History of Alcoholics Anonymous


is a global fellowship founded in 1935 by Bill Wilson and Robert Smith, and has since grown to be worldwide.

Alcoholism in the 1700s and 1800s

Nearly two centuries before the advent of Alcoholics Anonymous, John Wesley established Methodist penitent bands, which were organized on Saturday nights, the evening on which members of these small groups were most tempted to frequent alehouses. The hymns and teaching provided during the penitent band meetings addressed the issues that members faced, often alcoholism. As a result, penitent bands have often been compared to Alcoholics Anonymous in scholarly discourse.

Temperance Movement and Prohibition

Alcoholism in the 1930s

In post-Prohibition 1930s America, it was common to perceive alcoholism as a moral failing, and the medical profession standards of the time treated it as a condition that was likely incurable and lethal. Those without financial resources found help through state hospitals, the Salvation Army, or other charitable societies and religious groups. Those who could afford psychiatrists or hospitals were subjected to a treatment with barbiturate and belladonna known as "purge and puke" or were left in long-term asylum treatment.
Despite being aware of medical issues associated with alcoholism, doctors and scientists dismissed them. Skepticism of earlier 20th century claims about the dangers of alcohol arose, minimizing the reality of alcohol-related health problems. Moreover, alcohol-related diseases were not published during this time. Post-prohibition scientists allegedly were eager to separate themselves from the period of temperance. The legislature of Virginia burned scientific journals that condoned moderate drinking to distance themselves from the "wet-dry debate".

The Oxford Group

The Oxford Group was a Christian fellowship founded by American Christian missionary Frank Buchman. Buchman was a minister, originally Lutheran, then Evangelical, who had a conversion experience in 1908 in a chapel in Keswick, England, the revival center of the Higher Life movement. As a result of that experience, he founded a movement named A First Century Christian Fellowship in 1921. This came to be known as the Oxford Group by 1928.
Buchman summarized the Oxford Group philosophy in a few sentences: "All people are sinners"; "All sinners can be changed"; "Confession is a prerequisite to change"; "The changed person can access God directly"; "Miracles are again possible"; and "The changed person must change others."
The practices they utilized were called the five C's:
  • Confidence
  • Confession
  • Conviction
  • Conversion
  • Continuance
Their standard of morality was the Four Absolutesa summary of the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount:
  • Absolute-Honesty
  • Absolute-Purity
  • Absolute-Unselfishness
  • Absolute-Love
In his search for relief from his alcoholism, Bill Wilson, one of the two co-founders of AA, joined The Oxford Group and learned its teachings. While Wilson later broke from The Oxford Group, he based the structure of Alcoholics Anonymous and many of the ideas that formed the foundation of AA's suggested Twelve-Step Program on the teachings of the Oxford Group. Later in life, Bill Wilson gave credit to the Oxford Group for saving his life.
An Oxford Group understanding of the human condition is evident in Wilson's formulation of the dilemma of the alcoholic; Oxford Group program of recovery and influences of Oxford Group evangelism still can be detected in key practices of Alcoholics Anonymous. The Oxford Group writers sometimes treated sin as a disease. They believed that sin was "anything that stood between the individual and God". Sin frustrated "God's plan" for oneself, and selfishness and self-centeredness were considered the key problems. Therefore, if one could "surrender one's ego to God", sin would go with it. In early AA, Wilson spoke of sin and the need for a complete surrender to God. The Oxford Group also prided itself on being able to help troubled persons at any time. AA gained an early warrant from the Oxford Group for the concept that disease could be spiritual, but it broadened the diagnosis to include the physical and psychological.
In 1955, Wilson wrote: "The early AA got its ideas of self-examination, acknowledgment of character defects, restitution for harm done, and working with others straight from the Oxford Group and directly from Sam Shoemaker, their former leader in America, and from nowhere else." According to Mercadante, however, the AA concept of powerlessness over alcohol departs significantly from Oxford Group belief. In AA, the bondage of an addictive disease cannot be cured, and the Oxford Group stressed the possibility of complete victory over sin.

