Alcoholics Anonymous
BY JACK ALEXANDER
THREE MEN sat around the bed of an alcoholic
patient in the psychopathic ward of Philadel-
phia General Hospital one afternoon a few
weeks ago. The man in the bed, who was a
complete stranger to them, had the drawn and
slightly stupid look that inebriates get while
being defogged after a bender. The only thing
that was noteworthy about the callers, except
for the obvious contrast between their well-
groomed appearances and that of the patient,
was the fact that each had been through the
defogging process many times himself. They
were members of Alcoholics Anonymous, a
band of ex-problem drinkers who make an 
avocation of helping other alcoholics to beat 
the liquor habit.

The man in the bed was a mechanic. His
visitors had been educated at Princeton, Yale
and Pennsylvania and were, by occupation, a
salesman, a lawyer and a publicity man. Less
than a year before, one had been in shackles in
the same ward. One of his companions had been
what is known among alcoholics as a sanitarium
commuter. He had moved from place to place,
bedeviling the staffs of the country's leading
institutions for the treatment of alcoholics. The
other had spent twenty years of life, all outside
institution walls, making life miserable for him-
self, and his family and his employers, as well
as sundry well-meaning relatives who had had
the temerity to intervene.

The air of the ward was thick with the aroma
of paraldehyde, an unpleasant cocktail smelling
like a mixture of alcohol and ether which hospi-
tals sometimes use to taper off the paralyzed
drinker and soothe his squirming nerves. The
visitors seemed oblivious of this and of the
depressing atmosphere that clings to even the
nicest of psychopathic wards. They smoked and
talked with the patient for twenty minutes or
so, then left their personal cards and departed.
If the man in the bed felt that he would like to
see one of them again, they told him, he had
only to put in a telephone call.


THEY MADE it plain that if he actually wanted
to stop drinking, they would leave their
work or get up in the middle of the night to
hurry to where he was. If he did not choose to
call, that would be the end of it. The members
of Alcoholics Anonymous do not pursue or cod-
dle a malingering prospect, and they know the
strange tricks of the alcoholic as a reformed
swindler knows the art of bamboozling.

Herein lies much of the unique strength of a
movement which, in the past six years, has
brought recovery to around 2,000 men and women,
a large percentage of whom had been,
considered medically hopeless. Doctors and
clergymen, working separately or together I
have always managed to salvage a few cases.
In isolated instances, drinkers have found their
own methods of quitting. But the inroads into
alcoholism have been negligible, and it remains
one of the great unsolved public-health enigmas.

By nature touchy and suspicious, the alcoholic 
likes to be left alone to work out his puzzle,
and he has a convenient way of ignoring the
tragedy which he inflicts meanwhile upon those
who are close to him. He holds desperately to
a conviction that, although he has not been able
to handle alcohol in the past, he will ultimately
succeed in becoming a controlled drinker. One
of medicine's queerest animals, he is, as often
as not, an acutely intelligent person. He fences
with professional men and relatives who attempt 
to aid him and he gets a perverse satisfaction 
out of tripping them up in argument.


THERE IS no specious excuse for drinking
which the troubleshooters of Alcoholics
Anonymous have not heard or used themselves.
When one of their prospects hands them a
rationalization for getting soused, they match
it with half a dozen out of their own experience.
This upsets him a little, and he gets defensive.
He looks at their neat clothing and smoothly
shaved faces and charges them with being
goody-goodies who don't know what it is to
struggle with drink. They reply by relating their
own stories: the double Scotches and brandies
before breakfast; the vague feeling of discom-
fort which precedes a drinking bout; the awak-
ening from a spree without being able to account
for the actions of several days and the haunting
fear that possibly they had run down someone
with their automobiles.

