them, but this has taken three long years. There had been an immense amount of
failure, but a long time had been taken just to sober up this handful.
How could this handful, a furious message, to all those who still didn’t know? Not all the
drunks in the world could come to Akron or to New York. How could we transmit our
message to them? By what means? Maybe we thought we should go to the old timers in
each group, which then meant nearly everybody, find the sum of money, somebody
else’s money, of course, and say to them, well, now take a sabbatical year off your job, if
you have any, and you go to Keokuk and to Omaha and to Chicago and to San Francisco
and to Los Angeles wherever it may be, and you give this thing a year and get a group
started. It had already got evidence by then, for we were just about to be moved out of
the city hospital in Akron to make room for people with broken legs and ailing livers, that
the hospitals were not too happy with us.
We tried to run their business perhaps too much, and besides, drunks were apt to be
noisy in the night, and there were other inconveniences, which we’re all familiar with. So
it was obvious that drunks being such lovely creatures, we would have to have a great
chain of hospitals. And as that dream burst upon me, it sounded good, because you see,
I have been down in Wall Street in the promotion business, and I remember the great
sums of money that were made as soon as people got this chain idea, you know, the
chain drug stores, the chain grocery store, the chain dry goods store.
Why not chain drunk tanks and let us make the dough? So we needed some
missionaries, some guys. We needed a chain of drunk tanks. That got very clear, awful
clear to me.
Bob is a conservative type of Yankee. I don’t think he was quite so fast for those items,
but I was very insistent. It would take a pile of dough to finance all this, but after all, with
this brand new light shining in our dark world, we just squirted in the eyes of rich guys
and laid up with the dough.
(11:40 – 12:33)
Besides, we reflected we’d have to get some kind of literature. Up to this moment, not a
syllable of this program, so far as I know, was in writing. It was a kind of a word-of-mouth
deal with variations according to each man or woman’s fancy.
Well, in a general way, we said, well, the booze has got you down, boys, and you got an
allergy and an obsession, and you’re hopeless if you are. You better get honest with
yourself and take stock. You ought to talk this out with somebody, kind of a confession,
you know, and you ought to make restitution for the harm you did.
(12:33 – 15:19)
You ought to make amends and all that kind of business, and while you’re afraid, as best
you could according to your life’s advantage. And that was the sum of the word-of-mouth
program up to that time. But as I say, variations on that were already appearing.
How could we unify this thing? Could we, out of our experience, get certain principles,
describe certain methods that had done the trick for us? Yes, obviously, if this movement
was to propagate, it had to have a literature so its message could not be garbled, either
by the drunks or by the general public. So Bob and I reflected that late afternoon in
1937. Missionaries, chain of drunk tanks, and a book.
Well, even by then, he and I had begun to learn that we were not the government of
alcoholics and non-alcoholics. He, I guess more than I, already realized that the
conscience of the group, the opinion of the group, when it was an informed opinion and
in the group’s interest, could be better than our own. We’d better consult both.
Well, there was dear old non-alcoholic, his wife, T. Henry Williams, there in Akron, and
they’d let us meet in their house. After it got out of the Smiths’ parlor, it got into theirs,
and he was a great friend of ours. So we called a meeting of the Akron group, that is to
say, those who had been sober any great length of time.
I think for this particular meeting, we scraped up about 18. And that evening, Bob and I
told them that we were within sight of success. That we thought this thing might go on
and on and on.
That a new light, indeed, was shining in our dark world. But how could this light be
reflected and transmitted without being distorted and dark? And at this point, they
turned the meeting over to me. And being a salesman, I set right the work on them
drunk tanks and subsidies for the missionaries.
(15:19 – 20:30)
I was pretty poor then. And we touched on the book. And the group conscience consisted
of 18 men, good and true.
And the good and true men, you could see right away, were damn skeptical about it all.
Almost with one voice, they chorused, let’s keep it simple. This is going to bring money
into this thing.
This is going to create a professional flag. We’ll all be ruined. Well, I countered, that’s a
very good argument.
Lots of what you say. But even within gunshot at this very house, alcoholics are dying
like flies. And if this thing doesn’t move any faster than it has in the next, in the last
three years, it may be another 10 before it gets to the outskirts of Akron.
How in God’s name are we going to carry this message to others? Well, we’ve got to take
some kind of chances. We can’t keep it so simple it becomes an anarchy and get
complicated. We can’t keep it so simple it won’t propagate itself.
And we gotta have a lot of money to do these things. So exerting myself to the utmost,
which was considerable in those days, we finally got a vote in that little meeting, and it
was a mighty close vote. By just a majority of maybe two or three, the meeting said with
some reluctance, well, Bill, if we need a lot of dough, you better go back to New York
where there’s plenty of it, and you raise it.
Well, boy, that was the word I’d been waiting for. So I scrammed back to the great city,
and I began to approach some people of means and describe this tremendous thing that
had happened. And it didn’t seem so tremendous as the people of means at all.
They said, what, 35 or 40 drunks? Sobered up? They have sobered them up before now,
you know. And besides, Mr. Wilson, don’t you think it’s kind of sweeping up the shavings?
I mean, wouldn’t something for the Red Cross be better? In other words, with all of my
most ardent solicitation, I got one hell of a freeze from the gentleman over there. Well, I
began to get blue.
