Flashback Friday: Alcoholics Anonymous 1935
Author: John Leffman
Eighty-seven years ago, today, Robert Smith drank his last drink, the date marked by AA for its anniversaries.
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is an international mutual aid fellowship dedicated to abstinence based recovery from alcoholism through its spiritually inclined Twelve Step program. Following its Twelve Traditions, AA and autonomous AA groups are self-supporting through the strictly voluntary contributions from members only. The Traditions also establish AA as non-professional, non-denominational and apolitical, with an avowed desire to stop drinking as its sole requirement for membership. Though AA has not endorsed the disease model of alcoholism, to which its program is nonetheless sympathetic, its wider acceptance is partly due to many members independently promulgating it. A recent scientific review shows that by many measures AA does as well or better than other clinical interventions or no treatment. In particular, AA produces better abstinence rates with lower medical costs. As of 2020, having spread to diverse cultures, including geopolitical areas normally resistant to grassroots movements, AA has estimated its worldwide membership to be over two million with 75% of those in the U.S. and Canada.
AA marks 1935 for its founding when Wall Street analyst and newly recovering alcoholic Bill Wilson, then reeling from a failed proxy fight, sought to stay sober by commiserating with detoxing surgeon Bob Smith. After leaving the Oxford Group to form a fellowship of alcoholics only, Wilson and Smith, along with other early members, wrote Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered From Alcoholism, from which AA acquired its name. Published in 1939 and commonly called “the Big Book”, it contains AA’s Twelve Step recovery program. Later editions included the Twelve Traditions, first adopted in 1946 to formalize and unify the fellowship as a “benign anarchy”.
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June 11, 2022 at 12:21 PM
This has helped a huge number of people… I’ve heard some say it wasn’t their thing but it helped many people getting their lives back.
June 11, 2022 at 3:07 PM
I spent a couple of years in a sister group in the early 90s…CoDA…Co-Dependants Anonymous. Very helpful for those of us that have issues but, don’t drink much. It was a suggestion from the private hospital in Greensboro when after care ran out. Support from others with similar issues is a grand thing.
June 11, 2022 at 10:59 PM
That is cool that it branched out and helped other people with different problems.
June 12, 2022 at 1:25 AM
There is also Narcotics Anonymous.
June 11, 2022 at 1:44 PM
I know a few “friends of Bill,” and it’s amazing what AA has done for them.
June 11, 2022 at 3:08 PM
Oh, yeah. Read above comment….
June 11, 2022 at 9:05 PM
AA saved my life … I was one of those who didn’t do well with the medical model. But going from atheist to a man of faith was not an easy road … sometimes my after picture was worse than the before, but I didn’t drink and that was all that I asked from AA …
June 12, 2022 at 1:20 AM
It certainly saved many people from hell.
I was in CoDA for 2 1/2 years. Read my comment to Max, above.