30 Vesey Street, New York · 1941
A member brought in a prayer cut from a newspaper notice, and the office had it printed on wallet cards.
“Never had we seen so much A.A. in so few words.”
In 1941 Alcoholics Anonymous was six years old and suddenly busy. That March the Saturday Evening Post ran a long article about it, and letters poured into its one small office, at 30 Vesey Street in lower Manhattan. The office was run by Ruth Hock, a nonalcoholic secretary who had typed the Big Book as Bill W. dictated it.
One morning, as Ruth remembered it, a member named Jack C. dropped in for a chat and showed her a notice from the newspaper. AA’s archives trace it to the memorial notices in the New York Herald Tribune. It was addressed to someone’s mother.
In Memoriam
Mother—God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Goodbye.
The office wanted it on a card. On June 12, 1941, Ruth wrote to Henry S., a member in Washington who was a printer by trade, asking what it would cost to set it on “a small card, something like a visiting card, which can be carried in a wallet.” He sent 500 at once, and no bill. By Bill’s account, for several years a card went into every letter the office mailed.
Nobody at the office knew who had written the prayer. The notice didn’t say. By 1957 Bill had heard it credited to the early Greeks, an English poet, an American naval officer and a New York theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr.
It spread fast. By Bill’s account it soon took its place beside the two prayers AA already favored, the Lord’s Prayer and the Prayer of St. Francis.
It’s 1941, at AA’s one small office, on Vesey Street in lower Manhattan. A member named Jack drops in for a chat.
He shows the secretary, Ruth Hock, a few lines from the memorial notices in the paper. They’re a prayer.
God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
Bill W. later wrote that they had never seen so much AA in so few words.
Ruth writes to a member in Washington who’s a printer. Could he put it on a card small enough for a wallet? He sends five hundred, and no bill.
Nobody in the office knows who wrote it. The notice doesn’t say. More than eighty years later, people are still arguing about it.
Compare the accounts
The notice named no author. Here are four answers, in the order they were set down.
Only the 1950 answer is Niebuhr’s own, as AA’s magazine reported it. The last two come from the same researcher, seven years apart. Quotations are short excerpts, shown side by side for comparison.
9 years after the clipping reached AA
“Of course, it may have been spooking around for years, even centuries, but I don’t think so. I honestly do believe that I wrote it myself.”
The magazine dated his prayer to about 1932, as part of a longer one.
Quoted in “The Serenity Prayer,” AA Grapevine, January 1950. Niebuhr was a theologian at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
16 years after
“No one can tell for sure who first wrote the Serenity Prayer.”
He listed the guesses: the early Greeks, an anonymous English poet, an American naval officer, and Niebuhr, the choice of Jack Alexander, the Saturday Evening Post writer, “who once researched the matter.”
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age (1957), Bill’s own history of AA.
73 years after · Niebuhr had died in 1971
“…new evidence establishing to a high degree of confidence that Niebuhr did originate the Serenity Prayer.”
In 2008 he had doubted it. Then came Winnifred Wygal’s diary. On October 31, 1932, she wrote down Niebuhr’s words about “the serenity to accept what he cannot help and the courage to change what must be altered.”
His commentary “How I discovered I was wrong about the origin of the Serenity Prayer,” May 2014. Shapiro edits The Yale Book of Quotations.
80 years after · Wygal had died in 1972
“The demonstrable facts point to Winnifred Wygal as the coiner…”
She “combined pieces apparently drawn from Niebuhr with important other pieces of her own devising,” he wrote. Wygal was a YWCA official who had studied with Niebuhr, and hers is the earliest version known in print, from 1933.
The New Yale Book of Quotations (2021).
Still open
Wygal’s diary shows Niebuhr using the idea by 1932. Whether he or she gave the prayer its shape is still argued. AA’s own archives leave “a touch of mystery still,” and Bill’s answer in 1957 still holds: “Anyhow, we have the prayer…”
For a closer look
Three tellings of how the prayer reached the office, one small word that changed, and how the prayer went around the world.
AA has told this story three ways. They don’t agree on the year, the newspaper, the words, or who paid for the cards.
The Grapevine, 1950: an early member found it in 1939, “in an obituary appearing in the New York Times,” and brought it “to the little office on Vesey St.” By Bill’s own account, the office didn’t move to Vesey Street until the spring of 1940.
Bill W., 1957: “newsman Jack” brought in “an obituary notice from a New York paper” just before Ruth Hock left the office, in early 1942. In Bill’s memory it read “God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change.” A friend named Howard happened to walk in and said, “I’ll pay for the first printing.”
AA’s archives: in Ruth Hock’s memory, Jack C. came by one morning “for a chat” and showed her “the obituary notice.” The archives trace it to “an early June edition of the New York Herald Tribune,” where it read “Mother—God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change.” Ruth remembered Horace C. as the one who “had the idea of printing it on cards and paid for the first printing.” The archives don’t call the finder a newsman. They mention a different Jack C., a New York newspaperman, who wrote to Bill in 1957.
The archives also hold Ruth’s dated letter to the printer, June 12, 1941. Whatever else is uncertain, the prayer was in the office by then.
AA’s cards asked for courage to change the things “I can.” The versions credited to Niebuhr ask for courage to change the things “which should be changed,” or “which must be changed.”
Niebuhr didn’t seem to mind. Told of AA’s wording in 1950, he said, “in some respects, I believe your way is better.”
His daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, minded more. Asked in 2003 about “should” becoming “can,” she said, “if you can change something that should be changed, do it!” The change was, to her, “a dumbing down of the prayer.”
Other words moved too. Wygal’s 1933 version put courage first and asked for “insight to know the one from the other.” Most early versions pray for “us.” The notice in the paper said “me,” and so did AA’s cards.
Niebuhr’s wife, Ursula, told it this way in a letter to a Massachusetts newspaper. The prayer “happened to have been written for use in the village church at Heath,” in the hills of western Massachusetts. Their friend and neighbor Dr. Howard Robbins asked Niebuhr if he could print it in a monthly bulletin of the Federal Council of Churches. Then “the USO or some such organization asked for the use of it, and copies were printed, I believe, in the millions.”
She placed Robbins’s request early in the Second World War. The 1950 Grapevine has him asking in 1934, for a compilation he was making. Niebuhr’s daughter later dated the Heath service to the summer of 1943.
After the war the prayer reached Germany. Theodor Wilhelm, a German professor of education, heard it from Canadian soldiers and used it in a book in the early 1950s, under the pen name Friedrich Oetinger. That was the name of an 18th-century theologian, and for years Germans credited the prayer to him.