They tell of the eight-ounce bottles of gin
hidden behind pictures and in caches from cellar
to attic; of spending whole days in motion-pic-
ture houses to stave off the temptation to drink;
of sneaking out of the office for quickies during
the day. They talk of losing jobs and stealing
money from their wives' purses; of putting
pepper into whiskey to give it a tang; of tippling
on bitters and sedative tablets, or on mouth-
wash or hair tonic; of getting into the habit of
camping outside the neighborhood tavern ten
minutes before opening time. They describe a
hand so jittery that it could not lift a pony to
the lips without spilling the contents; drinking
liquor from a beer stein because it can be
steadied with two hands, although at the risk
of chipping a front tooth; tying an end of a towel
about a glass, looping the towel around the back
of the neck, and drawing the free end with the
other hand, pulley fashion, to advance the glass
to the mouth; hands so shaky they feel as if
they were about to snap off and fly into space;
sitting on hands for hours to keep them from
doing this.

These and other bits of drinking lore usually
manage to convince the alcoholic that he is
talking to blood brothers. A bridge of confidence
is thereby erected, spanning a gap which has
baffled the physician, the minister, the priest,
or the hapless relatives. Over this connection,
the troubleshooters convey, bit by bit, the
details of a program for living which has worked
for them and which, they feel, can work for any
other alcoholic. They concede as out of their
orbit only those who are psychotic or who are
already suffering from the physical impairment
known as wet brain. At the same time, they
see to it that the prospect gets whatever med-
ical attention is needed.


MANY DOCTORS and staffs of institutions
throughout the country now suggest Alco-
holics Anonymous to their drinking patients. In
some towns, the courts and probation officers
cooperate with the local group. In a few city
psychopathic divisions, the workers of Alcohol-
ics Anonymous are accorded the same visiting
privileges as staff members. Philadelphia Gen-
eral is one of these. Dr. John F. Stouffer, the
chief psychiatrist, says: "the alcoholics we get
here are mostly those who cannot afford private
treatment, and this is by far the greatest thing
we have ever been able to offer them. Even
among those who occasionally land back in here
again, we observe a profound change in person-
ality. You would hardly recognize them."

The Illinois Medical Journal, in an editorial
last December, went further than Dr. Stouffer,
in stating: "It is indeed a miracle when a person
who for years has been more or less constantly
under the influence of alcohol and in whom his
friends have lost all confidence, will sit up all
night with a drunk and at stated intervals admin-
ister a small amount of liquor in accordance with
a doctor's order without taking a drop himself."

This is a reference to a common aspect of
the Arabian Nights adventures to which Alco-
holics Anonymous workers dedicate them-
selves. Often it involves sitting upon, as well
as up with, the intoxicated person, as the im-
pulse to jump out a window seems to be an
attractive one to many alcoholics when in their
cups. Only an alcoholic can squat on another
alcoholic's chest for hours with the proper com-
bination of discipline and sympathy.

During a recent trip around the East and
Middle West, I met and talked with scores of
A.A.s, as they call themselves, and found them
to be unusually calm, tolerant people. Some-
how, they seemed better integrated than the
average group of nonalcoholic individuals. Their
transformation from cop fighters, canned-heat
drinkers, and, in some instances, wife beaters,
was startling. On one of the most influential
newspapers in the country, I found that the city
editor, the assistant city editor, and a nationally
known reporter were A.A.s, and strong in the
confidence of their publisher.


IN ANOTHER city, I heard a judge parole a
drunken driver to an A.A. member. The
latter, during his drinking days, had smashed
several cars and had had his own operator's
license suspended. The judge knew him and
was glad to trust him. A brilliant executive of
an advertising firm disclosed that two years ago
he had been panhandling and sleeping in a door-
way under an elevated structure. He had a
favorite doorway, which he shared with other
vagrants, and every few weeks he goes back
and pays them a visit just to assure himself he
isn't dreaming.

In Akron, as in other manufacturing centers,
the groups include a heavy element of manual
workers. In the Cleveland Athletic Club, I had
luncheon with five lawyers, an accountant, an
engineer, three salesmen, an insurance man, a
buyer, a bartender, a chain-store manager, a
manager of an independent store, and a man-
ufacturer's representative. They were mem-
bers of a central committee which coordinates
the work of nine neighborhood groups. Cleve-
land, with more than 450 members, is the big-
gest of the A.A. centers. The next largest are
located in Chicago, Akron, Philadelphia, Los
Angeles, Washington, and New York. All told,
there are groups in about fifty cities and towns.


