Illustration · A table in an archive reading room under a green-shaded lamp: an open box of folders, old letters laid out, one on Dolder Grand Hotel paper from Zurich, an envelope with a Swiss stamp, a pad and pencil, and a copy of the Big Book. Not drawn from a photograph.

Waterbury, New York and Providence · 1945 and after

Legacy

AA kept his story under a first name and an initial, and the people who went looking for his dates searched the wrong years first.

“…the recollections of his remarkable experience while under treatment by you has definitely become part of AA history.”

Bill W. to Dr. Carl Jung, January 23, 1961 · The Language of the Heart, 1988

Part of AA history

Rowland H. died at his desk in Waterbury on December 20, 1945, and was buried at Peace Dale. Helen died the next October. Yale’s obituary record, printed in January 1947, lists his jobs, his war service, his children and his two churches. For 1927 it has “big game hunting in Africa,” and for the next two years, “traveled in the United States.” It says nothing about drinking, Carl Jung or the Oxford Group.

AA already had his story, without his name. The Big Book of 1939 called him “a certain American business man.” Bill W. had tried to get word of it to Jung long before. In January 1946 he asked Margarita Luttichau, a student of Jung’s, to remind Jung that Rowland, his old patient, had helped Bill in his own recovery, and joked that he could claim to be “a lineal descendant from Dr. Jung.” In 1961 he wrote to Jung himself to thank him, and called the talk in which Jung gave Rowland up “the first link in the chain of events” that led to AA. Jung’s answer is told in Number One Man, 7 · Mr. Anonymous. Speaking at his 33rd anniversary, in a talk the Grapevine printed in January 1968, Bill told it once more: Rowland had gone to Jung “as a refuge of last resort.”

AA’s books never gave Rowland’s last name, and their dates came from Bill’s memory. Its biography of Bill, Pass It On, had him with Jung “for about a year,” and the Grapevine’s profile of him in May 1995 had him there “by 1931,” the year Bill remembered.

The people who went to his family’s papers looked in those years first, and didn’t find him there. In 2006 two researchers working separately, Amy Colwell Bluhm and Cora Finch, found him in Zurich in 1926, in letters written that spring. Bill’s date, Bluhm wrote, had sent the archivists and historians searching the wrong years.

He never joined AA. Some early members, Mike O. wrote, remembered him dropping in at its clubhouse on West 24th Street in New York, which opened in 1940. What he left AA was a story, and AA kept it, under a first name and an initial.

Listen Legacy About 1 minute

Follow the search

Who went looking

AA’s date for Rowland’s time with Jung came from Bill W.’s memory: about 1931. Here are five people who went to the papers, in the order they published, with where each looked and what each found.

From Mike O.’s essay for the Roundtable of AA History (1998) and Richard Dubiel’s book (2004), both as posted to AA History Lovers; Amy Colwell Bluhm’s paper (2006); Cora Finch’s Stellar Fire (2006–08); and Arthur S.’s timeline (2009). Quotations are short excerpts.

1998

Mike O.

The family’s papers, Providence · still 1931

“…there is no evidence in the records of the RIHS to suggest Hazard was in Switzerland at all during 1931 or ’32.”

An AA member in Florida, he drew on the Rhode Island Historical Society’s papers and its curator, Rick Stattler. He kept Bill’s year and guessed the treatment had come in pieces. By his last revision, in 2001, the essay also had the family paying a lay therapist in 1933 and bringing Rowland home in 1936.

Mike O., “Rowland Hazard (1881–1945),” for The Roundtable of AA History, April 12, 1998, revised through July 2001, reposted in AA History Lovers message 1807 (2004).

2004

Richard Dubiel

The same papers · 1931, two weeks to two months

“…they do not ever mention him going to Jung for psychiatric treatment.”

A professor in Wisconsin writing about the Emmanuel Movement, he read the letters between Rowland’s mother and brother, and made the family’s lay therapist, Courtenay Baylor, part of AA’s story. Stattler, who had sorted the papers, thought two weeks with Jung likelier than two months.

Richard M. Dubiel, The Road to Fellowship (2004), chapter 4, as excerpted in AA History Lovers message 1821 (2004).

2006

Amy Colwell Bluhm

Leonard Bacon’s and Irving Fisher’s papers at Yale · 1926

“[Bill W.’s] original report resulted in archivists and historians incorrectly calibrating their searches to the wrong date.”

She was writing a dissertation on another of Rowland’s cousins, Carol Sawyer Baumann, one of Jung’s early circle in Zurich, when a Washington Post review of Susan Cheever’s biography of Bill W., in May 2004, mentioned his name. From letters no one had examined, by Jung, Rowland, his cousin Leonard Bacon and his uncle and aunt, Irving and Margaret Fisher, she placed his first analysis with Jung in 1926, and guessed at a second in 1928.

Amy Colwell Bluhm, “Verification of C. G. Jung’s Analysis of Rowland Hazard and the History of Alcoholics Anonymous,” History of Psychology, November 2006.

