New Mexico, New York and Waterbury · 1936–1945
A relapse after AA had begun, a story Jung told in London, two sons lost in the war, and a desk in Waterbury.
“…when he had repeated his story twenty, or it may have been fifty, times, he got sick of it and took to drink again.”
In 1936 Rowland H. joined the Episcopal Church. That summer he was at the ranch in New Mexico, and in August, Richard Dubiel found in his brother Pierre’s papers, he had “a serious drinking bout.” The family paid to bring him back east, and that month he was in a hospital in New York. One letter proposed asking his friend Shep C. of the Oxford Group to help.
By then Bill W. had been sober for nearly two years and Dr. Bob for more than one, and the drunks they had found still met inside the Oxford Group. On August 30 Jung himself landed in New York for a lecture tour. Nobody knows whether he and Rowland met.
Rowland went back to work. He left the brokerage in 1938 for Lockwood Greene, an engineering firm, and by 1940, Yale’s record says, he was executive vice-president of The Bristol Company of Waterbury, Connecticut, a maker of precision instruments. He was a vestryman of Calvary Church in New York, Sam Shoemaker’s parish and the Oxford Group’s American home, and of St. Peter’s-by-the-Sea at Narragansett. When the Group renamed itself Moral Re-Armament in 1938, he stayed with it. Lois W. remembered him as “an ardent Oxford Grouper until his death.” He never joined AA.
The war came into the family. His eldest son, Rowland, Princeton class of 1941, was killed in service in April 1944. Peter, who had been at Harvard, was lost in action at Okinawa in March 1945.
On December 20, 1945, Rowland died of a coronary occlusion in Waterbury, at his office desk. He was 64. He was buried at Peace Dale, and Helen died the next October. Nobody has found a record of his drinking after 1936. His daughter-in-law said in 1995 that, as far as the family knew, he never took another drink after he got sober.
It’s April 1939, in London. Carl Jung is telling an audience about an alcoholic the Oxford Group cured. They sent him round Europe to tell his story, Jung says, and after twenty or fifty times he got sick of it and drank again. Jung doesn’t say who he was.
The same month, in New York, the Big Book tells of a businessman a famous doctor gave up on, and says he lives and is a free man.
Rowland H. went to Europe with the Group in 1935. In August 1936 his family brought him back from New Mexico after a bad drinking bout. He stayed with the Group and his church, and went to work for an instrument company in Waterbury, Connecticut. The war took two of his sons.
In December 1945 he died at his desk. Nobody has found that he drank again after 1936.
Compare the accounts
In April 1939, the month the Big Book came out in New York, Jung told a London audience about an alcoholic he had turned away. He never said who the man was. Cora Finch thinks he was likely Rowland. Here are the two stories side by side.
From Jung’s remarks to the Guild of Pastoral Psychology, London, April 5, 1939, printed in his Collected Works, vol. 18, as Cora Finch quotes them, and “There Is a Solution” in Alcoholics Anonymous, 1939. Quotations are short excerpts.
April 5 · no name
“A hysterical alcoholic was cured by this Group movement, and they used him as a sort of model…”
When he drank again, Jung said, the Group sent him to a doctor, and Jung refused the case: “I sent the man back to these people…”
Jung, The Symbolic Life, Collected Works, vol. 18, paragraphs 620–21, as Cora Finch quotes it.
April · no name, no year
“But this man still lives, and is a free man.”
After his treatment he was drunk in a short time, the book says, and the doctor called him “utterly hopeless,” then told him of the rare alcoholics who had had “vital spiritual experiences.”
“There Is a Solution,” in Alcoholics Anonymous (1939), the Big Book. Bill W. wrote the chapter.
What came first
Then
The doctor
If it was Rowland
Jung’s story runs the other way from AA’s: the Group first, then the drink, then the doctor. If his alcoholic was Rowland, Cora Finch argues, the talk AA remembers may have come in 1936, after the Group’s tour of Europe, perhaps that August, when Jung was in America. Either way, the Big Book’s free man had been drunk less than three years before it went to press.
For a closer look
Jung’s second telling, the instrument company in Waterbury, and two sons.
In a later talk, also printed in volume 18 of his Collected Works, Jung told what seems to be the same story. This time the alcoholic had come under “the laudable influence of a certain religious movement” and was held up as a witness to divine grace, and when he drank again the movement decided he was “pathological” and put him in a clinic.
Cora Finch found the London remarks through Dr. Robert Winer, a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst, who pointed out that Jung had told his own version of a patient who was very likely Rowland. Jung’s point, she writes, is less about hopelessness than about consistency: if a man’s faith has cured him once, that is where he should look again.
Waterbury was a factory city, and The Bristol Company made precision instruments there. Rowland had run chemical and coke businesses, a woolen mill and a pottery, and in 1940–41 he also worked in New York as an independent consultant in engineering and industrial management.
When he died, the Scientific Apparatus Makers of America sent the family a memorial. It is in his papers at the Rhode Island Historical Society.
Rowland Gibson, called Rowley in the family, was born in 1917, went to Princeton with the class of 1941 and died in service on April 29, 1944. Peter Hamilton, born in 1918, was at Harvard from 1937 to 1941. He died on March 27, 1945, at Okinawa, and was still listed as missing in action when his father died.
Mel B., citing a book called The Little Giants, wrote that Peter was a Navy pilot, killed chasing a Japanese plane through flak from American guns. Ron R., in his Grapevine profile, tells it a little differently. A snapshot of Rowland with Peter in a naval officer’s uniform, in front of the house at Peace Dale, survives from 1943 or 1944.
Of the four children only Charles, the youngest, lived long. He died in 1995.