From Time Magazine's Heroes of the Century ,
The Healer- Bill Wilson
The Healer- Bill Wilson
From the rubble of a wasted life, he overcame alcoholism and founded the 12-step program that has helped millions of others do the same
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BY Susan Cheever
Second Lieut. Bill Wilson didn't think twice when the first butler he had ever seen offered him a drink. The 22-year-old soldier didn't think about how alcohol had destroyed his family. He didn't think about the Yankee temperance movement of his childhood or his loving fiance Lois Burnham or his emerging talent for leadership. He didn't think about anything at all. "I had found the elixir of life," he wrote. Wilson's last drink, 17 years later, when alcohol had destroyed his health and his career, precipitated an epiphany that would change his life and the lives of millions of other alcoholics. Incarcerated for the fourth time at Manhattan's Towns Hospital in 1934, Wilson had a spiritual awakening--a flash of white light, a liberating awareness of God--that led to the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous and Wilson's revolutionary 12-step program, the successful remedy for alcoholism. The 12 steps have also generated successful programs for eating disorders, gambling, narcotics, debting, sex addiction and people affected by others' addictions. Aldous Huxley called him the greatest social architect of our century.
William Griffith Wilson grew up in a quarry town in Vermont. When he was 10, his hard-drinking father headed for Canada, and his mother moved to Boston, leaving the sickly child with her parents. As a soldier, and then as a businessman, Wilson drank to alleviate his depressions and to celebrate his Wall Street success. Married in 1918, he and Lois toured the country on a motorcycle and appeared to be a prosperous, promising young couple. By 1933, however, they were living on charity in her parents' house on Clinton Street in Brooklyn, N.Y. Wilson had become an unemployable drunk who disdained religion and even panhandled for cash.
Inspired by a friend who had stopped drinking, Wilson went to meetings of the Oxford Group, an evangelical society founded in Britain by Pennsylvania Frank Buchman. And as Wilson underwent a barbiturate-and-belladonna cure called "purge and puke," which was state-of-the-art alcoholism treatment at the time, his brain spun with phrases from Oxford Group meetings, Carl Jung and William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, which he read in the hospital. Five sober months later, Wilson went to Akron, Ohio, on business. The deal fell through, and he wanted a drink. He stood in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel, entranced by the sounds of the bar across the hall. Suddenly he became convinced that by helping another alcoholic, he could save himself.
Through a series of desperate telephone calls, he found Dr. Robert Smith, a skeptical drunk whose family persuaded him to give Wilson 15 minutes. Their meeting lasted for hours. A month later, Dr. Bob had his last drink, and that date, June 10, 1935, is the official birth date of A.A., which is based on the idea that only an alcoholic can help another alcoholic. Because of our kinship in suffering,
Bill wrote, our channels of contact have always been charged with the language of the heart.
The Burnham house on Clinton Street became a haven for drunks. My name is Bill W., and I'm an alcoholic,
he told assorted houseguests and visitors at meetings. To spread the word, he began writing down his principles for sobriety. Each chapter was read by the Clinton Street group and sent to Smith in Akron for more editing. The book had a dozen provisional titles, among them The Way Out and The Empty Glass. Edited to 400 pages, it was finally called Alcoholics Anonymous, and this became the group's name.
But the book, although well reviewed, wasn't selling. Wilson tried unsuccessfully to make a living as a wire-rope salesman. A.A. had about a hundred members, but many were still drinking. Meanwhile, in 1939, the bank foreclosed on the Clinton Street house, and the couple began years of homelessness, living as guests in borrowed rooms and at one point staying in temporary quarters above the A.A. clubhouse on 24th Street in Manhattan. In 1940 John D. Rockefeller Jr. held an A.A. dinner and was impressed enough to create a trust to provide Wilson with $30 a week--but no more. The tycoon felt that money would corrupt the group's spirit.
Then, in March 1941, The Saturday Evening Post published an article on A.A., and suddenly thousands of letters and requests poured in. Attendance at meetings doubled and tripled. Wilson had reached his audience. In Twelve Traditions, Wilson set down the suggested bylaws of Alcoholics Anonymous. In them, he created an enduring blueprint for an organization with a maximum of individual freedom and no accumulation of power or money. Public anonymity ensured humility. No contributions were required; no member could contribute more than $1,000.
