How Bill Wilson Invented Alcoholics Anonymous

Bill Wilson (right) and Bob Smith in a rare photograph.

Seventy-one years ago today, outside the Akron, Ohio, city hospital, Dr. Robert Smith swigged from a bottle of beer. He and his friend Bill Wilson had just mapped out a new way to cure alcoholism, and they were sure it would work. Smith only needed one last drink to prevent hand tremors on the job. It sounds like the recidivist’s lame excuse, but the beer did turn out to be Smith’s last. The date was June 10, 1935—now known as the official birthday of Alcoholics Anonymous.

If Wilson’s story sounds familiar, even clichéd, now, it’s only because he popularized the idea that “sharing” one’s story is a necessary part of overcoming alcoholism. Every drinker’s trajectory is different, of course, but Wilson helped define what we now recognize as the basic plot points of addiction.

By the time he got a call from an old drinking buddy in 1934, Wilson had, in AA parlance, hit bottom. In 1905, when he was only 10, his father had left his mother; his maternal grandmother raised him and his sister in Vermont. He took his first drink at a dinner party in 1917, after he joined the Army as a second lieutenant. Following an uneventful stint in Europe during World War I, he moved to New York City, got married, and made a small fortune on Wall Street. He also drank for days on end.

The crash of 1929 all but ruined him, both financially and emotionally. His drinking prevented him from keeping a job, and he and his wife, Lois, had to move in with her father in Brooklyn. He started bar fights, blacked out, and stole money for booze from Lois’s purse. He was hospitalized after several benders and always vowed to quit drinking, but he never could. He had just returned from a stay in Manhattan’s expensive Charles B. Towns Hospital when Ebby Thatcher, a friend from boarding school, paid him a visit in November 1934. The two had spent many liquor-drenched evenings together over the years, and Wilson looked forward to another. But Thatcher was a changed man. He had joined the Oxford Group Movement and gotten sober.

The Oxford Group was the brainchild of Dr. Frank Buchman, a Lutheran minister. Popular in the 1920s on college campuses (including Oxford University, from which it took its name) and in upscale neighborhoods, the group promoted Buchman’s belief in divine guidance: One should wait for God to give direction in every aspect of life (it wasn’t about alcoholism or any other single problem) and surrender to that advice. Buchman’s program emphasized public confession of sin during meetings at members’ houses, making restitution to those sinned against, and promoting the group to the public. The group’s individualistic bent—if God’s guidance could solve everyone’s problems, social movements seemed useless—divorced it from activism or politics. But when Buchman told a reporter in 1936, “I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism,” the Oxford Group’s fortunes started to fall. After Buchman’s death, in 1961, the group all but disappeared. Few remember his name today, but his principles—surrender to divine guidance, confession, and making amends—live on in another unlikely fellowship.

Wilson, an atheist since age 11, dismissed Thatcher’s claims: “Last summer an alcoholic crackpot; now, I suspected, a little cracked about religion.” But a month later, back in a hospital bed in Towns doped on barbiturates and belladonna (which were used to treat alcoholism at the time), Wilson yelled, “If there be a God, let him show himself!” “Suddenly my room blazed with an indescribably white light,” he wrote in 1957. “I was seized with an ecstasy beyond description. Every joy I had known was pale by comparison.” The next day, Thatcher brought him a copy of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which James writes that “the only radical remedy . . . for dipsomania is religiomania.” Wilson would devote his life to the idea that surrender to God was the only replacement for surrender to alcohol.

When he got out of the hospital, Wilson not only joined the Oxford Group, he also went on a crusade to convert other drunks, trolling bars and hospitals for potential initiates. He believed that the Group’s principles were the best and maybe only course for curing alcoholism. On a business trip to Akron in the spring of 1935, alone in a hotel lobby and struggling to avoid the bar, he scoured the church directory for the number of the local Oxford Group. An Episcopal minister put him in touch with a woman whose friend, Dr. Robert Smith, was an alcoholic. Smith agreed to meet with Wilson for 15 minutes. They ended up talking for six hours. Smith decided to quit drinking that very night. His wife invited Wilson to move in for the duration of his stay in Akron, and the two men devoted their free time to the Oxford Group and enlightening other drinkers.

Around the coffee table at night, the two debated the best ways to reform alcoholics. But Smith himself had not yet tasted his last drink. In June he returned from a conference in Atlantic City so soused that his wife worried he wouldn’t be able to perform a scheduled surgery in three days. But after bed rest and gallons of coffee, when the time came Smith was ready. Wilson dropped him off at the hospital on June 10, 1935, and gave him a beer to steady his hands. That was the last drink of Smith’s life, and the moment Alcoholics Anonymous was born.

