Illustration · A country road in the Berkshire hills on a summer evening, a stone wall beside it and a pint bottle lying in the grass under the roadside bushes. Not drawn from a photograph.

New York and Vermont · 1932–1934

The pint in the bushes

A hospital, a farm in Vermont, a company in trouble, and a lay therapist from Boston.

“You will never take a drink again.”

The voice Rowland H. said he heard on the road to Pittsfield, as Cebra G. remembered it for Bill W. in 1954 · Mel B., Ebby, 1998

The deepest slump

In February 1932, less than a year after his second wedding to Helen, Rowland H. went into a hospital for alcoholism. He was there into March. Richard Dubiel, who went through the family’s papers at the Rhode Island Historical Society, found it in the letters his mother and his brother Pierre wrote each other. Almost none of Rowland’s own letters survive.

He was dividing his time then between the ranch in New Mexico and a farm in Vermont, Sugarbush, at Glastenbury northeast of Bennington, with another house, Ladyhill, at Shaftsbury nearby. Early in 1933 he gave up running his businesses. His brother-in-law Wallace Campbell took them over, the ventures in New Mexico among them. Rowland’s canceled checks show only routine bills after that, still signed by him, and late in the year he stopped writing checks at all. Dubiel calls the months from January 1933 to October 1934 the deepest slump of his life.

In April 1933 Rowland drew up a list of people who might buy maple syrup from the farm. One name on it was C. Baylor. Baylor answered, Dubiel writes, but didn’t order any syrup.

A farmer stoking the firebox under a long, steaming pan of boiling sap inside a wooden sugarhouse. — Boiling sap down to maple syrup in a sugarhouse at Waitsfield, Vermont, in March 1940.Photo: Marion Post Wolcott, Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress

That spring there was trouble at a board table too. Rowland had been one of the nine founding directors of the Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation in 1920. For years the company had told its shareholders next to nothing, and in May 1933 the New York Stock Exchange announced that it would take the stock off its list in August, a step, the New York Times said, that the Exchange had never taken over a company’s accounting. A truce came on July 7.

About two weeks later his mother wrote from Vermont, “Mr. Baylor just arrived.” Courtenay Baylor was a lay therapist from Boston, trained at Emmanuel Church, where since 1906 the Emmanuel Movement had run classes and counseling for people with nervous troubles, drink among them. The family paid him from at least December 1933 to October 1934, and he worked, Pierre wrote afterwards, “with Helen, Carol and Rowley as well as Roy.”

Somewhere in these years Rowland found the Oxford Group, the evangelical fellowship his cousin Susan had hoped he would try in 1927. The first mention of it in the family’s papers is a letter of Pierre’s in February 1934. Years later Cebra G. remembered a story Rowland told him. Driving from South Williamstown to Pittsfield, in Massachusetts, with his pint bottle beside him, he heard a voice say he would never take a drink again, and he threw the bottle into the bushes. Nobody wrote down when.

By the summer of 1934 he was well enough to carry the Group’s message himself, and by October, Dubiel found, he was back at his old pace.

Listen The pint in the bushes About 1 minute

Two records

What he told, and what the papers show

In February 1935 Rowland told his story at an Oxford Group meeting in Frederick, Maryland, and the local paper took it down. Here it is beside the family’s papers, as Richard Dubiel and Cora Finch read them.

From “Testimonials At Services Heard,” the Daily News, Frederick, Maryland, February 23, 1935, as Cora Finch quotes it, and the Hazard family papers as Dubiel and Finch describe them. Quotations are short excerpts.

When

What he told, 1935

“…going to pieces spiritually…”

and he found it out in 1932, the paper reported.

The family’s papers

In a hospital for alcoholism in February and March 1932.

The way in

What he told, 1935

“…through his daughter, a 20-year-old college girl…”

The family’s papers

The Group is first mentioned in his brother’s letter of February 1934. His cousin Susan Keith had followed Frank Buchman since the 1920s.

What did it

What he told, 1935

The Group, which had taken

“…liquor out of his life…”

The family’s papers

A relapse in 1933, and a lay therapist, Courtenay Baylor, paid by the family from at least December 1933 to October 1934.

