“At some of these we balked. We thought we could find an easier, softer way. But we could not. With all the earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. Some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go absolutely.
“Remember that we deal with alcohol - cunning, baffling, powerful! Without help it is too much for us. But there is One who has all power - that One is God. May you find Him now!
“Half measures availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point. We asked His protection and care with complete abandon. Here are the steps we took...”
Granting that Bill ended up fully reconciled to the compromise, his initial misgivings may turn out in the long run to have been prophetic. At the time, however, there were no indications whatsoever that the permissive, suggestions only approach was anything but a boon to the movement.
In 1938 and 1939 when the Big Book was being written, there were 100 members in the fellowship. By 1945 active AA membership was up to 13,000. The primary reason for this explosive increase was that the program - the Steps - were a winning formula; they worked, and there was a big need for them out there in the population. America was boozy and was spawning a great many alcoholics.
Highly favorable press coverage of the AA story was also a major factor in the spectacular growth pattern. A series of enthusiastic articles on AA appeared in the fall of 1939 in the Cleveland "Plain Dealer." These pieces produced a flood of new AA members in the Cleveland area. This sudden expansion was the first tangible evidence that AA had the potential to grow into a movement of major proportions.
The sequence of events during this period is significant. The Big Book was published in April of 1939, and in it the suggestions-only approach to the Steps was disseminated for the first time. A few months later the "Plain Dealer" articles ran, and Cleveland AA’s found themselves relating to new prospects on an unprecedented scale. It suddenly became attractive, in a way it had not been before when the fellowship was smaller and more intimate, to ease up a bit on the idea that all the principles should be practiced all the time by all the members. More and more emphasis began to be placed on the fact that the Steps were to be considered as suggestions only. At this time, and through this set of circumstances, the "cafeteria style" take-what-you-like-and-leave-the-rest approach to the Twelve Steps came into practice.
And it seemed to work. It turned out that many newcomers could get sober and stay sober without anything like the full and intensive practice of the whole program that had been considered a life-or-death necessity in the early years. In fact, alcoholics in significant numbers began to demonstrate that they could stay off booze on no more than an admission of powerlessness, some work with other alcoholics, and regular attendance at AA meetings.
This is not to say that all AA’s began to take this super-permissive approach to the Twelve Steps. A great many continued to opt for the original, full program approach. But now for the first time the workability of other, less rigorous approaches was established, and a tendency had emerged which was to become more pronounced as time went on.
At first this seemed like an unmixed blessing. After all, those who chose actively to practice all of the Twelve Steps were as free as ever to do so. Those who preferred working with some, or just a couple, of the Steps were staying sober too. And AA was attracting more and more new members and more and more favorable recognition. In 1941, Jack Alexander's article on Alcoholics Anonymous was published in the “Saturday Evening Post.” AA membership at the time stood at 2,000. In the next nine months it jumped 400%.
By now it was possible to distinguish three variant practices of the AA program which we have labeled the strong-cup-of-coffee, medium-cup-of-coffee, and weak-cup-of-coffee approaches. Strong AA was the original, undiluted, dosage of the spiritual principles. Strong AA’s took all twelve of the Steps - and kept on taking them. They did not stop with the admission of powerlessness over alcohol, but went on right away to turn their wills and lives over to God's care. They began to practice rigorous honesty in all their affairs. In short order they proceeded to take a moral inventory, admit all their wrongs to at least one other person, take positive and forceful action in making such restitution as was possible for those wrongs, continued taking inventory, admitting their faults, and making restitution on a regular basis, pray and meditate every day, go to two or more AA meetings weekly, and actively work the Twelfth Step, carrying the AA message to others in trouble.
The medium AA’s started off with a bang, pretty much like the strong AA’s, except they hedged or procrastinated a bit on parts of the program that they feared or did not like - maybe the God Steps, maybe the inventory Steps, depending on their particular nervousness or dislikes. But after they had stayed sober for a while, the medium AA’s eased up and settled into a practice of the program that went something like this: an AA meeting a week; occasional Twelfth Step work (leaving more and more of that to the "newer fellows" as time went on); some work with the Steps (but not like before); less and less inventory (as they became more and more "respectable"); some prayer and meditation still, but not on a daily basis any more (not enough time, due to the encroachment of business engagements, social activities, and other baggage that went along with the return to normal life in the workaday world).
The weak AA’s were a varied lot. The thing common to all of them was that they left big chunks of the program totally and permanently out of their reckoning right from the outset - sometimes the God Steps, sometimes the inventory Steps, often both. Weak AA’s tended to talk in terms like, "All you need to do to stay sober is go to meetings and stay away from the first drink." Most of the weak AA’s who were successful in staying sober were pretty faithful meeting-goers. Since they were doing so little with the principles, their sobriety and their survival depended more exclusively than did those of the strong and medium AA’s on constant exposure to the people of AA.
The fact is that only the strong-cup-of-coffee-ers were practicing the program as it had been laid out in the Big Book. Granting that the medium and weak AA’s had every right as AA members to practice the principles any way they wanted (including hardly any at all), since the Steps were "suggestions only" - still, the way the first members had done it, and the way the Big Book had recorded it was the strong-cup-of-coffee way.
The medium approach had - and still has - a real, constructive place in the AA recovery scheme, in that it can be used as a temporary platform for reluctant beginners. The medium-cup-of-coffee option enables many who initially are not up to the strong approach to gain a foothold in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous.
But medium AA can, and often does, become a trap. It is no place for an AA member to try to settle out permanently. People who stick too long in medium AA pass the point where they might be encouraged to step up to strong AA and end up sliding back into weak AA.
Weak AA has none of the redeeming features of medium AA. It is clearly at odds with the program as outlined in the Big Book. It bases itself on a flat and unnegotiable refusal to work with vital recovery principles. Weak AA’s cop out and stay copped out on most of the Twelve Steps. They water down the program to the point where there really is no program in the sense that the first members of AA understood the program. A more inclusive, more accurate, and more descriptive term than "weak AA" for this practice is "copped-out and watered-down AA", or COWD AA for short. With the passage of time, a definite evolution has taken place in AA in the respective popularity and acceptability of the strong and COWD approaches.
In the first years of their existence, the COWD AA’s tended to feel obligated to defend and sing the praises of their "heterodox" approaches and even to chide the strong AA’s a bit for being rigid and holier-than-thou. The strong AA’s, for their part, tended to be more relaxed and tolerant, less strident, less defensive. After all, their method was obviously safer since it involved taking more of the medicine. And it was obviously the original and genuine article as the Big Book eloquently attested.
But this juxtaposition of attitudes came to have a peculiar effect in a movement which prided itself on its good-natured inclination to let all kinds of maverick opinions and practices have their say and their way. The loudest voices came to be the voices of heterodoxy, and these came in time to have the greatest impact on newcomers. Copped-out and watered-down AA came to be the "in" thing, the wave of the future; strong AA came to be regarded - not universally, but widely - as a bit stodgy and a bit passé.
The COWD AA’s had in a sense proven Bill and the first hundred AA’s wrong. In the introduction to the Twelve Steps, the statement: "...we thought we could find an easier, softer way, but we could not..." was an unequivocal assertion that it was necessary to practice all the Steps. But the COWD AA’s did not practice all the Steps, and they were staying sober. They had found an easier, softer way. Human nature being what it is, it was inevitable that the less demanding, medium-to-weak approach would grow in popularity while the older, more rigorous approach would decline. Who wants to do things the hard way when they do not have to? Who wants to drive a car with standard shift when the model with automatic is a hundred dollars cheaper?
