Illustration · A cheap hotel room at night, with an open Bible on the bureau beside the bed. Not drawn from a photograph.

Akron and New York · 1936–1946

A mile long

Early groups made rules to keep the wrong drunks out; two newcomers got in anyway, and the rules didn’t last.

“Who dared to be judge, jury, and executioner of his own sick brother?”

Bill W., on the early groups’ membership rules · Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, 1953

The fence

In AA’s second year there were only two groups of alcoholics, “struggling, nameless.” A newcomer knocked at one of them and talked frankly with its oldest member. He was desperate, and he wanted to get well. “But,” he asked, “will you let me join your group? Since I am the victim of another addiction even worse stigmatized than alcoholism, you may not want me among you.” The book never says what it was.

The oldest member called in two others. Turn the man away and he would soon die; let him in, and “only God knows what trouble he’ll brew.” They asked whether they should sacrifice one for the many. Then one of the three said what they really feared was their reputation, and five words kept running through his mind: “What would the Master do?” “Not another word was said.” The newcomer went to work carrying the message, and never troubled anyone with his “other difficulty.” Bill W. later placed the story in Akron, with Dr. Bob as the oldest member.

In “A.A.’s other group,” in New York, “a salesman we shall call Ed” sold automobile polish and preached against God. Told to stop it “or get out,” he picked up the foreword to the book then being written and read its line on membership aloud. “When you guys wrote that sentence, did you mean it, or didn’t you?” So Ed stayed, and stayed sober, until a sales trip in 1938. He wired for money, and nobody came. In a cheap hotel in a neighboring state, his hand brushed the bureau beside the bed and found a Gideon Bible. About two weeks later he turned up on a member’s stairs: “Have you fellows had your morning meditation?”

As AA grew, so did the rules. In 1940 several Cleveland groups wouldn’t let a drinker into a meeting until he had been in a hospital or “talked to by ten men.” From 1943 the office in New York asked the groups to send in their membership rules. Listing them, Bill recalled, took a great many sheets of paper. In the Twelve and Twelve’s telling, “The total list was a mile long.”

The long form of the Traditions in 1946 said the opposite: “Our membership ought to include all who suffer from alcoholism. Hence we may refuse none who wish to recover.” When the Traditions came out, some groups, especially those with long lists of “protective” rules, reacted violently, Bill wrote. But group after group, the rules went.

Listen A mile long About 1 minute

A mile long

The list

The lists the groups sent to New York don’t survive in AA’s books. These are rules the books do record, from the first years to 1941.

Most come from Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers (1980) and Pass It On (1984), which quote letters and members’ memories. The order is roughly by date.

“You couldn’t go to a meeting until you did it.” The surrender, on your knees.

Akron, the 1930s

Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, chapter VIII
Five to eight days in a private room at City Hospital first.

Akron, the 1930s

Good Oldtimers, chapter VIII
“You had to be sponsored.” A member went to see the wife first.

Cleveland and Akron, the 1930s

Clarence S., in Good Oldtimers, chapter IX
Visits from members first: “a thorough indoctrination by eight or nine individuals” before the first meeting.

Akron, 1937

Earl T., “He Sold Himself Short,” in the Big Book
Give up “other sins such as hatred, adultery,” or Dr. Bob and his friends “refuse to work with him.”

Akron, 1938

Frank Amos’s report, in Good Oldtimers, chapter X
“You’ll have to quit it or get out.”

New York, 1938, to Ed the atheist

Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, Tradition Three
“Do you still have your job?” “Still married?” If so, “we can’t help you.”

New York, the late 1930s

Ruth Hock, in Pass It On, chapter 12
“Snifters”: “men who stood by the door, sniffing each man who came in.”

The early years

Good Oldtimers, chapter XIX
Black alcoholics “invited to attend open or closed group meetings as visitors.”

New York, 1940

Bobbie B., in Pass It On, chapter 19
No “rummy” at a meeting “unless he has been hospitalized or talked to by ten men.”

