The Jack Alexander Article
From the March 1, 1941 issue of The Saturday Evening Post
Alcoholics Anonymous
THREE MEN sat around the bed of an
alcoholic patient in the psychopathic ward of Philadelphia
General Hospital one afternoon a few weeks ago. The man in the
bed, who was a complete stranger to them, had the drawn and
slightly stupid look the inebriates get while being defogged
after a bender. The only thing that was noteworthy about the
callers, except for the obvious contrast between their
well-groomed appearances and that of the patient, was the fact
that each had been through the defogging process many times
himself. They were members of Alcoholics Anonymous, a band of
ex-problem drinkers who make an avocation of helping other
alcoholics to beat the liquor habit.
The man in the bed was a mechanic. His
visitors had been educated at Princeton, Yale and Pennsylvania
and were, by occupation, a salesman, a lawyer and a publicity
man. Less than a year before, one had been in shackles in the
same ward. One of his companions had been what is known among
alcoholics as a sanitarium commuter. He had moved from place to
place, bedeviling the staffs of the country's leading
institutions for the treatment of alcoholics. The other had
spent twenty years of life, all outside institution walls,
making life miserable for himself, and his family and his
employers, as well as sundry well-meaning relatives who had had
the temerity to intervene.
The air of the ward was thick with the
aroma of paraldehyde, an unpleasant cocktail smelling like a
mixture of alcohol and ether which hospitals sometimes use to
taper off the paralyzed drinker and soothe his squirming nerves.
The visitors seemed oblivious of this and of the depressing
atmosphere of psychopathic wards. They smoked and talked with
the patient for twenty minutes or so, then left their personal
cards and departed. If the man in the bed felt that he would
like to see one of them again, they told him, he had only to put
in a telephone call.
THEY MADE it plain that if he actually
wanted to stop drinking, they would leave their work or get up
in the middle of the night to hurry to where he was. If he did
not choose to call, that would be the end of it. The members of
Alcoholics Anonymous do not pursue or coddle a malingering
prospect, and they know the strange tricks of the alcoholic as a
reformed swindler knows the art of bamboozling.
Herein lies much of the unique strength of
a movement, which in the past six years, has brought recovery to
around 2,000 men and women, a large percentage of whom had been
considered medically hopeless. Doctors and clergymen, working
separately or together, have always managed to salvage a few
cases. In isolated instances, drinkers have found their own
methods of quitting. But the inroads into alcoholism have been
negligible, and it remains one of the great, unsolved
public-health enigmas.
By nature touch and suspicious, the
alcoholic likes to be left alone to work out his puzzle, and he
has a convenient way of ignoring the tragedy which he inflicts
meanwhile upon those who are close to him. He holds desperately
to a conviction that, although he has not been able to handle
alcohol in the past, he will ultimately succeed in becoming a
controlled drinker. One of medicine's queerest animals, he is,
as often as not, an acutely intelligent person. He fences with
professional men and relative who attempt to aid him and he gets
a perverse satisfaction out of tripping them up in argument.
THERE IS no specious excuse for drinking
which the troubleshooters of Alcoholics Anonymous have not heard
or used themselves. When one of their prospects hands them a
rationalization for getting soused, they match it with a half a
dozen out of their own experience. This upsets him a little, and
he gets defensive. He looks at their neat clothing and smoothly
shaved faces and charges them with being goody-goodies who don't
know what it is to struggle with drink. They reply by relating
their own stories: the double Scotches and brandies before
breakfast; the vague feeling of discomfort which precedes a
drinking bout; the awakening from a spree without being able to
account for the actions of several days and the haunting fear
that possibly they had run down someone with their automobiles.
They tell of the eight-ounce bottles of
gin hidden behind pictures and in caches from cellar to attic;
of spending whole days in motion-picture houses to stave off the
temptation to drink; of sneaking out of the office for quickies
during the day. They talk of losing jobs and stealing money from
their wives' purses; of putting pepper into whiskey to give it a
tang; of tippling on bitters and sedative tablets, or on
mouthwash or hair tonic; of getting into the habit of camping
outside the neighborhood tavern ten minutes before opening time.