And when I began to get blue, my stomach kicked up as well as other things. And I was
laying in bed one night with an imaginary ulcer attack. Used to have them all the time.
I had one to time the 12 steps for it. And I said, my God, we’re starving to death here at
Clinton Street. By this time, the house was full of drunks.
They were eating us out of house and home. In those days, we never believed in
charging anything for, anybody for anything. So Lois was earning the money.
I was being a missionary, and the drunks were eating the meals. This can’t go on. We got
to have them drunk tanks.
We got to have them missionaries. And how we got to have them missionaries? And we
got to have a boat. That’s for sure.
Well, the next morning, I crawled into my clothes and I saw my brother-in-law. He’s a
doctor, and he is about the last person who stuck to me when the chips were way, way
down. The only one, save, of course, dear Lois.
Well, I said, I’ll go up and see Leonard. So I went up to see my brother-in-law Leonard. He
pried out a little time between the patients coming in up there.
And I started my awful bellyache about these rich guys who wouldn’t give us any dough
for his great and glorious enterprise. So well on its way to success. Think of it.
Forty hopeless cases sober for two, three years. Well, he’d heard this story before. He
resigned himself to hearing it again.
But at length, he scratched his head and he said, well, well, when I went to high school, I
used to know a girl. And she had an uncle by the name of Richard. He was then a pretty
old man.
(20:32 – 20:56)
And it seems to me that somehow he was tied up with the Rockefeller family and their
character. And if you want to, we’ll call up the Rockefeller offices and see if there is such
a man. And if there is, is he alive? And will he see it? Would you like me to do that? Well,
I hadn’t tried the Rockefeller office, so I said, well, sure, give them a ring.
(21:01 – 21:20)
On what slender threads our destiny sometimes hangs. Remember, my brother-in-law
said, I knew a girl and I think she had an uncle. So the call was made.
(21:21 – 22:00)
Instantly there came on to the other end of the wire the voice of dear Willard Richard.
One of the loveliest Christian gentlemen that I have ever known. And the moment he
recognized my brother-in-law, he said, why, Leonard, he said, where have you been all
these years? Well, my brother-in-law, unlike me, is a man of very few words, so he
quickly said to dear old Uncle Willard that he had a brother-in-law who was apparently
having some success sobering up drunks.
(22:02 – 25:59)
Could the two of us come over there and see him? Why, certainly, said dear Willard,
come right over. So we go over to Rockefeller Plaza, we go up that elevator, 54 flights,
56, I guess it is, and we walk plump into Mr. Rockefeller’s personal office and ask to see
Mr. Richardson. And here sits this lovely, benign old gentleman, who nevertheless had a
kind of a shrewd twinkle in his eye.
So I sat down and told him about our exciting discovery, this horrific cure for alcoholics
that had just hit the world. How it worked, what we had done, and boy, this was the first
receptive man with money or access to money. Remember, we were in Mr. Rockefeller’s
personal office at this point, and by now, too, we had learned that this was Mr.
Rockefeller’s closest personal friend, perhaps.
So he said, why, yes, he said, I’m much interested. Wouldn’t you like to have lunch with
me, Mr. Wilson? Well, now, you know, for a rising promoter, that sounded pretty good. I
was going to have lunch with best friend John Dee, but things were looking up.
My ultra attack disappeared. So I had lunch with the old gentleman, and we drove his
thing again, and boy, he’s so warm and kind and friendly. Right at the close of lunch, he
said, well, now, Mr. Wilson, or Bill, if I can call you that, said, wouldn’t you like to have a
larger meeting with some of my friends? There’s Frank Amos.
He’s in the advertising business, but he was on a committee that recommended Mr.
Rockefeller drop the probation business. And there’s Leroy Chipman. He looks at Mr.
Rockefeller’s real estate, and there’s Mr. Scott, he’s chairman of the board up at the
Riverside Church, and he said a number of people like that.
I believe they’d like to hear this talk. So a meeting was arranged, and it fell upon a
winter’s night, late 1937. And the meeting was at 30th Rockefeller Plaza.
We called in post haste a couple of drunks, macarons, smithy included, of course, adding
the protection. I came in with the New York contingent, four or five. And to our
astonishment, we were ushered into Mr. Rockefeller’s personal board room right next to
our office, right next to his office.
And I thought to myself, well, now this is really getting hot. And indeed, I felt very much
warm when I was told by Mr. Richardson that I was sitting in a chair just vacated by Mr.
Rockefeller. And I said, well, now we really are getting close to the bankroll.
Old Doc Silkworth was there that night, too. And he testified what he had seen happen to
these new friends of ours. And each drunk, thinking of nothing better to say, well, each
of us told our stories of drinking and of recovery.
(26:02 – 28:05)
And these folks listened. They seemed very definitely impressed. So I could see that the
moment for the big touch was coming.
So I gingerly brought up the subject of the drunk tank, the subsidized missionary, and
this question of a book or a lyric book. Well, God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders
to perform. But it didn’t look like a wonder to me when Mr. Scott, head of a large
engineering firm and chairman of the Riverside Church, looked at us and said, but
gentlemen, he said, up to this point, this has been the work of goodwill only.
No plants, no property, no paid people, just one carrying the good news to the next. Isn’t
that true? And may it not be that that is where the great power of this society lies. Now,
if we subsidize it, might it not already hold character? We want to do all we can.
