did what she could to hold the family together and prayed that her husband would somehow find an answer to his problem. “How my wife kept her faith and courage during all those years, I’ll never know,” Bob said. “If she had not, I know I would have been dead a long time ago.
“For some reason, we alcoholics seem to have the gift of picking out the world’s finest women,” he said. “Why they should be subjected to the tortures we inflict upon them, I cannot explain.”
In early 1933, about the time of the beer experiment, Dr. Bob and Anne had come into contact with the Oxford Group. It was a spiritual movement that sought to recapture the power of first-century Christianity in the modern world. Its founder, Frank Buchman, had brought followers into his First Century Christian Fellowship two decades earlier. His Oxford Group Movement, started in 1921, was based upon the same principles. (In 1939, he changed the name to Moral Rearmament.)
Members of the Oxford Group sought to achieve spiritual regeneration by making a surrender to God through rigorous self-examination, confessing their character defects to another human being, making restitution for harm done to others, and giving without thought of reward—or, as they put it: “No pay for soul surgery.” They did, however, accept contributions.
Emphasis was placed on prayer and on seeking guidance from God in all matters. The movement also relied on study of the Scriptures and developed some of its own literature as well.
At the core of the program were the “four absolutes”: absolute honesty, absolute unselfishness, absolute purity, and absolute love.
(In 1948, Dr. Bob recalled the absolutes as “the only yardsticks” Alcoholics Anonymous had in the early days, before the Twelve Steps. He said he still felt they held good and could be extremely helpful when he wanted to do the right thing and the answer was not obvious. “Almost always, if I measure my decision carefully by the yardsticks of absolute honesty, absolute unselfishness, absolute purity, and absolute love, and it checks up pretty well with those four, then my answer can’t be very far out of the way,” he said. The absolutes are still published and widely quoted at A.A. meetings in the Akron-Cleveland area.)
In addition to the four absolutes, the Oxford Groupers had the “five C’s” and the “five procedures.” The C’s were confidence, confession, conviction, conversion, and continuance, while the procedures were: Give in to God; listen to God’s direction; check guidance; restitution; and sharing—for witness and for confession. There were slogans as well: “Study men, not books”; “Win your argument, lose your man”; “Give news, not views.” In addition, a member recalled how Groupers would go around smiling enthusiastically and asking each other, “Are you maximum?”
Undisputed leader (as well as founder) of the Oxford Group Movement, Frank Buchman was a Lutheran minister from Pennsylvania, who did not drink or smoke. Buchman looked askance at A.A. in later years, and was never quite comfortable with its members.
Oxford Groupers sought to “change” community leaders, with the idea that their example would motivate others. Thus, there was a great deal of publicity and fanfare when new converts achieved spiritual rebirth. Dr. Buchman himself was often interviewed and widely quoted.
A rubber-company president, grateful because the Oxford Group had sobered up his son, brought some 60 Oxford Group leaders and “team members” to Akron for a ten-day “house party,” as their gatherings were called. They held meetings throughout the day, and it all culminated in a dinner for 400 prominent citizens of the community.
This had a substantial impact in local church circles and attracted many new members, who subsequently set up weekly meetings in various neighborhoods (much as A.A. members do today).
Oxford Group influence later waned in Akron for various reasons, including the fact that the rubber-company heir got drunk again. But by this time, the team had moved on to St. Louis to sober up a beer baron’s son, a situation that undoubtedly posed ticklish publicity problems for the groupers.
It was Anne who persuaded Dr. Bob to go to Oxford Group meetings in the first place, but he later found himself attracted to members of the group “because of their seeming poise, health, and happiness.
“These people spoke with great freedom from embarrassment, which I could never do,” he said. “They seemed very much at ease.” Above all, Dr. Bob was impressed because “they seemed to be happy. I was self-conscious and ill at ease most of the time, my health was at the breaking point, and I was thoroughly miserable.”
Dr. Bob realized that these newfound friends “had something I did not have.” He thought he might profit from an association with them. If he did not, it wouldn’t do him any harm.
Probably because of his earlier church experiences, his enthusiasm cooled somewhat when he found that their program had a spiritual aspect. However, it was reassuring to know that they did not meet in a church, but at the Mayflower Hotel and in private homes.
Dr. Bob and Anne were regular attenders at the West Hill group, which met on Thursday nights. He and a few others might have been alcoholics, but he would not admit this in the beginning, when “I at no time sensed that it might be an answer to my liquor problem.”
For the next two and a half years, Bob attended Oxford Group meetings regularly and gave much time and study to its philosophy. It might be said, in fact, that he then embarked on a spiritual search destined to last for the rest of his life.
“I read everything I could find, and talked to everyone who I thought knew anything about it,” Dr. Bob said. He read the Scriptures, studied the lives of the saints, and did what he could to soak up the spiritual and religious philosophies of the ages. Still, he got drunk.
Another of the regular attenders at the West Hill meeting was Henrietta Seiberling, daughter-in-law of Frank A. Seiberling, founder and first president of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. A graduate of Vassar College, Henrietta was at the time a young housewife with three teenage children, who were also members of the Oxford Group.
As she recalled it (in 1978, the year before her death), a friend named Delphine Weber asked her one night in March or April 1935, “What are we going to do about Bob Smith?”
“What’s wrong with him?” Henrietta asked.
“He’s a terrible drinker,” Delphine replied, noting that he was having problems at the hospital and was practically bankrupt because of his drinking.
“I immediately felt guided that we should have a meeting for Bob Smith, before Bill [Wilson] ever came to Akron,” said Henrietta. She went to fellow Oxford Groupers T. Henry and Clarace Williams and asked whether it would be possible to use their home as a meeting place. They readily agreed.
T. Henry, who was a quite well-to-do inventor responsible for a new process in tire-making, was said to look more like a drunk than most alcoholics, because of his ruddy complexion. He was kidded about this a great deal but took it good-naturedly.
Though T. Henry and Clarace undoubtedly had their own spiritual problems, they were regarded as a saintly couple who freely gave of themselves out of a kind of sustained natural goodness that surfaces for only brief moments in most of us.
Unlike others who shared their memories of the Smiths, Henrietta came close to criticizing Anne, stating that she never shared deeply at meetings and was “very sensitive.” Henrietta told of an incident in which Anne was speaking about a situation and using the third person. “I said, ‘Anne, would you put that in the first person singular?’ She burst into tears. First-person sharing was costly to her pride. But she knew