They describe a hand so jittery that it could not lift a pony to
the lips without spilling the contents; drinking liquor from a
beer stein because it can be steadied with two hands, although
at the risk of chipping a front tooth; tying an end of a towel
about a glass, looping the towel around the back of the neck,
and drawing the free end with the other hand; hands so shaky
they feel as if they were about to snap off and fly into space;
sitting on hands for hours to keep them from doing this.
These and other bits of drinking lore
usually manage to convince the alcoholic that he is talking to
blood brothers. A bridge of confidence is thereby erected,
spanning a gap, which has baffled the physician, the minister,
the priest, or the hapless relatives. Over this connection, the
troubleshooters convey, bit by bit, the details of a program for
living which has worked for them and which, they feel, can work
for any other alcoholic. They concede as out of their orbit only
those who are psychotic or who are already suffering from the
physical impairment known as wet brain. At the same time, they
see to it that the prospect gets whatever medical attention is
needed.
MANY DOCTORS and staffs of institutions
throughout the country now suggest Alcoholics Anonymous to their
drinking patients. In some towns, the courts and probation
officers cooperate with the local group. In a few city
psychopathic divisions, the workers of Alcoholics Anonymous are
accorded the same visiting privileges as staff members.
Philadelphia General is one of these. Dr. John F. Stouffer, the
chief psychiatrist, says: "the alcoholics we get here are
mostly those who cannot afford private treatment, and this is by
far the greatest thing we have ever been able to offer them.
Even among those who occasionally land back in here again, we
observe a profound change in personality. You would hardly
recognize them".
The Illinois Medical Journal, in an
editorial last December, went further than D. Stouffer, in
stating: "It is indeed a miracle when a person who for
years has been more of less constantly under the influence of
alcohol and in whom his friends have lost all confidence, will
sit up all night with a drunk and at stated intervals administer
a small amount of liquor in accordance with a doctor's order
without taking a drop himself."
This is a reference to a common aspect of
the Arabian Nights adventures to which Alcoholics Anonymous
workers dedicate themselves. Often it involves sitting upon, as
well as up with, the intoxicated person, as the impulse to jump
out a window seems to be an attractive one to many alcoholics
when in their cups. Only an alcoholic can squat on another
alcoholic's chest for hours with the proper combination of
discipline and sympathy.
During a recent trip around the East and
Middle West, I met and talked with scores of A.A.s, as they call
themselves, and found them to be unusually calm tolerant people.
Somehow, they seemed better integrated than the average group of
nonalcoholic individuals. Their transformation from cop
fighters, canned-heat drinkers, and, in some instances, wife
beaters, was startling. On one of the most influential
newspapers in the country, I found that the city editor, the
assistant city editor, and a nationally known reporter were
A.A.s, and strong in the confidence of their publisher.
IN ANOTHER city, I heard a judge parole a
drunken driver to an A.A. member. The latter, during his
drinking days, had smashed several cars and had had his own
operator's license suspended. The judge knew him and was glad to
trust him. A brilliant executive of an advertising firm
disclosed that two years ago he had been panhandling and
sleeping in a doorway under an elevated structure. He had a
favorite doorway, which he shared with other vagrants, and every
few weeks he goes back and pays them a visit just to assure
himself he isn't dreaming.
In Akron, as in other manufacturing
centers, the groups include a heavy element of manual workers.
In the Cleveland Athletic Club, I had luncheon with five
lawyers, an accountant, an engineer, three salesmen, an
insurance man, a buyer, a bartender, a chain-store manager, a
manager of an independent store, and a manufacturer's
representative. They were members of a central committee, which
coordinates the work of nine neighborhood groups. Cleveland,
with more than 450 members, is the biggest of the A.A. centers.
The next largest are located in Chicago, Akron, Philadelphia,
Los Angeles, Washington and New York. All told, there are groups
in about fifty cities and towns.
IN DISCUSSING their work, the A.A.s spoke
of their drunk rescuing as "insurance" for themselves.
