Illustration · An imagined center of the kind the Twelve and Twelve describes: a club on the ground floor, beds and a loan counter on the second, classrooms on the third, three plates by the door, and the floors still to come outlined in the sky. Not drawn from a photograph; the books never say where Middleton was.

A town Bill called Middleton · Undated

Middleton Group #1

A group built a center with three floors, three corporations and sixty-one rules, and when it came apart, the promoter sent out one rule more.

“Every group had the right to be wrong.”

Bill W., on group autonomy · Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, 1953

A pilot plant

“I thought for a long time that I ought to be able to manage it from New York,” Bill W. admitted in a talk in 1955. The groups told him otherwise: “Services, yes. But government, no.” They would run their own affairs, and what they wanted, he said, “included the right to be wrong.”

In “a town we’ll call Middleton,” Bill wrote in 1953, a thriving group had started up. Its elders dreamed of “a kind of pilot plant A.A. groups could duplicate everywhere”: a club on the ground floor; on the second, a place to sober up drunks and pay off their back debts; on the third, “an educational project—quite noncontroversial, of course.” In imagination it would rise “several stories more, but three would do for a start.” It would take “other people’s money,” and the town’s wealthy citizens signed on.

The elders were about to ask the Foundation, AA’s headquarters in New York, for a charter, and a few doubters wrote to New York first. New York replied that it could grant no charter, and warned that groups trying to mix AA with treatment and schooling had “come to sticky ends elsewhere.” The group went ahead, as it had every right to. A promoter “organized three corporations and became president of them all,” and “sixty-one rules and regulations were adopted.”

Then the floors filled up. Some drunks “yearned for education, but doubted if they were alcoholics.” Others started in the club, “pitched a binge, were hospitalized, then graduated to education on the third floor.” It was “confusion compounded.” An AA group, Bill concluded, “simply couldn’t handle this sort of project,” and the end came “something like that day the boiler burst in Wombley’s Clapboard Factory.”

When the gloom lifted, the promoter wrote to the Foundation that he wished he’d “paid some attention to A.A. experience.” Then he made a little card “about golf-score size.” Its cover read “Middleton Group #1, Rule #62.” Inside was a single sentence: “Don’t take yourself too damn seriously.” The man who had drawn up the whole scheme, Bill wrote, could see the joke on himself, “and that is the very acme of humility.”

Middleton’s lesson went past autonomy. AA hospitals, Bill wrote, “all bogged down because you cannot put an A.A. group into business,” and clubs and Twelfth Step houses had to drop AA’s name. A group was to do one thing, carry the message to the drunk who still suffered. Clubs, hospitals and rest farms could help, but run apart from the groups by the people who paid for them. New York’s first club (What’s the angle?) learned that early: it “had to be on the side lines,” Bill said, and “could not be managed by the A.A. groups as such.” Something useful tells how the founders’ names came off a letterhead.

Listen Middleton Group #1 About 1 minute

Compare the tellings

Three floors or four

Bill told the Middleton story twice, in his book on the Traditions and in a talk two years later. The building changed between the two.

From the Twelve and Twelve (1953), Tradition Four, and Bill’s talk at St. Louis in 1955, printed, “edited and enlarged,” in AA Comes of Age (1957) as “Unity: The Second Legacy.” Top floor first.

1953The book

In imagination, “several stories more”

Third floor“an educational project—quite noncontroversial, of course”
Second floor“sober up drunks and hand them currency for their back debts”
Ground floorA club

Whose idea: The elders, who “dreamed of innovations,” and then “a super-promoter”
The charter: The elders were “about to apply to the Foundation for a charter”
The rules: “sixty-one rules and regulations were adopted”
The card: Made after he wrote to the Foundation; it became “an A.A. classic”

1955The talk

Upstairs“a loan agency where the indigent alcoholic could borrow a little spare cash”
The next“a clinic and rehabilitation center”
The next floor“a meeting room”
One floorA club

Whose idea: One “super-promoter,” who “was to become the general manager”
The charter: “He applied to New York for a super-charter.”
The rules: “he wrote sixty-one rules, regulations, and by-laws”
The card: Sent with his letter, and “already mailed to every group in the United States”

Middleton Group #1Rule #62Open the cardFold it shut

“Don’t take yourself too damn seriously.”

