Not-God (15 page)

Different yet related developments in Akron were as profoundly shaping the rapid evolution of the fellowship into Alcoholics Anonymous. Four significant occurrences are noteworthy, and all were separations: of the alcoholics within the Oxford Group; of the visiting Cleveland alcoholics from their Akron base; of Dr. Bob Smith’s practice with alcoholics from Akron City Hospital; and finally of the newly self-conscious Alcoholics Anonymous from any Oxford Group association.

Almost immediately upon Bill Wilson’s departure from Akron in November 1937, and probably related to the co-founders’ conversations, the Akron surgeon began to invite the alcoholics attending each Wednesday’s Oxford Group meeting at the Williams home to gather separately from the non-alcoholic Oxford Groupers after the regular session. The distinction between “closed meetings” (those for alcoholics only) and “open meetings” (those which non-alcoholics were welcome to attend) had not yet entered A.A. consciousness. Yet in New York at Clinton Street each week, after the “regular meeting” usually attended also by wives, alcoholics who wished to ask private questions about the program adjourned with Wilson to a smaller upstairs livingroom. The nature of the questions asked and the obvious utility of this practice in the all-important matter of honesty had no doubt led Bill to urge it upon Dr. Bob. In any case, by early 1938 the Akron alcoholics were meeting briefly but separately each week after the regular Oxford Group meeting.
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Early 1938 had also brought the first commuting Clevelanders to Akron each Wednesday evening. These men, after being sobered up by Dr. Bob at Akron City Hospital, had usually spent a few weeks in Akron — sharing the daily round of camaraderie that characterized these years. Eventually however they had to return to their families and — if lucky — their jobs in Cleveland, and when they did so, the loss of that intense feeling of fellowship proved painful. Thus began the practice of the Clevelanders making the seventy-five mile round-trip by car each Wednesday, a further testimony to the importance they attached to this meeting.
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Growth in Cleveland was at first very slow, but by early 1939, nine to twelve of that city’s alcoholics were making the journey each week. At this point there emerged both a problem and an opportunity. The dynamo powering the Cleveland effort, Clarence S., was a zealous pigeon-pursuer, one who at times literally hauled his prospects off bar stools. Given the nature of Cleveland’s population as well as Clarence’s open-minded zeal, roughly half of the alcoholics making the weekly journey turned out to be practicing Roman Catholics. Some of these, when first approached by Clarence, had shied away from “the religion” they perceived in his message. But in the agony of their active alcoholism, in their desire “to do anything” to get sober, and on his assurance that the Akron gatherings were in no way a “religious service,” they had agreed to give it a try.
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Those who did give it a try got sober. Furthermore, despite all Clarence’s assurances, some of them began again to worry that what went on at the Williams’s in Akron each week was “a Protestant religious service.” They needled Clarence about this on the drive back to Cleveland each week, and eventually at least two of them carried their concerns to their parish priest — who promptly pronounced Catholic attendance at the Wednesday meetings a violation of Church law and so forbade his charges to attend.
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Meanwhile, the multilith draft of the text of
Alcoholic’s Anonymous
had been circulating among the Akronites, and by mid-April of 1939 the first printed copies became available. Clarence at once borrowed from the title of the draft the name by which he began to refer to his group. This was not “the alcoholic squadron of the Oxford Group” but “Alcoholics Anonymous,” apparently the first clear use of the term as a specific and exclusive name. The mere change of name did little to allay Catholic suspicion, but the availability of a written and published program afforded another option. At the Williams’s home on Wednesday, 10 May 1939, Clarence — with the approval of his traveling companions — announced that this would be their last visit to the Akron meeting. On the next evening, interested
alcoholics
were invited to a new meeting to be held each week in Cleveland at the home of Abby G., the most recently sober of the visitors. This would be a meeting, Clarence declared, of “Alcoholics Anonymous.”