We’re gathered for that. But would it be one? Well, then the salesmen all gave Mr. Scott
the rock. And we said, why, Mr. Scott? There are only 40 of us.
It’s taken three years. Why, millions, Mr. Scott, will rot before this thing ever gets to
them unless we have money and lots of it. And we made out our case, at last, with these
gentlemen, for the missionaries, the drunk tank, the book.
(28:06 – 28:53)
So one of them volunteered to investigate us very carefully. And since poor old Dr. Bob
was harder up than I was, and since the first group and the typical community situation
was in Akron, we directed their attention out there. And Frank Amos, still a trustee in the
foundation, at his own expense, got on a train, went out to Akron, made all sorts of
preliminary inquiries around town about Dr. Bob.
All the reports were good, except that he was a drunk, had recently got over. He visited
the little meeting out there. He went to the Smith’s house.
(28:55 – 29:26)
And he came back with what he thought was a very modest project. And he
recommended to these friends of ours that, well, we could have at least just a total
amount of money at first, say $50,000, something like that. That would clear off the
mortgage on the Smith’s place.
It would get us a little rehabilitation place. We could put Dr. Smith in charge. We could
subsidize a few of these people briefly until we got some more money.
(29:26 – 30:26)
We could, you know, it would start the chain of hospitals, and we’d have a few
missionaries, and we could get busy on the book, all for a mere $50,000. Well,
considering the kind of money we were backed up against, that did sound a little small,
but, you know, one thing leads to another, and it sounded real good. We were real glad.
Mr. Willard Richardson, our original contact, then took that report into John Diggs, Jr., as
everybody called him, and I’ve since heard what went on in there. Mr. Rockefeller read
the report, called Willard Richardson back, and he said, somehow I am strangely stirred
by all this. This interests me immensely.
(30:28 – 33:07)
And then looking at his friend Willard, he said, but isn’t money going to spoil this? I’m
terribly afraid that it would, and yet I’m so strangely stirred by it. Then came another
turning point in our destiny, when that man whose business is giving away money said to
Willard Richardson, no, he said, I’m going to be the one to spoil this one with money. You
say these two men who are heading it are a little strapped.
I’ll put $5,000 in the Riverside Church Treasury. You folks can form yourselves into a
committee and draw on it as you like. But please don’t ask me for any more.
But I want to hear what goes on. Well, the $50,000 had then shrunk to five. We raised
the mortgage on Smithy’s House for about $3,000.
That left two, and Smithy and I commenced drawing on that two. Well, that was a long
way from a string of drunk tanks and books. What in thunder would we do? Well, we had
more meetings with our newfound friends, Amos, Richardson, Scott, Chipman, and those
fellows who stuck with us to this day, some of them now being gone.
And in spite of Mr. Rockefeller’s advice, we again convinced these folks that this thing
needed a lot of money. What could you do without it? So, one of them proposed, well,
why don’t we form a foundation, something like the Rockefeller Foundation? Well, I said,
I hope it’ll be like that with respect to money. And then one of them got a free lawyer
from Eli Hill Roth’s firm who was interested in the thing.
And we asked him to draw up an agreement of trust, a charter, for something to be
called the Alcoholic Foundation. Why we picked that one, I don’t know. I don’t know
whether the foundation was alcoholic.
(33:07 – 35:22)
It was the Alcoholic Foundation, not the Alcoholic Foundation, no. And the lawyer was
very much confused because in the meeting in which we formed the foundation, we
made it very plain that we drunks did not wish to be in the majority. We felt that there
should be non-alcoholics on the board and they ought to be in a majority of one.
Well, indeed, said the lawyer, what is the difference between an alcoholic and a nonalcoholic? And one of our smart drunks said, well, that’s the same. A non-alcoholic is a
guy who can drink and an alcoholic is a guy who can’t drink. Well, said the lawyer, how
do we say that legally? I wouldn’t know.
So at length, we had a foundation and a board, which I think then was of about seven,
consisting of four of these new friends, including my brother-in-law, Mr. Richards and
Chiplyn Amos, and some of us drunks. I think Smithy went on the board, but I kind of
coyly stayed off it thinking, well, it would be more convenient later on. So we had this
wonderful new foundation.
These friends, unlike Mr. Rockefeller, were told that we needed a lot of dough. And so
our salesmen around New York started to solicit the money, again from the very rich.
And we had a list of them, and we had credentials and letters from friends of Mr. John B.
Rockefeller.
How could you miss, I asked you, sir? The foundation had been formed in the spring of
1938, and all summer we solicited the rich. Well, they were either in Florida, or they
preferred the Red Cross, or some of them thought the drunks were disgusting. And we
didn’t get one damn cent in the whole summer of 1938, praise God.
(35:27 – 42:23)
Well, meantime, we began to hold trustee meetings, and they were commiseration
sessions on getting no dough. What was the mortgage, and what was Smithy and me
eating away at it? The five grand had about gone up the slew, and we were all stony
broke again. Smithy couldn’t get his practice back either, because he was a surgeon, and
nobody liked to be carved up by an alcoholic surgeon, even if he was three years sober.
So things were tough all around, no fooling. Well, what would we do? So one day,
probably in August 1938, I produced at a foundation meeting a couple of chapters of a
proposed book in rough and in mimeograph. As a matter of fact, we’d been using
chapters of this proposed book, along with some recommendations of a couple doctors
down at John Hopkins to try to put the bite on the rich.