As the Twelve and Twelve gives it, 1953. In the 1955 talk as printed, the cover read “Group so-and-so, place so-and-so. Rule No. 62.” The sentence inside ended “too damned seriously.”

Not the corporations

Bill’s lesson wasn’t against separate corporations as such. The long form of Tradition Six recommends them for clubs and hospitals, “so set apart that, if necessary, they can be freely discarded by the groups.” The trouble was a group running them: “An A.A. group, as such, should never go into business.”

For a closer look

Go deeper

A tough patient at Towns Hospital and the one idea he bought; a job the liquor trade offered a member; and how groups split without breaking.

One idea

To show what a single purpose means, the Twelve and Twelve tells a member’s story. “Restless one day,” he took the subway to Towns Hospital, where Dr. William D. Silkworth pointed him to “an awfully tough Irishman” on the third floor. The man asked, “How much does your scheme cost?” “Nothing at all.” What was the visitor getting out of it? His own sobriety. “There’s no angle.”

When the visitor mentioned the spiritual side, the patient took him for a religious recruiter. The visitor said he couldn’t teach him anything about religion, but thought he was “a conceited Irishman who thinks he can run the whole show.” Suppose, the member asked later, he had had to say “that A.A. went in for education, hospitals, and rehabilitation”? “Where would we have wound up? No place, of course.”

The book doesn’t name the member or give a year. Pass It On says he was “obviously, Bill himself.”

Out with lanterns

Several big distillers, the Twelve and Twelve says, once planned a campaign of alcohol education: drinking was fine in moderation, heavy drinkers should ease off, and alcoholics shouldn’t touch it. Their trade association picked an AA member with public relations experience to run it, and every ad would name him in full and say he belonged to AA.

He came to the New York office to ask whether anything in AA’s tradition stood in his way. Asked how he felt about the catch, he turned the job down himself. The drys, he said, would answer at once: “They’d be out with lanterns looking for an honest A.A. to plump for their brand of education.” AA would be caught between the wets and the drys. “Alcoholics Anonymous saved my life, and it comes first.”

In Bill’s 1955 talk, as printed, the warning about the drys is his own reasoning, not the member’s. Neither telling gives a name or a year. In an essay on anonymity, reprinted in AA Comes of Age, Bill also recalled a member who used AA’s name in a crusading Prohibition magazine. Of that and the liquor-trade job he wrote that “these two developments never happened to get far,” but “their implications were nevertheless terrific.”

A resentment and a coffeepot

Group autonomy was practice long before it was written down. In May 1939 the Cleveland members stopped coming down to Akron’s meeting as a body, while it still met as part of the Oxford Group, and started one of their own. At one of the first, Oxford Group loyalists turned up from Akron and were, as one of the Cleveland wives remembered, “very bitter and voluble.” Good Oldtimers draws the lesson: “one A.A. group could break away from another—without necessarily endangering the old group or the new.” Members put it more shortly: “All you need to start a new group in A.A. is a resentment and a coffeepot.”

In Toledo, when one meeting grew too big, a member got drunk over it: “You’re going to divide.” Duke P. remembered, “But it wasn’t dividing; it was expanding.” By Easter 1942 the town had several groups.

Groups kept their own customs too. In Little Rock in January 1944, Bill and Lois W. saw the group’s leader guard his anonymity by addressing a meeting of 1,200 “from behind a closed curtain.” Pass It On calls autonomy then “the A.A. tradition (as yet only a custom).”

Sources

Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. AA Grapevine and Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1953. Traditions Four, Five and Six, with their long forms.
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “Unity: The Second Legacy,” “Service: The Third Legacy,” and Appendix B, “Why Alcoholics Anonymous Is Anonymous.”
Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapters 17 and 19.
Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. AA World Services, 1980. Chapters XII and XX.