2006

Cora Finch

Leonard Bacon’s papers at Yale, and the bank ledgers in Providence · May to July 1926

“I have not found any indication that Rowland visited Zurich between 1926 and 1931…”

Calling herself an amateur researcher, she followed him through his checks, the family’s telegrams and his relatives’ letters, from Zurich to Africa, London and New Mexico, and put it all online, notes and all.

Cora Finch, “Stellar Fire: Carl Jung, a New England Family, and the Risks of Anecdote,” stellarfire.org, 2006–07, last updated May 2008.

2009

Arthur S.

A timeline for AA members · 1931, likely 1926

“…a patient for about a year, (probably less)…”

His timeline, cross-referenced to the books for AA members, kept Bill’s year at the head of the entry, put the new one beside it in parentheses, and added a note to update it for Dubiel and Finch.

Arthur S., A Narrative Timeline of AA History, version of September 2009.

The wrong year first

Each search found what the papers held for the years it searched. It took letters kept with a cousin’s papers, in another library, to move the date back five years.

For a closer look

Go deeper

The first link in AA’s chain, the question of a second visit to Jung, and what is left of his papers.

The first link

In AA’s telling, Rowland is where the chain begins: Jung to Rowland, Rowland to Ebby T., Ebby to Bill W., and Bill to Dr. Bob in Akron. Bill closed his 1961 letter to Jung the same way. The “astonishing chain of events,” he wrote, “actually started long ago in your consulting room.”

The Grapevine’s 1995 profile was headed “A vital link in the chain.” Richard Dubiel wrote that AA tradition knew Rowland as “the messenger behind the messenger,” and that two things about him were usually told: he was in the Oxford Group, and he had been Jung’s patient. AA’s books leave out the rest of his life, and the years between.

A second visit?

AA’s story has Rowland at Jung’s twice, with a relapse between, and the conversation that mattered on the second visit. The papers show only the first, in 1926.

Cora Finch found no sign of Zurich between 1926 and 1931. There might have been time for a quick stop on the way to Africa in 1927, she wrote, but he apparently thought his drinking under control then. The family’s trip to Europe in the summer of 1931 left at most two months, Dubiel found, and the curator thought two weeks likelier. Amy Colwell Bluhm guessed at one in the spring of 1928 (2 · The dope for me), but Leonard Bacon’s letters from that April, as Finch quotes them, have him giving Rowland up in London, and Rowland sailed home. Nothing yet shows a second visit.

Jung came to America in late August 1936, the month Rowland’s family brought him back east after a bout in New Mexico (7 · Fifty times). Nothing shows they met. Writing to Bill in 1961, Jung said Rowland had “adequately reported” their conversation, but gave no date for it.

His papers

The Rhode Island Historical Society in Providence keeps the Rowland Hazard III Papers, two and a half feet of shelf sorted in 1999 by Steve Dalpe and Rick Stattler. Most of it is investment correspondence from his New York years and bank records from 1918 to 1939. Papers on the New Mexico businesses went in with the Aguadero Corporation’s records.

Almost none of his own letters survive, Dubiel wrote, so his life has to be read through other people’s: his mother’s and his brother’s, in Providence, and his aunt Caroline’s and his cousin Leonard Bacon’s, at Yale. Rowland’s letter from Zurich in May 1926 was in Leonard’s papers, in a folder marked “Hazard Family.”

The finding aid’s list of sources includes an unpublished typescript of 1992 by Ron R., who wrote the Grapevine’s 1995 profile. Its title is “Rowland the Messenger.”

Sources

Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University, 1945–1946 (January 1947), the entry for Rowland Hazard, class of 1903.
The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. “The Bill W.–Carl Jung Letters,” from the Grapevine of January 1963, with Bill’s letter of January 23, 1961, and Jung’s reply of January 30; and “Dr. Jung, Dr. Silkworth, and AA,” from January 1968.
Alcoholics Anonymous. Works Publishing, 1939. “There Is a Solution.”
Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter 5.
Ron R., “What We Were Like,” AA Grapevine, May 1995.
Mike O., “Rowland Hazard (1881–1945),” The Roundtable of AA History, April 12, 1998, revised through July 2001, reposted in AA History Lovers message 1807, May 2004.
Richard M. Dubiel, The Road to Fellowship. iUniverse, 2004. Chapter 4, as excerpted by Glenn C. in AA History Lovers message 1821, May 2004; not yet checked against the book.
Amy Colwell Bluhm, “Verification of C. G. Jung’s Analysis of Rowland Hazard and the History of Alcoholics Anonymous,” History of Psychology 9, no. 4 (November 2006), pages 313–324. Pages 313, 316–317 and 321–322.
Ian McCabe. Carl Jung and Alcoholics Anonymous: The Twelve Steps as a Spiritual Journey of Individuation. Karnac, 2015. Chapter 1, quoting Bill’s letter to Margarita Luttichau of January 10, 1946, in AA’s archives in New York.
Cora Finch, “Stellar Fire: Carl Jung, a New England Family, and the Risks of Anecdote”, stellarfire.org, 2006–07, last updated May 2008 (archived copy). The acknowledgments, chapter 7 and the notes.
Arthur S., A Narrative Timeline of AA History, 2009 (1931 and 1945).
Rhode Island Historical Society, Rowland Hazard III Papers, finding aid, 1999.