One Drunk to Another Suggestions Only
Watch The Kitchen Table
2Came to believethat a Powergreater thanourselves couldrestore usto sanity. 1We admittedwe were powerlessover alcohol—that our liveshad becomeunmanageable.
Illustration · A clubroom before a meeting, with the First Step lettered on a poster on an easel and more posters beside it. The easel and the lettering follow the Passaic, N.J., group’s description in the Grapevine, March 1948; the room and the other posters are imagined. Not drawn from a photograph.

Detroit, St. Louis, Rochester and St. Paul · 1943–1948

Four nights

Groups began taking newcomers through the program in a short course of evenings, borrowing plans from one another and changing them, and AA’s new magazine printed the plans and the arguments over them.

“Each new prospect is asked to attend four successive Thursday night meetings…”

Dick W., on his group in St. Louis · AA Grapevine, June 1945

A short course

In Detroit, the North-West Group held its first Discussion Meeting at 10216 Plymouth Road on Monday night, June 14, 1943. By the account of Cliff M., a later archivist of AA in southeast Michigan, the group split the Steps into four phases, Admission, Spiritual, Restitution and Inventory, and Working and Message, and took one each Monday in turn. Other groups in Detroit took up the method, and Washington’s groups printed it as a pamphlet, An Interpretation of the Twelve Steps.

In June 1945 the Grapevine, AA’s magazine, then a year old, printed Dick W.’s account of one of the four groups in St. Louis, which ran as a club. Its new men came to four Thursday nights in a row: Bill W.’s story and what an alcoholic is; “the spiritual angle, trying to help clarify many of the 12 steps”; the chapters of the book; and AA’s literature, how the club ran, and the Twelfth Step. Only then were they full members, with a white card. A year’s sobriety earned a gold one, “not exactly solid gold, but covered with gold paper.” The plan, Dick W. wrote, “has done much to reduce the number of slippers among new members.” The magazine was working through the Steps too, one a month, in editorials by members.

The Grapevine made it a series on “the various indoctrination plans followed by different groups throughout the country.” In September M.L. of the Genesee Group in Rochester, New York, described a plan with a step before the meetings. A newcomer, or novice, had a “canvass or workout” from his sponsors, following a booklet the group had written, before he was “permitted to attend a group meeting.” Then he heard four talks: one on Steps 1 to 3, one on Steps 4 to 7, one on Steps 8 to 11 and a last one on Step 12 alone. The talks also took up the Four Absolutes, the Oxford Group’s ideals of honesty, unselfishness, purity and love.

Two Manhattan members wrote back in October. J.D. wanted the program kept “simple,” without the Four Absolutes beside the Steps. A.T. had come in when AA had about 2,000 members, and had been told only to go to meetings, as often as he could: “These meetings were my course of training…” He thought meetings “at which the 12 Steps are explained” were “often most helpful.” What he objected to was the tendency “to lay down the law to newcomers”: any other course of instruction seemed to him “to border on self-righteousness.” He also quoted the booklet’s answer to its own question, “Am I now ready for A.A.?”: “You must have a belief in God and faith in His power to help you.” That answer, he wrote, “might well have frightened me away from A.A. forever.” M.L. replied in November and closed with an invitation: “come and visit us—we promise not to frighten him.”

St. Paul’s plan, printed that December, had been running since the spring: four talks of 45 minutes, given side by side in four rooms on Wednesday nights, which a newcomer was asked to hear in sequence. It drew on “the Washington, D. C., pamphlet,” and each newcomer went home with a small card: “I made a 24-Hour Deal Today” at the top, “Easy Does It” at the bottom. In Sacramento a weekly beginners’ class using the pamphlet’s four discussions cut the “casualties,” the Grapevine reported in April 1946. At the Seamen’s Club in New York, it had reported that February, a new pamphlet printed the Steps both ways: on one page “the 12 Steps have been streamlined into 5.”

By 1948 at least one group was taking the Steps one at a time. The Passaic Group in New Jersey had printed “12 individual posters, with one of the 12 Steps on each,” and set one on an easel at each meeting. The same page of the Grapevine suggested that a group “Discuss each of the 12 Steps in succession, one at each meeting” (Legacy follows the Step meetings of later years).

Listen Four nights About 1 minute

Classes and posters, 1943–1948

Ways to cut twelve

Six ways groups divided or set out the program, by the year each was reported or began, in or close to each account’s own words. Four of the six used four evenings, and no two of those divided it the same way.

From the Grapevine, 1945–1948, and for Detroit a later history by Cliff M. St. Paul’s article numbers three discussions and ends on the Twelfth Step; Rochester’s talks also covered the Four Absolutes. The seamen’s five were the steps their group lived by, not a course of evenings.

  1. 1943

    Detroit

    North-West Group · Monday nights, in turn

    1. 1Admission
    2. 2Spiritual
    3. 3Restitution and Inventory
    4. 4Working and Message

    Cliff M., “A Brief History of A.A. in Detroit.” Washington’s groups printed the method as a pamphlet.

