Principles, Not Personalities

Today’s two sentences come from “Who Is a Member of Alcoholics Anonymous?”, which Bill W. wrote for the Grapevine in August 1946, four months after the Twelve Points, the first form of the Traditions, appeared in the same magazine. He starts from the Big Book’s line of 1939 on membership. Then he tells how the office in New York had polled the groups for their rules on who could join, and what the pile showed: with every rule in force at once, he reckoned, about nine in ten of AA’s first and finest members would have been shut out. Today’s lines close his list of the reasons why, which the card here sets out.

The essay goes on to groups that pass charters and bylaws and set up committees to weed out the undesirable, until the quarrels over enforcing them do the group more harm than anyone they were meant to keep out. Then it turns to the old-timers. Each of them, Bill writes, winces at the names of people he once condemned, among them “people he confidently predicted would never sober up,” some of them by then sober for years, and perhaps now close friends of his. Bill had done it himself. Of Ebby T., the school friend who phoned him in November 1934 and came over to tell him how he’d got sober, he wrote: “Long ago I had marked him for a hopeless case.”

In Akron in the summer of 1935, Bill and Dr. Bob S. hoped Eddie R. would become the third of them to stay sober. They worked on him for weeks, and Anne S. had him, his wife and their two small children living in the house, until, in the story Anne loved to tell, he jumped up from lunch one day and chased her up the stairs with a knife. In Bill’s telling, he only toyed with a carving knife at her kitchen table while she sat calmly watching him. “After that, they thought maybe Eddie wasn’t the right one to work on,” Elgie R. remembered, and Bill wrote that “we had given him up.” Years later, at a large AA gathering at a country club in Youngstown, the first thing Dr. Bob said, as Elgie told it, was “Holy Moses!” There was Eddie. In 1950, at Dr. Bob’s funeral, he told Smitty, Dr. Bob’s son, that he had been dry about a year, in the Youngstown group. Seven years sober, he got in touch with Bill, and Nell Wing, Bill’s secretary, met him and couldn’t picture so quiet and gentle a man causing anyone trouble. Henrietta D., the wife of AA’s third member, remembered him saying AA had had two firsts: one who said yes to the program, and one who said no.

In September 1940 the members in Toledo started a group of their own, and on Saturdays some of them drove down to Akron to talk things over with Dr. Bob. As one of its first members remembered it, Dr. Bob told them to keep the group spiritual, and that if they would “keep principles ahead of personalities” and keep working with others, it would come out all right. He said, “Alcohol is a great leveler of people, and A.A. is, too.” Tradition Twelve, as AA adopted the Traditions in 1950, ends on the same idea.

More on Eddie R. and the house on Ardmore Avenue: Tuna fish sandwiches, in Call Me Anne. On the groups’ membership rules and how the Third Tradition ended them: A mile long, in Rule 62.