Illustration · A newspaper rewrite desk at night, with a story about AA whose member’s name has been struck out in pencil and a photograph marked to cut. Not drawn from a photograph.

On the road · 1946–1950

The short form

The groups shrugged at the Traditions, so Bill W. took them on the road, the office fought members’ names in the papers, and a friend from Chicago suggested cutting them down.

“But please don’t talk any more about those damned Traditions.”

One of the letters Bill W. got, as he quoted it · Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, 1957

Those damned Traditions

The Traditions came out in AA’s magazine, the Grapevine, in the spring of 1946 (Twelve Points tells how). They got, Bill W. wrote, “a mixed reception. Only groups in dire trouble took them seriously.” Many members were indifferent, and some said, “Let’s keep A.A. simple” (Legacy, in Keep Coming Back, follows that phrase). Later in 1948 a New York member, George H., who had visited 370 groups, reported that oldtimers in Chicago, Cleveland and Akron wanted the Steps only; Good Oldtimers says they found the Traditions “too unwieldy.”

So Bill went out to sell them. “At this point I began to travel and talk a lot about the new principles,” he wrote. “The members listened, but were obviously bored.” Letters asked for his drinking story instead. He did all this through a long depression (The quarter mile tells it).

He kept going. In February 1948, partly to sound out the groups on the elected conference he wanted (A standing vote tells that fight), he and Lois W. crossed Canada by train, through Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary. At Regina the city’s only member climbed aboard at 4 a.m. to greet them. They walked three miles past snowslides in the dark on the way to his father’s home in British Columbia, and in Vancouver Bill spoke about the Traditions to about 1,000. In Los Angeles, Lois remembered, about 6,000 heard Bill and Dr. Bob at the Shrine Auditorium. The trip lasted three months.

Meanwhile members were putting their names and pictures in the papers. At one point, Bill wrote, “about a hundred” were doing it. Some called anonymity “horse-and-buggy stuff”; some “actually believed that being photographed with the Governor would really help.” The office sent “remonstrances, kind ones, of course, to every breaker,” and wrote to newspapers, radio stations and publishers across the country. After that, the papers kept members’ names and faces out of AA stories, sometimes, Bill wrote, sacrificing “good stories to this end.” Bill knew the pull. He once called himself, for two or three years, “A.A.’s number one anonymity breaker,” though Pass It On says he was stretching the facts.

And the Traditions were long. Earl T., who had started AA’s Chicago group (The closing tells his first meeting), came to Bill’s home “One day in 1947, or thereabouts,” and suggested cutting them down to the length of the Twelve Steps. After “a week of wrestling” they had a first draft, and months of revision produced the final one. The Grapevine then printed the short form “in every issue.” Pass It On dates the work to 1949, in time for the convention in Cleveland.

Listen The short form About 1 minute

Word for word

Long into short

The aim, Bill wrote, was “capsule statements which in length matched our familiar Twelve Steps of Recovery.” Here is how many words each Tradition kept.

Counted from the long and short forms as the Big Book prints them today, in its Appendix I. The long form there has been lightly updated since 1946, for one thing to name the General Service Board.

Tradition 1 Long form, 38 wordsShort form, 12 words
Tradition 2 Long form, 22 wordsShort form, 32 words
The only one that grew. Its second sentence, “Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern,” echoes the long form’s Nine.
Tradition 3 Long form, 54 wordsShort form, 12 words
Tradition 4 Long form, 75 wordsShort form, 16 words
Tradition 5 Long form, 26 wordsShort form, 17 words
Tradition 6 Long form, 164 wordsShort form, 32 words
Tradition 7 Long form, 113 wordsShort form, 11 words
The deepest cut, by proportion: 113 words down to 11.
Tradition 8 Long form, 61 wordsShort form, 14 words
Tradition 9 Long form, 157 wordsShort form, 21 words
Tradition 10 Long form, 47 wordsShort form, 19 words
Tradition 11 Long form, 66 wordsShort form, 25 words
Tradition 12 Long form, 64 wordsShort form, 17 words

The long formThe twelve points of 1946, as updated

887

The short formThe Twelve Traditions as members know them

228

The Twelve StepsFor comparison

200

A quarter the length

From 887 words to 228: the short form is about a quarter the length of the long, and only a little longer than the Twelve Steps.

For a closer look

Go deeper

When the short form was written; Dr. Bob’s two ways to break anonymity; and cases from the office files.

1947 or 1949?

Bill’s history of 1957 says Earl T. came by “One day in 1947, or thereabouts,” and that the final draft followed several months later. Bill wrote that they did the cutting together. Pass It On (1984) says Bill did it, in 1949, after Earl suggested it as plans for the Cleveland convention were laid; the convention was first proposed in a letter of June 1949.

AA’s website doesn’t mention the short form; it says the Grapevine “published the Traditions one by one from December 1947 to November 1948.” None of the books on hand names the issue in which the short form first appeared.

Two ways to break it

Warren C., who came to AA in Cleveland in 1939, remembered Dr. Bob saying there were two ways to break the anonymity Tradition: “(1) by giving your name at the public level of press or radio; (2) by being so anonymous that you can’t be reached by other drunks.”

Ernie G. of Toledo kept a little book listing the earliest hundred members by full name, with their phone numbers. After a meeting in Jackson, Michigan, where nobody gave a last name, he asked, “How would we tell anyone in A.A.?”

Bill drew the same line in 1955: “Of course no A.A. need be anonymous to family, friends, or neighbors.” Before the general public, he wrote, “the lid can and must stay down.” First names only follows the line from the group to the radio.

The cases in the files

Bill’s essay “Why Alcoholics Anonymous Is Anonymous,” first printed in the Grapevine in January 1955 and reprinted in AA Comes of Age, tells cases like those in the office files, without names. An insurance company paid a member to talk about AA in a series of radio broadcasts across the country. The office objected, and he dropped the plan when told his sponsor would get thousands of letters of protest.

Bill imagined AA’s name being used to sell everything “from pretzels to prune juice.” Members testified before legislative committees, a candidate for office advertised his membership, and a member’s libel suit reached a radio audience estimated at twelve million.

The files held “many scores of such experiences with broken anonymity,” Bill wrote. “I can say this because I was once a breaker of anonymity myself.”

Sources

Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “Service: The Third Legacy,” and Appendix B, “Why Alcoholics Anonymous Is Anonymous.”
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. AA Grapevine and Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1953. Traditions Eleven and Twelve.
Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapters 13, 19, 20 and 22.
Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. AA World Services, 1980. Chapters XXI and XXVII.
Lois Remembers. Al-Anon Family Groups, 1979. Chapters 15 and 19.
Alcoholics Anonymous (the Big Book), fourth edition. AA World Services, 2001. The Twelve Steps, and Appendix I, the long and short forms of the Traditions.
Alcoholics Anonymous, “The Beginnings of the Twelve Traditions,” aa.org.