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The Akronites — alcoholics and non-alcoholic Oxford Groupers — were shaken by this development, and the situation remained confused for the next three years. Clarence S. was an abrasive personality. Many expressed less than regret at his departure and predicted that there would soon be further problems in Cleveland. In this they proved correct, but the difficulties within Cleveland A.A. did not move any alcoholics to return to Akron or to renew connections with the Oxford Group. Yet the Clevelanders did continue to send their “really difficult cases” back to Dr. Bob in Akron for treatment. Some of these, after their release from the hospital, continued the practice of remaining in Akron for a time in order to absorb the intensive daily fellowship. Having developed strong bonds of affection and especially a sense of loyalty to T. Henry Williams, a few of these, even after they had returned to Cleveland and had joined a group there, continued to journey to Akron each week for the Wednesday meeting — even after, in late 1939, Dr. Smith and most of the Akron alcoholics had separated from the Oxford Group setting of the Williams’s home. Only in 1942, under the impact of World War II gasoline rationing, did the visits of this significant minority cease.
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Meanwhile yet another unforeseen occurrence took on significance because of early A.A.’s wariness of Roman Catholic opinion. Dr. Bob Smith had treated his alcoholics, under varying diagnoses, at two hospitals — Akron City and Green Cross. Hospitals at the time were reluctant to admit alcoholics under
any
diagnosis, less over moral or treatment concerns than because of the blunt fact that alcoholics rarely paid their bills. In the spring of 1939, administrators at the Akron City and Green Cross Hospitals, noting that Dr. Smith’s mysterious patients owed over five thousand dollars, began scrutinizing his admissions more carefully.
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Since 1934, Dr. Bob had been on the visiting staff of St. Thomas Hospital, a Catholic institution in Akron. Much of his practice there was in the emergency room, and he had often lamented over coffee with the gentle nun who was the hospital’s admissions officer the ravages caused by alcohol-related accidents and fights. In the course of one such conversation, in the spring of 1939, A.A.’s medical co-founder confessed his own alcoholism to this nun, Sister Ignatia of the Sisters of Charity of Saint Augustine who staffed the facility. If the sister was surprised by this admission, she was less shocked by the request that followed it. “Sister, these people need medical treatment —
I know
. Do you think we could smuggle at least a couple who I’m sure I could help in here?”
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In later years both Sister Ignatia and Dr. Bob Smith relished a specific descriptive word and an ironic circumstance in describing the events of the next months. The sickly nun and the alcoholic surgeon cherished the thrill of “bootlegging” alcoholics into St. Thomas — most often under the diagnosis of “acute gastritis.” And, to prevent discovery of their deception, they ensconced their patients who were in the most acute stages of withdrawal in the hospital’s “flower room” — a nook previously used only for patients who had died and were awaiting removal to the morgue or funeral parlor.
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Soon, the nun saw some of the amazing results of Dr. Smith’s ministrations and sought to learn more about his technique. Chatting with the endless stream of visitors who daily stopped by to visit her charges, Sister Ignatia learned of the Oxford Group connection and in this found another cause for possible concern if she were to ask the Sister Administrator openly to admit Dr. Smith’s alcoholics. She took her problem to a young assistant pastor from the neighboring St. Martin’s parish, a priest whose newly ordained zeal touched her heart and upon whom she was in the habit of calling when obvious alcoholics seemed in need of spiritual ministration.
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Father Vincent Haas listened quietly and carefully. Yes, it was wonderful what Dr. Smith was doing. He himself knew only frustration in his efforts at counseling alcoholics and their families — they just didn’t seem to
hear
him. Yes, of course he would look in on one of “those meetings” — if Dr. Smith approved. So it was that one evening in early 1940 Father Haas trundled off to the King School where, by that time, the alcoholics were meeting. A profoundly spiritual man who saw the whole world through the prism of deep faith, the young priest found less “primitive Christianity” than “a movement just like the early Franciscans.” Entranced, enthralled, and enthusiastic, he reported this perception and the warm welcome accorded him not only to Sister Ignatia but (at her urging) to her administrative superior, and Dr. Bob’s St. Thomas practice found secure footing and sure support. The few Clevelanders who were visiting the King School each week of course carried this news back to their city and thus laid to rest the lingering bogey which still haunted some of that metropolis’s more scrupulous Catholic alcoholics.