And we still had these two book chapters kicking around, and so Frank Amos said, well,
now I know the religious editor down there at Hopkins. Old friend of mine, Gene Axman,
said, why don’t you take these two book chapters, your story and the introduction to the
book, down there and show them to Gene and see what he thinks about it. So I took the
chapters down.
To my great surprise, Gene, who has since become a great friend of ours, looked at the
chapters and said, why? He said, Mr. Wellesley, could you write a whole book like this?
Oh, I said, sure, sure. Well, there was more talk about it. I guess he went in and showed
it to Mr. Canfield, the big boss.
Now the meeting was handed. The upshot was that Harper’s intimated that they would
pay me as the budding author $1,500 in advance royalties, bringing enough money in to
enable me to finish the book. Well, I felt awful good about that.
It made me feel like I was an author or a comer, maybe. I felt real good about it. But
after a while, not so good.
Because I began to reason, and so did the other boys. Well, if this guy Wilson eats up the
1,500 bucks while he’s doing this book, after the book gets out, it’ll take a long time to
catch up. And if this thing gets some publicity, what are we going to do with the
inquiries? And after all, what’s a lousy 10% royalty anyway? Well, the 1,500 still look
pretty big to me.
Then we thought, too, now here’s a fine publisher like Harper’s, but if this book, if and
when done, should prove to be the main textbook for AA, why would we want our main
means of propagation in the hands of somebody else? Shouldn’t we control this thing?
Well, at that point, the book project really began to get hot. It began to take off. Why?
We said what we ought to do is to form a book company, a publishing company, a
corporation.
We could call it, let it stay, Works Publishing Company, this being the first of a great
many works, you see. And we could sell stock certificates to all the drunks, get the
money coming in, support the author and the guy who collected the money and the gal
who would help me on the book while this was going on. Well, we took this idea to the
next trustees meeting, and they all shook their heads, and they went out and made
some more inquiries, and we had another trustees meeting.
They’d gone to some publisher friends, and the publisher says, well, these authors, they
all got the crazy idea that they can publish their own books, but it ain’t so. We don’t
believe in it. Well, then we had kind of an alcoholic rebellion.
We said to our friends, well, after all, you didn’t produce any dough. We think we’ll try
this on separate foundations. So I had a guy helping me on this thing who had red hair
and ten times my energy, and some promoter he was.
He said, Bill, this is simple. Come on with me. We walk into a stationary store.
We buy a pad of blank stock certificates. We write across the top of them, Works
Publishing Company, par value, $25. So we take a pad of these stock certificates.
Of course, we didn’t bother to incorporate it. That didn’t happen for several years. We
took this pad of stock certificates to the next AA meeting.
Boy, you shouldn’t mix money with spirituality, you know. And we said to the drunk, well,
look, this thing is going to be a thing. Parker, he’ll take a third of this thing for services
rendered.
I, the author, I’ll take a third for services rendered. And you can have a third of these
stock certificates, par 25, if you’ll just start paying up on your stock. If you only want one
share, it’s only $5 a month for each.
And the drunk all gave us a stony look. They said, what the hell? You mean to say you’re
asking us to buy stock in a book that you ain’t written yet? Why, sure, we said, if
Harper’s will put money in this thing, why shouldn’t you? Harper said it’s going to be a
good book. But the drunk still gave us a stony stare.
No assault. Well, we had to think up some more arguments. So we said, well, we’ve been
looking about the printing costs of the books, boys.
We get a book here, you know, 400, 450 pages, it ought to sell for about $350. Now,
back in those days, we found on inquiries and printers that that $350 book could be
printed for $0.35, making a thousand percent profit. Of course, we didn’t mention the
other expenses, just the printing costs.
(42:24 – 43:09)
So boys, just think of it. When these books move out in carload lots, we’re printing them
for $0.35 and we’re selling them direct mail. $350, how can you lose? The drunk still
gave us a stony stare.
No assault. Well, we figured we had to have a better argument than that. Harper said it
was a good book.
We could print them for $0.35 and sell them for $350. But how are we going to convince
the drunk that we could move carload lots of these? Millions of dollars worth. So we get
the idea, we’ll go up to the Reader’s Digest.
(43:10 – 45:05)
And we got an appointment with Mr. Kenneth Payne, the managing editor up there. Gee,
I’ll never forget the day we got off the train up to Pleasantville and went over to his
office, Oxford Inn. We excitedly told him the story of this wonderful budding society.
We dwelled upon the friendship of Mr. Rockefeller and Harry Emerson Sposik. You know,
we were traveling in good company, Mr. Payne. And the society, by the way, was about
to publish this textbook, then in protest of being written.
And we were wondering, Mr. Payne, if this wouldn’t be a matter of tremendous interest
to the Reader’s Digest, having in mind, of course, that the Reader’s Digest had a
circulation of 12 million readers. And if we really would move some, you see. Well, Mr.
Payne said, this sounds extremely interesting.
He said, I like this idea. Why, I think it will be an absolutely ideal piece for the Digest.
Well, how soon do you think this new book will be out, Mr. Wilson? Well, I said, we got a
couple chapters written and said if we can get right at it, Mr. Payne, you know, probably
this being, let us say, October, we ought to get this out by next April, next May.
