How Alcoholics Anonymous Started: The Unlikely Story Behind the World's Most Famous Recovery Programme

May 12
14 min read

Dr Bob and Bill W in suits smiling, a book titled "Alcoholics Anonymous," and text: "How Alcoholics Anonymous Started." Yellow background.

It began with a desperate phone call in a hotel lobby, a surgeon's last beer before an operation, a blinding flash of white light, and a Swiss psychiatrist who told a wealthy businessman there was no hope for him. Alcoholics Anonymous didn't arrive fully formed. It was pieced together from personal catastrophe, spiritual crisis, and a chain of chance encounters that, had even one of them broken, would probably have meant the organisation never existed at all.

Today AA has around two million members in more than 160 countries. But in 1935 it was just two men in an Ohio kitchen, trying to figure out how to stay sober.

The World Before AA: Alcoholism as a Moral Failing

To understand why Alcoholics Anonymous was so radical, you have to understand what came before it. In post-Prohibition 1930s America, it was common to perceive alcoholism as a moral failing, and the medical profession of the time treated it as a condition that was likely incurable and lethal. Those without money found what help they could through state hospitals, the Salvation Army, or religious charities. There was no programme, no framework, and no language for what was really happening to people.

Before the publication of the Big Book, alcoholism in America was viewed largely as it had been in the 19th century. The temperance movements of the 19th century and the recent experiment with Prohibition focused on the individual. Calling it a disease wasn't compassionate thinking; it was practically unheard of. The American Medical Association wouldn't formally recognise alcoholism as an illness until 1956.

The Thread That Led to It All: Carl Jung and Roland Hazard

The story of AA's founding didn't begin with Bill Wilson or Dr. Bob Smith. It began, surprisingly enough, in a consulting room in Zurich.

Rowland Hazard III was primarily a businessman throughout his career and a member of a prominent Rhode Island family. In the late 1920s, he had a severe drinking problem and made an expensive journey to seek help from the famous psychiatrist Carl Jung. He boarded an ocean liner bound for Zurich, hoping to find a method of release from the famous Dr. Carl Jung. But the great doctor had no psychological advice for him. He was told that his problem was not treatable from a medical standpoint. The consultation reportedly cost the equivalent of around $50,000 in today's money.

Jung's conclusion was bleak but historically important. He told Hazard that a handful of rare cases like his had only ever recovered through a profound spiritual experience. It wasn't a prescription or a therapy. It was closer to a last resort. Jung further advised that Rowland's affiliation with a church did not spell the necessary vital experience.

Shaken, Hazard sought out the Oxford Group, a Christian organisation popular in America and Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. The Group was dedicated to what its members termed the Four Absolutes: absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love. It emphasised personal confession, moral inventory, and the idea that a changed person should share their story with others. Hazard found sobriety within the Group, and true to its principles, he carried the message to someone else.

Ebby Thacher: The Link Nobody Remembers

That someone else was Edwin "Ebby" Thacher, a childhood friend of Bill Wilson's. Thacher was a school friend of Wilson, and battled his whole life with alcoholism, frequently landing in mental hospitals or jail. After one bender, three members of the Oxford Group, including Rowland Hazard, convinced the court to parole Thacher into their custody.

Hazard took Thacher under his wing and introduced him to Oxford Group principles. Ebby got sober, and in the autumn of 1934, he showed up unannounced at Bill Wilson's apartment in Brooklyn. Wilson had been expecting an evening of drinking with an old friend. What he got instead was the sight of a glowing, clear-eyed man who refused the drink pushed across the table toward him.

Thacher told Wilson of his conversion and acquainted him with the teachings of Rowland Hazard about the Oxford Group's life-changing programme, as well as the prescription of Carl Jung for a conversion. Wilson was intrigued, but he wasn't ready. He kept drinking for a while longer, until circumstances finally forced his hand.

Bill Wilson: The White Light at Towns Hospital

William Griffith Wilson was born on November 26, 1895, in East Dorset, Vermont. He'd become a reasonably successful stockbroker on Wall Street during the 1920s boom, but his drinking had accelerated to a point where it was destroying everything. Between 1933 and 1934, Wilson was hospitalised for his alcoholism multiple times.

