“Every Man Needs to Acquire Habits of Self-Help”

Week Two of our series on Americans and liquor, our actions and attitudes. 

When we left off last week our President has just marked the end of Prohibition, 1933, by saying our nation needed “a good strong drink.”  For once, we obeyed our President, and hit the bottle.  Women in particular joined in the fun; having been barred from saloons before Prohibition, they had discovered the delights of drinking with other men and women in speakeasies.  Among Prohibition’s many unintended consequences, as we said last week, was a sharp rise in the volume of liquor and the number Americans putting it away each year.

Bill WilsonBy 1935, only two years later, two serious drunks, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith founded Alcoholics Anonymous, “to help other alcoholics achieve sobriety.” (It should be noted that AA does not take a stand on temperance or any other outside issues; it only focuses on helping alcoholics achieve sobriety.  It is not anti alcohol, just pro recovery for those powerless over alcohol.) 

Today AA claims US membership of over a million, worldwide 2 million members in 100,000 groups, and has spawned countless other programs using the 12 step approach.  Filmmaker Ken Burns called us “A Nation of Drunkards,” (not as high per capita consumption as, say, Russia, or the UK, but up there.)  But our nation also leads the pack in recovery movements.  As we said last week, we Americans are committed to both self-indulgence and self-improvement, often simultaneously, or at least serially!

The self-help movement, that very American approach to solving one’s problems by forming support groups of people similarly afflicted, was really perfected by AA.  But you can go back farther and find advocates for self improvement like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, and even to Ben Franklin’s quaint and crazy self actualizing schemes.  And my title quote is from that most unlikely hero of the self-help movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

It’s hard to picture Emerson at an AA meeting; he was such an advocate for self-reliance and individualism, working out one’s own problems, in one’s own way.  But in fact, self reliance supports the egalitarian spirit of self help groups like AA, and fosters its style of suspicion toward experts or authorities.  Such groups are remarkably democratic and lay led, with local autonomy and low overhead. Keep it simple and local, use volunteers; sounds pretty American to me.

Dr. Bob SmithI won’t recount the whole 75 years of AA or quote a lot of statistics – the facts and data are all pretty easily found. But since this is a column about America, let me reflect on a few people in AA history who embody some very typical American styles and attitudes.

Bill Wilson, co-founder, was a failed Wall Street broker who kept drinking away his jobs, relationships, trust, and self esteem.  He finally got sober in NY with the help of an unorthodox doctor who thought alcoholism was a disease, not a moral failing, a Christian group, the Oxford Movement, and by reading in the new field of psychology, especially William James. With the zeal of a convert he used his salesman skills at first just to help one alcoholic at a time, but for the next four decades he applied his sales experience and organization ideas into forming a movement.  There have been movies and plays about Bill and cofounder Dr. Bob; while Bill is of course a historical person, he seems in real life to be almost like a character in a drama, as American a salesman as Willie Loman is Death of a Salesman. 

Bill met Dr. Bob in Akron Ohio in 1935.  (Last week I noted that both the Temperance Movement and AA started in Ohio – more Americana, heartland Midwest.)  Newly sober but tempted to drink while away from his NY home on a sales trip, Bill phoned an unknown clergyman from the hotel lobby asking for the name of another drunk to talk with, and was referred to a notorious drunk who was also a local doctor.  They met at the home of a well to do woman, Henrietta Sieberling, a member of the Oxford Movement.  They talked all night, helped each other stay sober, and AA was born.

Dr. Bob’s part of the AA story adds more Americana to the tale, at least the mid 20^th century brand.   For all its anti-professionalism and determination to be lay led, AA would never have lasted without considerable help from professionals, like clergy and physicians, who would refer clients to their groups and lend credibility to the new idea that alcoholism was not a moral failure of the lower classes but a disease that affects every class and race (and gender and occupation.)  And despite AA’s remarkable and crucial insistence that it be self supporting by members and decline outside contributions, the progrm needed and got all kinds of advocacy and support from non-alcoholic people of power and influence and money. Mrs. Sieberling and countless other women hosts and patrons, provided support besides money – coffee, encouragement, referrals, credibility.  Lois Wilson, Bill’s wife, founded Al-Anon for the spouses and families.  The Rockefellers and other industry leaders, as they had supported temperance 30 years earlier to improve worker efficiency, now advocated for companies to treat rather than fire workers in recovery.

Marty MannOne more less known AA figure who adds to the Americana is Marty Mann, one of the first women members of AA and one of the first to carve out a profession in the field of recovery education and advocacy.  Founder in 1944 of the National Council on Alcoholism, she took the message of recovery to academia, legislatures, public media, and popular culture.  Born into wealth in Chicago at the turn of the century she drank heavily into the 30’s, when she met Bill Wilson, and became his first woman sponsee.  Like Bill and Bob, she brought her vocational skills, in her case, media and public relations, into her convert’s zeal.  She was fearless and bold in proclaiming her three convictions, which were all radical ideas in the 40’s:

-Alcoholism is a disease and the alcoholic a sick person.

-The alcoholic can be helped and is worth helping.

-Alcoholism is a public health problem and therefore a public responsibility.

Mann worked tirelessly with state and federal representatives and agencies to enact laws that set aside public health money, medical insurance and public institutions for alcohol treatment (as opposed to the then norm of jail and drunk tanks.)  Through savvy public media, she created a climate and hosted events where many famous public figures came out about their alcoholism.  She helped to found Yale University’s School of Alcohol Studies and brought academic credibility to the progressive view of alcoholism as a public health problem.  In the late 50’s Edward R. Murrow included her in his list of the 10 greatest living Americans.

Alcoholics Anonymous is now active in 170 countries, but its birthplace and its heartland values are as American as – apple pie?  How about hard apple cider?

Copyright © 2104 Deborah Streeter