Experience within the group has shown, they said, that once a
recovered drinker slows up in this work he is likely to go back
to drinking himself. There is, they agreed, no such thing as an
ex-alcoholic. If one is an alcoholic - that is, a person who is
unable to drink normally - one remains an alcoholic until he
dies, just as a diabetic remains a diabetic. The best he can
hope for is to become an arrested case, with drunk saving as his
insulin. At least, the A.A.s say so, and medical opinion tends
to support them. All but a few said that they had lost all
desire for alcohol. Most serve liquor in their homes when
friends drop in, and they still go to bars with companions who
drink. A.A.s tipple on soft drinks and coffee.
One, a sales manager, acts as bartender at
his company's annual jamboree in Atlantic City and spends his
nights tucking the celebrators into their beds. Only a few of
those who recover fail to lose the felling that at any minute
they may thoughtlessly take one drink and skyrocket off on a
disastrous binge. An A.A. who is a clerk in an Eastern city
hasn't had a snifter in three and a half years, but says that he
still has to walk fast past saloons to circumvent the old
impulse; but he is an exception. The only hangover from the wild
days that plagues the A.A. is a recurrent nightmare. In the
dream, he finds himself off on a rousing whooper-dooper,
frantically trying to conceal his condition from the community.
Even this symptom disappears shortly, in most cases.
Surprisingly, the rate of employment among these people, who
formerly drank themselves out of job after job, is said to be
around ninety percent.
One-hundred-percent effectiveness with
non-psychotic drinkers who sincerely want to quit is claimed by
the workers of Alcoholics Anonymous. The program will not work,
they add, with those who only "want to want to quit",
or who want to quit because they are afraid of losing their
families or their jobs. The effective desire, the state, must be
based upon enlightened self-interest; the applicant must want to
get away from liquor to head off incarceration or premature
death. He must be fed up with the stark social loneliness, which
engulfs the uncontrolled drinker, and he must want to put some
order into his bungled life.
As it is impossible to disqualify all
borderline applicants, the working percentage of recovery falls
below the 100-percent mark. According to A.A. estimation, fifty
percent of the alcoholics taken in hand recover immediately;
twenty-five percent get well after suffering a relapse or two;
and the rest remain doubtful. This rate of success is
exceptionally high. Statistics on traditional medical and
religious cures are lacking, but it has been informally
estimated that they are no more than two or three percent
effective on run-of-the-mine cases.
Although it is too early to state that
Alcoholics Anonymous is the definitive answer to alcoholism, its
brief record is impressive, and it is receiving hopeful support.
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. helped defray the expense of getting it
started and has gone out of his way to get other prominent men
interested.
ROCKEFELLER'S GIFT was a small one, in
deference to the insistence of the originators that the movement
be kept on a voluntary, non paid basis. There are no salaried
organizers, no dues, no officers, and no central control.
Locally, the rents of assemble halls are met by passing the hat
at meetings. In small communities, no collections are taken, as
the gatherings are held in private homes. A small office in
downtown New York acts merely as a clearinghouse for
information. There is no name on the door, and mail is received
anonymously through a post-office box. The only income, which is
money received from the sale of a book describing the work, is
handled by the Alcoholic Foundation, a board composed of three
alcoholics and four non-alcoholics.
In Chicago, twenty-five doctors work hand
in hand with Alcoholics Anonymous, contributing their services
and referring their own alcoholic patients to the group, which
now numbers around 200. The same cooperation exists in Cleveland
and to a lesser degree in other centers. A physician, Dr. W. D.
Silkworth, of New York City, gave the movement its first
encouragement. However, many doctors remain skeptical. Dr.
Foster Kennedy, an eminent New York neurologist, probably had
these in mind when he stated at a meeting a year ago: "The
aim of those concerned in this effort against alcoholism is
high; their success has been considerable; and I believe medical
men of goodwill should aid."
