Authors: Ernest Kurtz
And so the large old house at 182 Clinton Street opened again, but now with a new accent, to any alcoholics Bill Wilson could find for whom he might sense a glimmer of hope. Some degree of charity surely influenced this decision, but mainly it was inspired by the “inquiring, rational mind” of which Bill had been so proud when drinking. His self-consciousness of it did not desert him when he had sobered. “We thought we could feed our charges at low cost and pick up a lot of knowledge about alcoholism. As it turned out, we did not sober up a single one, but we
did
pick up a lot of knowledge.” For six months, Bill and Lois carefully and lovingly “dry-nursed” a variety of alcoholics brought to Clinton Street from the Calvary Church mission. The results were nil. Once, Lois arrived home from her new efforts at independent interior decorating to find her husband trying to protect their own home’s interior from being “decorated” by five rampaging drunks. On another occasion, she and Bill returned together from a brief vacation to find that the problem-drinking guest to whom they had entrusted their home had turned on the kitchen stove gas jets and committed suicide.
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From all this, Bill learned one very important thing which he later developed into one-half of his philosophy of life — or at least of alcoholism: “Lois and I continued to find that if we permitted alcoholics to become too dependent on us they were apt to stay drunk.” Slowly, except for very special cases, the activities at Clinton Street were cut back to an open-house evening each Tuesday. Yet the idea that change of environment was needed persisted in a different form. From picking up alcoholics at the Calvary Church mission and bringing them to his home, Wilson shifted to seeking out likely prospects at Towns Hospital and taking them to the Oxford Group meetings at Sam Shoemaker’s church. This new style and procedure involved an act of faith that meant much both to Bill and to the alcoholics whom he approached. Dr. Silkworth was risking his medical reputation and career in allowing Bill to roam the corridors of Towns. That a non-alcoholic, and a psychiatrist at that, could show such confidence in this new approach stiffened many spines when the going got rough, as well as immensely motivated many patients devoted to “the little doctor who loved drunks.” He, the patients knew, was a medical man rather than a religious fanatic. And so at least some tolerated their initial discomfort among the Oxford Groupers and ignored their intuitive wariness of this strange enthusiast, Bill Wilson. Further, two of Wilson’s Towns prospects soon achieved sobriety.
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Meanwhile, Bill’s own role within the Oxford Group was becoming more ambiguous. Committed Groupers could not help but admire his enthusiasm. Let one of them even mention having received “guidance” about some apparently hopeless drunk, and Bill with his two newly sobered friends, Hank P. and Fitz M., would tear off in Hank’s car, driving without complaint over to New Jersey or up into Westchester County. That was fine, the Groupers felt, but they soon discovered a problem. The difficulty arose because something happened, and because something else did not happen.
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The problem was that the objects of concern with whom Bill, Hank, and Fitz were successful began to attend the Oxford Group meetings, but clearly the Tuesday gatherings of the alcoholics at the Wilson home were far more important to them than anything occurring under the direct sponsorship of either the Group or Calvary Church. What did not happen seemed even more threatening. Not only the newcomers but also Bill himself limited their participation in the Group to attending meetings and seeking out other alcoholics. The Oxford Group self-consciously aimed to convert the world, and had chosen to achieve this by seeking out and converting the socially prominent who would then allow their prominence to help them “carry the message” to other potential leaders. The only thing in which Bill Wilson and his little coterie showed any interest, however, was seeking out hopeless alcoholics, prominent or not. Further, some of the “saved” alcoholics who still clung to remnants of careers in the world of business revealed extreme shyness about shouting their names and the fact of their salvation from the housetops.
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Slowly, as 1936 turned into 1937, the Calvary Church Oxford Group adjusted. Telling their experience — “sharing,” as they called it, for “confession” and for “witness” — had from its beginning been an important part of Oxford Group practice. This telling of their experience the newly sober alcoholics had enthusiastically embraced. Clearly, they loved to tell their stories. But too often, according to Group standards, “They were giving views, not news of what God had done.” Well, then, perhaps lengthened “quiet times” — the period spent in silent meditation listening for God’s guiding voice — would help them appreciate the difference between “views” and “news.” Further, the majority decided that the received “guidance” should not only be shared, but that the Group as group should “check” it. Wilson and his alcoholics seemed to pick and choose among the guidances offered. But if the
Group
could agree on what directives were clearly from God — by the criteria of the “four absolutes” of honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love — then perhaps they all could again function unitedly in seeking world conversion.