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Accidental circumstances had dictated that the first exposure of Father Haas was to “Alcoholics Anonymous” at the King School rather than to “the alcoholic squadron of the Oxford Group” at the Williams’s home. Despite the departure of the Clevelanders, in the year 1939, “the alcoholic squadron of the Oxford Group increased in numbers and noise — until we took the place over.” Bob E. gives the best account. “Instead of being the alcoholic squad of the Oxford Group, we were the main body there and we had the most to say and we were kind of running the thing.” The committed Oxford Group members did not make this surrender easily. Bob E. says, “They had us in silence, listening for guidance half the time.… That’s the way it started. That made the drunks very restless. We couldn’t stand that — get the jitters, you know. As we increased in numbers and influence, that was almost cut out. They could see where their fundamentals were not being adhered to.”
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Two further problems exacerbated the rapidly deteriorating situation. When the book
Alcoholics Anonymous
was published and distributed, some in the Oxford Group complained that the program was “being commercialized.” These Groupers had no use for the alcoholics’ pride in their literary venture. Also, not only were the alcoholics themselves feeling uncomfortably crowded sprawled across the floor and on thirty folding chairs in the Williams’s livingroom, but Clarace Williams spoke to Henrietta Seiberling about her increasing anxiety over “what was happening” — to her home as well as to Oxford Group principles.
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Finally, in late October 1939, most of the alcoholics left the Williams’s home and began meeting at the home of Dr. Bob and Anne Smith. The friendship among Henrietta Seiberling, Clarace Williams, and Anne Smith had seemed about to snap under the strain from the two factions in the Group. The most poignant yet apparently accurate memory recalled: “We pulled out rather suddenly. There were some hot conversations on the telephone; it was a 3-way thing between Clarace, Annie — the women decided it, as was usually the case in a thing like that. ‘Hen’ and Clarace and Annie decided right there and Doc went along with Annie. But we pulled out all of a sudden without any warning and so we had no place to go, so we held our meeting from October to December at Doc’s house.” The Smith home, however, soon also became overcrowded with “between seventy to eighty people in my small livingroom and diningroom.” Before long, the alcoholics moved to the King School.
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For a time some of the Akron Oxford Group had difficulty accepting the separation. T. Henry Williams, of whom all factions always spoke most highly, finally shared some of his own pain and confusion with Bill and Lois Wilson. After apologizing for his delay in writing, he explained:

By late October 1939, Alcoholics Anonymous had come into a clear existence of its own. The book presenting its program had been published. Its final separation from Oxford Group sponsorship had been successfully completed. Most importantly, a new group flourished in a new city under the sole name “Alcoholics Anonymous,” and without any direct impetus from either of A.A.’s co-founders.
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Yet there were also problems. Differences of opinion about publicizing the book as well as about financing the other projects persisted, especially in New York. Tensions and controversies over the Oxford Group connection smoldered, especially in Akron. And in Cleveland, there began to appear the first hints that the further development of Alcoholics Anonymous — both that desired and that feared — not only would continue, but would continue to be beyond the fellowship’s own total control.

Sober as well as drunk, the members of Alcoholics Anonymous were learning they were limited and therefore needed others. But that need of others was also limited. Alcoholics Anonymous had been born — now it needed not only to grow but also to mature. Yet as was the case with the sobriety of its individual members, A.A.’s growth had to precede its maturity. In its growth as fellowship over the next two years, Alcoholics Anonymous honed its awareness of its style of needing others. By doing so, A.A. set the stage for its further development as program.