Today more than 2 million A.A. members in 150 countries hold meetings in church basements, hospital conference rooms and school gyms, following Wilson's informal structure. Members identify themselves as alcoholics and share their stories; there are no rules or entry requirements, and many members use only first names.
Wilson believed the key to sobriety was a change of heart. The suggested 12 steps include an admission of powerlessness, a moral inventory, a restitution for harm done, a call to service and a surrender to some personal God. In A.A., God can be anything from a radiator to a patriarch. Influenced by A.A., the American Medical Association has redefined alcoholism as a chronic disease, not a failure of willpower.
As Alcoholics Anonymous grew, Wilson became its principal symbol. He helped create a governing structure for the program, the General Service Board, and turned over his power. I have become a pupil of the A.A. movement rather than the teacher,
he wrote. A smoker into his 70s, he died of pneumonia and emphysema in Miami, where he went for treatment in 1971. To the end, he clung to the principles and the power of anonymity. He was always Bill W., refusing to take money for counseling and leadership. He turned down many honors, including a degree from Yale. And he declined this magazine's offer to put him on the cover--even with his back turned.
Memorial Service for Dr. Bob- talk by Bill W.
24th Street Clubhouse, New York City, N.Y.
November 15, 1952
A meeting was held at the 24th Street Club House in memory of Dr. Bob. A recording of Dr. Bob’s last talk was played and a portrait of Dr. Bob was unveiled. Bill W. then addressed the meeting.
Dr. Bob’s recorded voice has come down to us across the air since he died in 1950. Some may say that his actual voice is still forever, but you and I know that is not so and that his spirit will be with us so long as this well loved society of ours endures. Now, I happen to be one who believes that people never die, that on beyond death there is another life and it could be that Dr. Bob is looking down upon us now, seeing us, hearing what we say and feel and think and have done in this meeting. I know his heart will be glad.
Dr Bob was a chap who was modestly and singularly against taking any personal acclaim or honor but surely now that he is no longer with us he can’t mind, I don’t believe and for him I wish to thank everyone here who has made this occasion possible and the unveiling possible, with all the work and love that that has entailed. Again, I wish to thank each and everyone.
In A.A. we always deal in personalities, really, this thing is transmitted from one to another and it isn’t so much what we read about it that counts, it’s what we uniquely know about of ourselves and those just around us who have us and who we would help. Therefore, I take it that you folks would like it better than anything else if I just spun a few yarns about Dr. Bob and that very early part of A.A. which we so often call the period of flying blind.
Of course you’ll remember my little story about how a friend comes to me with the idea of getting more honest, more tolerant, making amends, helping others without demand for reward, praying as best I knew how and that was my friend Ebby.
As you heard Dr. Bob say, he had heard those things too from the same source, namely the Oxford Groups which have since as such, passed of f the scene and have left us with a rich heritage of both what and what not to do. Anyway, a friend comes to me and I go to other alcoholics and try to make them my friends and some did become my friends but as you heard Dr. Bob say, not a darn one got sober.
Then came that little man that we who live in this area saw so much, him with kind of blue eyes and the white hair,’ Doc Silkworth. You’ll remember that Doc said to me, look Bill, you’re preaching at these people too much. You’ve got the cart before the horse. This ‘white flash’ experience of yours scares these drunks to death. Why don’t you put the fear of God into them first. You’re always talking about James and the Varieties of Religious Experience and how you have to deflate people before they can know God, how they must have humility. So, why don’t you use the tools that we’ve really got here, why don’t you use the tool of the medical hopelessness of alcoholism for practically all those involved. Why don’t you talk to the drunk about that allergy they’ve got and that obsession that makes them keep on drinking and guarantees that they will die. Maybe when you punch it into them hard it will deflate them enough so that they will find what you found.
So, another indispensable ingredient was added to what is now this successful synthesis and that was just about the time I set out for Akron on a business trip. It had been suggested by the family that it was about time that I went back to work. I went out there on this venture which as Dr. Bob said, fortunately fell through.