IN DISCUSSING their work, the A.A.s spoke
of their drunk-rescuing as "insurance" for
themselves. Experience within the group has
shown, they said, that once a recovered drinker
slows up in this work he is likely to go back to
drinking himself. There is, they agreed, no such
thing as an ex-alcoholic. If one is an alcoholic -
that is, a person who is unable to drink normally
-one remains an alcoholic until he dies, just as
a diabetic remains a diabetic. The best he can
hope for is to become an arrested case, with
drunk-saving as his insulin. At least, the A.A.s
say so, and medical opinion tends to support
them. All but a few said that they had lost all
desire for alcohol. Most serve liquor in their
homes when friends drop in, and they still go
to bars with companions who drink. The A.A.s
tipple on soft drinks and coffee.

One, a sales manager, acts as bartender at
his company's annual jamboree in Atlantic City
and spends his nights tucking the celebrators
into their beds. Only a few of those who recover
fail to lose the feeling that at any minute they
may thoughtlessly take one drink and skyrocket
off on a disastrous binge. An A.A. who is a
clerk in an Eastern city hasn't had a snifter in
three and a half years, but says that he still has
to walk fast past saloons to circumvent the old
impulse; but he is an exception. The only hang-
over from the wild days that plagues the A.A.
is a recurrent nightmare. In the dream, he finds
himself off on a rousing whooper-dooper, fran-
tically trying to conceal his condition from the
community. Even this symptom disappears
shortly, in most cases. Surprisingly, the rate
of employment among these people, who for-
merly drank themselves out of job after job, is
said to be around ninety percent.

One-hundred-percent effectiveness with
non-psychotic drinkers who sincerely want to
quit is claimed by the workers of Alcoholics
Anonymous. The program will not work, they
add, with those who only "want to want to quit,"
or who want to quit because they are afraid of
losing their families or their jobs. The effective
desire, they state, must be based upon enlight-
ened self-interest; the applicant must want to
get away from liquor to head off incarceration
or premature death. He must be fed up with
the stark social loneliness which engulfs the
uncontrolled drinker, and he must want to put
some order into his bungled life.

As it is impossible to disqualify all borderline
applicants, the working percentage of recovery
falls below the 100-percent mark. According to
A.A. estimation, fifty percent of the alcoholics
taken in hand recover almost immediately;
twenty-five percent get well after suffering a
relapse or two; and the rest remain doubtful.
This rate of success is exceptionally high.
Statistics on traditional medical and religious
cures are lacking, but it has been informally
estimated that they are no more than two or
three percent effective on run-of-the-mine
cases.

Although it is too early to state that Alcoholics
Anonymous is the definitive answer to alcohol-
ism, its brief record is impressive, and it is
receiving hopeful support. John D. Rockefeller,
Jr., helped defray the expense of getting it
started and has gone out of his way to get other
prominent men interested.


ROCKEFELLER'S GIFT was a small one, in
deference to the insistence of the origi-
nators that the movement be kept on a volun-
tary, nonpaid basis. There are no salaried or-
ganizers, no dues, no officers, and no central
control. Locally, the rents of assembly halls are
met by passing the hat at meetings. In small
communities, no collections are taken, as the
gatherings are held in private homes. A small
office in downtown New York acts merely as a
clearinghouse for information. There is no name
on the door, and mail is received anonymously
through a post-office box. The only income,
which is money received from the sale of a book
describing the work, is handled by the Alcoholic
Foundation, a board composed of three alcohol-
ics and four nonalcoholics.

In Chicago, twenty-five doctors work hand
in hand with Alcoholics Anonymous, contribut-
ing their services and referring their own alco-
holic patients to the group, which now numbers
around 200. The same cooperation exists in
Cleveland and to a lesser degree in other cen-
ters. A physician, Dr. W.D. Silkworth, of New
York City, gave the movement its first encour-
agement. However, many doctors remain skep-
tical. Dr. Foster Kennedy, an eminent New
York neurologist, probably had these in mind
when he stated at a meeting a year ago: "The
aim of those concerned in this effort against
alcoholism is high; their success has been con-
siderable; and I believe medical men of goodwill
should aid."

