William Griffith Wilson (26 November 1895–24
January 1971) (also known as Bill Wilson or
Bill W.), was the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous
(AA), a fellowship of self-help groups dedicated to
helping alcoholics recover from their addiction.
According to the AA tradition of anonymity, Wilson was
and still is commonly known as "Bill W." In 1934, in the
course of his struggle with alcoholism, Wilson underwent
a spiritual experience that apparently gave him the
strength to stop drinking. He then took his method to
other alcoholics, starting with AA co-founder
Dr. Bob
Smith in 1935. Working with the members of a growing
society of recovering alcoholics, Wilson developed the
Twelve-step spiritual program and the basic
organizational guidelines for AA known as the Twelve
Traditions. In spite of his sobriety, success, and
recognition, Wilson was a deeply troubled man who
suffered from compulsive behavior and frequent
depressions. Wilson turned over leadership of AA to the
service board in 1955, and for the remainder of his life
was free to experiment with alternate cures. He took an
interest in spiritualism, in niacin (vitamin B3) as a
possible cure for alcoholism, and in LSD as a means of
inducing spiritual change. Wilson died of lung diseases
in 1971. His wife, Lois Wilson was the founder of
Al-Anon, a group dedicated to helping the friends and
relatives of alcoholics.Childhood
When Wilson was 10, his father left on a business trip that turned out to be a
permanent absence, and his mother announced that she would be leaving the family
to study Osteopathic medicine. Abandoned by their parents, Wilson and his sister
were left in the care of their maternal grandparents. Wilson showed some talent
and determination in his teen years. He designed and carved a working boomerang
after dozens of failed efforts. He taught himself to play the fiddle by dogged
persistence, pasting to the neck of the instrument a diagram of the notes. At
school, after initial difficulties, he found success in sports. But he
experienced a serious depression at the age of seventeen when his first love,
Bertha Bamford, died from complications during surgery.Marriage, work, and
addiction
Wilson met his future wife Lois Burnham, who was four years older than him,
during the summer of 1913 while sailing on Vermont's Emerald Lake; two years
later the couple became engaged. Wilson was called into the army in 1917. During
military training in Massachusetts, the young officers were often invited to
dinner by the locals, and Wilson had his first drink, a glass of beer, to little
effect. A few weeks later at another dinner party Wilson drank some Bronx
cocktails, and felt at ease with the guests and liberated from his awkward
shyness; "I had found the elixir of life," he wrote. "Even that first evening I
got thoroughly drunk, and within the next time or two I passed out completely.
But as everyone drank hard, not too much was made of that. "Bill and Lois were married on January 24, 1918, just before he left to join the
war in Europe. After an uneventful military service but much exposure to wine
and beer, Wilson returned to live with his wife in New York, his dependence on
alcohol now fully established. He failed to graduate from law school because he
was too drunk to pick up his diploma. Wilson became a stock speculator and had
success traveling the country with his wife, evaluating companies for potential
investors. (During these trips Lois had a hidden agenda: she hoped the travel
would keep Wilson from drinking.) However his constant drinking made business impossible and ruined his
reputation. As his drinking grew more serious, starting in 1933 he had to be
committed to the Towns psychiatric hospital three times under the care of
Dr.
William D. Silkworth. Silkworth's theory was that alcoholism took the form of an
allergy (the inability to stop drinking once started) and an obsession (to take
the first drink). Wilson gained hope from Silkworth's assertion alcoholism was a
medical condition rather than a moral failing, but even that knowledge could not
help him. He was eventually told that he would either die from his alcoholism or
have to be locked up permanently due to alcoholic insanity. Conversion
and turning point
One day, an old drinking friend named
Ebby Thatcher phoned Wilson wanting to
visit with him. Expecting to spend a day drinking and re-living old times,
Wilson was instead shocked by Thatcher's refusal to drink. "I've got religion" he
said to explain his unexpected abstinence. Thatcher had been sober for several
weeks under the guidance of the Oxford Group, an evangelical society that among
other pursuits, sought to help drunkards achieve sobriety. Shortly after Ebby's visit,
Bill was admitted to Towns Hospital to recover from
another bout of drinking. According to Bill, while lying in bed depressed and
despairing he cried out, "I'll do anything! Anything at all! If there be a God,
let Him show Himself!". He then had the sensation of a bright light, a feeling
of ecstasy, and a new serenity. He never drank again for the remainder of his
life. Bill described what happened to Dr. Silkworth, who told him not to
discount this experience. Ebby visited Bill in hospital and walked him through
some of the basic tenets of the Oxford Group. Upon his release from the
hospital, Bill was told to seek out and bring the message of his recovery to
others as Ebby had done for him. A new spiritual program for recovery
Wilson joined the Oxford movement and set out trying to help other alcoholics,
but he had no success in helping anyone get sober. Wilson visited Dr. Silkworth,
who told him to stop preaching and to try talk to alcoholics about the grave
nature of their disease, about the allergy and the obsession, and about Wilson's
personal experience with alcohol. It was not long before Wilson had his chance
to try this new approach. In 1935 Wilson made a business trip to Akron, Ohio.
The venture fell through, and in a state of gloom and frustration he was tempted
to drink again. He decided that his only hope in remaining sober was to help
another alcoholic. So instead of entering a nearby bar, Wilson entered a phone
booth at his hotel and started calling the phone numbers on a church directory
he saw there. He eventually got through to
Henrietta Seiberling, who was a
member of an Oxford Group circle that had been searching for a solution to
Dr.
Bob Smith's drinking problem. Henrietta arranged a meeting between the two men.
