Legacy

The board’s policy statement was printed in Box 4-5-9, and the full position paper was available from AA’s office. Permission “should not be granted to outside publishers or other parties” to reprint AA literature for study guides or interpretive texts. If any were to be made, AA World Services should publish them, but it did “not plan to publish study guides or interpretations of A.A. literature at this time.” It was “preferable that the individual member or prospect interpret the literature according to his own point of view.”

The same article quoted three of the board’s directors, unnamed. One wrote, “The authors of this priceless material knew what they were doing.” Another wrote, “I almost have the feeling that the words are living, changing, growing.” A third had learned recovery “through the experience of one drunk sharing with another, not on an instructive basis or in a classroom atmosphere.” The article named no treatment center, teacher or guide.

A year later AA World Services adopted a reprint policy that let others print the Steps if they were “listed in their entirety and in sequence” and made clear that “any interpretations or editorial comments are those of the author and not of A.A.” (Problems other than alcohol tells how other fellowships adapted them.) Today AA’s note on its approved books says that “A.A. does not try to tell any individual member what he or she may or may not read.”

Joe McQ. was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1928, and got sober on March 10, 1962. In Little Rock he founded Serenity House, a treatment program, and wrote a Twelve Step curriculum for treatment centers, Recovery Dynamics, first copyrighted in 1977, by Serenity Recovery’s account. Charlie P. was born in Tulsa in 1929 and farmed at Maysville, Arkansas. They met in 1973 at an Al-Anon convention, where Charlie was speaking and Joe was the one introducing him. The Dallas group’s history calls them “The Arkansas Travelers.” Joe died in 2007 and Charlie in 2011.

The accounts differ on how fast it grew. By 1980, the website’s history says, “about eight studies” had been given in all; the Memphis account says they were leading five or six weekends a year. Both may be right, one counting the total and the other the pace.

Kristen McGuiness, writing in The Fix in 2011, has their conferences running “from the early 1970s” and says they sold “almost five million Big Books on their own.” The website’s history and the Memphis account both date the start to 1977, and no other source gives that figure. AA counts more than 35 million copies of the first four editions in English, all told; five million would be about one in seven of them.

The resolution passed at St. Louis on July 3, 1955, said the Traditions and the Charter’s warranties could be changed only with the written consent of “at least three-quarters of all those registered groups who respond,” given at least six months to think about it. It doesn’t mention the Steps.

The Charter as printed in AA Comes of Age does: “no change in Article 12 of the Charter or in the Twelve Traditions of A.A. or in the Twelve Steps of A.A.” without three-quarters of the groups. It was adopted in 1955 and updated by ten Conferences up to 1988, and the printed text doesn’t say when the Steps were added. Roger C., writing on the website AA Agnostica, sets out the case some members make: a 1957 provision giving AA’s board “the negative right” to prevent changes to the Steps, and, “in keeping with the Charter,” what would “apparently” be a two-thirds vote. He disagrees with that case. The provision’s original text wasn’t found for this page.

Bill W. had answered the question for himself in the Grapevine in February 1961: “Should we try to amend our Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions? Here the answer would seem to be ‘no.’” What could change, he wrote, was “their application.”