The active help of two medical men of good-
will, Drs. A. Wiese Hammer and C. Dudley
Saul, has assisted greatly in making the Philadel-
phia unit one of the more effective of the
younger groups. The movement there had its
beginning in an offhand way in February, 1940,
when a businessman who was an A.A. convert
was transferred to Philadelphia from New York.
Fearful of backsliding for lack of rescue work,
the newcomer rounded up three local barflies
and started to work on them. He got them dry,
and the quartet began ferreting out other cases.
By last December fifteenth, ninety-nine alcohol-
ics had joined up. Of these, eighty-six were
now total abstainers -thirty-nine from one to
three months, seventeen from three to six
months, and twenty-five from six to ten months.
Five who had joined the unit after having be-
longed in other cities had been nondrinkers
from one to three years.


AT THE end of the time scale, Akron, which
cradled the movement, holds the intra-
mural record for sustained abstinence. Accord-
ing to a recent checkup, two members have
been riding the A.A. wagon for five and a half
years, one for five years, three for four and a
half years, one for the same period with one
skid, three for three and a half years, seven for
three years, three for three years with one skid
each, one for two and a half years, and thirteen
for two years. Previously, most of the Akron-
ites and Philadelphians had been unable to stay
away from liquor for longer than a few weeks.

In the Middle West, the work has been almost
exclusively among persons who have not ar-
rived at the institutional stage. The New York
group, which has a similar nucleus, makes a
sideline specialty of committed cases and has
achieved striking results. In the summer of
1939, the group began working on the alcoholics
confined in Rockland State Hospital, at Orange-
burg, a vast mental sanitarium which gets the
hopeless alcoholic backwash of the big popula-
tion centers. With the encouragement of Dr.
R.E. Blaisdell, the medical superintendent, a
unit was formed within the walls, and meetings
were held in the recreation hall. New York
A.A.s went to Orangeburg to give talks, and
on Sunday evenings, the patients were brought
in state-owned buses to a clubhouse which the
Manhattan group rents on the West Side.

Last July first, eleven months later, records
kept at the hospital showed that of fifty-four
patients released to Alcoholics Anonymous,
seventeen had had no relapse and fourteen
others had had only one. Of the rest, nine had
gone back to drinking in their home com-
munities, twelve had returned to the hospital,
and two had not been traced. Dr. Blaisdell has
written favorably about the work to the State
Department of Mental Hygiene, and he praised
it officially in his last annual report.

Even better results were obtained in two
public institutions in New Jersey, Greystone
Park and Overbrook, which attract patients of
better economic and social background than
Rockland, because of their nearness to prosper-
ous suburban villages. Of seven patients re-
leased from the Greystone Park institution in
two years, five have abstained for periods of
one to two years, according to A.A. records.
Eight of ten released from Overbrook have
abstained for about the same length of time.
The others have had from one to several re-
lapses.


WHY SOME people become alcoholics is a
question on which authorities disagree.
Few think that anyone is "born an alcoholic."
One may be born, they say, with a hereditary
predisposition to alcoholism, just as one may
be born with a vulnerability to tuberculosis. The
rest seems to depend upon environment and
experience, although one theory has it that
some people are allergic to alcohol, as hayfever
sufferers are to pollens. Only one note is found
to be common to all alcoholics - emotional
immaturity. Closely related to this is an obser-
vation that an unusually large number of alcohol-
ics start out in life as an only child, as a younger
child, as the only boy in a family of girls or the
only girl in a family of boys. Many have records
of childhood precocity and were what are known
as spoiled children.

Frequently, the situation is complicated by
an off-center home atmosphere in which one
parent is unduly cruel, the other overindulgent.
Any combination of these factors, plus a divorce
or two, tends to produce neurotic children who
are poorly equipped emotionally to face the
ordinary realities of adult life. In seeking es-
capes, one may immerse himself in his business,
working twelve to fifteen hours a day, or in
sports or in some artistic sideline. Another finds
what he thinks is a pleasant escape in drink. It
bolsters his opinion of himself and temporarily
wipes away any feeling of social inferiority which
he may have. Light drinking leads to heavy
drinking. Friends and family are alienated and
employers become disgusted. The drinker
smolders with resentment and wallows in self-
pity. He indulges in childish rationalizations to
justify his drinking: He has been working hard
and he deserves to relax; his throat hurts from
an old tonsillectomy and a drink would ease the
pain; he has a headache; his wife does not
understand him; his nerves are jumpy; every-
body is against him; and so on and on. He
unconsciously becomes a chronic excuse-maker
for himself.

