One Drunk to Another A Bunch of Actors
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Illustration · A street-corner newsstand on a winter morning in 1941, with a bundle of the week’s new magazines and a roll of nickels on the counter. Not drawn from a photograph.

Philadelphia and New York · 1940–1941

A bunch of actors

The Saturday Evening Post sent a reporter fresh from exposing rackets to find out whether AA was one.

“They had behaved like a bunch of actors sent out by some Broadway casting agency.”

Jack Alexander, on the first four members who called on him · quoted in Pass It On, 1984

The assignment

AA reached Philadelphia in 1940 with a salesman, Jimmy B., who had gone there for a job, and two of the city’s doctors, A. Wiese Hammer and C. Dudley Saul, were soon singing its praises to a friend: Judge Curtis Bok, one of the owners of the Saturday Evening Post. That winter Bok called in Jack Alexander, a reporter known as hard-nosed, who had just finished an exposé of the New Jersey rackets. Alexander hesitated, Pass It On says, until he heard that AA “had connections with both religion and Rockefeller.”

Four members called on him at his apartment. They were good-looking and well dressed, he remembered, drank nothing but Coca-Cola, and spun yarns about their drinking. When they left, he was sure his leg was being pulled. Bill W., whom he met the next day at AA’s office on Vesey Street, struck him as “a very disarming guy,” but so frank about his own past and his mistakes that Alexander thought him “either incredibly naive or a bit stupid.”

Bill had a plan of his own. “We gave him our records, opened the books,” he wrote, introduced him to the trustees and to members of every kind, and showed him AA from New York and Philadelphia to Chicago, by way of Akron and Cleveland. Though he was not an alcoholic, Bill wrote, Alexander soon became “a true A.A. convert in spirit.”

Two things worried Bill. He asked Alexander to leave out the Oxford Group if he could, since Frank Buchman’s remarks about Hitler had led to charges that it was pro-Nazi (Stockbridge, in What Not to Do, tells them), or at least to say nothing that stung: “After all, we owe our lives to the group.” And the Post wanted photographs. “No pictures, no article,” the editors said, as Bill remembered it. Over the protests of fearful members, he gave them the pictures.

The article, with the subtitle “Freed Slaves of Drink, Now They Free Others,” led the issue of March 1, 1941, which reached the newsstands on February 24. It called Bill “Griffith” and Dr. Bob “Armstrong,” and it printed the Alcoholic Foundation’s mailing address. In Toledo a new member was handed a two-dollar roll of nickels and sent from newsstand to newsstand until he had bought 40 copies.

Listen A bunch of actors About 1 minute

By AA’s own count

The line the news moved

AA’s membership from 1938 to 1943, in the round numbers its own books give, with the first stories about it pinned where they fell.

Counts from the Big Book’s foreword (1939), Bill W.’s writing in the Grapevine and AA Comes of Age (1957), and the editors of The Language of the Heart (1988). They are AA’s own round numbers; nobody kept a roll.

AA’s membership, 1938 to 1943, with the first stories about itA line chart of AA’s membership in the round numbers its own books give: about 40 in the spring of 1938, 100 in April 1939, 800 at the end of 1939, 2,000 in the spring of 1941, 8,000 at the end of 1941 and 10,000 in the spring of 1943. Numbered pins mark Liberty’s article in September 1939 (1), the Plain Dealer’s series in October 1939 (2), the Houston Press articles early in 1940 (3), the Rockefeller dinner in February 1940 (4) and the Saturday Evening Post article in March 1941 (5). The line stays low until 1940 and climbs most steeply in the months after the Post article.02,0004,0006,0008,00010,000193819391940194119421943401008002,0008,00010,000Liberty, September 19391The Plain Dealer, October 19392The Houston Press, early 19403The Rockefeller dinner, February 19404The Saturday Evening Post, March 19415
After that the line runs off the top: 24,000 members by 1946, by Bill’s count; 111,765 in 1951, by the records Pass It On cites; 200,000 in 1957. At that size it can’t show which story moved it.
  1. 1

    Liberty · September 1939

    “Alcoholics and God.” AA began 1939 with fewer than a hundred members and ended it with more than 800, Bill wrote.

  2. 2

    The Plain Dealer · October 1939

    A series in Cleveland, where a group of a score or so ran into the hundreds within months.

  3. 3

    The Houston Press · early 1940

    Six articles, written anonymously, and the first group in Texas.

  4. 4

    The Rockefeller dinner · February 1940

    The wire services carried it worldwide, and membership went “from eight hundred to over two thousand in twelve months,” Bill wrote. The basket tells the dinner.

  5. 5

    The Saturday Evening Post · March 1941

    Ruth Hock counted 918 inquiries in the first twelve days. AA went from 2,000 members to 8,000 by the end of the year.

A hundredfold

By Bill’s reckoning, a handful of friends in the press had “increased AA’s ranks by one-hundred-fold in the short space of four years.”

For a closer look

Go deeper

What Alexander and Bill each made of their first meeting, the names the Post printed, and the article that came nine years later.

Two views of Vesey Street

Alexander took Bill’s frankness for naivety. Bill saw the same month as AA at work: the records, the trustees, the trip west. He called it “our organized service of public information,” the part of AA’s public relations “that most A.A.’s have never seen.”

Pass It On gives each of them half. Alexander had been right that Bill was candid, it says, but there was nothing naive or stupid about it: “it was deliberate, and it achieved its purpose.”

Names in the Post

The Post printed no real names. Bill was “Griffith” and Dr. Bob “Armstrong,” and among four other stories at the end was Marty M.’s, as “Sarah Martin,” Pass It On says.

Of the four photographs, one was taken before the fireplace at the 24th Street clubhouse, captioned “A typical clubhouse discussion group.” Bill sat front and center, with Lois W. and Ruth Hock among the others, many of them with their backs to the camera. (What’s the angle?, in Rule 62, tells the clubhouse.)

The second article

In 1949 Bill asked him for another piece. Alexander answered on June 9 that he had always thought about writing a follow-up but had never gotten around to it, AA’s archives record. “The Drunkard’s Best Friend” ran in the Post of April 1, 1950. (Arthur S.’s timeline dates it March 29.)

Alexander became an AA trustee in 1951 and stayed on the board until 1956, though poor health kept him from most of its meetings, Pass It On says. He read Bill’s drafts of the Twelve and Twelve and sent back notes (Legacy, in Rule 62, tells what he made of them). He died in 1975.

Sources
  • Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter 14 and its notes.
  • Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “When A.A. Came of Age,” “Service: The Third Legacy” and “Landmarks in A.A. History.”
  • The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “Twelve Suggested Points for AA Tradition” (April 1946), “Press, Radio, Television” (October 1957) and “Let’s Keep It Simple—But How?” (July 1960), first printed in the AA Grapevine, and the editors’ introduction to Part One.
  • Alcoholics Anonymous. Works Publishing, 1939. The foreword.
  • aa.org, “The Story Behind Jack Alexander’s Article.”
  • aa.org, “Anonymity Letter to Media,” January 2026.
  • Arthur S., A Narrative Timeline of AA History, 2009.