How Alcoholics Connected with the Oxford Group

Rowland Hazard
In 1926, Rowland Hazard, an American business executive, went to Zurich, Switzerland, to seek treatment for alcoholism with psychiatrist Carl Jung. When Hazard ended treatment with Jung after about a year, and came back to the US, he soon resumed drinking, and returned to Jung in Zurich for further treatment. Jung told Hazard that his case was nearly hopeless and that his only hope might be a "spiritual conversion" with a "religious group".
Back in America, Hazard went to the Oxford Group, whose teachings were eventually the source of such AA concepts as "meetings" and "sharing", making "restitution", "rigorous honesty" and "surrendering one's will and life to God's care". Hazard underwent a spiritual conversion" with the help of the Group and began to experience the liberation from drink he was seeking. He became converted to a lifetime of sobriety while on a train ride from New York to Detroit after reading For Sinners Only by Oxford Group member AJ Russell.
Ebby Thacher
Members of the group introduced Hazard to Ebby Thacher. Hazard brought Thacher to the Calvary Rescue Mission, led by Oxford Group leader Sam Shoemaker. Over the years, the mission had helped over 200,000 needy people. Thacher also attained periodic sobriety in later years and died sober.
Bill Wilson
In keeping with the Oxford Group teaching that a new convert must win other converts to preserve his own conversion experience, Thacher contacted his old friend Bill Wilson, whom he knew had a drinking problem.

1934 Bill Wilson sober

was an alcoholic who had ruined a promising career on Wall Street by his drinking. He had also failed to graduate from law school because he was too drunk to pick up his diploma. His drinking damaged his marriage, and he was hospitalized for alcoholism at Towns Hospital in New York four times in 1933–1934 under the care of William Silkworth.
On Wilson's first stay at Towns Hospital, Silkworth explained to him his theory that alcoholism is an illness rather than a moral failure or failure of willpower. Silkworth believed that alcoholics were suffering from a mental obsession, combined with an allergy that made compulsive drinking inevitable, and to break the cycle one had to completely abstain from alcohol use. Wilson was elated to find that he suffered from an illness, and he managed to stay off alcohol for a month before he resumed drinking.
When Ebby Thacher visited Wilson at his New York apartment and told him "he had got religion," Wilson's heart sank. Until then, Wilson had struggled with the existence of God, but of his meeting with Thacher he wrote: "My friend suggested what then seemed a novel idea. He said, 'Why don't you choose your own conception of God?' That statement hit me hard. It melted the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadow I had lived and shivered many years. I stood in the sunlight at last." When Thacher left, Wilson continued to drink. Thacher returned a few days later bringing with him Shep Cornell, another Oxford Group member who was aggressive in his tactics of promoting the Oxford Group Program, but despite their efforts Wilson continued to drink.
The next morning Wilson arrived at Calvary Rescue Mission in a drunken state looking for Thacher. Once there, he attended his first Oxford Group meeting, where he answered the call to come to the altar and, along with other penitents, "gave his life to Christ". Wilson excitedly told his wife Lois about his spiritual progress, yet the next day he drank again and a few days later readmitted himself to Towns Hospital for the fourth and last time.
At Towns Hospital under Silkworth's care, Wilson was administered a drug cure concocted by Charles B. Towns. Known as the Belladonna Cure, it contained belladonna and henbane. These plants contain deliriants, such as atropine and scopolamine, that cause hallucinations.
It was while undergoing this treatment that Wilson experienced his "Hot Flash" spiritual conversion. While lying in bed depressed and despairing, Wilson cried out: "I'll do anything! Anything at all! If there be a God, let Him show Himself!" He then had the sensation of a bright light, a feeling of ecstasy, and a new serenity. Wilson described his experience to Silkworth, who told him not to discount it.
Thacher visited Wilson at Towns Hospital and introduced him to the basic tenets of the Oxford Group and to the book Varieties of Religious Experience by American psychologist and philosopher William James. Upon reading the book, Wilson was later to state that the phrase "deflation at depth" leapt out at him from the page of William James's book; however, this phrase does not appear in the book. It was James's theory that spiritual transformations come from calamities, and their source lies in pain and hopelessness, and surrender. James's belief concerning alcoholism was that "the cure for dipsomania was religiomania".
Upon his release from the hospital on December 18, 1934, Wilson moved from the Calvary Rescue Mission to the Oxford Group meeting at Calvary House. There Wilson socialized after the meetings with other ex-drinking Oxford Group members and became interested in learning how to help other alcoholics achieve sobriety. It was during this time that Wilson went on a crusade to save alcoholics. Sources for his prospects were the Calvary Rescue Mission and Towns Hospital. Though not a single one of the alcoholics Wilson tried to help stayed sober, Wilson himself stayed sober.