Why, Mr. Payne said, I’m sure the Digest would like something like this, Mr. Wilson. He
said, I’ll take it up to the editorial board. And he said, when the time is right and you get
all ready to shoot, come on up and we’ll put a special feature writer on this thing and
we’ll tell all about your son.
(45:06 – 47:12)
And then my promoter’s friend said, but Mr. Payne, will you mention the new book in the
piece? Oh, yes, yes, Mr. Payne mentioned the new book. That’s all we needed. Then we
went back to Now, look, boys, there are positively millions in there.
How can you miss? Harper says it’s going to be a good book. We buy them for 35 cents
from the printer. We sell them for 350.
The Reader’s Digest is going to give us a free ad in a piece, and boys, they’ll move out
by the carload. How can you miss? And after all, we only need four or five thousand
bucks. So then we began to sell the shares that were publishing, not yet incorporated,
par value, $25.
Five dollars a month to poor people. Some people could buy as many as one guy bought
ten shares. We sold a few shares to non-alcoholics.
And my promoter friend, who was to get a third interest, was a very important man in
this transaction because he went out and kept collecting the money from the drunk so
that little Ruthie Hawk and I could keep working on the book, and so Lois would have
some groceries, although she was still working in that department store. So the
preparation started, and some more chapters were done, and we went into AA meetings
in New York with these chapters in the rough. Well, it wasn’t like chicken in the rough.
The boys didn’t eat those chapters up at all. I suddenly discovered that I was in a terrific
whirlpool of arguments. I was just the umpire, and finally had to stipulate, well, boys,
over here you got the holy rollers who say we need all the good old-fashioned stuff in the
book, and over here you tell me we got to have a psychological book, and that never
cured anybody, and they didn’t do much with drunks in the missions, so I guess you’ll
have to leave me just to be the umpire.
(47:12 – 52:53)
I’ll scribble out some roughs here and show them to you, and let’s get the comments in.
So we fought, bled, and died our way through one chapter after another. We sent them
out to Akron, and they were peddled around, and there were terrific hassles about what
to do in this book and whatnot.
Meanwhile, we sent drunks writing their stories, or having newspaper people that we had
write stories for them to go in the back of the book. We had an idea we’d have a text,
you know, and then we’d have stories all about the drunks who were staying sober in the
back. Prove it up.
So then came that night when we were up around that chapter five. As you know, I’d
gone all on about myself, which was natural after all, and then we had a little
introductory chapter, and we dealt with the agnostic, and we described alcoholism, but
boy, we finally got up to the point where we really had to say what the book was all
about and how this deal worked. Well, as I told you, this was a six-step program then.
On this particular evening, I was lying in bed on Clinton Street wondering what the deuce
this next chapter would be about, and the idea came to me, well, we need a definite
statement, a concrete principle that these drunks can’t wiggle out from. Can’t be any
wiggling out of this deal at all. And this six-step program has two big gaps in between.
They’ll be wiggling out. Moreover, if this book goes out to distant readers, they have got
to have an absolute explicit program by which to go. Well, while I was thinking these
thoughts, and while my imaginary ulcer was tainting me, and while I was mad as hell as
these drunks because the money was coming in slow, some had to stop and weren’t
paying up, a couple of guys come in and they gave me a big argument, and we yelled
and shouted.
And I finally went down and laid on the bed with my ulcer, and I said, poor me. Well,
there was a pad of paper under the bed, and I reached for that, and I said, well, now
you’ve got to break this program up into small pieces so they can’t wiggle out. So I
started writing, trying to bust it up into little pieces.
And when I got the pieces set down on that piece of yellow paper, I put numbers on
them, and was rather agreeably surprised when it came out as twelve. I said, well, that’s
a good, significant figure in Christianity and mystic lore. Then I noticed that instead of
leaving the God idea to the last, I’d got it up front, but I didn’t pay much attention to
that.
It looked pretty good. Well, next meeting comes along. I’d gone on beyond the steps,
trying to amplify them and write that chapter, and I took that chapter with the steps in
the meeting, and boy, pandemonium broke loose.
What do you mean by changing the program? What about this? What about that? This
thing is overloaded with God. We don’t like this. You’ve got these guys on their knees.
Stand them up. This thing, a lot of these drunks are scared to death of being God, but
let’s take God out of it entirely. Such were the arguments we had.
Well, out of that terrific hassle about the twelve steps, there did come a ten-strike. That
argument caused the introduction of a phrase which has been a lifesaver by thousands.
It was certainly not a my fault.
I was on the pious side then, you see, still suffering from this big hot flash of mine. The
idea of God as you understand him came out of that perfectly ferocious argument, and
we put that into the steps. Well, little by little, the thing ground down, and little by little,
the drunks put in the money, and we kept an office open over in Newark, which was the
office of a defunct business that I’d tried to establish my friend in.
The money ran low at time zone. Little Ruthie Hock worked for no pay. We gave her
plenty of stock in the works publishing, of course.
All you had to do was tear it off the page, part 25, have a week’s salary there. So we got
around to about January 1939, and somebody said, well, hadn’t we better test this thing
out? Hadn’t we better kind of make a pre-publication copy, a monolithic or a
mimeograph copy of this text and a few of these stories that had come in, and try it out,
you know, on the preacher, on the doctor, Catholic Committee on Publications,
psychiatrists, policemen, fishwives, housewives, drunks, everybody, just to see if we got
anything that goes against the grain anyplace, and also to find out if we can’t get some
better ideas on heaven right here on this good old earth. So said the priest, why don’t
you go back to Mr. Wilson and ask him to change heaven to utopia, because we’re in the
business of promising people something much better later on.