The active help of two medical men of
goodwill, Drs. A. Wiese Hammer and C. Dudley Saul, has assisted
greatly in making the Philadelphia unit one of the more
effective of the younger groups. The movement there had its
beginning in an offhand way in February 1940, when a businessman
who was an A.A. convert was transferred to Philadelphia from New
York. Fearful of backsliding for lack of rescue work, the
newcomer rounded up three local barflies and started to work on
them. He got them dry, and the quartet began ferreting out other
cases. By last December fifteenth, ninety-nine alcoholics had
joined up. Of these, eighty-six were now total abstainers -
thirty-nine from one to three months, seventeen from three to
six months, and twenty-five from six to ten months. Five who had
joined the unit after having belonged in other cities had been
nondrinkers from one to three years.
At the end of the time scale, Akron, which
cradled the movement, holds the intramural record for sustained
abstinence. According to a recent checkup, two members have been
riding the A.A. wagon for five and a half years, one for five
years, three for four and a half years, one for the same period
with one skid, three for three and a half year, seven for three
years, three for three years with one skid each, one for two and
a half years, and thirteen for two years. Previously, most of
the Akronites and Philadephians had been unable to stay away
from liquor for longer than a few weeks.
In the Middle West, the work has been
almost exclusively among persons who have not arrived at the
institutional stage. The New York group, which has a similar
nucleus, makes a sideline specialty of committed cases and has
achieved striking results. In the summer of 1939, the group
began working on the alcoholics confined in Rockland State
Hospital, at Orangeburg, a vast mental sanitarium, which get the
hopeless alcoholic backwash of the big population centers. With
the encouragement of Dr. R. E. Baisdell, the medical
superintendent, a unit was formed within the wall, and meetings
were held in the recreation hall. New York A.A.s went to
Orangeburg to give talks, and on Sunday evenings, the patients
were brought in state-owned buses to a clubhouse which the
Manhattan group rents on the West Side.
Last July first, eleven months later,
records kept at the hospital showed that of fifty-four patients
released to Alcoholics Anonymous, seventeen had had no relapse
and fourteen others had had only one. Of the rest, nine had gone
back to drinking in their home communities, twelve had returned
to the hospital and two had not been traced. Dr. Baisdell has
written favorably about the work to the State Department of
Mental Hygiene, and he praised it officially in his last annual
repor
Even better results were obtained in two
public institutions in New Jersey, Greystone Park and Overbrook,
which attract patients of better economic and social background,
than Rockland, because of their nearness to prosperous suburban
villages. Of seven patients released from the Greystone Park
institution in two years, five have abstained for periods of one
to two years, according to A.A. records. Eight of ten released
from Overbrook have abstained for about the same length of time.
The others have had from one to several relapses.
WHY SOME people become alcoholics is a
question on which authorities disagree. Few think that anyone is
"born an alcoholic". One may be born, they say, with a
hereditary predisposition to alcoholism, just as one may be born
with a vulnerability to tuberculosis. The rest seems to depend
upon environment and experience, although one theory has it that
some people are allergic to alcohol, as hay fever sufferers are
to pollens. Only one note is found to be common to all
alcoholics - emotional immaturity. Closely related to this is an
observation that an unusually large number of alcoholics start
out in life as an only child, as a younger child, as the only
boy in a family of girls or the only girl in a family of boys.
Many have records of childhood precocity and were what are known
as spoiled children.
Frequently, the situation is complicated
by an off-center home atmosphere in which one parent is unduly
cruel, the other overindulgent. Any combination of these
factors, plus a divorce or two, tends to produce neurotic
children who are poorly equipped emotionally to face the
ordinary realities of adult life. In seeking escapes, one may
immerse himself in his business, working twelve to fifteen hours
a day, or in what he thinks is a pleasant escape in drink. It
bolsters his opinion of himself and temporarily wipes away any
feeling of social inferiority, which he may have. Light drinking
leads to heavy drinking. Friend and family are alienated and
employers become disgusted. The drinker smolders with resentment
and wallows in self-pity. He indulges in childish
rationalizations to justify his drinking: He has been working
hard and he deserves to relax; his throat hurts from an old
tonsillectomy and a drink would ease the pain: he has a
headache; his wife does not understand him; his nerves are
jumpy; everybody is against him; and son and on. He
unconsciously becomes a chronic excuse-maker for himself.
