Thoughts on a Visit to Akron -- Floyd H.
AA Old Timers Reveal How Outside Influences Have Corrupted Recovery Success Rates in AA
Chief Blackhawk (Detroit, 40 years in October, 1998), sitting on the front porch of Dr. Bob's house at 855 Ardmore in Akron, Ohio: “Floyd, there are vital reasons that we are not allied with any sects, denominations, politics, organizations, or institutions. You want to know what they are?”
On a summer of 1998 trip to Akron to do the AA Historical Tour of that city, I had the great fortune of meeting several old-timers who knew many of our founders on a personal level. Three in particular all knew Bill Wilson personally, Chief having met him dozens of times before Bill's death; and Larry and Glen, both of whose sponsors were taken through The Work by Dr. Bob. All three knew Clarence Snyder as well.
I thank them for the hours they spent, sharing what they knew personally of early AA and answering my questions about changes that have taken place in the fellowship. I especially appreciate their insights regarding a concern of mine in recent years, namely, why our success rates today so much lower than that of the founders. I also thank the others who injected their observations during my talks with these three, though I did not get the names of all those other AA’s.
Each of these gentlemen during the discussion shared two ideas that they said Bob stressed often: (1) keep it simple, and (2) learn from our early mistakes -- there’s no need to have to rebuild AA from the ground up each generation if AA’s will use what we learned from our early mistakes. It seemed to these three gentlemen that we in the fellowship do seem often to be involved in rebuilding from Ground Zero rather than doing what Dr. Bob urged.
Here is what was shared by those gentlemen and their friends over a four-day visit:
(A) Originally, AA had no meetings. Later, AA’s gathered regularly at Dr. Bob's house, once a week, to indoctrinate newcomers. Later, as the numbers became too large for Dr. Bob's small living room/dining area, the meetings were moved to the 676 Palisades Drive home of T. Henry and Clarence Williams (non-alcoholics involved in the Oxford Group in Akron); after the number in weekly attendance there hit close to 100, the group had to find a larger meeting place. Two weeks later, arrangements were made with the local school board to use the auditorium at King School. Early meetings took one of four forms:
1. Typical Open Meeting: Male speaker (and, later on, a female speaker as more women came on board); announcements/collection for coffee fund; male speaker; ends with leader sharing.
2. Typical Closed Meeting: Chairperson leads Q & A session; one particular step discussed by pre-selected panel; option: all 12 Traditions discussed by panel.
3. Panel Meeting: A moderator w/ 2-3 members answered questions submitted on cards.
4. Spotlight Meeting: Leader and 2-3 speakers talk on one of the assets from the inventory list, such as humility, honesty, generosity, etc. Speakers were chosen -- no volunteers.
Interestingly, of the meetings I randomly attended while in Akron, the first was exactly like #1 above, the second one was a Q & A meeting, and the third was a spotlight meeting. The Akron Intergroup lists approximately 450 meetings per week now, and only 12% of those in the directory were marked as discussion meetings. Original AA had no discussion meetings. Also of interest to me was the fact that during my nine years in AA, I had never come across any of the type meetings I attended in Akron, the closest thing being our speaker meetings in the Houston area, which are sometimes drunkalogs. When I mentioned that, one of the Akron old-timers said: New York started telling drinking stories -- we never did that in Akron meetings in the early days. We focused on the spiritual solution.
(B) By May of 1939, Clarence Snyder, out of Cleveland, was tiring of the role that non-alcoholics in the Oxford Group were exerting. (There was also a problem in that many of Clarence’s Cleveland members were Catholic, and they were forbidden at that time to associate with such sects as the Oxford Group.) Clarence, therefore, started the very first group to break away from the Oxford Group and actually call itself “AA.” He declared that attendance at the Cleveland AA meetings would be limited to alcoholics and their family members only -- no non-alcoholics allowed. Membership would be limited to those who had an “honest desire to stop drinking”. A huge debate followed and the next week an Akron contingent arrived and tried to stop the meeting in Cleveland, resulting in near fisticuffs. But Clarence moved forward, and thus so did AA. One old-timer said that Clarence really started AA because Bill and Bob were too grateful to the Oxford Group early on to have the guts to separate from them even though the Oxford Group sought out only the rich alcoholics in town and had other practices that made real alcoholics uncomfortable.
(C) In the early years, Akron and NY combined for a 75% success rate. In truth, Akron accounted for most of that success rate. A letter written by Bill Wilson later addressed that discrepancy:
We used to pussyfoot on this spiritual business a great deal more out here (in New York) and the result was bad, for our record falls quite a lot short of the performance of Akron and Cleveland, where there are now about 350 alcoholics, many of them sober 2 or 3 years, with less than 20% ever having any relapse. Out there they have always emphasized the spiritual way of life as the core of our procedure and we have begun to follow suit in New York for the simple reason that our record was only half as good....