(53:03 – 55:00)
Well, so the book had passed monthly, and the stories came in, somehow we got them
edited, somehow we got the galley together, we got up to the printing contract. Well,
meanwhile, the drunks had been kind of slow on those subscription payments, the thing
a little further on, I was able to go up to Charlie’s Town, where old Doc Silkworth held
course, and Charlie believed in us mindedly, and so we had put the slug on Charlie for
$2,500. Charlie didn’t want any stock, he wanted a promissory note on the book not yet
written.
So we tapped Charlie for $2,500, which we routed around through the Alcoholic
Foundation so it could be tax exempt, you understand. So all told, we had blown in,
supporting three of us in an office to do this job, in these nine months, upwards of
$6,000, and the money, the till was getting very low. Well, we still had to get it printed.
So we go up to Cornwall Press, the largest printer in the world, where we’ve made
previous inquiry, and we asked about printing, and, oh yes, they’d be very glad to do it,
and how many books would we like? Well, we said, that’s very hard to estimate. Of
course, our membership is very small at the present time, we won’t tell many of the
membership, but after all, the Reader’s Digest is going to print a plug about it to 12
million readers, this book should go out in Carlos, Mr. Printer. And Mr. Printer was none
other than dear old Mr. Blackwell, one of our great friends.
(55:01 – 55:36)
And Mr. Blackwell said, well, boys, how much of a down payment do you want to make?
How many books would you like printed? Well, we said, we’ll be conservative, let’s print
5,000 of them just to start. And Mr. Blackwell said, well, what are you going to use for
money? Well, we said, well, we won’t need much, I imagine a few hundred dollars on
account would be all right with you, Mr. Blackwell, because after all, we’re traveling in
very good company, you know, we’re friends with the Rockefellers and all that. So
Blackwell started printing the 5,000 books.
(55:37 – 55:55)
Plates were made, then the galleys were read. Gee, all of a sudden, we thought of the
Reader’s Digest. We walk in on Mr. Kenneth Payne, and we said, Mr. Payne, we’re all
ready to shoot.
(55:56 – 58:37)
And Mr. Payne said, shoot what? Oh, yes, he said, I remember you, Mr. Parker and Mr.
Wilson. You were the gentleman up here last fall. He said, I told you that I thought the
Reader’s Digest would be interested in this new work and in this book.
But he said, right after you were here, I consulted our editorial board, and to my great
surprise, they didn’t like the idea at all, and I forgot to tell you. Boy, we had the drunks
with 4,500 bucks in it, Charlie Townes hooked for 2,500 bucks on the cuff with the
printer, maybe $500 left in the bank. What in the deuce would we do? Well, this fellow,
Morgan Ryan, the good-looking Irishman that has taken the book over to the Catholic
Committee on Publications, had been, in earlier time, a good ad man.
He said, I know Gabriel Heater, and Gabriel Heater is putting on these three-minute hotplug programs on the radio. He said, I’ll get an interview with Gabriel Heater. Maybe he’ll
interview me on the radio about all this.
So our spirits rose once again, and then all of a sudden, we had a big chill. We thought,
well, supposing this Irishman got drunk before Heater interviewed him. So he went over
to see Heater, and lo and behold, Heater would interview him.
And then we got still more scared. So we rented a room in the downtown athletic club,
and we put Ryan in there with a day and night guard for 10 days. Meanwhile, boy, our
spirits rose again.
We could see those books just going out in carloads. Then my promoter friend said, well,
look, there should be, you know, a follow-up on a big thing like this Heater interview. He
said, it’ll be heard all over the country, national network.
(58:38 – 59:11)
Now he said, I think, folks, that the big market for this book are the doctors, the
physicians. And he said, I suggest that we pitch the last $500 we got in the treasury on a
postal card show, going to every physician east of the Rocky Mountains. And on the
postal card, we will say, hear all about Alcoholics Anonymous on Gabriel Heater’s
program.
(59:12 – 59:53)
Send $350 for the book Alcoholics Anonymous. Sure, sure, for alcoholism. So we spent
the last $500.
The postal card shower went out. They managed to keep Ryan sober, although he since
hasn’t made it. All the drunks had their ears glued to the radio.
The group market in Alcoholics Anonymous was already saturated, because you see, we
had 49 stockholders, and they had all got a book free. And then we had 28 guys with
stories, and they all got a free book. So we’d run out the AA market.
(59:54 – 1:01:29)
But we could see it moving out in carloads to these doctors and their patients. Sure
enough, Ryan is interviewed. Heater pulls out the old tremolo stop, and we could see
them book orders coming back in carloads.
Well, we just couldn’t wait to go down to old post office box 658 Church Street, Ann
Arbor. The address printed in the back was the old book. We hung to it for about three
days, and then my friend Hank and little Ruthie Haas, that some of you remember, and I
went over.
And we looked in box 658. It wasn’t a locked box. You just looked through the glass.
And we could see in there a few of these postal cards. I had a terrible thinking sensation.
But my friend, the promoter, he said, boy, Bill, he said, they can’t put all that stuff in the
box.