All the time he is drinking, he tells
himself and those who butt into his affairs the he can really
become a controlled drinker if he wants to. To demonstrate his
strength of will, he goes for weeks without taking a drop. He
makes a point of calling at his favorite bar at a certain time
each day and ostentatiously sipping milk or a carbonated
beverage, not realizing that he is indulging in juvenile
exhibitionism. Falsely encouraged, he shifts to a routine of one
beer a day and that is the beginning of the end once more. Beer
leads inevitably to more beer and then to hard liquor. Hard
liquor leads to another first-rate bender. Oddly, the trigger,
which sets off the explosion, is as apt to be a stroke of
business success as it is to be a run of bad luck. An alcoholic
can stand neither prosperity nor adversity.
THE VICTIM is puzzled on coming out of the
alcoholic fog. Without his being aware of any change, a habit
has gradually become an obsession. After a while, he no longer
needs rationalization to justify the fatal first drink. All he
knows is that he feels swamped by uneasiness or elation, and
before he realizes what is happening, he is standing at a bar
with an empty whisky pony in front of him and a stimulating
sensation in his throat. By some peculiar quirk of his mind, he
has been able to draw a curtain over the memory of the intense
pain and remorse caused by preceding stem-winders. After many
experiences of this kind, the alcoholic begins to realize that
he does not understand himself; he wonders whether his power of
will, though strong in other fields, isn't defenseless against
alcohol. He may go on trying to defeat his obsession and wind up
in a sanitarium. He may give up the fight as hopeless and try to
kill himself. Or he may seek outside help.
If he applies to Alcoholics Anonymous, he
is first brought around to admit that alcohol has him whipped
and that his life has become unmanageable. Having achieved this
state of intellectual humility he is given a dose of religion in
the broadest sense. He is asked to believe in a Power that is
greater than himself, or at least to keep an open mind on that
subject while he goes on with the rest the rest of the program.
Any concept of the Higher Power is acceptable. A skeptic or
agnostic may choose to think of his Inner Self, the miracle of
growth, a tree, man's wonderment at the physical universe, the
structure of the atom, or mere mathematical infinity. Whatever
form is visualized, the neophyte is taught that he must rely
upon it and, in his own way, to pray to the Power for strength.
He next makes a sort moral inventory of
himself with the private aid of another person - one of his A.A.
sponsors, a priest, a minister a psychiatrist, or anyone else he
fancies. If it gives him any relief, he may get up at a meeting
and recite his misdeed, but he is not required to do so. He
restores what he may have stolen while intoxicated and arranges
to pay off old debts and to make good on rubber checks; he makes
amends to persons he has abused and in general, cleans up his
past as well as he is able to. It is not uncommon for his
sponsors to lend him money to help out in the early stages.
This catharsis is regarded as important
because of the compulsion, which a feeling of guilt exerts in
the alcoholic obsession. As nothing tends to push an alcoholic
toward the bottle more than personal resentments, the pupil also
makes out a list of his grudges and resolves not to be stirred
by them. At this point, he is ready to start working on other,
active alcoholics. By the process of extroversion, which the
work entails, he is able to think less of his own troubles.
The more drinkers he succeeds in swinging
into Alcoholics Anonymous, the greater his responsibility to the
group becomes. He can't get drunk now without injuring the
people who have proved themselves his best friends. He is
beginning to grow up emotionally and to quit being a leaner. If
raised in an Orthodox Church, he usually, but not always,
becomes a regular communicant again.
SIMULTANEOUSLY WITH the making over of the
alcoholic goes the process of adjusting his family to his new
way of living. The wife or husband of an alcoholic, and the
children, too, frequently become neurotics from being exposed to
drinking excesses over a period of years. Reeducation of the
family is an essential part of a follow-up program, which has
been devised.