The old-timers said that Cleveland AA was enjoying a success rate equal to Akron’s, and, over time, Cleveland would actually sustain the highest success rates, averaging 93% over several decades. So I asked: “What the heck went wrong?” Chief told me that if I would reread a part of our Preamble, I’d see a direct reference to what happened that led to the early failures in AA that we need not repeat, though we seem to anyway. He said: “Floyd, there are vital reasons that we are not allied with any sects, denominations, politics, organizations, or institutions. You want to know what they are?” “You bet,” I said. “Each of those was added over the years to address a specific failure that occurred during what Dr. Bob called our ‘experimental stage,’” the Chief said. So here’s what Chief and the other old-timers from Akron shared:
SECTS
The men said that, though we owe gratitude to the Oxford Group, Clarence showed wisdom in breaking away from them. Why?
(1) Dr. Bob went to weekly Oxford Group meetings for 2-1/2 years, but they never got him sober. The Oxford Groupers thought that going to meetings could treat alcoholism. We found out early on that going to meetings had nothing to do with our getting sober and staying sober. We used meetings early on to hook the newcomers -- we planned ‘em out and set up the newcomers, really.
(2) The Oxford Group was dominated by rich, non-alcoholics, many members of Akron’s “high society”. They meant well but their approach was doomed to failure because they didn’t work one-on-one, one alkie talking to another alkie, like Bill did with Dr. Bob. Another said: “Read the book, Dr. Bob and the Good Old-timers. You’ll see that the founders did not consider meetings necessary to maintain sobriety. Morning devotion and quiet time were the two musts.” (I checked when I got home. He was right -- it’s on page 136, almost verbatim.)
DENOMINATIONS
“Reverend Buchman was the Lutheran minister from Pennsylvania who started the Oxford Movement. While they had their 6 steps that formed the basis of our twelve, they sought out top people in the community to help, hoping their recovery would “filter down” throughout the community. They liked dealing with the rich and famous. All the years that our founders were in the Oxford Group, they called themselves “the alcoholic squad” because they never felt a part of that group. Dr. Bob had a problem with their religious leaning, but he agreed to go to their meetings when he found out they were held at the Mayflower Hotel and in private homes. Later, Dr. Bob would change his attitude and make use of what religion offered, using the Bible daily in his morning reading time. But that was after he sobered up.”
POLITICS
“The Oxford Group got involved in political issues, especially saying some pro-Nazi things in the ‘30’s. That came back to bite ‘em, so we stay away from politics.”
ORGANIZATIONS
“The Cleveland group’s experience with an outside organization taught us about the danger of trying that. Get in with another organization, they bring their values and opinions and they seldom are what we know works in helping drunks. When Clarence’s group formed in Cleveland, an article ran in the Cleveland newspaper, The Plain Dealer. The group was flooded with requests for help, and many were low-bottoms who needed 3-5 days of hospitalization. After being turned down by all the local hospitals and after helping the son of a person associated with the Salvation Army, that organization told Clarence they’d make some beds available for alcoholics. In accepting their aid, two things happened. First, AA became allied with an outside organization; next, they fell under that organization’s philosophy about recovering from alcoholism and compromised what the alcoholics knew really worked. In order to get the beds, the AA’s violated their own procedures.” I asked: “So what was that organization’s philosophy that went against what AA’s had been doing?”
They answered: “The Cleveland Salvation Army had a policy of limiting bed space for anyone to a total of three months. Their motive was noble: “we’ll help you down-and-out’s to get by until you get a job and a place of your own, but to motivate you, we’re putting a time limit on our assistance -- you have three months, max.” Now, for the alkies coming in, they told them the same thing but added, “You also have to visit with a recovered alcoholic daily; that is, you have to meet with them 90 times in 90 days, and we’re gonna check to make sure you do. Miss a meeting and you have no bed. You’re back on the streets.” So instead of taking the drunks through in 3 or 4 hours the way we always did it, or a matter of days at the most, we’re now into this 90-in-90 plan.”
I said: “So the Cleveland Salvation Army introduced this thing we hear so often today -- ‘Go to 90 meetings in 90 days’?”
They said, “Exactly. And the early Cleveland AA’s, desperate to get beds they thought they had to have, compromised their approach to working the steps quickly. But to their great credit, the Cleveland AA’s keep meticulous records (with Clarence’s insistence) and their stats revealed that no one gained any long-term sobriety using that plan. So Cleveland separated itself from the Salvation Army with a valuable lesson: stick to the methods proven successful -- alkies taking alkies through the steps and doing it pronto. After Cleveland got back to doing that instead of the 90-in-90-Salvation-Army plan, the AA’s got a 93% success rate over the next several decades.”
