New York and Akron · 1935–1937
The Group listened for God together and checked what it heard. The alcoholics didn’t fit, and the Group’s leaders said so. By the end of 1937 New York’s drunks met on their own.
“The rest of the team would get guidance for him to work with such and such a person in order to ‘bring him to God.’”
An Oxford Grouper’s day began with a quiet time, alone with a notebook. “Use a note-book and pencil,” Cecil Rose advised in When Man Listens (1937). “Put down the thoughts which come in ‘quiet time.’” Not everything written down came from God, the Group’s handbooks warned, so guidance was tested: against the Bible, against the four absolutes, and against what other people heard. “But chiefly,” Sam Shoemaker wrote in 1932, “guidance is to be tested by the concurrence of other guided people.”
That was team guidance. Lois W. remembered the Group of early 1935 working “in teams of six to a dozen, sitting quietly together like a Quaker meeting and listening for the guidance of God for each one.” Bill W. belonged to a team for a while. When it chose someone for him to work with, his own guidance was usually different, and he felt nothing in common with the people they picked. “He became a bit annoyed at being told what to do.”
The people he did feel for were drunks, and he brought them home. From the fall of 1935 he and Lois held a weekly meeting for alcoholics at their house on Clinton Street in Brooklyn. Calvary’s leaders called the work “narrow and divisive,” and near the end of 1935 the men living at the Calvary Mission were told not to go. The Group, Pass It On says, disapproved of “the alcoholics’ concentration on their problem to the exclusion of other group concerns.”
Inside the Group, at least one man had doubts. Sherwood Day had worked beside Buchman for twenty-two years. Recovering from pneumonia in the winter of 1936–37, Lean writes, he found himself reacting against some of his colleagues’ attitudes and phrases. Among the doubts Lean lists for him: “Was it right to consider that alcoholics were no longer part of their responsibility?” Day later left and became a Presbyterian minister.
“Until the middle of 1937 we in New York had been working alongside the Oxford Groups,” Bill wrote twenty years later. “But in the latter part of that year we most reluctantly parted company with these great friends.” The Groupers hadn’t thought much of an aim limited to alcoholics, he said, and the alcoholics couldn’t do much about helping them “save the whole world.” In Akron, Dr. Bob’s alcoholics stayed in the Group two years longer.
It’s 1935, in New York. Every morning the Oxford Group’s people sit quietly with a notebook and pencil and write down what they believe God is telling them. Then they check it with one another. In a team, the others listen for you too. Bill W. joins one. The team gets guidance that he should work with this man or that one, and Bill feels nothing for the people they choose. He wants to work with drunks.
So he brings them home to Clinton Street, and the Group’s leaders call it narrow. In the latter part of 1937, New York’s alcoholics part company with the Group, reluctantly.
Twenty years later Bill sets down what they had to drop: pressure, aggressive evangelism, team guidance, the absolutes served by the bucket, and famous names. The Group, he writes, showed them what to do, and what not to do.
Set side by side
In 1957 Bill W. set down what AA had to drop from the Oxford Group: five things it couldn’t sell to alcoholics. Here each one is set beside the Group’s own words for it, from its books and its biographer.
Quotations are short excerpts, shown side by side for comparison. Bill’s are all from AA Comes of Age (1957), in his order.
What to do, and what not to
Bill set the list down without blaming anyone. The Groupers “had clearly shown us what to do,” he wrote, and from them AA had also learned “what not to do as far as alcoholics were concerned.” “Our debt to them, nevertheless, was and is immense, and so the final breakaway was very painful.”
For a closer look
What “checking” meant; the two times Bill wrote his list down; and who decided, in New York and in Akron.
The Group used the word for two things: testing your guidance against other people’s, and pointing out one another’s faults. In the order the accounts were written:
Bill wrote his list down at least twice. The first time was in a letter of October 30, 1940, to a member in Richmond, Virginia. It opens personally: some of the Group’s presentation of the Christian message “saved my life,” Bill wrote, while “other attitudes of the O.G. nearly got me drunk again.” Then come eight points: aggressive evangelism, publicity, the word “absolute,” coercion and checking, guidance, tolerance, no religious requirement, and room for Catholics.
With “absolute” in front of honesty, purity, unselfishness and love, he wrote, those ideals “either turned people away by the hundreds or gave a temporary spiritual inflation resulting in collapse.” He kept guidance itself, “most of us believe profoundly in the principle of ‘guidance,’” but found that receiving it accurately took “considerable spiritual preparation.”
Seventeen years later, in AA Comes of Age, he gave the five on the cards above, and coercion and checking had a name: “team guidance.”
Was Buchman a dictator? His biographer Garth Lean, one of his followers, gathered answers from people who had worked with him. Paul Tournier: “He never drew people to himself, but he was authoritarian.” Cuthbert Bardsley, later a bishop: “His word went, woe betide you if you crossed swords with him.” Paul Hodder-Williams: “He held together a team of very different people on a very loose rein.”
Lean’s own answer was that “in the 1930s, and on most occasions throughout his life, the basis of action was the guidance of God as sought by the individual and in groups.” He allowed that as Buchman grew older, “exceptions to this openness became more frequent.”
In Akron the Wednesday meeting at T. Henry Williams’s house was planned each Monday by the members who felt responsible for it. “We sat down and sought guidance and direction as to what to put together for the meeting,” T. Henry remembered. Clarence S. of Cleveland remembered who those planners were: the “most surrendered.” The alcoholics, a minority, were usually only “surrendered”; the others were “more surrendered” or “most surrendered.” In New York the word for it was “maximum.”