Alcoholics Anonymous, which is synthesis
of old ideas rather than a new discovery, owes its existence to
the collaboration of a New York stockbroker and an Akron
physician. Both alcoholics, they met for the first time a little
less than six years ago. In thirty-five years of periodic
drinking, Dr. Armstrong, to give the physician a fictitious
name, had drunk himself out of most of his practice. Armstrong
had tried everything, including the Oxford Group, and had shown
no improvement. On Mother's Day 1935, he staggered home, in
typical drunk fashion, lugging an expensive potted plant, which
he placed in his wife's lap. The he went upstairs and passed
out.
At that moment, nervously pacing the lobby
of an Akron hotel, was the broker from New York, whom we shall
arbitrarily call Griffith. Griffith was in a jam. In an attempt
to obtain control of a company and rebuild his financial fences,
he had come out to Akron and engaged in a fight for proxies. He
had lost the fight. His hotel bill was unpaid. He was almost
flat broke. Griffith wanted a drink.
During his career in Wall Street, Griffith
had turned some sizable deals and had prospered, but, through
ill-timed drinking bouts, had lost out on his main chances. Five
months before coming to Akron, he had gone on the water wagon
through the ministration of the Oxford Group in New York.
Fascinated by the problem of alcoholism, he had many times gone
back as a visitor to a Central Park West detoxicating hospital,
where he had been a patient, and talked to the inmates. He
effected no recoveries, but found that by working on other
alcoholics he could stave off his own craving.
A stranger in Akron, Griffith knew no
alcoholics with whom he could wrestle. A church directory, which
hung in the lobby opposite the bar, gave him an idea. He
telephone on of the clergymen listed and through him got in
touch with a member of the local Oxford Group. This person was a
friend of Dr. Armstrong's and was able to introduce the
physician and the broker at dinner. In this manner, Dr.
Armstrong became Griffith's first real disciple. He was a shaky
one at first. After a few weeks of abstinence, he went east to a
medical convention and came home in a liquid state. Griffith,
who had stayed in Akron to iron out some legal tangles arising
from the proxy battle, talked him back to sobriety. That was on
June 10, 1935. The nips the physician took from a bottle
proffered by Griffith on that day were the last drinks he ever
took.
GRIFFITH'S lawsuits dragged on, holding
him over in Akron for six months. He moved his baggage to the
Armstrong home, and together the pair struggled with other
alcoholics. Before Griffith went back to New York, two more
Akron converts had been obtained. Meanwhile, both Griffith and
Dr. Armstrong had withdrawn from the Oxford Group, because they
felt that its aggressive evangelism and some of its other
methods were hindrances in working with alcoholics. They put
their own technique on a strict take-it-or-leave-it basis and
kept it there.
Progress was slow. After Griffith had
returned East, Dr. Armstrong and his wife, a Wellesley graduate,
converted their home into a free refuge for alcoholics and an
experimental laboratory for the study of the guest's behavior.
One of the guest, who unknown to his hosts, was a
manic-depressive as well as an alcoholic, ran wild one night
with a kitchen knife. He was overcome before he stabbed anyone.
After a year and a half, a total of ten persons had responded to
the program and were abstaining. What was left of the family
savings had gone into the work. The physician's new sobriety
caused a revival in his practice, but not enough of one to carry
the extra expense. The Armstrongs, nevertheless, carried on, on
borrowed money. Griffith, who had a Spartan wife, too, turned
his Brooklyn home into a duplicate of Akron mTnage. Mrs.
Griffith, a member of an old Brooklyn family, took a job in a
department store and in her spare time played nurse to
inebriates. The Griffiths also borrowed, and Griffith managed to
make odd bits of money around the brokerage houses. By the
spring of 1939, The Armstrongs and the Griffiths had between
them cozened about one hundred alcoholics into sobriety.
IN A BOOK, which they published at that
time, the recovered drinkers described the cure program and
related their personal stories. The title was Alcoholics
Anonymous. It was adopted as a name for the movement itself,
which up to then had none. As the book got into circulation, the
movement spread rapidly. Today, Dr. Armstrong is still
struggling to patch up his practice. The going is hard. He is in
debt because of his contributions to the movement and the time
he devotes gratis to alcoholics. Being a pivotal man in the
group, he is unable to turn down the requests for help, which
flood his office.