You heard him tell about the story in the hotel after I had taken a good beating and I was tempted to drink and needed to look up another alcoholic, not this time to save him but to save myself, for I had found that working with others had a vast bearing on my own sobriety.
Then, how we were brought together by a girl who was the last person on a long list of people I ‘d been referred to. The only one who had time enough and who cared enough and that was a girl in Akron, herself no alcoholic, her name was Henrietta Seiberling. She invited me out there and she became interested at once. She called Smiths and we learned Smithy had just come home with a potted plant for dear old Annie and he put it on the dining room table but as Annie said that just then he was on the floor and they couldn’t come over at that minute.
l remember the next day how he put in an appearance. Haggard, worn, not wishing to stay and how then we talked for hours. Now I have often heard Dr. Bob say and I thought he said it on the recording that it was not so much my spirituality that affected him,
he was a student of those things and I certainly know that he was never affected by any superior morality on my part. So, what did affect him? Well, it was this ammunition that dear old Doc Silkworth had given me, the allergy plus the obsession. The God of science declaring that the malady for most of us is hopeless so far as our personal power is concerned. As Dr. Bob put it in his story in the book here came the first man into my life who seemed to know what this thing alcoholism was all about.
Well, if it wasn’t the dose of spirituality I poured into Dr. Bob, it was that dose of indispensable medicine to this movement, the dose of hopelessness so far as one doing this alone is concerned. The bottle of medicine that Dr. Silkworth had given me that I poured down the old grizzly bear’s throat. That’s what I used to call him.
Well, he gagged on it a little, got drunk once more and that was the end. Then he and I set out looking for drunks, we had to look some up. There is a little remembered part of the story. The story usually goes that we immediately called up the local city hospital and asked the nurse for a case but that isn’t quite true. There was a preacher who lived down the street and he was beset at the time by a drunk and his name was Eddie and we talked to Eddie and it turned out that Eddie was not only a drunk but something which in that high faluting language we now call a manic depressive, not very manic either, mostly depressed. Eddie was married with two or three kids, worked down at Goodrich Company and his depression caused him to drink and the only thing that would stop the depression was apparently baking soda. When he got a sour stomach, he got depressed so he was not only drinking alcohol but we estimated that in the past few years he had taken a ton of baking soda. Well, we tried for a while, of course, we thought we had to be good Samaritan’s so we got up some dough to try to keep the family going, we got Eddie back on the job but Eddie kept right on with alcohol and baking soda both. Finally, Dr. Bob and Annie took Eddie along with me into their house, a pattern which my dear Lois followed out to the nth degree later and we tried to treat Eddie and my mind goes back so vividly to that evening when Eddie really blew his top. I don’t know whether it was the manic side or on the depressive side but boy did he blow it and Annie and I were sitting out at the kitchen table and Eddie seized the butcher knife and was about to do us in when Annie said very quietly well Eddie, I don’t think your going to do this.
And he didn’t. Thereafter, Eddie was in a State asylum for a period I should think of going on a dozen or more years but believe it or not he showed up at the funeral of Dr. Bob in the fall of 1950 as sober as a judge and he had been that way for three years.
So even that obscure little talk about Eddie made the grade. So then Dr. Bob and I talked to the man on the bed, Bill Dotson, who some of you have heard, A.A. number three. Here was another man who said he couldn’t get well, his case was too tough, much tougher than ours besides he knew all about religion. Well, here it was, one drunk talking with another, in fact, two drunks talking to one. The very next day the man on the bed got out of his bed and he picked it up and walked and he has stayed up ever since. A.A. number three, the man on the bed.
So the spark that was to become Alcoholics Anonymous was struck. I came back to New York after having taken away a great deal from Akron. I never can forget those mornings and those nights at the Smiths. I can never forget Annie reading to us and the two or three drunks who were hanging on, out of the bible. I couldn’t possibly say how many times we read Corinthians on love, how many times we read the entire book of James with loving emphasis on that line Faith without works is dead.
It did make a very deep impression on me, so from the very beginning there was reciprocity, everybody was teacher and everybody was pupil and nobody need look up or down to the other because as Jack Alexander put it years later we are all brothers and sisters under the skin.