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The alcoholics responded by chafing under the changes. Increasingly, “Wilson’s drunks” felt — and said — that the Tuesday evening meetings at Clinton Street did a lot more to keep them sober than the more strictly structured Calvary Church Oxford Group gatherings. With ever greater vociferousness, also, the more committed Groupers rejected the alcoholics’ objection. The continuing small percentage of alcoholics to attain sobriety, they pointed out, proved the correctness of their own view. “Alcoholics just weren’t worth all that trouble,” and each week a few additional Groupers received guidance that Bill Wilson should abandon his efforts with drunks and turn instead more directly to the aims of the Group as a whole.
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Wilson himself became increasingly uncomfortable. He truly loved Sam Shoemaker, the kindly cleric who had introduced him to the Christian life and had helped him understand the meaning of adversity and apparent failure, prayer, and the unbounded goodness of a loving God. To separate himself from Sam would cut his spiritual taproot just when he was beginning to see that alcoholism was a “three-fold disease”: physical, mental,
and spiritual
. Yet, more and more, his drunks were rebelling against the pressures imposed by the Oxford Group. “Absolutes, hell! I just want to stay sober today!” became an ever more frequent aside ever more raucously proclaimed as the newly sober began speaking about their newly found “salvation.”
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The crisis came to a head in late spring 1937, while Sam Shoemaker was on vacation. One evening Bill discovered that alcoholics from the mission had been forbidden to come to Clinton Street, and soon it became loudly bandied about at the larger Oxford Group meetings that the Wilsons were not “really maximum.” The phrase was strange to Bill and Lois, who found it upsetting. Finally, the “divergent work” of a “secret, ashamed sub-group” became the subject of a Sunday morning sermon at Calvary by the church’s young associate pastor.
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All this, Bill decided, was just about enough. Wilson rearranged the ideas that had so far held him close to the Oxford Group. Yes, alcoholics still needed to believe in something greater than themselves. And it was still true that spiritual experiences of a blinding flash such as his own were rare. He accepted as true, too, that the spiritual side of alcoholism still had to be learned from others, and a spiritual way of life worked out with others. Yet more and more Bill discovered that new adherents could get sober by believing in each other and in the strength of
this
group. Men who had proven over and over again, by extremely painful experience, that they could not get sober on their own had somehow become more powerful when two or three of them worked together on their common problem. This, then, whatever it was that occurred among them, was what they could accept as a power greater than themselves. They did not need the Oxford Group.
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So the yet unnamed group of alcoholics struggling for sobriety separated from the Oxford Group. Later, in 1955 at the fellowship’s twentieth anniversary and “Coining of Age” convention, Wilson set out to record carefully the exact nature of his and A.A.’s debt to the Oxford Group.
One circumstance of his address highlighted two concerns that impelled Bill to be as honest and as accurate as possible. He made his oral presentation with the Rev. Dr. Samuel Shoemaker and his close Jesuit friend, Fr. Edward Dowling, seated on the platform behind him. These two men of differing religious background personified Wilson’s concerns. On the one hand, Wilson wished to acknowledge the Oxford Group contribution, thus not slighting Shoemaker’s role in his own recovery. On the other hand, especially in this setting honoring him as co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill felt the need to emphasize A.A.’s early and complete separation from the Oxford Group, thus not compromising the Roman Catholic principles of Dowling.
