The Sober Truth Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 got to be alcoholics in the first place.
    Fabulous life aside, the article also offered some uncited statistics. Over two thousand souls had been “saved by AA” to date, claimed Alexander, and the organization’s success rate was without equal:
    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, they state, must be based upon enlightened self-interest; the applicant must want to get away from liquor to head off incarceration or premature death.
    Alexander also pointed out one Philadelphia chapter that claimed an 87 percent success rate, once again without any confirmation.
    There is but one mention of an opposing viewpoint anywhere in the feature, and it is quickly eclipsed before the author even finds his way to the end of the next sentence: “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.’”
    Alexander closed the piece with a description of Bill and Lois Wilson’s life that bordered on hagiography: “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.”
    The article was a sensation. It drew six thousand letters from around the world, all of which the
Post
promptly forwarded to the Alcoholism Foundation. By the end of that year, the
Ladies’ Home Journal
had published a similarly glowing piece and AA had been featured in a gushing “March of Time” newsreel shown throughout the nation. 16
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS ENTERS THE ESTABLISHMENT
    AA’s members recognized early on that to establish true legitimacy, they would eventually need to earn the imprimatur of the scientific community. The process was hardly smooth. When the Big Book was first published in 1939, the American Medical Association, bewildered by its tone and inflated claims, called the work “a curious combination of organizing propaganda and religious exhortation. . . . [T]he one valid thing in the book is the recognition of the seriousness of addiction to alcohol. Other than this, the book has no scientific merit or interest.” 17
    The
Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases
went even further in 1940, calling AA a “regressive mass psychological method” and a “religious fervor,” writing: “The big, big book,
i.e
. big in words, is a rambling sort of camp-meeting confession of experiences, told in the form of biographies of various alcoholics who had been to a certain institution and have provisionally recovered, chiefly under the influence of the ‘big brothers of the spirit.’ Of the inner meaning of alcoholism there is hardly a word. It is all surface material.”
    Undeterred, AA wouldn’t have long to wait before one of its own had discovered a way to influence the establishment from within. Marty Mann, a wealthy Chicago debutante, was among the first women ever to join Alcoholics Anonymous. Her own conversion story describes being struck instantly and irrevocably by a passage in the Big Book, “We cannot live with anger”—a phrase that reportedly produced in her an immediate and life-altering sense of calm. Not content to simply spread the word one-to-one as the twelfth step recommends, Mann became an active force in lobbying for the group on a national stage. Her breakthrough came when she formed the National