Griffith is even deeper in the hole. For
the past two years, he and his wife have had no home in the
ordinary sense of the word. In a manner reminiscent of the
primitive Christians, they have moved about, finding shelter in
the home of A.A. colleagues and sometimes wearing borrowed
clothing.
Having got something started, both the prime
movers want to retire to the fringe of their movement and spend
more time getting back on their feet financially. They feel that
the way the thing is set up, it is virtually self-operating and
self-multiplying. Because of the absence of figureheads and the
fact that there is no formal body of belief to promote, they
have no fears that Alcoholics Anonymous will degenerate into a
cult.
The self-starting nature of the movement
is apparent from letters in the files of the New York office.
Many persons have written in saying that they stopped drinking
as soon as they read the book, and made their homes meeting
places for small local chapters. Even a fairly large unit, in
Little Rock, got started in this way. An Akron civil engineer
and his wife, in gratitude for his cure four years ago, have
been steadily taking alcoholics into their home. Out of
thirty-five such wards, thirty-one have recovered.
TWENTY PILGRIMS from Cleveland caught the
idea in Akron and returned home to start a group of their own.
From Cleveland, by various means, the movement has spread to
Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Atlanta,
San Francisco, Evansville, and other cities. An alcoholic
Cleveland newspaperman with a surgically collapsed lung moved to
Houston for his health. He got a job on a Houston paper, and
through a series of articles, which he wrote for it, started an
A.A. unit, which now has thirty-five members. One Houston member
has moved to Miami and is now laboring to snare some of the more
eminent winter-colony lushes. A Cleveland traveling salesman is
responsible for starting small units in many different parts of
the county. Fewer than half of the A.A. members has ever seen
Griffith or Dr. Armstrong.
To an outsider who is mystified, as most
of us are, by the antics of problem-drinking friends, the
results, which have been achieved, are amazing. This is
especially true of the more virulent cases, a few of which are
herewith sketched under names that are not their own.
Sara Martin was a product of the F. Scott
Fitzgerald era. Born of wealthy parents in a Western City, she
went to Eastern boarding schools and "finished" in
France. After making her debut, she married. Sara spent her
nights drinking and dancing until daylight. She was known as a
girl who could carry a lot of liquor. Her husband had a weak
stomach, and she became disgusted with him. They were quickly
divorced. After her father's fortune had been erased in 1929,
Sara got a job in New York and supported herself. In 1932,
seeking adventure, she went to Paris to live and set up a
business of her own, which was successful. She continued to
drink heavily and stayed drunk longer than usual. After a spree
in 1933, she was informed that she had tried to throw herself
out a window. During another bout, she did jump or fall - she
doesn't remember which - out of a first-floor window. She landed
face first on the sidewalk and was laid up for fix months of
bone setting, dental work, and plastic surgery.
IN 1936, Sara Martin decided that if she
changed her environment by returning to the United States, she
would be able to drink normally. This childish faith in
geographical change is a classic delusion, which all alcoholics
get at one time, or another. She was drunk all the way home on
the boat. New York frightened her and she drank to escape it.
Her money ran out and she borrowed from friends. When the
friends cut her, she hung around Third Avenue bars, cadging
drinks from strangers. Up to this point she had diagnosed her
trouble as a nervous breakdown. Not until she had committed
herself to several sanitariums did she realize, through reading,
that she was an alcoholic. On advice of a staff doctor, she got
in touch with an Alcoholics Anonymous group. Today, she has
another good job and spends many of her nights sitting on
hysterical women drinkers to prevent them from diving out of
windows. In here late thirties, Sarah Martin is an attractively
serene woman. The Paris surgeons did handsomely by her.
Watkins is a shipping clerk in a factory.
Injured in an elevator mishap in 1927, he was furloughed with
pay by a company, which was thankful that he did not sue for
damages. Having nothing to do during a long convalescence,
Watkins loafed in speakeasies. Formerly a moderate drinker, he
started to go on drunks lasting several months. His furniture
went for debt, and his wife fled, taking their three children.
