Something useful

A plan at three in the morning

In 1942 she left Macy’s for the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, writing radio scripts and then directing research. She wanted to be more broadly useful. Walking up Fifth Avenue one day, she looked at the windows of the grand apartment houses and wondered how many people like her were suffering behind them. During those years she read an article by Dwight Anderson, a publicist who had got sober with a psychiatrist’s help before AA began. He set out four statements about the problem drinker. She took them as her own, and cut them to three.

One cold night in February 1944 she couldn’t sleep. At about two in the morning she prayed, and then said the Serenity Prayer. At three she got up, went to her typewriter, and in what seemed almost automatic writing typed out a full plan: teach everyone the facts about alcoholism, and so take away its stigma. There would be committees in towns across the country, information centers, and hospital beds and clinics for alcoholics, whom most hospitals turned away.

Bill W. doubted that anyone would listen, and told her bluntly that she lacked scientific credibility. She gathered a small planning group, and her friend Dr. Ruth Fox, a psychiatrist, wrote to E. M. Jellinek at Yale’s Center of Alcohol Studies. Jellinek met her the next evening, and within forty-eight hours of getting her plan he had her on Yale’s staff. For six months she spent her working weeks in New Haven, living with the Jellineks and learning the science. On October 2, 1944, the National Committee for Education on Alcoholism opened a tiny office in New York, in the Academy of Medicine’s building on East 103rd Street. The staff was Marty and a secretary, and the first year’s budget was $13,000.

Image to comeYale University, New Haven, postcard, 1930–1945

She called a press conference at once, and newspapers across the country ran it on the front page. On October 9 the New York Herald Tribune, on page 9, used her full name in its headline: “Mrs. Marty Mann, Ex-Alcoholic, Explains How She Was Cured.” In her first year she gave 106 talks, traveled 36,000 miles and spoke in 45 cities to more than 34,000 people. She got New York’s buses and subway trains to carry a plain statement: “Alcoholism is a disease.”

Many in AA were alarmed. With Yale in favor and Bill urging her on, and after six months of holding back for fear of losing her sobriety, she had decided to say in public both that she was an alcoholic and that AA had got her sober. She was photographed full face and named as a member, and Bill W. and Dr. Bob had lent their names to her letterhead. Some members thought she was on an ego trip, or would drink and disgrace them all, and letters attacked Bill for not stopping her. But wherever she spoke, AA groups filled with newcomers, and, for the first time in AA’s history, with women in numbers. Then in 1946 a fund-raising letter went out that mentioned AA throughout, with the founders’ names on it. Bill and Dr. Bob withdrew, and AA’s trustees, then called the Alcoholic Foundation, declared: “Alcoholics Anonymous looks with disfavor on the unauthorized use of its name in any fund-raising activity.” After that she went on saying she was an alcoholic, but stopped saying where she got sober. “I have the right to say I am an alcoholic and that I am here. I do not have the right to say you are an alcoholic and that you are here.”

In January 1949 she had major surgery, and went back to work before she had recovered, because Yale was pulling out. A fund-raising leaflet, “My Daddy Didn’t Do It,” had told of a drinking banker named Harry Brown, and Yale graduates named Harry Brown who were bankers had written angry letters to the dean. In May she put coin boxes in the city’s bars that read “You Can Drink,” “Help the Alcoholic Who Can’t” and “Alcoholism Is a Disease.” On June 30 she wrote to her advisory board for money: “This is a matter of life or death!” On December 31, 1949, Yale cut the committee loose. It renamed itself the National Committee on Alcoholism, and in 1957 the National Council on Alcoholism. She ran it for eighteen more years. The early years, and above all the ones after Yale, were hard: “It was like pushing a boulder up a hill with your nose—three steps up and two back.”