The Union Club, New York · February 8, 1940
John D. Rockefeller Jr. gave a dinner for AA, and his son told the guests AA should pay its own way.
“There was a place in A.A. where spirituality and money would mix, and that was in the hat.”
In February 1940, John D. Rockefeller Jr. invited some 400 of New York’s prominent and wealthy men to dinner at the Union Club, to meet the alcoholics. About 75 came. Bill W. reckoned that the guest list’s “total financial worth might easily be a billion dollars.” The alcoholics thought their money troubles were over.
A New York member sat at each table to answer questions. Rockefeller had fallen ill, so his son Nelson hosted. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick spoke for religion and the neurologist Dr. Foster Kennedy for medicine. Dr. Bob spoke briefly, and Bill told his own story. The dinner was squab on toast.
“Breathlessly we waited for the climax—the matter of money,” Bill wrote. Nelson Rockefeller told the guests that AA “should be self-supporting so far as money is concerned. It needs only our good will.” They applauded, shook hands, and “the whole billion dollars’ worth of them walked out the door.”
Afterward Rockefeller gave $1,000, and the guests about $2,000 more, enough to allot Bill and Dr. Bob $30 a week for a year. The newspapers did the rest. “John D. Rockefeller dines toss-pots,” one headline read, and orders for the book poured in. Within five years AA wrote to the dinner guests that it needed no more of their money.
It’s February 8, 1940, at the Union Club in New York. John D. Rockefeller Jr. has invited some four hundred of New York’s prominent and wealthy men to dinner, to meet a roomful of sober drunks. About seventy-five come.
The alcoholics think their money troubles are over.
After dinner, Rockefeller’s son Nelson stands up. AA, he says, should be self-supporting. It needs only their good will.
The guests applaud, shake hands, and walk out the door. Bill W. and his friends are dazed.
But the newspapers carry the story around the world, and orders for the book pour in. Within five years, AA writes to the dinner guests. Thank you, but we don’t need your money anymore.
In order
Bill counted three money temptations: two to take outside money, and one, in between, to hold back the members’ own. One rule came out of them.
All from Bill’s own account in Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, 1957. The count of three is his.
1937–1938
Rockefeller’s advisers heard the members’ plans for hospitals, paid missionaries and free literature. He gave $5,000 to keep Bill and Dr. Bob going, and no more: “But please don’t ever ask me for any more.”
$30 a week each, while it lasted
Bill W., 1957
1941
The second ran the other way: members grew so wary of money that they held back their own. The office asked each member for a dollar a year, and Bill cursed the drunks for being slow to send it. That night, when the hat came up the stairs at the club, he found a half-dollar in his pocket, put it back, and dropped in a dime.
He never again criticized anybody for not sending a dollar
Bill W., 1957
Later
A woman left AA $10,000 in her will, when the office badly needed it. The trustees argued it out. Taking it, some said, would be “like the alcoholic’s first drink.” They turned it down, and resolved to turn down every such gift.
Bill doesn’t give the year
Bill W., 1957
1950
The rule the members adopted with the other Traditions: “Every A.A. group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions.”
The reason the basket goes around
The Twelve Traditions, short form
Corporate poverty
Bill borrowed a phrase from St. Francis: corporate poverty. For AA it didn’t mean no money at all, he wrote, but “the least possible money to do the job well.” The basket is how the groups raise that much themselves.
For a closer look
Rockefeller’s famous sentence, told two ways in one book; the dollar a year; and what the papers made of the dinner.
Rockefeller said it to his old friend Dick Richardson, not to Bill, and Bill told it two ways in the same book.
In one chapter, Rockefeller says, “I think money will spoil this.” In another, he says to Richardson, “Dick, I am afraid that money will spoil this thing.”
The question itself was older. At the late-1937 meeting in Rockefeller’s office, his friend Albert Scott had asked, “Won’t money spoil this thing?” The sense is the same every way it’s told. Bill called Rockefeller and St. Francis “the oddly assorted pair who were really responsible for A.A.’s Tradition on money.”
In 1941, after the Saturday Evening Post article, the book’s income couldn’t pay for answering thousands of letters. The office set a dollar a year per member as the yardstick for what groups might send. “It was the first time A.A. Headquarters had asked groups for any help.”
That morning Bill griped about stingy drunks and grandly handed a friend fresh off a bender a five-dollar bill, money Lois needed for groceries. That night, at the club on 24th Street, the leader asked the members to “go a little heavy on the hat tonight” because the rent was behind. Bill swapped his half-dollar for a dime.
His verdict on himself: the five dollars was “an ego-feeding act, bad for him and bad for me.”
No reporters were let into the dinner. If one of the alcoholics had turned up drunk, the evening would have been a disaster for Rockefeller. Once it had gone well, his publicity firm helped draft a statement for the press.
Some headlines were lurid, like “John D. Rockefeller dines toss-pots,” but the stories were friendly. Bill wrote that the news of the dinner “helped double our total membership in a year’s time.”
Rockefeller also bought 400 copies of the Big Book, at a dollar each, to send to everyone on the guest list.