He said, they got mailbags full of it out there. So we go to the clerk, and he brings us out
12 lousy postal cards, 10 of them completely illegible, written by Dr. Drunkard Monkey.
And we had exactly two orders for the book, Alcoholics Anonymous.
(1:01:30 – 1:01:45)
And we were absolutely and utterly stony broke. The sheriff then moved in on the office.
Poor old Mr. Blackwood wondered what to do for money and felt like taking the book
over.
(1:01:46 – 1:05:34)
And at that very opportune moment, the house in which Lois and I lived was foreclosed,
and we and our furniture were set out in the street. And that was the state of the book
Alcoholics Anonymous in the summer of 1939 and the state of great Sister Wilson’s work.
Moreover, a great cry went up from the drunks, what about our $4,500? And Charlie,
who was pretty well off, was even a little uneasy about that note for $2,500.
What would we do? What would we do? Well, we put our goods into storage on the cuff,
couldn’t even pay the drayman. An AA landed us a summer camp, another AA landed us
a car. The folks around New York began to pass a hat for groceries for the Wilsons, for
which they supplied us $50 a month.
So we had a lot of discontented stockholders, 50 bucks a month, a summer camp, and
an automobile with which to revise the falling fortunes of the book Alcoholics
Anonymous. We began to shop around from one magazine to another. What did they
give us in publicity? Nobody bit, and it looked like the whole dump was going to be
foreclosed, book, office, Wilsons, everything.
When one of the boys in New York, who happened to be a little bit prosperous at the
time and who had a fashionable clothing business on Fifth Avenue, which we learned was
mostly on mortgage, having drunk nearly all of it up, one of those guys, Burt Taylor,
saved it. I went to Burt one day and I said, Burt, there is a promise of an article in Liberty
Magazine. I just got it today, but it won’t come out until next September.
It’s going to be called Alcoholics and Jobs. It’ll be printed by Liberty Magazine’s Fulton
editor, Fulton Osler, the then editor. And Burt, when that piece is printed, why, these
books will go out in carload lots.
We need a thousand dollars real bad to get us through the summer. Well, Burt says,
you’re sure that article’s going to be printed, aren’t you? Oh, yes, that’s positive. Well, he
said, okay.
He says, I haven’t got the dough, but he said this man down in Baltimore, Mr. Cochran,
he’s connected with the wet-and-dry forces. Well, I said, Burt, this wet-and-dry, Burt said,
you ain’t going to be fuzzy where you get this stuff. He’s a customer of mine.
He buys his pants in here. Let me call him up. So Burt gets on long-distance phone with
Mr. Cochran in Baltimore, a very wealthy man, and he said, Mr. Cochran, time to time,
did I mention this Alcoholics Fellowship to which I belong? Mr. Cochran said, yes, yes, Mr.
Taylor.
Well, Burt said, Mr. Cochran, our fellowship has just come out with a magnificent new
textbook, Sure Cure for Alcoholism. Mr. Cochran, it’s something that we think that every
public library in America should have. And Mr. Cochran, the retail price of the book is
$250, but Mr. Cochran, if you just buy a couple of thousand of those books and put them
in the large libraries, of course, we would sell for that purpose at a considerable
discount.
(1:05:36 – 1:07:00)
Well, Mr. Cochran said he didn’t think he’d care to do that. And then Burt said, well, Mr.
Cochran, some publicity has come out about, will come out next fall about this new book,
Alcoholics Anonymous, but in the meantime, the books are moving rather slowly and we
need to say a thousand dollars to tide us over. And would you loan the Works Publishing
Company a thousand dollars? Well, said Mr. Cochran, what does his balance sheet look
like, this Works Publishing Company? And after he learned what the Works Publishing
looked like, Mr. Cochran said, no thanks.
So then Burt said, well, now Mr. Cochran, you know me, would you loan the money to me
on the credit of my business? Why, certainly, Mr. Cochran said, send down your note, Mr.
Taylor. So Burt hopped a business that a year or two later was to go broke anyway. He
saved the book Alcoholics Anonymous, turned the thousand dollars over to us.
We lasted until the Liberty article came in. A thousand inquiries, 800 inquiries came in as
a result of that. We moved a few books.
(1:07:01 – 1:08:04)
We barely squeaked through the year 1929. But in all this period, we’d heard nothing
from John D. Rockefeller. Meanwhile, there’d been foundation meeting after foundation
meeting.
Too bad we were having such a hard time, but no doubt. When all of a sudden, in my
about February 1940, Mr. Richardson came to a trustees meeting and he said, I have
great news. Mr. Rockefeller, who we hadn’t heard from since 1937, we were told had
been watching all the time with immense interest.
Moreover, Mr. Rockefeller would like to give this fellowship a dinner, to which he would
invite his friends to see the beginnings of this new and promising style. Then Mr.
Richardson produced the invitation list. And oh, here was the president of the Chase
Bank and Wendell Wilkie and all kinds of very prominent people, many of them
extremely rich.
(1:08:04 – 1:09:16)
I mean, a quick look at the list, I figured would add up to a couple of billion dollars. So we
felt maybe, you know, at last, you know, there would be some money inside. So the
dinner came.
And we got Harry Emerson Fossey, who’d reviewed the AA books down there. He gave us
a wonderful plug. Foster Kennedy came and spoke on the medical attitude.