In December 1934, he was admitted to Towns Hospital in New York for the fourth and final time. The facility used what was called the Towns-Lambert Cure, which included a compound derived from belladonna and other plants known to produce delirium and hallucinations. There, Bill W had a "White Light" spiritual experience and quit drinking. Earlier that evening, Thacher had visited and tried to persuade him to turn himself over to the care of a Christian deity who would liberate him from alcohol. He was also given belladonna, which causes hallucinations.

Wilson later described what happened that night in vivid terms: his room blazed with white light, he felt seized by an ecstasy beyond description, and a profound sense of peace settled over him. Whether it was a divine moment or a belladonna-induced vision has been debated ever since. Wilson's physician, Dr. William Silkworth, had administered the belladonna cure, a cocktail containing atropine, hyoscyamine, and scopolamine, all physiologically capable of inducing vivid, visionary states.

What nobody disputes is the outcome. Wilson's sobriety from alcohol, which he maintained until his death, began December 11, 1934. He never drank again.

Dr. Silkworth was also important in another way. He was one of the first physicians to genuinely believe that alcoholism had a medical dimension, describing it to Wilson as a combination of a physical allergy and a mental obsession. That framing would become central to everything AA would later teach.

The Phone Call That Founded AA

By the spring of 1935, Wilson had been sober for several months and was actively trying to help other alcoholics recover. None of them had managed to stay sober, but Wilson had noticed something: talking with other drinkers seemed to keep him from relapsing himself. The act of helping was, paradoxically, the thing that kept him well.

He was in Akron, Ohio on a business trip that had gone badly wrong. He'd lost a proxy fight and was left nearly broke, staying at the Mayflower Hotel. Walking through the lobby, dejected and depressed and faced with the prospect of succumbing to the lure of the hotel's bar, he instead went to a phone booth and began to search desperately for another alcoholic, someone like himself, to talk to.

He worked through a local church directory and eventually reached Henrietta Seiberling, an Oxford Group member in Akron. She directed him to a local physician she knew was also struggling with drink. His name was Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith.

Bill W was at a professional convention in Akron and was battling to stay sober. He sought out the telephone number of a still-suffering alcoholic and was given the name and number of Dr. Bob S. After delaying the meeting for a day, Dr. Bob agreed to a fifteen-minute encounter. When they met, the fifteen minutes became six hours.

Alcoholics Anonymous founders: Dr Robert Holbrook Smith, or ‘Dr Bob’, (left) and Bill Wilson, ‘Bill W’ (right) (1930s)

Dr. Bob: The Other Half of the Equation

Robert Holbrook Smith was born and raised in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. His parents took him to religious services four times a week, and in response he determined he would never attend religious services when he grew up. He went on to study medicine at Dartmouth and the University of Michigan, eventually setting up as a colorectal surgeon in Akron. But alcohol was with him throughout.

Dr. Bob Smith was 16 years older than Bill W. He began drinking in his college days and quickly developed a tolerance for alcohol and was noted for the absence of hangovers, which caused him to believe he was an alcoholic from the time he began drinking. During Prohibition, when physicians could obtain medicinal alcohol legally, Dr. Bob recollected that he would go through the telephone directory and write bogus prescriptions to keep himself supplied with drink.

He'd been attending Oxford Group meetings in Akron since 1933 without managing to stay sober. The meetings gave him principles but not sobriety. When Wilson arrived and spoke from genuine lived experience rather than religious doctrine, something shifted.

Doctor Bob wrote: "He gave me information about the subject of alcoholism which was undoubtedly helpful. Of far more importance was the fact that he was the first living human with whom I had ever talked, who knew what he was talking about in regard to alcoholism from actual experience. In other words, he talked my language."

Wilson moved in with the Smith family. During this period, however, Smith returned to drinking while attending a medical convention. Smith's last drink was on June 10, 1935, a beer to steady his hand for surgery, and this is considered by AA members to be the founding date of AA.

Mother's Day, 1935: The First Meeting

The meeting between Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob that is widely regarded as the birth of Alcoholics Anonymous took place on Mother's Day, May 12, 1935, at the Gate Lodge of the Seiberling estate in Akron. The two men immediately recognised in each other something that had been missing from every other attempt at recovery: a fellow sufferer who genuinely understood.

They began working with other alcoholics almost immediately, visiting patients at Akron City Hospital. One patient quickly achieved complete sobriety. These three men made up the nucleus of the first AA group, though the name Alcoholics Anonymous was not yet used. In the fall of 1935, a second group slowly took shape in New York. A third appeared in Cleveland in 1939. It took four years to produce about 100 sober alcoholics in the three founding groups.

