Bill Wilson, left, and Father Ed Dowling, right
Dr. Bob Smith, left, and Heywood Broun, right
The entire 12-step movement, which now totals more than 100 self-help fellowships, can be traced back to two men originally from Vermont, Bill Wilson, a failed New York City stockbroker, and Dr. Bob Smith, an Akron, Ohio physician.
The birth of Alcoholics Anonymous is dated from their meeting and Smith’s last bottle of beer on June 10, 1935. They would be affectionately known ever after as Bill W. and Dr. Bob, the co-founders of AA.
Wilson had been influenced by Ebby Thacher – or Ebby T. in the preferred anonymous parlance of 12-step programs – a friend from boarding school, who paid Wilson a visit in November 1934, while Thacher was a member of the Oxford Group, popular on college campuses in the 1920s, and founded by Frank Buchman, a Lutheran minister.
The first edition of Alcoholics Anonymous, known almost universally by its informal title as simply the Big Book, was published on April 10, 1939. There were 4,730 books printed, with red cloth binding, wide columns, thick paper (which was why it was called the Big Book in the first place), and a red, yellow, black and white dust jacket, which came to be known as the “circus cover.”
Alcoholics Anonymous, or AA as it is also known, has long had an impact on the larger culture and its perhaps most famous slogan, “one day at a time,” long ago entered the public vocabulary as a sentiment to remind people feeling overwhelmed by events to pause for a moment, step back and see their lives in the present moment, not the past or future, which has made the concept of the current 24 hours – and in a crisis sometimes even smaller units of time – a cornerstone of AA.
Wilson’s spiritual advisor and “sponsor” for almost 20 years from November 1940 until his death in April 1960 was a Jesuit priest, Father Ed Dowling, from St. Louis.
Dowling was born in St. Louis on Sept. 1, 1898. He attended the Baden Public and the Holy Name Parochial School and went on to St. Louis University High School. In 1918, he served as a private in the First World War. In 1919, he began working as a reporter on the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Later that same year, Dowling entered the Order at Florissant and followed the regular course subsequently for philosophy at St. Louis University.
Dowling was a member of the American Newspaper Guild and served as a delegate for the St. Louis local at Guild conventions in Toronto and San Francisco. He was a friend of Heywood Broun, the noted New York columnist, Guild founder and legendary union activist, and helped, along with then Father Fulton J. Sheen, to convert Broun from agnosticism to Catholicism seven months before his death in 1939.
When he decided to become a priest, Dowling reportedly told his newspaper colleagues he was entering the seminary – the very next morning – at an all-night cafe frequented by Globe-Democrat reporters.
Dowling’s regency from 1926 to 1929 was spent at Loyola Academy in Chicago. He was ordained in 1931 by Archbishop John Joseph Glennon of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, who was elevated to be a cardinal shortly before his death in 1946.
On a cold and rainy November night in 1940, Dowling showed up at 10 p.m. unannounced at Bill Wilson’s apartment above AA’s Twenty-Fourth Street Club in New York City.
“I’m Father Ed Dowling from St. Louis,” he said. “A Jesuit friend and I have been struck by the similarity of the AA twelve steps and the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.”
Dowling would become the first American Catholic clergyman to prominently endorse AA, both in later revised editions of the Big Book, and in 1947 in The Queen’s Work, a magazine published by the Central Office of Sodalities of Our Lady.
When Dowling, as one of the originators, helped start Couples Are Not Alone (CANA), a national Catholic movement for married couples in 1942, he borrowed heavily, he told Wilson, from AA’s 12 steps to help participants deal with mental difficulties, scruples and sexual compulsions.
As a guest speaker at AA’s St. Louis International Convention in Kiel Auditorium in 1955, Dowling remarked: “There is a negative approach from agnosticism. This was the approach of Peter the Apostle. ‘Lord, to whom shall we go’?” I doubt if there is anybody in this hall who really ever sought sobriety. I think we were trying to get away from drunkenness. I don’t think we should despise the negative. I have a feeling that if I ever find myself in heaven, it will be from backing away from hell.”
Dowling died peacefully in his sleep in Memphis on April 3, 1960.
It has has been customary across Canada during the third week in November since 1981, which begins Sunday, Nov. 16 this year, to mark National Addictions Awareness Week and all its variants such as National Aboriginal Addictions Awareness Week and Manitoba Addictions Awareness Week (MAAW).
The federal government in 1987 first proclaimed the week. Approximately 600,000 people take part in NAAW activities throughout the country.
Much of the early work was conceptualized and developed in St. Albert, Alberta at the Nechi Training, Research & Health Promotions Institute, which is housed with Poundmaker’s Lodge, known as Canada’s first addictions treatment centre specifically for aboriginal clients.
Damian Thompson, associate editor at The Spectator in London, specializing in religion and classical music, published a book in May 2012 called, The Fix: How Addiction Is Invading our Lives and Taking Over Your World, in which he argues addictions to iPhones, painkillers, cupcakes, alcohol and Internet pornography – to name just a few – are taking over our lives. Our most casual daily habits can quickly become obsessions that move beyond our control, Thompson argued, suggesting that human desire is in the process of being reshaped.
“Already, the distinction between ‘addicts’ and ordinary people is far less clear than it was even 20 years ago, Thompson wrote in a May 28, 2012 piece for the Daily Telegraph in London, where he was editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist at the time, headlined, “Addiction: the coming epidemic,” with the “line between consumption, habit and addiction is becoming dangerously blurred The difference between old-fashioned porn and Internet porn is a bit like the difference between wine and spirits. After hundreds of years as a mild intoxicant, erotica has undergone a sudden distillation. Digital porn is the equivalent of cheap gin in Georgian England: a reliable if unhygienic hit that relieves misery and boredom. And, unlike the old ‘dirty mags,’ it is available in limitless quantities.”
Whether addiction is a disease, in the true medical sense of the word (Thompson argued it is not), a cognitive behavioural problem, or self-destructive habits borne out of poor choices, but choices nonetheless, is an ongoing debate, and while interesting, is of secondary importance. Whatever addiction is or isn’t, few would argue that it doesn’t affect entire families – and even communities – across all generational, ethnic, racial and class distinctions.
Addiction, be it to alcohol or other drugs, gambling, Internet pornography, etc., is an equal opportunity destroyer of lives. While the addict or the alcoholic may be the most obvious casualty, the collateral damage is all around them.
While it’s impossible to overstate the influence of Alcoholics Anonymous and related 12-step programs on addictions treatment and recovery, it’s not the only model in a reality where relapse is the norm.
Two steps forward, one step backwards and perhaps a step sideways is the reality of addiction.
Bill Wilson himself was a surprisingly freethinker on a lot of this, refusing often to get bogged down in the semantics. AA worked for him, so he worked his program with a live-and-let live attitude.
soundingsjohnbarker 