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me this newspaper story and gave me the number. Three days later, Harry R. came to see me — right into the flophouse. He asked for me by name, then he started right in in front of the others: “Are you a drunkard?” And he talked about the allergy and the first drink. He asked me if I could stop drinking, lying, mooching for a week. I said, “How?” and he told me I had to get down on my knees and ask God to help me. He said if I didn’t want to do it right there with all the other bums — he said that, “other bums” — watching, I could go into the john in the corner to kneel down, but to leave the door open so he could see me. Well, I did, and he wrote the address of the Orchard Grove group and told me if I could kneel down every morning, and not take a drink, and kneel down every night to thank God, and didn’t lie or mooch, then I could come to the meeting. By God, a week later I did, and I felt something I never felt before — surrounded by clean, wholesome, friendly people. The raffle seller took me home that night, and he gave me a bag of donuts, and so I forgot and started to mooch — told him I only had one other pair of trousers. God, he jumped all over me! “Mex,” he said, “you want too much: you only have to do three things to get everything you want, because everything you want is being sober: Don’t ever take a drink again — if you do, Mex, slit your throat, you’d be better off. And don’t ever miss your meeting; and anytime you’re asked to do something in A.A. do it — never say ‘No’ to A.A.” And, God, I got scared, but I did those three things, and here I am.
    The point: The difference in the way those deriving from Akron and Cleveland lived their Alcoholics Anonymous lies not so much in any specific clinging to “absolutes,” but in the greater emphasis on “the spiritual” and especially “surrender” that derived from historical circumstance. In New York, Bill Wilson was influenced especially by the pressure of those who feared “too much religion” — they, and he, had been such. Meanwhile Dr. Bob and his Akron-Cleveland followers and even Clarence S. found themselves threatened and pressured especially by those who felt that in separating from the Oxford Group they had jettisoned “the spiritual” altogether.
    For those in Akron-Cleveland so conditioned, clinging to “the Four Absolutes” did not contradict “not-God,” for there were “four absolutes” only because at root there was but One Absolute — the God who was ultimate reality. The four as the One remained beyond human control: as always to be striven for, they reinforced the core sense of not-God-ness. To Dr. Bob Smith, “those four absolutes” were “the only yardsticks we had in the early days.” As he said of “absolute love,” “I don’t think any of us will ever get it.…” The key, for Dr. Bob Smith as for “A.A. of Akron” and Cleveland’s “Four Absolutes,” lay not in the absoluteness of rigidity that they historically had special reason to fear, but in the not-God-ness of “simplicity” and “tolerance” that they also, because of their history, implemented in their own “different” way. 12
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    Clarence S., formerly of Cleveland but at the time of this writing residing in Florida between extensive jaunts to serve those who respect him as the longest continuously sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous, offers in his presentations an interpretation of Alcoholics Anonymous that currently seems to be in a moment of cultural ascendency. It may well be termed an approach from the “right,” although of course that term is used in its religious rather than political or economic sense. 13
    Openly theistic and a conservative Christian by any objective norm, Clarence explicitly takes as his text explaining Alcoholics Anonymous the words of Paul in Second Corinthians, Chapter Five, verse seventeen: “Therefore, if any man be in Christ he is a new creature. Old things are