DAVID ADAMS looks back to where it all began for the worldwide Alcoholics Anonymous movement…
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AA sign in Germany. PICTURE: Vangore/Wikipedia Licence – CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Mention the acronym AA and there’s a good chance people will know which organisation you’re talking about. For 80 years, Alcoholics Anonymous has been helping people deal with the issue of alcoholism through its famous “12 step” program.
The organisation traces its origins to the emergence in the early 20th century of the Oxford Group, a religious movement popular in the US and Europe which had been founded by US Christian missionary Dr Frank Buchman.
According to the AA’s US website, members of the Oxford Group “practiced a formula of self-improvement by performing self-inventory, admitting wrongs, making amends, using prayer and meditation, and carrying the message to others”.
A New Yorker named Bill Wilson, once described as a “golden boy” stockbroker on Wall Street whose career had been ruined by alcoholism, was introduced to the group and its teachings but unconvinced at first by the group’s methods, he continued his struggle with alcohol.
In December, 1934, however – during a stint in hospital related to his alcoholism, Wilson had a powerful spiritual experience and, according to found his depression and despair lifted and, according to the AA website, his “depression and despair were lifted, and he felt free and at peace”.
Wilson stopped drinking and in 1935, he met with a surgeon, Dr Robert ‘Bob’ Smith, in Akron, Ohio, who has also been in contact with the Oxford Group, but who hadn’t yet achieved sobriety.
Dr Smith was immediately inspired with Wilson’s story and soon was able to put drink aside. Both men started working with alcoholics in Akron’s City Hospital and along with one patient formed what would become the first AA group. A second group started in New York that same year – 1935 – and a third in Cleveland in 1939.
It was in that year that what had become a ‘fellowship’ – governed by a board known as The Alcoholic Foundation – published a textbook, Alcoholics Anonymous, which, written by Wilson, set out what became known as the 12 steps. These include admitting powerlessness over alcohol, coming to believe that a “Power greater than ourselves” could restore alcoholics to “sanity”, and, having made a list of all the people they had harmed, making direct amendments to people affected by their alcoholism.
In the US, membership of the groups – which meet anonymously and which are based on members sharing their stories with each other – grew rapidly and the organisation soon spread to other countries, initially Canada and then elsewhere, and by 1950, there were 100,000 ‘recovered’ alcoholics worldwide including in Australia.
The first attempt to establish a group in Australia had taken place in 1942 but it failed and it was only in 1945 that the first AA meetings began in Sydney.
The organisation describes itself as a non-professional, informal fellowship and, according to a statement on the Australian website, says it is “not a religious organisation nor is it affiliated with any religious body” and welcomes “members of all religions, agnostics and atheists alike”.
It currently has some two million members around the world, including about 20,000 in Australia.
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