1939 Cleveland Plain Dealer Articles - Part 6
The first extensive publicity of the newly-formed AA Fellowship.
These articles are reprinted from the Cleveland Plain Dealer with
permission The Elrick B. Davis Articles From The Cleveland Plain Dealer
October - November 1939
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These articles appeared in the main Cleveland newspaper, the Plain
Dealer, just five months after the first A.A. group was formed in
Cleveland. The articles resulted in hundreds of calls for help from
suffering alcoholics who reached out for the hope that the fledgling
Alcoholics Anonymous offered.
The thirteen reliable members of the Cleveland group handled as many as
500 calls in the first month following the appearance of Davis' articles.
The following year Cleveland could boast 20 to 30 groups with hundreds of
members.
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October 21, 1939, Alcoholics Anonymous Makes Its Stand Here - Part 1
October 23, 1939, Alcoholics Anonymous Makes Its Stand Here - Part 2
October 24, 1939, Alcoholics Anonymous Makes Its Stand Here - Part 3
October 25, 1939, Alcoholics Anonymous Makes Its Stand Here - Part 4
October 26, 1939, Alcoholics Anonymous Makes Its Stand Here - Part 5
November 2, 1939, A Noted Divine Reviews "Alcoholics Anonymous"
November 4, 1939, A Physician Looks Upon Alcoholics Anonymous
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Reprinted from the November 2, 1939 Cleveland Plain Dealer with
permission A Noted Divine Reviews "Alcoholics Anonymous" By Elrick B.
Davis
In a recent series, Mr. Davis told of Alcoholics Anonymous, an
organization of former drinkers banded together to beat the liquor habit.
This is the first of two final articles on the subject.
The Book
When 100 members of Alcoholics Anonymous, the extraordinary fellowship of
men and women who have cured themselves of "incurable" alcoholism by
curing each other and adopting a "spiritual way of life," had established
their cures to the satisfaction of their physicians, families, employers
and psychotherapists, they published a book.
It is a 400-page volume of which half is a history of the movement and a
description of its methods, and the other half a collection of 30 case
histories designed to show what a wide variety of persons the fellowship
has cured. It is called "Alcoholics Anonymous," and may be bought for
$3.50 from the Works Publishing Co., Box 657, Church Street Annex
Postoffice, New York.
The name of the publisher is that adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous for its
only publishing venture. The address is "blind" because the name
"Alcoholics Anonymous" means exactly what it says. The price of the book
is "cost," 50 cents a volume less than one of the country's soundest
old-line book publishers would have charged if the fellowship had
accepted that house's offer to publish the book and pay the society 40
cents a copy royalty on sales.
Among the first reviews of the book to see print was that written by the
Rev. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick for the Religious Digest. That review so
attracted at least one well-known Cleveland minister that he obtained a
copy of the book, got in touch with the Cleveland chapter of the society,
and plans to preach a sermon about the movement.
Dr. Fosdick is himself the author of seventeen books. His review of
"Alcoholics Anonymous" follows:
"This extraordinary book deserves the careful attention of anyone
interested in the problem of alcoholism. Whether as victims, friends of
victims, physicians, clergymen, psychiatrists or social workers there are
many such, and this book will give them, as no other treatise known to
this reviewer will, an inside view of the problem which the alcoholic
faces. Gothic cathedral windows are not the sole things which can be
truly seen only from within. Alcoholism is another. All outside views are
clouded and unsure. Only one who has been a alcoholic and has escaped the
thraldom can interpret the experience.
Truth
"This book represents the pooled experience of 100 men and women who have
been victims of alcoholism - and who have won their freedom and recovered
their sanity and self-control. Their stories are detailed and
circumstantial, packed with human interest. In America today the disease
of alcoholism is increasing. Liquor has been an easy escape from
depression. As an English officer in India, reproved for his excessive
drinking, lifted his glass and said, "This is the swiftest road out of
India," so many Americans have been using hard liquor as a means of
flight from their troubles until to their dismay they discover that, free
to begin, they are not free to stop. One hundred men and women, in this
volume, report their experience of enslavement and then of liberation.
"The book is not in the least sensational. It is notable for its sanity,
restraint and freedom from over-emphasis and fanaticism.
"The group sponsoring this book began with two or three ex-alcoholics,
who discovered one another through kindred experience. From this a
movement started; ex-alcoholics working for alcoholics, without fanfare
or advertisement, and the movement has spread from one city to another.
"The core of their whole procedure is religious. They are convinced that
for the helpless alcoholic there is only one way out-the expulsion of his
obsession by a Power Greater Than Himself. Let it be said at once that
there is nothing partisan or sectarian about this religious experience.
Agnostics and atheists, along with Catholics, Jews and Protestants, tell
their story of discovering the Power Greater Than themselves. 'Who are
you to say that there is no God,' one atheist in the group heard a voice
say when, hospitalized for alcoholism, he faced the utter hopelessness of
his condition. Nowhere is the tolerance and open-mindedness of the book
more evident than in its treatment of this central matter on which the
cure of all these men and women has depended. They are not partisans of
any particular form of organized religion, although they strongly
recommend that some religious fellowship be found by their participants.
By religion they mean an experience which they personally know and which
has saved them from their slavery, when psychiatry and medicine had
failed. They agree that each man must have his own way of conceiving God,
but of God Himself they are utterly sure, and their stories of victory in
consequence are a notable addition to William James' 'Varieties of
Religious Experience.'"
Contact:
The Legacy Group of Alcoholics Anonymous © 2005