Dr. Bob had been unable to stay sober on his own, so he was skeptical that
Wilson would be able to help him, but he agreed to give Wilson fifteen minutes
nevertheless. Fifteen minutes turned into four hours as Wilson told Dr. Bob of
the solution he had found. Not long after, Dr. Bob had his last drink—a beer to
help steady his hand to perform surgery. The new approach had worked so well
that Wilson and Dr. Bob decided to try it with another alcoholic. Birth
of AA
The two men went to a hospital to talk to another alcoholic named Bill D. They
used the same approach that Wilson had used on Dr. Bob. Bill D. sobered
up and
now there were three men carrying the new message of recovery. (Years later,
this meeting was recognized as the first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.) The
three men then carried the message to another alcoholic, and so the fellowship
began its growth. Wilson soon returned to New York and began to carry the
message there. His efforts bore fruit and soon there was a second group in New
York City. A manual of recovery
In 1938, after about 100 alcoholics in Akron and New York had
sobered up, the
fellowship decided that a book would be the best way to promote their program of
recovery; Wilson was chosen as primary author. The book was written to carry the
message as a face-to-face meeting, and included the list of suggested activities
for spiritual growth called the Twelve Steps. The title "Alcoholics Anonymous"
was selected for the book, and the movement took on the same name. Leadership
of AA
After positive articles in Liberty magazine in 1939 and the Saturday
Evening Post in 1941, Alcoholics Anonymous began its rapid growth. But when Wilson and Lois
made a cross-country trip to visit AA groups, they found a wide variety of
practices and rules, such as groups with charismatic leaders and groups with no
concerns for anonymity.
Wilson began to form a vision for a purely democratic constitution that would
allow no accumulation of money, power, and prestige within Alcoholics Anonymous. Ten years later,
these rules were published as the "Twelve Traditions." The Alcoholics Anonymous general service
conference of 1955 was a landmark event for Wilson in which he turned over the
leadership of the maturing organization to an elected board. Life After Alcoholics Anonymous
In the final fifteen years of his life, Wilson experimented with various
unconventional cures for alcoholism such as niacin (vitamin B3). For a time he
became involved in experiments with LSD as a means of inducing the spiritual
change he saw as essential to a release from alcoholism. For Wilson,
spiritualism (communicating with the spirits of the dead) was a life-long
interest. One of his letters to his spiritual advisor Fr. Ed Dowling suggests
that while Wilson was working on his text book of the twelve steps and
traditions he felt that his spiritualist activities were helping him: "I have
good help — of that I am certain. Both here and over there," — the 'over there'
referring to the spirit world. Alcoholics Anonymous historian Ernest Kurt asserts that "...
despite his conviction that he had evidence for the reality of 'the spiritual'
and so — in his logic — of the actual existence of a 'higher Power,' Wilson
chose not to share, much less to proclaim or to impose, this foundation for
faith either with, to, or upon Alcoholics Anonymous." Wilson and his
Alcoholics Anonymous colleagues took pains to keep Wilson's unconventional spiritual activities away
from Alcoholics Anonymous and public scrutiny. During the last years of his life, Wilson ceased
attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings on the grounds that he would always be asked to speak as
the co-founder rather than as an alcoholic. Wilson's life was continuously slowed by another compulsion that he had not been
able to drop: smoking, which brought on emphysema and later pneumonia. He
continued to smoke even while dependent on an oxygen tank in the late 1960s.
During the last days of his life, his health fading, Wilson was visited by
colleagues and friends who wanted to say goodbye. During the final month he
repeatedly asked for a whisky, and once attempted to punch a male nurse who
refused to give him one. Wilson died of emphysema and pneumonia on 24 January
1971 en route to treatment in Miami, Florida. Bill W.: the man and his
legacy
Wilson was a man of many great strengths and just as great weaknesses. He loved
being the center of attention, but after the Alcoholics Anonymous principle of anonymity had
become established he refused an honorary degree from Yale University and
refused to allow his picture — even from the back — on the cover of Time.
Wilson's persistence, his ability to take and use good ideas, and his
entrepreneurial flair are revealed in his pioneering escape from an alcoholic
'death sentence', his central role in the development of a program of
spiritual
growth, and his leadership in creating and building Alcoholics Anonymous, "an independent,
entrepreneurial, maddeningly democratic, non-profit organization. "Unknown to most of the AA membership, Wilson received millions of dollars in
royalties from sales of Alcoholics Anonymous books. In 1940 Bill bought out his publishing
partner, Hank P., for $200 — taking advantage of Hank's being on a slip,
“completely broke and very shaky”. In a few years the share for which Hank
received $200 would have been worth millions. Wilson never escaped from smoking and other compulsive behaviors. He was an
unfaithful husband and womanizer. He had a mistress by the name of Helen Wynn
who actually received ten percent of Wilson's royalties from the book
Alcoholics Anonymous after his death. Later in his life Wilson actually had
to be kept away from young women who arrived at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings needing help.
Wilson is perhaps best known as a synthesis of ideas, the man who pulled
together various threads of psychology, theology, and democracy into a workable
and life-saving system. Aldous Huxley called him "the greatest social architect
of our century," and Time magazine named Wilson to their "Time 100" list of
The Most Important People of the 20th Century. Susan Cheever sums up the man
and his character as follows:"Bill Wilson never held himself up as a
model; he only hoped to help other people by sharing his
own experience, strength, and hope. He insisted again
and again that he was just an ordinary man who, because
of his bitter experience, discovered, slowly and through
a conversion experience, a system of behavior and a
series of actions that works for alcoholics who want to
stop drinking." |
My Name is Bill W DVD
My Name is Bill W Softcover
My Search for Bill W
The Language of the Heart Hardcover
|