All the time he is drinking, he tells himself
and those who butt into his affairs that he can
really become a controlled drinker if he wants
to. To demonstrate his strength of will, he goes
for weeks without taking a drop. He makes a
point of calling at his favorite bar at a certain
time each day and ostentatiously sipping milk
or a carbonated beverage, not realizing that he
is indulging in juvenile exhibitionism. Falsely
encouraged, he shifts to a routine of one beer
a day, and that is the beginning of the end once
more. Beer leads inevitably to more beer and
then to hard liquor. Hard liquor leads to another
first-rate bender. Oddly, the trigger which sets
off the explosion is as apt to be a stroke of
business success as it is to be a run of bad luck.
An alcoholic can stand neither prosperity nor
adversity.


THE VICTIM is puzzled on coming out of the
alcoholic fog. Without his being aware of
any change, a habit has gradually become an
obsession. After a while, he no longer needs
his rationalizations to justify the fatal first drink.
All he knows is that he feels swamped by uneas-
iness or elation, and before he realizes what is
happening, he is standing at a bar with an empty
whiskey pony in front of him and a stimulating
sensation in his throat. By some peculiar quirk
of his mind, he has been able to draw a curtain
over the memory of the intense pain and re-
morse caused by preceding stemwinders. After
many experiences of this kind, the alcoholic
begins to realize that he does not understand
himself; he wonders whether his power of will,
though strong in other fields, isn't defenseless
against alcohol. He may go on trying to defeat
his obsession and wind up in a sanitarium. He
may give up the fight as hopeless and try to kill
himself. Or he may seek outside help.

If he applies to Alcoholics Anonymous, he is
first brought around to admit that alcohol has
him whipped and that his life has become unman-
ageable. Having achieved this state of intellec-
tual humility, he is given a dose of religion in
its broadest sense. He is asked to believe in a
Power that is greater than himself, or at least
to keep an open mind on that subject while he
goes on with the rest of the program. Any con-
cept of the Higher Power is acceptable. A
skeptic or agnostic may choose to think of his
Inner Self, the miracle of growth, a tree, man's
wonderment at the physical universe, the struc-
ture of the atom, or mere mathematical infinity.
Whatever form is visualized, the neophyte is
taught that he must rely upon it and, in his own
way, to pray to the Power for strength.

He next makes a sort of moral inventory of
himself with the private aid of another person
- one of his A.A. sponsors, a priest, a minister,
a psychiatrist, or anyone else he fancies. If it
gives him any relief, he may get up at a meeting
and recite his misdeeds, but he is not required
to do so. He restores what he may have stolen
while intoxicated and arranges to payoff old
debts and to make good on rubber checks; he
makes amends to persons he has abused and,
in general, cleans up his past as well as he is
able to. It is not uncommon for his sponsors to
lend him money to help out in the early stages.

This catharsis is regarded as important be-
cause of the compulsion which a feeling of guilt
exerts in the alcoholic obsession. As nothing
tends to push an alcoholic toward the bottle
more than personal resentments, the pupil also
makes out a list of his grudges and resolves not
to be stirred by them. At this point, he is ready
to start working on other, active alcoholics. By
the process of extroversion, which the work
entails, he is able to think less of his own
troubles.

The more drinkers he succeeds in swinging
into Alcoholics Anonymous, the greater his
responsibility to the group becomes. He can't
get drunk now without injuring the people who
have proved themselves his best friends. He is
beginning to grow up emotionally and to quit
being a leaner. If raised in an orthodox church,
he usually, but not always, becomes a regular
communicant again.


SIMULTANEOUSLY WITH the making over of
the alcoholic goes the process of adjusting
his family to his new way of living. The wife or
husband of an alcoholic, and the children, too,
frequently become neurotics from being ex-
posed to drinking excesses over a period of
years. Reeducation of the family is an essential
part of a followup program which has been
devised.