A group started in New York, but let’s turn back to Akron. Smithy, unlike me and the man on the bed was bothered very badly by a temptation to drink. Smithy was one of these continuous drinkers. He wasn’t what you would call one of these panty waist periodic’s. He guzzled all the time and apparently by the time he got to be sixty odd which was when he got A.A. He was so soaked in rum that he just had a terrible physical urge to drink. Long after he told me that he had that urge for something like six or seven years and that it was constant and that his basic release from it was in doing what we now call the twelfth step. So Smithy, greatly out of love and partly by being driven began to frantically work on those cases, first in City Hospital in Akron and then as they got tired of drunks in the place, finally over at St. Thomas where there is now a plaque which bears an inscription dedicated to all those who labored there in our pioneering time and describing St. Thomas in Akron as the first religious institution ever to open it’s doors to Alcoholics Anonymous.
Ah, how much of drama, how much of struggle, how much of misery, how much of joy lies in the era before the plaque was put there. No one can say. There was a sister in the hospital, a veritable saint if you ever saw one. Our beloved Sister Ignatia. Dr. Bob mentioned her. He told how she would deny beds to people with broken legs in order to stick drunks in them. She loved drunks. She was a sort of female Silkworth, if you know what I mean. So finally a ward was provided and you remember that Dr. Bob was an M.D. and a mighty good one. Now you know that quite within the A.A. Tradition Dr. Bob might have charged all those drunks who went through that place for his medical services. He treated 5,000 drunks medically and never charged a dime, even in that long period when he was very poor. For unlike most of us to whom it is a credit to belong to Alcoholics Anonymous, it was no credit to a surgeon at that time. It was lovely that the old boy got sober
his patients said, but how the hell do I know he’ll be sober when he cuts me up at nine o’clock in the morning.
And so that frantic effort went on out there and it went on here and we got back and forth a little bit between Akron and New York. You haven’t any conception these days of how much failure we had. How you had to cull over hundreds of these drunks to get a handful to take the bait. Yes, the discouragement’s were very great but some did stay sober and some very tough ones at that.
The next great memory I have is that of a day I shared with him in his living room in the fall of 1937. I, you remember had sobered up in late ‘34 and Bob in June 1935. Well, we began to count noses, we asked ourselves How many were dry and for how long,
Not how many failures, how many successes were there in Akron, New York and the trickle to Cleveland and in the other little trickles to Philadelphia and Washington. How much time elapsed on how many cases? We added up the score and I guess we had maybe forty folks sober and with real time elapsed. For the first time Dr. Bob and I knew that God had made a great gift to us children of the night and that the long procession coming down through the ages need no longer all go over into the left hand path and plunge over the cliff. We knew that something great had come into the world.
Then it was a question of how we would spread this and that was answered by the publication of the book and the opening of the office here. It was spread by our great friends who rallied about us. There were friends in medicine, friends in religion, friends in the press and just plain but great friends. They all came to our aid and spread the good news.
Meanwhile drunks from all over Ohio, all over the Middle West flocked into the Akron hospital where Dr. Smith and Sister Ignatia ministered to them. And I have no doubt that two out of three of those drunks are sober, well and happy today. So that achievement certainly entitles Dr. Bob to be named as the prince of all twelve steppers.
That was the end of the flying blind period, next we needed to discover whether we could hold together as groups. We had learned that we might survive as individuals but could this movement hold together and grow. On a thousand anvils and after a million heartbreaks the tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous was also forged out of our experience and what had been a tiny chip, launched in the flying blind time on the sea of alcoholism now became a mighty armada spreading over the world, touching foreign beach heads. Of all that, this meeting here in this historic place in commemoration of Dr. Bob is a great and moving symbol. I know that he looks down upon us. I know that he smiles and we know that he is glad.
This is a magazine article which appeared in The American Weekly on Dr. Robert Holbert (Bob) Smith
By Booton Herndon, The American Weekly March 11, 1951
Dr. Bob - His Only Monument Is a Plaque, but the Thousands He Helped Rescue From Alcoholism Will Never Forget Him.