Before Wilson returned to New York, he and Smith helped rehabilitate two alcoholics, who began attending Oxford Group meetings. This “alcoholic squadron of the Akron Oxford Group,” as they called themselves, were the first members of what would become AA. Back home, Wilson began opening his living room on Tuesday nights to a contingent of alcoholics from the New York Oxford Group. But the two camps tended to clash. The nonalcoholics resented Wilson’s concentrating his attention on a minority clique, while the alcoholics chafed under the Oxford Group’s aggressive, authoritarian atmosphere. “These ideas had to be fed with teaspoons rather than by buckets,” Wilson later wrote. In 1937 Wilson decided to sever his faction entirely from the Oxford Group.

More important, the Catholic Church hated Buchman, and Wilson didn’t want to alienate Catholic alcoholics. He didn’t want to alienate anybody, in fact, a feat that proved difficult when he began to codify his process. The twelve steps he listed in the self-published Alcoholics Anonymous (also known as the “Big Book”) in 1939 were really just a restatement of the Oxford Group’s tenets. The ideas of personal powerlessness and divine guidance appear in six steps (for example, Step 1, “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable,” and Step 3, “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him”); confession and restitution permeate five steps (e.g., Step 5, “Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs,” and Step 8, “Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all”); while the last step promotes the group’s beliefs (“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”).

The agnostic members of the New York group objected to Wilson’s references to God and feared driving away unreligious new members. To appease them, Wilson deleted the phrase “on our knees” from “Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings” in Step 7, substituted “a power greater than ourselves” for “God” in Step 2, and added “as we understand him” after “God” in Steps 3 and 11. But half of the steps still mention “God,” “Him,” or a higher power.

AA professes to be spiritual rather than religious. Wilson tried to explain the distinction in a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous entitled “We Agnostics”: “As soon as we were able to lay aside prejudice and express even a willingness to believe in a Power greater than ourselves, we commenced to get results, even though it was impossible for any of us to fully define or comprehend that Power, which is God. Much to our relief, we discovered we did not need to consider another’s conception of God. Our own conception, however inadequate, was sufficient to make the approach and to effect a contact with Him. As soon as we admitted the possible existence of a Creative Intelligence, a Spirit of the Universe underlying the totality of things, we began to be possessed of a new sense of power and direction. . . . [L]ay aside prejudice, even against organized religion. We have learned that whatever the human frailties of various faiths may be, those faiths have given purpose and direction to millions.”

In 1939 alcoholics in Cleveland decided to form their own chapter. They took the title of Wilson’s book as their name, becoming the first group to call itself Alcoholics Anonymous. But even after the publication of the Big Book, the organization grew slowly. Its early members came mostly from the middle class. After all, the founders were a surgeon and a Wall Street trader. Wilson and Smith continued to convert alcoholics on barstools and in hospital beds, but membership didn’t take off until The Saturday Evening Post ran a laudatory article on the organization in March 1941, under the headline “Freed Slaves of Drink, Now They Free Others.” AA mushroomed from two chapters and 100 members in 1939 to 360 chapters and 10,000 members in 1944.

The disease theory of alcoholism helped boost the numbers. In the nineteenth century, most people saw alcoholism as a moral failing, but doctors had already begun to wonder if it didn’t have a physiological basis. Wilson’s doctor mentioned to him that he thought alcoholics suffered from something like an allergy to alcohol, and Wilson helped promote the idea to the American public. Although many dispute that theory today, it has undoubtedly removed some of the stigma from alcoholism, making it less shameful for alcoholics to seek treatment.

As the organization ballooned in the 1940s, Wilson decided it needed to govern itself. He set up a general conference of elected delegates from local groups, which would, in turn, elect representatives to a national assembly. After implementing the plan in 1950, he said, “I became entirely sure that Alcoholics Anonymous was at last safe—even from me.”

Smith died of prostate cancer in November 1950; Wilson, a lifelong smoker, succumbed to emphysema-related pneumonia in January 1971. Since then, their 12 steps have been adapted to treat everything from compulsive gambling to overeating. The group’s near-institutionalization in American society has, however, brought it its share of controversy. Courts often order perpetrators of alcohol-related crimes to attend AA, and some have argued that given AA’s religious underpinnings, their sentences violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment. In 1997 the New York Court of Appeals agreed, ruling that “adherence to the AA fellowship entails engagement in religious activity and religious proselytization.”

In recent decades, secular alternatives to AA have sprung up around the country, as have movements advocating moderate drinking and control rather than abstinence and admission of powerlessness. But AA remains the most popular self-help group by far, boasting more than two million members worldwide in over 97,000 groups.

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.