Alcoholics Anonymous, which is a synthesis
of old ideas rather than a new discovery, owes
its existence to the collaboration of a New York
stockbroker and an Akron physician. Both alco-
holics, they met for the first time a little less
than six years ago. In thirty-five years of
periodic drinking, Dr. Armstrong, to give the
physician a fictitious name, had drunk himself
out of most of his practice. Armstrong had tried
everything, including the Oxford Group, and
had shown no improvement. On Mother's Day,
1935, he staggered home, in typical drunk fash-
ion, lugging an expensive potted plant, which
he placed in his wife's lap. Then he went upstairs
and passed out.

At that moment, nervously pacing the lobby
of an Akron hotel, was the broker from New
York, whom we shall arbitrarily call Griffith.
Griffith was in a jam. In an attempt to obtain
control of a company and rebuild his financial
fences, he had come out to Akron and engaged
in a fight for proxies. He had lost the fight. His
hotel bill was unpaid. He was almost flat broke.
Griffith wanted a drink.

During his career in Wall Street, Griffith had
turned some sizable deals and had prospered,
but, through ill-timed drinking bouts, had lost
out on his main chances. Five months before
coming to Akron, he had gone on the water
wagon through the ministrations of the Oxford
Group in New York. Fascinated by the problem
of alcoholism, he had many times gone back as
a visitor to a Central Park West detoxicating
hospital, where he had been a patient, and
talked to the inmates. He effected no re-
coveries, but found that by working on other
alcoholics he could stave off his own craving.

A stranger in Akron, Griffith knew no alcohol-
ics with whom he could wrestle. A church
directory, which hung in the lobby opposite the
bar, gave him an idea. He telephoned one of
the clergymen listed and through him got in
touch with a member of the local Oxford Group.
This person was a friend of Dr. Armstrong's
and was able to introduce the physician and the
broker at dinner. In this manner, Dr. Armstrong
became Griffith's first real disciple. He was a
shaky one at first. After a few weeks of absti-
nence, he went East to a medical convention
and came home in a liquid state. Griffith, who
had stayed in Akron to iron out some legal
tangles arising from the proxy battle, talked him
back to sobriety. That was on June 10, 1935.
The nips the physician took from a bottle prof-
fered by Griffith on that day were the last drinks
he ever took.


GRIFFITH'S lawsuits dragged on, holding him
over in Akron for six months. He moved
his baggage to the Armstrong home, and to-
gether the pair struggled with other alcoholics.
Before Griffith went back to New York, two
more Akron converts had been obtained. Mean-
while, both Griffith and Dr. Armstrong had
withdrawn from the Oxford Group, because
they felt that its aggressive evangelism and
some of its other methods were hindrances in
working with alcoholics. They put their own
technique on a strict take-it-or-leave-it basis
and kept it there.

Progress was slow. After Griffith had re-
turned East, Dr. Armstrong and his wife, a
Wellesley graduate, converted their home into
a free refuge for alcoholics and an experimental
laboratory for the study of the guests' behavior.
One of the guests, who, unknown to his hosts,
was a manic depressive as well as an alcoholic,
ran wild one night with a kitchen knife. He was
overcome before he had stabbed anyone. After
a year and a half, a total of ten persons had
responded to the program and were abstaining.
What was left of the family savings had gone
into the work. The physician's new sobriety
caused a revival in his practice, but not enough
of one to carry the extra expense. The Arm-
strongs, nevertheless, carried on, on borrowed
money. Griffith, who had a Spartan wife, too,
turned his Brooklyn home into a duplicate of
the Akron ménage. Mrs. Griffith, a member of
an old Brooklyn family, took a job in a depart-
ment store and in her spare time played nurse
to inebriates. The Griffiths also borrowed, and
Griffith managed to make odd bits of money
around the brokerage houses. By the spring of
1939, the Armstrongs and the Griffiths had
between them cozened about one hundred alco-
holics into sobriety .


IN A BOOK which they published at that time,
the recovered drinkers described the cure
program and related their personal stories. The
title was Alcoholics Anonymous. It was adopted
as a name for the movement itself, which up to
then had none. As the book got into circulation,
the movement spread rapidly.