Before the Twelve Steps, There Were Six

Something most people don't know about the Twelve Steps is that they weren't part of the original programme at all. For the first four years of what would become AA, the fellowship ran entirely on a spoken, word-of-mouth set of six principles, passed from member to member with no written version and no fixed wording.

During the three years after Dr. Bob's recovery, the growing groups at Akron, New York, and Cleveland evolved what they called the "word-of-mouth programme." As they began to form a society separate from the Oxford Group, their principles ran roughly as follows:

We admitted that we were licked, that we were powerless over alcohol.
We made a moral inventory of our defects or sins.
We confessed or shared our shortcomings with another person in confidence.
We made restitution to all those we had harmed.
We tried to help other alcoholics, with no thought of reward in money or prestige.
We prayed to whatever God we thought there was for power to practice these precepts.

These six steps were themselves influenced by the Oxford Group's principles and by William James's work on religious experience. They were loose, informal, and interpreted differently depending on who was doing the explaining. In Akron and Cleveland, members still adhered to the Oxford Group's absolutes of honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love. This was the gist of their message to incoming alcoholics right up to 1939, when the Twelve Steps were finally put to paper.

The expansion happened in a single evening. Wilson wrote the Twelve Steps one night while lying in bed, which he felt was the best place to think. He prayed for guidance before writing, and in reviewing what he had written and numbering the new steps, he found they added up to twelve. He then thought of the Twelve Apostles and became convinced that the programme should have twelve steps.

Bill sat up one night with a pencil and pad, using the six tenets of the Oxford Group as his raw material. He speedily wrote for 30 minutes, and when he was done, he had twelve steps.

The six-step word-of-mouth programme was expanded into what became the Twelve Steps in December of 1938.

The reaction within the fellowship was not universally enthusiastic. When the draft was shown to their New York meeting, the protests were many and loud. Agnostic members didn't like the idea of kneeling. Others said they were talking too much about God. And why should there be twelve steps when they'd done fine on six? The heated discussion went on for days and nights.

Out of that argument came one of AA's most enduring and important ideas. The agnostic contingent finally convinced the group that they needed to make it easier for people without religious belief by using terms like "a Higher Power" or "God as we understand Him." Those expressions have since enabled countless people to make a beginning where none could have been made otherwise.

The number twelve stuck. The phrasing was softened. And what had been a loose, informal spoken tradition became the structured written programme that would eventually spread worldwide.

The Big Book and the Name "Alcoholics Anonymous"

By 1938, the fellowship was growing but had no written programme and no public identity. Wilson became convinced that a book was needed. He began drafting what would become the foundational text, writing much of it in Newark, New Jersey, using secretarial help provided by Ruth Hock.

Wilson and Smith formed a nonprofit group called the Alcoholic Foundation and published a book that shared their personal experiences and what they did to stay sober. The book they wrote, Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story Of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered From Alcoholism, is the basic text for AA members on how to stay sober, and it is from the title of this book that the group got its name.

On April 10, 1939, 4,730 copies of the first edition of Alcoholics Anonymous were published at $3.50 a copy. The printer, Edward Blackwell of the Cornwall Press, was told to use the thickest paper in his shop. The large, bulky volume became known as the Big Book, and the name has stuck ever since. Wilson later admitted the idea was partly a sales tactic: the thick paper was meant to convince buyers they were getting their money's worth.

Initially the book barely sold. 5,000 copies sat in a warehouse, and Works Publishing was nearly bankrupt. Morgan R., recently released from an asylum, contacted his friend Gabriel Heater, host of a popular radio programme, to promote his recovery through AA. To ensure that Morgan stayed sober for the broadcast, members of AA kept him locked in a hotel room for several days under a 24-hour watch. The broadcast was a success and book sales picked up.

The Twelve Steps themselves were written by Wilson in December 1938. They were expanded from the Oxford Group's six principles, drawing also on William James's work on religious experience and the medical framing provided by Dr. Silkworth.

