Aa history Lovers 2010 moderators Nancy Olson and Glenn F. Chesnut page

Cure-hourly infusions of a hallucinogenic drug made from a poisonous plant.

The drug was coursing through Wilson's system when he received a visit from

an old drinking buddy, Ebby Thacher, who had recently found religion and

given up alcohol. Thacher pleaded with Wilson to do likewise. "Realize you

are licked, admit it, and get willing to turn your life over to God,"

Thacher counseled his desperate friend. Wilson, a confirmed agnostic, gagged

at the thought of asking a supernatural being for help.

But later, as he writhed in his hospital bed, still heavily under the

influence of belladonna, Wilson decided to give God a try. "If there is a

God, let Him show Himself!" he cried out. "I am ready to do anything.

Anything!"

What happened next is an essential piece of AA lore: A white light filled

Wilson's hospital room, and God revealed himself to the shattered

stockbroker. "It seemed to me, in the mind's eye, that I was on a mountain

and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing," he later said. "And

then it burst upon me that I was a free man." Wilson would never drink

again.
At that time, the conventional wisdom was that alcoholics simply lacked

moral fortitude. The best science could offer was detoxification with an

array of purgatives, followed by earnest pleas for the drinker to think of

his loved ones. When this approach failed, alcoholics were often consigned

to bleak state hospitals. But having come back from the edge himself, Wilson

refused to believe his fellow inebriates were hopeless. He resolved to save

them by teaching them to surrender to God, exactly as Thacher had taught

him.
Following Thacher's lead, Wilson joined the Oxford Group

, a Christian movement that was

in vogue among wealthy mainstream Protestants. Headed by a an ex-YMCA

missionary named Frank Buchman, who stirred controversy with his lavish

lifestyle and attempts to convert Adolf Hitler, the Oxford Group combined

religion with pop psychology, stressing that all people can achieve

happiness through moral improvement. To help reach this goal, the

organization's members were encouraged to meet in private homes so they

could study devotional literature together and share their inmost thoughts.

In May 1935, while on an extended business trip to Akron, Ohio, Wilson began

attending Oxford Group meetings at the home of a local industrialist. It was

through the group that he met a surgeon and closet alcoholic named Robert

Smith. For weeks, Wilson urged the oft-soused doctor to admit that only God

could eliminate his compulsion to drink. Finally, on June 10, 1935, Smith

(known to millions today as Dr. Bob ) gave in. The

date of Dr. Bob's surrender became the official founding date of Alcoholics

Anonymous.

In its earliest days, AA existed within the confines of the Oxford Group,

offering special meetings for members who wished to end their dependence on

alcohol. But Wilson and his followers quickly broke away, in large part

because Wilson dreamed of creating a truly mass movement, not one confined

to the elites Buchman targeted. To spread his message of salvation, Wilson

started writing what would become AA's sacred text: Alcoholics Anonymous,

now better known as the Big Book.
The core of AA is found in chapter five, entitled "How It Works." It is here

that Wilson lists the 12 steps, which he first scrawled out in pencil in

1939. Wilson settled on the number 12 because there were 12 apostles.
In writing the steps, Wilson drew on the Oxford Group's precepts and

borrowed heavily from William James' classic The

[16]

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_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false> Varieties of

Religious Experience, which Wilson read shortly after his belladonna-fueled

revelation at Towns Hospital. He was deeply affected by an observation that

James made regarding alcoholism: that the only cure for the affliction is

"religiomania." The steps were thus designed to induce an intense

commitment, because Wilson wanted his system to be every bit as

habit-forming as booze.

The first steps famously ask members to admit their powerlessness over

alcohol and to appeal to a higher power for help. Members are then required

to enumerate their faults, share them with their meeting group, apologize to

those they've wronged, and engage in regular prayer or meditation. Finally,

the last step makes AA a lifelong duty: "Having had a spiritual awakening as

the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and

to practice these principles in all our affairs." This requirement

guarantees not only that current members will find new recruits but that

they can never truly "graduate" from the program.
Aside from the steps, AA has one other cardinal rule: anonymity. Wilson was

adamant that the anonymous component of AA be taken seriously, not because

of the social stigma associated with alcoholism, but rather to protect the

nascent organization from ridicule. He explained the logic in a letter to a

friend:
[In the past], alcoholics who talked too much on public platforms were

likely to become inflated and get drunk again. Our principle of anonymity,

so far as the general public is concerned, partly corrects this difficulty

by preventing any individual receiving a lot of newspaper or magazine

publicity, then collapsing and discrediting AA.
AA boomed in the early 1940s, aided by a glowing Saturday Evening Post

profile and the public admission by a Cleveland Indians catcher, Rollie