Cleveland, 1940

Clarence S.’s letter, in Good Oldtimers, chapter XXI
In “most groups,” a hospital stay, a talk with at least five members, or a committee’s approval first.

Cleveland, 1941

Clarence S.’s letter, in Good Oldtimers, chapter XXI
The men decided a woman newcomer should sit in the next room with the wives.

Akron, a year or two after 1939

Brown and Brown, A Biography of Mrs. Marty Mann
“Pure alcoholics” only: “beggars, tramps, asylum inmates, prisoners, queers, plain crackpots, and fallen women were definitely out.”

Every group, “at one time”

Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, Tradition Three

Nobody could have joined

“If all those rules had been in effect everywhere, nobody could have possibly joined A.A. at all.” In the end, Good Oldtimers says, the pioneers broke so many of their own rules “that there were no rules left!”

For a closer look

Go deeper

Whether Ed was Jim B.; three wordings of the one requirement; and what the books do and don’t say about the man with the double stigma.

Who was Ed?

The Twelve and Twelve calls him “a salesman we shall call Ed.” AA’s books never say who he was, but Jim B.’s own story, “The Vicious Cycle,” fits him closely. Jim came to AA in January 1938 and soon joined the New York members, selling auto polish for “ten dollars a week and keep at Hank’s house.” He lambasted the “spiritual angle” at meetings. The elders, he wrote, “held many prayer meetings hoping to find a way to give me the heave-ho.”

Then he slipped on a sales trip in New England; “telegrams bounced right back,” and Hank P. fired him over the phone: “now even my own kind had turned against me.” Ed, in the Twelve and Twelve, thought “I have been deserted by my own kind.”

The stories differ too. Jim says nothing of a hotel or a Bible; he “crawled back to New York a few days later,” where Ed came back “About two weeks later.” In 1968 Jim wrote that he got drunk on a sales trip, alone in Boston, and sobered up “after four days of no relief.” The film credits Jim B. with the Third Tradition, and How It Works tells his part in the fight over God in the book.

Honest, sincere, or just a desire?

The Foreword of 1939 said “The only requirement for membership is an honest desire to stop drinking.”

In the Twelve and Twelve (1953), Ed reads the foreword aloud as “a desire to stop drinking.” Bill’s history of 1957 quotes the Tradition as “a sincere desire to stop drinking.” Good Oldtimers says early members also had to believe in God, make a surrender and follow the Oxford Group, “in addition to having a desire (honest, sincere, or otherwise) to stop drinking.”

The short form of 1950 has just “a desire.” The word “honest” stayed in the Preamble until 1958; The Preamble tells how it went.

The man with the double stigma

The Twelve and Twelve never names his other addiction. It calls it “another addiction even worse stigmatized than alcoholism,” and later “his other difficulty,” and places him in “Year Two” at one of two nameless groups.

Good Oldtimers adds that Bill’s letters of 1938 and 1939 placed the story in Akron, “thereby implying that ‘the oldest member’ was Dr. Bob,” and that Bill named his partner when he told it again in 1969. The books don’t say who asked what the Master would do.

The Browns’ biography of Marty M. (2001) tells it differently: an Ohio group wrote to Bill about a gay alcoholic, and “The group was sharply divided.” It gives no source for this.

Sources

Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. AA Grapevine and Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1953. Tradition Three and the long form.
Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. AA World Services, 1980. Chapters VIII–X, XIX and XXI.
Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapters 12 and 19.
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “Unity: The Second Legacy” and “Service: The Third Legacy.”
Alcoholics Anonymous (the Big Book). First edition, 1939, the Foreword; fourth edition, 2001, “He Sold Himself Short” and “The Vicious Cycle.”
Sally Brown and David R. Brown, A Biography of Mrs. Marty Mann. Hazelden, 2001.
Jim B., “Sober for Thirty Years,” AA Grapevine, May 1968.