instead of running off to chin and gossip with my old friends.
Yes, my group (made up of individual AAs, including me) has improved a lot in its respect for our Fifth Tradition—in its ways of carrying the message. My own AA history has lengthened considerably since I first caught glimpses of the sobriety-preserving wisdom in the AA way of doing things (summed up in our Traditions. But I have recently discovered something else quite wonderful about the Fifth: It does not say that AAs should help only newcomers.
I do not agree that the newcomer is the most important member at any meeting. In my opinion, equally important are those old-timers who showed me the way, and any middle-timer who may today be suffering. If newcomers are indeed the lifeblood of AA, old- and middle-timers are its skin and backbone. What a bewildered mess we would be in without them!
So in your next meeting, when that Tradition about carrying the message “to the alcoholic who still suffers” is mentioned, please give a thought, not only to newcomers, but also to the alcoholics older in AA who are sitting there. One of them might be me. I still suffer, sometimes. I still need to hear the message, always.
B.L., New York, N.Y.
Tradition Eleven
Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.
July 1971
The names of Joe DiMaggio, Henry Ford, Fiorello La Guardia, Mrs. Thomas A. Edison, Admiral Richard E. Byrd, Senator Harry S. Truman, the Duke of Windsor, Earl Baldwin, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek may not seem to fit together. But they were all listed in New York newspapers as joint “sponsors” of the Oxford Group, an evangelical religious movement very popular in the 1930s. (Actually, it had no ties with the renowned English university; but people thought it did, so the name was used because such an image had obvious prestige value.) When Bill W., who codified AA customs into our Twelve Traditions, first sat down to write them out (for the Grapevine) in 1946, he had very much in mind this Oxford Group practice of exploiting celebrity names to promote its cause. And that, he told me once, was one reason he proposed “attraction” rather than such “promotion” as the basis of AA’s relations with the public. In fact, AA had already pretty much adopted the non-promotion policy as the young Fellowship’s way of doing things. Ex-drunks knew from their own experience that the hard sell generally does not persuade a rumpot (or anyone else) to give up his pot. Tradition Eleven just put this idea into capsule form.
But none of this was known to me, or of any use or interest whatsoever, one hot summer day in 1942. I stood in a seedy old joint on lower Main Street in Fort Worth, Texas, trying to get a glass of cold beer down before my shakes made me spill the damn thing.
Three thousand years and two bottles later, I had begun to get it all together, and I realized, to my mild surprise, that it must be afternoon. The evening-paper boys were delivering their wares.
I bought a paper and turned to my favorite gossip columnist. He had a funny piece that day about a bunch of folks in town who called themselves Alcoholics Anonymous. They sounded like awful fools, or some kind of fanatic reformers, just like the fellows who ran that rundown, shabby old mission next door to the tavern I was in. They had gone all sanctimonious, I figured, and had given up drinking and almost everything else I liked to do, which the mission preachers called “sinful ways.”
Despite my scorn for both the mission and this AA business, I did tear out the AA story and slip it into my wallet. I explained to the bartender that I wanted to show it to some drinking buddies of mine, for a laugh.
I wonder now whether that story really was funny, intentionally or unintentionally. Anyhow, I lost it and never thought of it again—consciously—through the next two and a half years of fierce alcoholic drinking. During that time, I took a geographical cure, seriously believing that if I moved to New York from Fort Worth, my drinking would somehow get straightened out. It was a severe and scary setback to find myself drinking even worse around Times Square than I ever had back in the old corrals of Cowtown.
One morning, sweatily trying to decide which shoelace to tackle first, desperately trying to remember what horrors I had perpetrated the night (or nights) before, I found myself crying and saying, “I’ve got to get out of this hell, some way.” Then I suddenly remembered that old Forth Worth newspaper clipping about Alcoholics Anonymous.
Two general ideas from that gossip column had apparently lodged themselves in the collection of throbbing cavities I called my head. One was that AA had something to do with people known to be very heavy drinkers. The other impression was that AA didn’t ask for more than your first name, so they could never tell anyone that you had joined their club.
That promise of privacy, that pledge—implied in the name Alcoholics Anonymous—to keep my shameful record absolutely confidential made it possible for me to show up at the local AA office a few days later. The Traditions were still unwritten, but the spirit of trustworthiness and anonymity which pervaded our Fellowship enabled me to sneak through the door on a clear, cold January day of 1945 and find at long last not only that I was at home, that I was wanted, but that no one would tell on me.
Already, I was the beneficiary of both halves of Tradition Eleven. Fort Worth members had cooperated with that Texas columnist back in 1942, so he could carry the message of AA in his newspaper. They had given him information about AA—not boastful promotion material. By that action, they had acknowledged that AA itself could not be anonymous; it could not be a secret society if it wanted to carry the message. And in their message that problem drinkers could recover, they also conveyed the AA promise of privacy, or confidentiality.
Because their behavior saved my life, I have ever since been glad to see our public information committees helping to get more and more publicity for AA in newspapers, on television, in magazines, books, and movies. It may not always be the kind of publicity I like; but when I am tempted to criticize, I just remember that all it has to do is to plant the twin seeds of (1) hope for the problem drinker and (2) anonymity—the conviction that he can trust us never to betray him. I’m sure such publicity has saved many other lives, and I hope we get cleverer and cleverer at figuring out ways to keep AA constantly being mentioned in the public media.
Once I had joined AA, I found there was something I could do, personally and privately, to help spread the message. Rather soon after starting to sober up, I told my friends and family about this wonderful new thing I had learned: that alcoholism is a disease, not a moral failing. It wasn’t my fault that I had been such a bad drunkard for so long; it was the disease’s fault. But I quickly added that now I was going to be all right, it wouldn’t happen again, because I had joined this marvelous organization called Alcoholics Anonymous.
I also told my doctor and employers, when it seemed appropriate for them to know. My friends in AA did, too. Whenever we told of our own membership, we knew that it might help chip away at the cruel stigma which still kills too many alcoholics. Sometimes, of course, the message was carried to other alcoholics, indirectly, through these doctors and employers.
Since we also told of our AA membership when we made amends, when we spoke at open meetings, and when we did Twelfth Step work, the notion of keeping our membership secret, or being furtive about it, just never occurred to most of us, I guess. After all, why should we be ashamed of recovering from a disease?
We did not tell any outsiders the names of other members, of course. That promise of confidentiality in our name was precious to me, and still is; I certainly would not break it.
But I have always loved to gossip, and it wasn’t easy to keep from telling last names and other identifying
