BILL W. ON "HOW THE BIG BOOK WAS PUT TOGETHER"

Here is a talk Bill Wilson gave in Fort Worth, Texas in 1954

    I think I’m on the bill for tonight’s show with a talk on the 12 Traditions of A.A. But you know drunks, like women, have the prerogative, or at least seize the prerogative of changing their minds - I’m not going to make any such damn talk!

    For something very festive I think the Traditions 1-12 would be a little too grim, might bore you a little. As a matter of fact, speaking of Traditions, when they were first written back there in 1945 or 1946 as tentative guides to help us hang together and function, nobody paid any attention except a few "againsters" who wrote me and asked what the hell are they about?

    Nobody paid the slightest attention. But, little by little as these Traditions got around we had our clubhouse squabbles, our little rifts, this difficulty and that, it was found that the Traditions indeed did reflect experience and were guiding principles.

    So, they took hold a little more and a little more and a little more so that today the average A.A. coming in the door learns at once what they’re about, about what kind of an outfit he really has landed in and by what principles his group and A.A. as a whole are governed.

    But, as I say, the dickens with all that. I would like to just spin some yarn and they will be a series of yarns which cluster around the preparation of the good old A.A. bible and when I hear that it always makes me shudder because the guys who put it together weren’t a damn bit biblical. I think sometimes some of the drunks have an idea that these old timers went around with almost visible halos and long gowns and they were full of sweetness and light. Oh boy, how inspired they were, oh yes. But wait till I tell you.

    I suppose the book yarn really started in the living room of Doc and Annie Smith. As you know, I landed there in the summer of ‘35, a little group caught hold. I helped Smithy briefly with it and he went on to found the first A.A. group in the world. And, as with all new groups, it was nearly all failure, but now and then, somebody saw the light and there was progress.

    Pampered, I got back to New York, a little more experienced group started there, and by the time we got around to 1937, this thing had leaped over into Cleveland, and began to move south from New York. But, it was still, we thought in those years, flying blind, a flickering candle indeed, that might at any moment be snuffed out.

    So, on this late fall afternoon in 1937, Smithy and I were talking together in his living room, Anne sitting there, when we began to count noses. How many people had stayed dry; in Akron, in New York, maybe a few in Cleveland? How many had stayed dry and for how long? And when we added up the total, it sure was a handful of, I don’t know, 35 to 40 maybe. But enough time had elapsed on enough really fatal cases of alcoholism, so that we grasped the importance of these small statistics.

    Bob and I saw for the first time that this thing was going to succeed. That God in his providence and mercy had thrown a new light into the dark caves where we and our kind had been and were still by the millions dwelling. I can never forget the elation and ecstasy that seized us both. And when we sat happily talking and reflecting, we reflected, that well, a couple of score of drunks were sober but this had taken three long years.

    There had been an immense amount of failure and a long time had been taken just to sober up the handful. How could this handful carry its’ message to all those who still didn’t know? Not all the drunks in the world could come to Akron or New York.

    But how could we transmit our message to them, and by what means? Maybe we could go to the old timers in each group, but that meant nearly everybody, to find the sum of money - somebody else’s money, of course - and say to them "Well now, take a sabbatical year off your job if you have one, and you go to Kentucky, Omaha, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles and wherever it may be and you give this thing a year and get a group started."

    It had already become evident by then that we were just about to be moved out of the City Hospital in Akron to make room for people with broken legs and ailing livers; that the hospitals were not too happy with us. We tried to run their business perhaps too much, and besides, drunks were apt to be noisy in the night and there were other inconveniences, which were all tremendous. So, it was obvious that because of drunks being such unlovely creatures, we would have to have a great chain of hospitals. And as that dream burst upon me, it sounded good, because you see, I’d been down in Wall Street in the promotion business and I remember the great sums of money that were made as soon as people got this chain idea. You know, chain drug stores, chain grocery stores, chain dry good stores.

    That evening Bob and I told them that we were within sight of success and that we thought this thing might go on and on and on, that a new light indeed was shining in our dark world. But how could this light be a reflection and transmitted without being distorted and garbled?

    At this point, they turned the meeting over to me, and being a salesman, I set right to work on the drunk tanks and subsidies for the missionaries, I was pretty poor then.

    We touched on the book. The group conscience consisted of 18 men good and true ... and the good and true men, you could see right away, were dammed skeptical about it all. Almost with one voice, they chorused "let’s keep it simple, this is going to bring money into this thing, this is going to create a professional class. We’ll all be ruined."

    "Well," I countered, "That’s a pretty good argument. Lots to what you say ... but even within gunshot of this very house, alcoholics are dying like flies. And if this thing doesn’t move any faster than it has in the last three years, it may be another 10 before it gets to the outskirts of Akron. How in God’s name are we going to carry this message to others? We’ve got to take some kind of chance. We can’t keep it so simple it becomes an anarchy and gets complicated. We can’t keep it so simple that it won’t propagate itself, and we’ve got to have a lot of money to do these things."

    So, exerting myself to the utmost, which was considerable in those days, we finally got a vote in that little meeting and it was a mighty close vote by just a majority of maybe 2 or 3. The meeting said with some reluctance, "Well Bill, if we need a lot of dough, you better go back to New York where there’s plenty of it and you raise it."

    Well, boy, that was the word that I’d been waiting for. So I scrammed back to the great city and I began to approach some people of means describing this tremendous thing that had happened. And it didn’t seem so tremendous to the people of means at all.