In eleven years, Watkins was arrested twelve times and served
eight workhouse sentences. Once, in an attack of delirium
tremens, he circulated a rumor among the prisoners that the
county was poisoning the food in order to reduce the workhouse
population and save expenses. A mess-hall riot resulted. In
another fit of D.T.'s, during which he thought the man in the
cell above was trying to pour hot lead on him, Watkins slashed
his own wrists and throat with a razor blade. While recuperating
in an outside hospital, with eighty-six stitches, he swore never
to drink again. He was drunk before the final bandages were
removed. Two years ago, a former drinking companion got him to
Alcoholics Anonymous, and he hasn't touched liquor since. His
wife and children have returned, and the home has new furniture.
Back at work, Watkins has paid off the major part of $2,000 in
debts and petty alcoholic thefts and has his eye on a new
automobile.
AT TWENTY-TWO, Tracy, a precocious son of
well-to-do parents, was credit manager for an investment-banking
firm whose name has become a symbol of the money-mad twenties.
After the firm's collapse during the stock market crash, he went
into advertising and worked up to a post, which paid him $23,000
a year. On the day his son was born, Tracy was fired. Instead of
appearing in Boston to close a big advertising contract, he had
gone on a spree and had wound up in Chicago, losing out on the
contract. Always a heavy drinker, Tracy became a bum. He tippled
on Canned Heat and hair tonic and begged from cops, who are
always easy touches for amounts up to a dime. On one sleety
night, Tracy sold his shoes to buy a drink, putting on a pair of
rubbers he had found in a doorway and stuffing them with paper
to keep his feet warm.
He started committing himself to
sanitariums, more to get in out of the cold than anything else.
In one institution, a physician got him interested in the A.A.
program. As part of it, Tracy, a Catholic made a general
confession and returned to the church, which he had long since
abandoned. He skidded back to alcohol a few times, but after a
relapse in February 1939, Tracy took no more drinks. He has
since then beat his way up again to $18,000 a year in
advertising.
Victor Hugo would have delighted in
Brewster, a heavy-thewed adventurer who took life the hard way.
Brewster was a lumberjack; cowhand, and wartime aviator. During
the postwar era, he took up flask toting and was soon doing a
Cook's tour of the sanitariums. In one of them, after hearing
about shock cures, he bribed the Negro attendant in the morgue,
with gifts of cigarettes, to permit him to drop in each
afternoon and meditate over a cadaver. The plan worked well
until one day he cam upon a dead man who, by a freak facial
contortion, wore what looked like a grin. Brewster met up with
the A.A.s in December 1938, and after achieving abstinence, got
a sales job, which involved much walking. Meanwhile, he had go
cataracts on both eyes. One was removed, giving him distance
sight with the aid of thick-lens spectacles. He used the other
eye for close-up vision, keeping it dilated with an eye-drop
solution in order to avoid being run down in traffic. The he
developed a swollen, or milk, leg. With these disabilities,
Brewster tramped the streets for six months before he caught up
with his drawing account. Today, at fifty, still hampered by is
physical handicaps, he is making his calls and earning around
$400 a month.
FOR THE Brewsters, the Martins, the
Watkinses, the Tracys, and the other reformed alcoholics,
congenial company is now available wherever they happen to be.
In the larger cities, A.A.s meet one another daily at lunch in
favored restaurants. The Cleveland groups give big parties on
New Year's and other holidays, at which gallons of coffee and
soft drinks are consumed. Chicago holds open house on Friday,
Saturday and Sunday - alternating, on the North, West, and South
Sides - so that no lonesome A.A. need revert to liquor over the
weekend for lack of companionship. Some play cribbage or bridge,
the winner of each hand contributing to a kitty for paying of
entertainment expenses. The others listen to the radio, dance,
eat, or just talk. All alcoholics, drunk or sober, like to gab.
They are among the most society-loving people in the world,
which may help to explain why they go to be alcoholics in the
first place.
Jack Alexander
The Saturday Evening Post
March 1, 1941
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