  2. 1945

    St. Louis

    One of four groups · four Thursdays in a row

    1. 1Bill’s story; what an alcoholic is
    2. 2The spiritual angle; “many of the 12 steps”
    3. 3The chapters of the book
    4. 4The literature, the club, the Twelfth Step

    Dick W., “Educational Plan,” Grapevine, June 1945

  3. 1945

    Rochester

    Genesee Group · after the sponsors’ “workout”

    1. 1The first three Steps
    2. 2The next four (4–7)
    3. 3The next four (8–11)
    4. 4The last Step

    M.L., “Rochester Prepares Novices for Group Participation,” Grapevine, September 1945

  4. 1945

    St. Paul

    Four rooms at once · every Wednesday

    1. 1The Admissions
    2. 2Inventory and Restitution
    3. 3Spiritual Aspects: Steps 2, 3, 5, 7 and 11
    4. 4The 12th Step, as a summary

    L.S.L., “St. Paul’s Four Discussion Groups,” Grapevine, December 1945

  5. 1946

    New York

    Seamen’s Group · the five steps it used

    1. 1Admission of Alcoholism
    2. 2Personality analysis and catharsis
    3. 3Adjustment of personal relations
    4. 4Dependence upon some Higher Power outside yourself—The Group, etc.
    5. 5Working with other Alcoholics

    J.F., “Case of the Sober Seamen,” Grapevine, March 1946

  6. 1948

    Passaic

    One Step at each meeting, on an easel

    1. 1
    2. 2
    3. 3
    4. 4
    5. 5
    6. 6
    7. 7
    8. 8
    9. 9
    10. 10
    11. 11
    12. 12

    R.W., “Visual Technique Aids Concentration,” Grapevine, March 1948

From four nights to one Step a night

Four of these six plans used four evenings, and each divided the program its own way, though some borrowed from others. By 1948 the Grapevine was suggesting what Step meetings do now: “each of the 12 Steps in succession, one at each meeting.”

For a closer look

Go deeper

The argument over Rochester’s booklet; whether a newcomer should wait to carry the message; and the seamen who wrote five steps of their own.

Laws, or simple?

In October 1945 J.D. of Manhattan objected to the reference in M.L.’s September letter to the Four Absolutes “in the same sentence with the ‘12 Steps’”: “Let’s keep the A.A. program simple, and not couple it with any outside religion, creed, or dogma.” A.T. had got hold of the group’s booklet, which he called Rudiments of A.A.

M.L. answered for the Genesee Group in November. The Absolutes, he wrote, had appeared in the booklet and were “not mentioned in the letter,” though the September letter as printed does name them. He then quoted, as he gave it, Akron’s own manual: “The Ethical Conduct of Alcoholics Anonymous is based on two definite sets of laws (italics mine) known as the Twelve Steps and the Four Absolutes.” The manual as it survives says only that AA “is based on a set of laws known as the Twelve Steps” (Your second Bible tells that manual). The group, M.L. wrote, was “not primarily concerned with large attendance at meetings.”

J.D. wrote again in December, under the heading “Plea for Simplicity.” J.D. had not read the booklet; the October comment “was directed only to the letter.” A newcomer, J.D. wrote, “comes into A.A. bewildered and confused in mind,” and should not be handed so soon “the much more difficult concepts of Absolute Love, Absolute Purity, and Absolute Unselfishness.”

Firmly in mind

The September 1945 issue, the one with Rochester’s plan, also carried an article by an unnamed nonalcoholic friend of AA, sorting newcomers into “Two Classes Who Fade” and a third who “Finds the Way.” The third kind, he wrote, did not approach a prospect “until they themselves first have the program firmly in their minds.”

M.S. of Manhattan answered in October. Two weeks into AA, knowing little beyond the book and the meetings, M.S. had gone out on calls with an older member, and the Steps had taken hold only gradually after that. “Today, after two and a half years in A.A., I don’t have the program ‘firmly in mind.’” As for a straight and narrow path: “God forbid!”

Two months earlier, in July, the Grapevine had printed Minneapolis’s nineteen points on “What Constitutes a Good Sponsor.” The first was “Sincerity in A.A. and dry for certain length of time.” A sponsor should “Come to all the classes with the new member,” and “A good sponsor will not have more than two neophytes a year.” (You Had to Be Sponsored follows the sponsors.)

Five steps at sea

The Seamen’s Group began in 1944, the Grapevine reported, after a merchant seaman it called Seaman Joe met AA at the Merchant Marine Rest Centre at Sands Point, New York. Seamen, Joe thought, needed a program built around their own lives: long voyages, foreign ports, often no home to come back to. The group took over 334½ West 24th Street in Manhattan, the building that had been AA’s first clubhouse. The Grapevine dated the move two ways: in January 1945 it said the Seamen had taken over the clubhouse that December, and in March 1946 it said the move to “a spacious two-story building” had come “seven months ago.”

Its five steps, which each member was to take “in his own way,” began with “Admission of Alcoholism—that one drink is too many and forty is not enough” and ended with “Working with other Alcoholics—Getting out of yourself.” The Higher Power step added “The Group, etc.” The club’s pamphlet, the Grapevine reported in February 1946, printed both: on one page “the 12 Steps have been streamlined into 5, while on another the entire 12 are given.”

“You know the phrase, ‘like a drunken sailor’?” Joe asked. “Well, here’s predicting it won’t be long ’til that phrase is changed to ‘sober as a seaman’.” (Problems other than alcohol follows the fellowships that rewrote the Steps for other troubles.)

Sources