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The better to capture both the significance of this circumstance and the larger context of the problem, Bill Wilson’s presentation on that occasion of his understanding of the relationship between Alcoholics Anonymous and the Oxford Group is offered at length and in his own words:
The Oxford Groupers had clearly shown us what to do. And just as importantly, we had also learned from them
what not to do
as far as alcoholics were concerned. We had found that certain of their ideas and attitudes simply could not be sold to alcoholics. For example, drinkers would not take pressure in any form, excepting from John Barleycorn himself. They always had to be led, not pushed. They would not stand for the rather aggressive evangelism of the Oxford Group. And they would not accept the principle of “team guidance” for their own personal lives. It was too authoritarian for them. In other respects, too, we found we had to make haste slowly. When first contacted, most alcoholics just wanted to find sobriety, nothing else. They clung to their other defects, letting go only little by little. They simply did not want to get “too good too soon.” The Oxford Groups’ absolute concepts … were frequently too much for the drunks. These ideas had to be fed with teaspoons rather than by buckets.
Besides, the Oxford Groups’ “absolutes” were expressions peculiar to them. This was a terminology which might continue to identify us in the public mind with the Oxford Groupers, even though we had completely withdrawn from their fellowship.
There was yet another difficulty. Because of the stigma then attached to the condition, most alcoholics wanted to be anonymous. We were afraid also of developing erratic public characters who through broken anonymity, might get drunk in public and so destroy confidence in us. The Oxford Group, on the contrary, depended very much upon the use of prominent names — something that was doubtless all right for them but mighty hazardous for us. Our debt to them, nevertheless, was and is immense, and so the final breakaway was very painful.
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Clearly, the final clause was primarily for the ears of Sam Shoemaker. Shoemaker himself had broken with the Oxford Group in early 1941, but he remained deeply aware of the close and continuing dependence of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous upon the ideas and practices that he had impressed upon Bill Wilson. The realization that many newer A.A.s were ignorant of the similarity which their cherished program bore to primitive Christianity pained the committed cleric. He hoped that these, hearing of the connecting link when the name “Oxford Group” no longer fluttered the flags of controversy, would look into the matter and come to see.
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Earlier in Wilson’s discourse, the phrase “the public mind” had brought a blissful smile to the lips of the genial Jesuit, “Puggy” Dowling. Looking out over the assembled conventioneers and recalling his experience at countless A.A. meetings across the country, Father Dowling guessed that approximately one-third of the members of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1955 were Roman Catholic. It had not always been so, he recalled with a muffled chuckle.
When the book
Alcoholics Anonymous
was ready for publication in 1939, the New York group had not contained a single Catholic. Dowling knew the story of that concern and its resolution when a new arrival, “fresh out of Greystone asylum,” was quickly pressed into service. Morgan R. was not only Catholic but claimed friendship with an official in the New York Archdiocesan chancery. Hopefully, the fledgling group had invested subway fare that Morgan might carry the precious manuscript uptown to his friend for pre-publication scrutiny. His task had not been to seek official approval. A printed
imprimatur
would have spelled doom by labeling the book “religious.” Rather, Morgan’s errand had been to make sure that there was nothing in the work to which the Catholic Church might object. Bill Wilson had heard that the Catholic Church was about to condemn the Oxford Group, and conscious of how much “Oxford Group” was in his program, Wilson had feared to fall under the same condemnation. “Strange,” Dowling mused. Bill apparently had never even been acquainted with a Catholic until he himself had come wandering by the old Twenty-Fourth Street clubhouse on a rainy night in 1940. The drolly inquisitive Jesuit whimsically wondered: in a free association test, would the most common first response to “Irish” be “Catholic” or “alcoholic"? It would be close, he decided. And now this Vermont Yankee was standing up there and equating “Catholic Church” and “public mind"!
31
Wilson’s careful analysis met the needs of 1955, but a greater historical distance allows deeper understanding of the origins of Alcoholics Anonymous in the Oxford Group. The Oxford Group, later known as Moral Re-Armament, originated in the activities of Frank Buchman, who had come to his own “spiritual experience” in 1908, while traveling in Scotland. A sometime college chaplain, Buchman sought to capture for his movement the aura surrounding universities that produced world leaders and therefore occupied a pivotal place in modern society. To achieve his mission of recalling the world to primitive Christianity, Buchman concentrated on the students and graduates of such institutions. The association with Oxford, he deemed, could facilitate acceptance and gain his message a respectful hearing.
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