He’d seen a very hopeless gal, Marty Mann, recover one of his patients. I got up and
talked about life among the anonymized. And the bankers assembled, 75 strong and in
great wealth, sat at the table with the alcoholics.
Well, the bankers had come probably as a sort of a command performance, and they
were a little suspicious that perhaps it was another prohibition deal. But they warmed up
under the influence of the alcoholics. Mr. Ryan, the hero of the episode, still sober, for
example, at his table was asked by a distinguished banker, why, Mr. Ryan, we presume
that you are in the banking business.
(1:09:17 – 1:09:45)
Mr. Ryan said, not at all, sir. I’m just out of Greystone asylum. Well, that intrigued the
bankers, and they were all warming up fine.
But unfortunately, Mr. Rockefeller couldn’t get to the dinner. He was sick, actually quite
sick that night. And he sent his son, a wonderful gent, Nelson Rockefeller, in his place
instead.
(1:09:46 – 1:10:53)
And after the show was over, everybody was in fine form, and we were all ready again
for the big touch. Nelson Rockefeller got up and speaking for his father, said, my father
sends word that he is so sorry he cannot be here tonight, but so glad that so many of his
friends can see the beginning of this great and wonderful thing. Something, Nelson
Rockefeller said, that had affected his life more than almost anything that had crossed.
Hey, soup tenders, flogged that Then said Nelson, but fortunately, gentlemen, this is a
work that proceeds on goodwill. It requires no money. Whereupon, the two million dollars
got up and walked out.
(1:10:55 – 1:12:09)
Well, that was a terrific letdown, but we weren’t let down very long. Again, the hand of
providence had intervened. Right after the dinner, Mr. Rockefeller asked that the talk be
published in a pamphlet.
He approached the rather defunct work publishing company and said he would like to
buy 400 books to send to all of the bankers who had come to the dinner and all who had
not. Well, seeing that this was for a good purpose, we let him have the books cheap. He
bought them cheaper than anybody has since.
We sold 400 books to John D. Rockefeller Jr. for one buck a piece to send his banker
friends. So, he sent out the book, the pamphlet, and with it, he wrote a personal letter
and signed every dog gone wrong. And in this letter, he again recited how glad he was
that his friends had been able to see this great beginning of what he thought would be a
wonderful thing, how deeply it had affected him.
(1:12:13 – 1:12:53)
And then he said, but fortunately, gentlemen, this is a work of goodwill. It leaves little, if
any, money, perhaps a slight amount of temporary help. I, said John D. Rockefeller, am
giving these good people $1,000.
So, the bankers all received Mr. Rockefeller’s letter and they all totted it up on the cuff.
Well, if John D. is giving $1,000, me, with only a few millions, I should send these boys
about 10 bucks. One, who had an alcoholic relative in tow, sent us in as high as $300.
(1:12:54 – 1:13:46)
So, with Mr. Rockefeller’s $1,000 plus the solicitation of all the rest of these bankers, we
got together the princely sum of $3,000, which was the first outside contribution to the
alcoholic foundation. And that $3,000 was divided equally between Smithy and me, so
that we could keep going somehow. And we solicited that dinner list for five years and
got about $3,000 a year out of it for five years.
And at the end of that time, we were able to say to Mr. Rockefeller, we don’t need any
more money. The book income is helping to support our office. The groups are
contributing to fill in.
(1:13:47 – 1:14:05)
The royalties are taking care of Dr. Bob and Bill Wilson. We don’t need any more money.
Now, you see, Mr. Rockefeller’s decision not to give us money saved his society.
(1:14:06 – 1:14:40)
He gave of himself. He gave of himself at a time when he was under public ridicule for
his views about alcohol. He said to the whole world, this is good.
The story went out on the wire all over the world. People ran into the bookstores to get
the no book, and boy, we really began to get some book orders. An awful lot of inquiries
came into the little office there at VG Street.
The book money began to pay to answer them. We hired one more house. It was Ruthie,
another gal, and me.
(1:14:40 – 1:15:55)
And then comes Jack Alexander with his terrific article in the Saturday Post. Then came
an immense flood of inquiries, six or seven thousand of them, and Alcoholics Anonymous
had become a national institution. Such is the story of the preparation of the book
Alcoholics Anonymous, and of its subsequent effects.
You all have some notion. The proceeds of that book have repeatedly saved the office in
New York, but it isn’t the money that has come out of it that has mattered. It is the
message that it carries in it that has transcended the mountains and the sea, and is even
at this moment lighting candles in dark taverns and on distant feet.
(1:16:06 – 1:17:35)
We hope you’ve enjoyed the recording of Bill W. speaking at the Texas State Convention
in June 1954. The recording has been made available through recoveryspeakers.org.
Recoveryspeakers.org is the world’s largest historical recovery audio archive. The
archive contains more than 3,000 vintage reel-to-reel recordings of AA and Al-Anon
conferences, plus rare never-before-heard educational sessions from various schools on
alcoholism, including Yale, Texas, and Salt Lake City.
These recordings date back as far as 1946. The mission of recoveryspeakers.org is to
preserve and digitize, as well as make available all of these rare recordings for future
generations needing recovery. As of June 2010, only 10% of this massive library has
been converted, and many of those recordings are now available at
recoveryspeakers.org. This project needs support. If you would like to help with this mission,
please visit recoveryspeakers.org and pass this information on. Thank You.