The kindly faced man lying in the white hospital bed raised his hand to the light, studied it calmly and then remarked to the nurse standing by his bed: I think this is it.
Thus Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith recently passed from the world. So, finally, the story of "Dr. Bob, beloved by 120,000members of Alcoholics Anonymous whom he had helped to find the way back to respectability and happiness, can be told. At the death of his wife, Anne, a year before, Dr. Smith's identity had been revealed, but the story of the co-founder of A.A. remained a secret.
Dr. Bob was a boy in New England, 72 years ago, and his mother sent him to bed at 5 o'clock every evening. Just as regularly did he secretly arise, dress, and slip out the back way to continue the game with his boyhood pals.
He learned early to revolt against authority.
When he went away to college he became a steady drinker. He had always wanted to be a doctor but his strong willed mother had always opposed it, and it was three years after he graduated from Dartmouth before
he got up the courage to go to medical school. He drank so continuously he just did manage to get his degree.
Once he went off on such a protracted binge that his fraternity brothers had to send for his father to straighten
him out.
All this time Bob was corresponding with Anne, his high school sweetheart. That was as far as their courtship went. With the exception of two hard working years as an intern, he was seldom sober. Still, Anne, waiting for a miracle, married no one else.
The miracle happened, apparently, after a year-long period of heavy drinking left him terrified and on the wagon. In 1915 when he was 35 years old and some 17 years after he had first met her, he married Anne and brought her to Akron with him as his bride. They were happy for several years - until the Eighteenth Amendment was passed.
The Grapevine, the official magazine of Alcoholics Anonymous, explains in the weird logic of the alcoholic what happened then. Dr. Bob figured that since he'd soon be unable to get any more alcohol, he might as well drink up what there was. Despite prohibition, he never found it difficult to get more. From then on, he had a regular pattern. He began drinking every afternoon at four. Every morning he'd quite his tortured nerves with sedatives and, trembling, go to work to make enough money to buy alcohol for four o'clock.
That went on for 15 years.
In the meantime, a New York broker who had drunk himself out of prominence discovered that when he was trying to talk drunks into going on the wagon, he had less craving for liquor. This broker, known to A.A.'s as Bill W., went to Akron on a business deal in 1935. The deal fell through and Bill found himself once more a failure, with only 2$ in his pocket. He knew right away that he had his choice: find a drunk to talk to, or get drunk himself.
Fortunately, he found a drunk, Dr. Bob.
Bill moved in with Dr. Bob and straightened him out. When he and Dr. Bob wanted a drink, they'd go out and find a drunk to talk to. They sobered up a number of habitual drinkers in Akron that way and then their fame began reaching out to other cities. Slowly, gradually, the idea spread. Almost before Dr. Bob and Bill, the co-founders, were aware of it, Alcoholics Anonymous was a going concern.
The book, Alcoholics Anonymous, was written. It is now in its 13th printing. People began to write in from all over the world. Some were alcoholics themselves, some were mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives or friends of alcoholics. They all got an answer. Dr. Bob, who had devoted half his life to drinking, still found himself a slave to alcohol - only now it was on the other fellow's breath. He personally visited some 5,000 in Akron hospitals, encouraging them. As his period of sobriety increased, more and more patients came to him, and it looked as though one part of his ambition, to own a convertible, might not be impossible after all.
Finally he made it. Last year he got a new yellow convertible.
The Grapevine pictures him, at the age of 71, speeding through the streets of Akron in it ."the long slim lines made even more rakish with the top down. No hat, his face to the sun, into the driveway he sped. Pebbles, flying, tires screeching, he'd swoosh to a stop.
And, just then, before he put 150 miles on the gleaming yellow convertible, Dr. Bob's malignant disease took a turn for the worse and he had to give up driving.
He died a few months later.
Bill W. explained why there will be no imposing monument to this man who saved so many people from alcoholism. When it was once suggested, last year,
Dr. Bob said: Anne and I plan to be buried just like other folks.
And so only a simple plaque in the alcoholic ward of St. Thomas Hospital in Akron, where Dr. Bob did so much of his work, commemorates his work as co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.