Today, Dr. Armstrong is still struggling to
patch up his practice. The going is hard. He is
in debt because of his contributions to the move-
ment and the time he devotes gratis to alcohol-
ics. Being a pivotal man in the group, he is
unable to turn down the requests for help which
flood his office.

Griffith is even deeper in the hole. For the
past two years, he and his wife have had no
home in the ordinary sense of the word. In a
manner reminiscent of the primitive Christians,
they have moved about, finding shelter in the
homes of A.A. colleagues and sometimes wear-
ing borrowed clothing.

Having got something started, both the prime
movers want to retire to the fringe of their
movement and spend more time getting back
on their feet financially. They feel that the way
the thing is set up, it is virtually self-operating
and self-multiplying. Because of the absence of
figureheads and the fact that there is no formal
body of belief to promote, they have no fears
that Alcoholics Anonymous will degenerate into
a cult.

The self-starting nature of the movement is
apparent from letters in the files of the New
York office. Many persons have written in say-
ing that they stopped drinking as soon as they
read the book, and made their homes meeting
places for small local chapters. Even a fairly
large unit, in Little Rock, got started in this way.
An Akron civil engineer and his wife, in gratitude
for his cure four years ago, have been steadily
taking alcoholics into their home. Out of thirty-
five such wards, thirty-one have recovered.


TWENTY PILGRIMS from Cleveland caught
the idea in Akron and returned home to
start a group of their own. From Cleveland, by
various means, the movement has spread to
Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Los Angeles, In-
dianapolis, Atlanta, San Francisco, Evansville,
and other cities. An alcoholic Cleveland news-
paperman with a surgically collapsed lung
moved to Houston for his health. He got a job
on a Houston paper and, through a series of
articles which he wrote for it, started an A.A.
unit which now has thirty-five members. One
Houston member has moved to Miami and is
now laboring to snare some of the more eminent
winter-colony lushes. A Cleveland traveling
salesman is responsible for starting small units
in many different parts of the country. Fewer
than half of the A.A. members have ever seen
Griffith or Dr. Armstrong.

To an outsider who is mystified, as most of
us are, by the antics of problem-drinking
friends, the results which have been achieved
are amazing. This is especially true of the more
virulent cases, a few of which are herewith
sketched under names that are not their own.

Sarah Martin was a product of the F. Scott
Fitzgerald era. Born of wealthy parents in a
Western city, she went to Eastern boarding
schools and "finished" in France. After making
her debut, she married. Sarah spent her nights
drinking and dancing until daylight. She was
known as a girl who could carry a lot of liquor.
Her husband had a weak stomach, and she
became disgusted with him. They were quickly
divorced. After her father's fortune had been
erased in 1929, Sarah got a job in New York
and supported herself. In 1932, seeking adven-
ture, she went to Paris to live and set up a
business of her own, which was successful. She
continued to drink heavily and stayed drunk
longer than usual. After a spree in 1933, she
was informed that she had tried to throw herself
out a window. During another bout, she did jump
or fall - she doesn't remember which - out of
a first-floor window. She landed face first on
the sidewalk and was laid up for six months of
bonesetting, dental work, and plastic surgery.


IN 1936, Sarah Martin decided that if she
changed her environment by returning to
the United States, she would be able to drink
normally. This childish faith in geographical
change is a classic delusion which all alcoholics
get at one time or another. She was drunk all
the way home on the boat. New York frightened
her and she drank to escape it. Her money ran
out and she borrowed from friends. When the
friends cut her, she hung around Third Avenue
bars, cadging drinks from strangers. Up to this
point, she had diagnosed her trouble as a nerv-
ous breakdown. Not until she had committed
herself to several sanitariums did she realize,
through reading, that she was an alcoholic. On
advice of a staff doctor, she got in touch with
an Alcoholics Anonymous group. Today, she
has another good job and spends many of her
nights sitting on hysterical women drinkers to
prevent them from diving out of windows. In
her late thirties, Sarah Martin is an attractively
serene woman. The Paris surgeons did hand-
somely by her.