John D. Rockefeller and the Decision That Shaped AA Forever

In 1937, Wilson approached the Rockefeller family for funding. He envisioned paid AA missionaries and a network of treatment centres. Wilson envisioned receiving millions of dollars to fund AA missionaries and treatment centres, but Rockefeller refused, saying money would spoil things. Instead, he agreed to contribute $5,000 in $30 weekly increments for Wilson and Smith to use for personal expenses.

In February 1940, Rockefeller gave a dinner for many of his prominent New York friends to publicise AA. This brought a flood of pleas from people seeking help. But the Rockefeller family's consistent position that AA should remain self-supporting turned out to be one of the most important decisions in the organisation's history. It meant AA couldn't be bought, controlled, or corrupted by outside money.

Bill Wilson's Secret: LSD and the Search for a Spiritual Shortcut

One of the least-known chapters in AA's history involves Bill Wilson's later experiments with LSD. In 1956, twenty years after co-founding AA, Wilson took LSD for the first time, when the drug was still legal, under the medical supervision of UCLA researcher Sidney Cohen, and with the spiritual guidance of the philosopher Gerald Heard.

Wilson believed that LSD might help other alcoholics access the kind of spiritual awakening that had saved his own life, and which he knew most people would never spontaneously experience. He would come to believe LSD might offer other alcoholics the spiritual experience they needed to kickstart their sobriety.

In 1957, he wrote a letter saying "I am certain that the LSD experience has helped me very much. I find myself with a heightened colour perception and an appreciation of beauty almost destroyed by my years of depression." The AA board was deeply uncomfortable with this position, and Wilson eventually stepped back from publicly advocating for it. The controversy was largely suppressed within AA circles for decades.

Sister Ignatia: The Unsung Hero of Early AA

One figure who rarely gets the recognition she deserves in the founding story is Sister Ignatia, a Catholic nun at St. Thomas Hospital in Akron. Dr. Bob became a member of the hospital staff. He and Sister Ignatia cared for and brought AA to some 5,000 sufferers. After Dr. Bob's death in 1950, she continued her work at Cleveland's Charity Hospital, where she helped a further 10,000 people find AA.

Sister Ignatia and Dr. Bob essentially invented the hospital-based model of AA outreach, which would later become standard practice worldwide. She'd quietly admit alcoholics to the hospital, often listing them under other diagnoses to avoid stigma, and arrange for AA members to visit them during recovery.

The Name, the Anonymity, and the Twelve Traditions

The tradition of anonymity was both practical and philosophical. Wilson calculated that a celebrity who slipped would destroy any positive effect created by an initial recovery. AA members therefore identified themselves by their first names only and avoided being photographed for national publications.

From the outset, AA was an inclusive organisation that welcomed alcoholics regardless of their race, gender, social class, sexual orientation, or prior criminal history. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.

By 1946, Wilson wrote the Twelve Traditions, a set of guidelines for how AA groups should function. These formally established the leaderless, decentralised model that has allowed AA to survive and spread without collapsing into personality cults or institutional corruption. They were formally adopted at the first International Convention in Cleveland in 1950.

What Happened to the Founders

Dr. Bob Smith died on November 16, 1950, of cancer. His final public appearance was at the Cleveland Convention that summer, where he told the crowd that the key to AA was to keep it simple. He was 71.

Bill Wilson died on January 24, 1971. A heavy smoker, he eventually suffered from emphysema and later pneumonia. He continued to smoke while dependent on an oxygen tank in the late 1960s. In 1999, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century, calling him "The Healer." He was listed alongside Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein.

Ebby Thacher, the man who first carried the message to Wilson, never achieved lasting sobriety himself. He spent decades in and out of AA, relapsing repeatedly until his death in 1966. The man who saved Bill Wilson's life couldn't save his own.

AA's Legacy and Global Reach

The Saturday Evening Post article of March 1941, written by journalist Jack Alexander, transformed AA's public profile almost overnight. The response was enormous. By the close of that year, membership had jumped to 6,000, and the number of groups multiplied in proportion.

Today the Big Book has sold over 30 million copies and has been translated into more than 70 languages. The Twelve Steps have been adapted into Narcotics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, and dozens of other recovery programmes. The model Wilson and Smith invented in an Ohio kitchen in 1935 became the template for how the world thinks about addiction recovery.

It all traces back to a phone call in a hotel lobby, a surgeon who agreed to fifteen minutes but stayed for six hours, and a chain of desperate, unlikely people who passed something fragile and important from one pair of hands to the next.