The hard part

What he told, 1935

“…a desperate and humiliating situation…”

The family’s papers

From January 1933 his businesses in his brother-in-law’s hands, and in May the Stock Exchange’s threat to Allied Chemical, on whose board he sat. Cora Finch thinks that was the situation he meant.

Left out

What he told, 1935

Not mentioned.

The family’s papers

Jung in 1926. Dr. Cowles’s spinal taps in 1928. The awakening in a hospital in East Africa the same year, and the books his cousin sent him there.

Bound by convention

His testimony gave the Group the whole credit, as a testimony was meant to. “In the Oxford Group, as today in Alcoholics Anonymous,” Cora Finch writes, “stories were somewhat bound by convention.”

For a closer look

Go deeper

Courtenay Baylor’s method, a friend’s book with a foreword by Jung, and patients of Rowland’s own.

Mr. Baylor

Courtenay Baylor had worked under Dr. Elwood Worcester of the Emmanuel Movement since about 1912, and by 1919 he counted some thousand cases. In his book Remaking a Man he called alcoholism “a secondary and false philosophy,” set going by a tenseness in the brain, and he began every session by getting the patient to relax.

He also believed a drinker’s home had to change with him. The surroundings that had helped make the drinker, he wrote, “must in its turn be ‘cured,’” which may be why the family paid him to work with Helen and the children too.

In February 1934 he wrote to Pierre about buying into a gold and silver mine in Nevada, as “clean a proposition as could be found in mining.” Pierre asked his business friends and said no. In 1949 a committee raised money for lanterns at the door of Emmanuel Church’s parish house in Baylor’s memory, and wrote to Pierre for a gift.

A friend’s book

At Yale, Rowland’s closest friend was an older classmate, Charles Roberts Aldrich, called Kid. In 1931 Aldrich published The Primitive Mind and Modern Civilization, with a foreword by Jung. Its preface thanks a short list of people who had helped, Jung, Toni Wolff and George French Porter among them, and last of all Rowland H., who, the historian Jared Lobdell writes, paid at least part of the costs.

Aldrich died of a heart attack at Carmel, California, in the spring of 1933. Lobdell thinks his death set off Rowland’s long binge of 1933 and 1934, though he gives no evidence for it.

Patients of his own

In February 1933, in the depths of his own trouble, his mother wrote three times of Roy’s “successes” with a patient, and then of other patients, apparently in Vermont. Nobody knows who they were. Dubiel wonders whether Rowland was copying his own therapist and taking on patients of his own.

Bill W. heard it much the same way. Writing to Jung in 1961, he said that in 1932–34 Rowland, “feeling that he could especially identify with these sufferers, addressed himself to the help of still others.” One of them was Ebby T. Part 6 tells it.

Sources

Richard M. Dubiel, The Road to Fellowship. iUniverse, 2004, chapter 4, as excerpted by Glenn C. in AA History Lovers messages 1821 and 1822, May 2004; not yet checked against the book.
Cora Finch, “Stellar Fire: Carl Jung, a New England Family, and the Risks of Anecdote”, stellarfire.org, 2006–07 (archived copy). Chapter 6 and notes 68–70, quoting “Testimonials At Services Heard,” the Daily News, Frederick, Maryland, February 23, 1935; and “Loose Ends,” on Allied Chemical and Dye and Courtenay Baylor.
Mel B., Ebby: The Man Who Sponsored Bill W. Hazelden, 1998. Chapter 6, on Cebra G.’s 1954 recollections.
Jared Lobdell, Culture, Alcohol and Society Quarterly 3, no. 2 (January–March 2007) and 3, no. 3 (April–June 2007), Brown University Library, on Charles Roberts Aldrich and Cebra G.’s 1954 conversation with Bill W.
Courtenay Baylor, Remaking a Man: One Successful Method of Mental Refitting, 1919.
Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University, 1945–1946 (January 1947), the entry for Rowland Hazard, class of 1903.
Rhode Island Historical Society, Rowland Hazard III Papers, finding aid, on his houses in Vermont.
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.
Mr. Walter M. Gaylord “firing” the King evaporator during boiling of maple syrup, Waitsfield, Vermont (photograph, March 1940), Marion Post Wolcott, Farm Security Administration–Office of War Information, Library of Congress. No known restrictions.