Watkins is a shipping clerk in a factory. In-
jured in an elevator mishap in 1927, he was
furloughed with pay by a company which was
thankful that he did not sue for damages. Having
nothing to do during a long convalescence,
Watkins loafed in speakeasies. Formerly a mod-
erate drinker, he started to go on drunks lasting
several months. His furniture went for debt,
and his wife fled, taking their three children. In
eleven years, Watkins was arrested twelve
times and served eight workhouse sentences.
Once, in an attack of delirium tremens, he
circulated a rumor among the prisoners that the
county was poisoning the food in order to reduce
the workhouse population and save expenses.
A mess-hall riot resulted. In another fit of
D.T.'s, during which he thought the man in the
cell above was trying to pour hot lead on him,
Watkins slashed his own wrists and throat with
a razor blade. While recuperating in an outside
hospital, with eighty-six stitches, he swore
never to drink again. He was drunk before the
final bandages were removed. Two years ago,
a former drinking companion got him into Alco-
holics Anonymous, and he hasn't touched liquor
since. His wife and children have returned, and
the home has new furniture. Back at work,
Watkins has paid off the major part of $2,000
in debts and petty alcoholic thefts and has his
eye on a new automobile.


AT TWENTY-TWO, Tracy, a precocious son
of well-to-do parents, was credit manager
for an investment-banking firm whose name has
become a symbol of the money-mad twenties.
After the firm's collapse during the stock-mar-
ket crash, he went into advertising and worked
up to a post which paid him $23,000 a year. On
the day his son was born, Tracy was fired.
Instead of appearing in Boston to close a big
advertising contract, he had gone on a spree
and had wound up in Chicago, losing out on the
contract. Always a heavy drinker, Tracy be-
came a bum. He tippled on canned heat and
hair tonic and begged from cops, who are always
easy touches for amounts up to a dime. On one
sleety night, Tracy sold his shoes to buy a
drink, putting on a pair of rubbers he had found
in a doorway and stuffing them with paper to
keep his feet warm.

He started committing himself to sanitariums, 
more to get in out of the cold than anything
else. In one institution, a physician got him
interested in the A.A. program. As part of it,
Tracy, a Catholic, made a general confession
and returned to the church, which he had long
since abandoned. He skidded back to alcohol a
few times, but after a relapse in February,
1939, Tracy took no more drinks. He has since
then beat his way up again to $18,000 a year
in advertising.

Victor Hugo would have delighted in Brew-
ster, a heavy-thewed adventurer who took life
the hard way. Brewster was a lumberjack; cow-
hand, and wartime aviator. During the postwar
era, he took up flask-toting and was soon doing
a Cook's tour of the sanitariums. In one of them,
after hearing about shock cures, he bribed the
Negro attendant in the morgue, with gifts of
cigarettes, to permit him to drop in each after-
noon and meditate over a cadaver. The plan
worked well until one day he came upon a dead
man who, by a freak of facial contortion, wore
what looked like a grin. Brewster met up with
the A.A.s in December, 1938, and after achiev-
ing abstinence, got a sales job which involved
much walking. Meanwhile, he had got cataracts
on both eyes. One was removed, giving him
distance sight with the aid of thick-lens specta-
cles. He used the other eye for close-up vision,
keeping it dilated with an eye-drop solution in
order to avoid being run down in traffic. Then
he developed a swollen, or milk, leg. With these
disabilities, Brewster tramped the streets for
six months before he caught up with his drawing
account. Today, at fifty, still hampered by his
physical handicaps, he is making his calls and
is earning around $400 a month.


FOR THE Brewsters, the Martins, the Wat-
kinses, the Tracys, and the other reformed
alcoholics, congenial company is now available
wherever they happen to be. In the larger
cities, A.A.s meet one another daily at lunch in
favored restaurants. The Cleveland groups give
big parties on New Year's and other holidays,
at which gallons of coffee and soft drinks are
consumed. Chicago holds open house on Friday,
Saturday, and Sunday - alternately, on the
North, West, and South Sides - so that no
lonesome A.A. need revert to liquor over the
weekend for lack of companionship. Some play
cribbage or bridge, the winner of each hand
contributing to a kitty for paying of entertain-
ment expenses. The others listen to the radio,
dance, eat, or just talk. All alcoholics, drunk or
sober, like to gab. They are among the most
society-loving people in the world, which may
help to explain why they got to be alcoholics in
the first place.