One Drunk to Another Rule 62
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Don’t take yourself too damn seriously.
Illustration · The Rule #62 card lying open on a meeting-room table, beside the envelope it came in and a cup of coffee. Drawn from Bill W.’s description of a card “about golf-score size”; not drawn from a photograph.

Rule 62

The Twelve Traditions

Twelve short principles that hold AA’s groups together, and the troubles in the groups that taught each one.

“In reality I had not been the author of the Traditions at all.”

Bill W. · Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, 1957

The Twelve Traditions are AA’s principles for its groups rather than its members: who may belong, who pays, who speaks for AA, and what it will and won’t do in public. Bill W., who wrote them down, insisted, “A code of traditions could not, of course, ever become rule or law.”

Each one came out of trouble. A century earlier a society begun by six drinkers had swept the country and then faded. AA’s own groups made so many membership rules that the list ran “a mile long.” A clubhouse needed a janitor, and a group in a town Bill called Middleton set up a center with three corporations and sixty-one rules. Letters about all of it piled up in New York, and in 1946 Bill turned them into twelve points. Members were “obviously bored,” he admitted, and then in 1950, at Cleveland, they adopted them.

This piece takes its name from the rule the Middleton promoter put on a card after his center collapsed, Rule #62: “Don’t take yourself too damn seriously.” It’s built chiefly from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions and Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, with Pass It On, Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers and Lois Remembers, and from the Big Book and the Grapevine; and, for the 1840s, from Lincoln’s address of 1842 and a scholar’s study of 1950. Where the sources disagree, these pages say so.

Start with 1 · The Washingtonians

How they came about

  1. 1840In Baltimore, six drinking companions start the Washingtonians, whose meetings of reformed drunks sweep the country and then fade.
  2. 1938In New York, a salesman the Twelve and Twelve calls Ed rails against God, and the members let him stay.
  3. 1939The Big Book’s Foreword asks members to stay anonymous, and names one requirement for membership: “an honest desire to stop drinking.”
  4. 1940AA’s first clubhouse opens in New York, and an old fireman asks whether its caretaker will be paid.
  5. 1943The office in New York begins collecting the groups’ membership rules.
  6. 1944Bill W. and Dr. Bob lend their names to the letterhead of Marty M.’s new committee on alcoholism.
  7. 1945The Foundation tells John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his 1940 dinner guests that AA needs no more of their money (in 1944, in another of Bill’s accounts). Late in the year a friend suggests turning the office’s mail into principles.
  8. 1946Bill W.’s twelve points appear in the Grapevine, AA’s magazine, in the spring.
  9. 1950AA’s first International Convention, in Cleveland, adopts the Traditions in their short form.
  10. 1951The first General Service Conference meets in New York.
  11. 1953Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions is published.
  12. 1955At St. Louis the Conference takes the Traditions over from the founders, and the Big Book adds them.

From trouble to Tradition

Each part has a short story, a one-minute audio stop, and a closer look for anyone who wants to go deeper. Read them in order, or start anywhere.

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