Perhaps I need to begin by explaining why I use the word governance in the headline above instead of government. It's because of what I think – and I hope I am being reasonable – about the connotations and overtones of the two words.
My Webster's Collegiate Dictionary gives a one-word meaning for governance: government. Are these, then, precisely equivalent words? I do not think so, at least not for me.
Every enterprise in the world, from rowing a boat on up, requires some kind of government but, thank God, most of them can be managed with some modest governance which, as I see it, is light-handed, non-coercive, and unaccompanied by military might and tax exactions, in short, government without regulatory busybodies and taxmen with guns.
Governance, as I understand and use the word, usually involves just some skill, some knowledge, some principles, and some real authority, as in: "he taught them as one having authority" (Mark 1:22), meaning moral authority. I am giving to governance the second meaning of government in my Webster's Dictionary: "moral conduct or behavior," a meaning the Dictionary says is now obsolete.
That old, obsolete meaning is clearly what is meant, for example, in these words Handel chose from the Old Testament (Isaiah 9:6) for The Messiah:
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.
Or consider how libertarian writer Brad Edmonds uses governance in this quote from his article, "Government Will Be Abolished," on lewrockwell.com December 30, 2003:
It is inevitable that forcible government will be abolished, replaced with the spontaneous, voluntary governance of the market, in which every participant is responsible to every other and is governed by the self-interest of 280 million pairs of eyes and 280 million personal wallets.
Note that I am not the one saying that the meaning, "moral conduct or behavior," is now "obs." It's Webster's Dictionary. They should know. And woe unto us that it is so. The seven non-obsolete meanings of government that Webster's cites cover what you usually think of when you say government, including "direction and supervision of public affairs." All of them I might summarize roughly by saying: "What the people who govern us are up to, and the rules, taxes, and force they inflict on us to get what they want."
Now to my present purpose: I offer here for your consideration some notes on an unusual instance in modern times of what I am calling governance; I mean the entity known as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).
I have long been fascinated by the history and structure of AA as one of the most successful governances of the last century. It is a movement, fellowship, or society that grew from its two cofounders, who met in Akron, Ohio, in June 1935, to more than two million living members in something like 150 nations today.
(It is inappropriate to call AA an organization; one of its Twelve Traditions contains the language, "AA as such ought never to be organized." Despite the AA Tradition, however, AA is of course organized – sort of – but after its own unique fashion. It has a shape and a scheme of governance. It is a "benign anarchy"; AA cofounder Bill Wilson once called it just that.1)
Last year, a book I wrote for young people (10 or so and up) was published by Boyds Mills Press of Honesdale, PA. Its title: Bill W., A Different Kind of Hero: The Story of Alcoholics Anonymous. (Amazon offers it at 30% off list.)
I am happy to say my book seems to appeal, not just to school and public librarians, for whom, primarily, it was designed, but also to some AA members, especially those who have developed an interest in AA history. One AA, Mel B., author of five books about alcoholism and AA published by Hazelden Press has called it "the best quick summary of Bill's life I've seen."
I am presently working on a similar book about the other cofounder, Dr. Bob Smith. I find the personal histories of the two founders of AA compelling records of the possibility of a complete turnaround in "moral conduct or behavior" in the life of anyone who needs it desperately and will "go to any length," as AAs say, to get it. I believe their stories have much relevance for people in assorted kinds of personal jams today.
When Bill W., the original AA pioneer and chief scribe and architect of the movement, died in 1971, The New York Times published a lengthy page-one obituary on his remarkable life. Up to that point, Wilson (the Times employed his full name, William Griffith Wilson) had successfully maintained his anonymity "at the level of press, radio, and film," as AA's Traditions ask members to do. He had turned down much personal publicity, including both a cover story in Time Magazine and a Doctor of Laws degree from Yale, since both would have involved use of his picture and his full name.
Since 1971, however, Wilson and Smith have become increasingly well known as major innovators in the field of alcohol and drug rehabilitation, and Wilson is truly a major writer – one could make the case that he is the major writer – in that field in the 20th century. Except for the case histories in it, he was the author of the basic AA text, Alcoholics Anonymous, which has gone through four editions. More than 20 million copies have been published and sold in English alone, and it has been translated into 40 languages, most recently into Manchurian.
Today Bill W. and his fellow Vermont native and cofounder of AA, Dr. Bob S. seem to be achieving an almost iconic status not just in AA but to some extent in the world at large. As the recognized co-founders of AA, they are still the only two widely known AA names, and they are likely to remain that way for the indefinite future. This I believe is true for three reasons:
- because of their cofounder status;
- because they were the senior AAs throughout their lifetimes in their respective bailiwicks, New York City for Wilson, and Akron, Ohio, for Smith; and
- because Wilson, as the chief architect of the movement, deliberately designed out of its future any replacements for himself and his cofounder partner.
As Wilson said when he stepped down in 1955 and relinquished his role as the surviving cofounder and therefore the elder at the top, it was time for the younger members to take over and see if the bottom-up structure he had devised by that time would actually work without any sort of guiding and ruling big shots.
Dr. Bob died in 1950. AA published his official biography in 1980 and employed in it his full name, Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith. Smith left behind, unlike Wilson, very little in the way of a paper trail; his legacy was a prodigious and truly heroic record of 12th Step work, which is the AA term for one-on-one attention to newcomers to the program, who typically arrive at AA in some stage of demoralization and physical collapse. In the last fifteen years of his life, all his years after he finally got sober himself, Dr. Bob, with the help of a Catholic nun, Sister Ignatia, hospitalized, attended, and introduced to the AA principles (without pay) approximately 5,000 alcoholics, who in their turn carried the AA message, initially all over the Midwest and by chain reaction ultimately everywhere.
Bill Wilson's official biography, Pass It On, was published by AA World Services, Inc., in 1984; but even before that, in 1975, a writer friend of his, Robert Thomsen, had published the first full-length biography of Wilson, called simply, Bill W. As it happens, I knew both Wilson and Thomsen in the 1960s when I was working for a New York daily (the Middletown Times-Herald Record), and on one occasion I took the photo of them which accompanies this article, as they sat chatting together, I think in 1966 or '67, at a function in the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.
Thomsen's biography is based on Bill's written and spoken records of his life and on many conversations the two men had over a number of years. Thomsen notes in his introduction that Bill knew that his biography would inevitably be written. Wilson wrote a volume on his first 40 years himself,2 and as he talked to Thomsen he insisted that, since he knew he would be written about, he wanted "to set the record somewhere near straight."
Thomsen's bio includes a quotation from British writer Aldous Huxley, who was a friend of Bill's. Huxley said that Bill was "the greatest social architect of the 20th century."3 Bill's official biography4 quotes Thomsen on this point. As far as I know, there is no other source for this comment of Huxley's, and so I do not know the context in which it was made.
Huxley's remark is, I think, usually understood as referring to Wilson and Smith's adaptation of the Oxford Group's5 spiritual principles to the salvaging of alcoholics. That was indeed an extraordinary contribution, but I tend to think, rather, that Huxley was referring to Bill's superb organization (always with Dr. Bob's concurrence while he was alive) of the governance of AA.
To summarize major features of the AA structure as it emerged over the first decades of its existence:
- It would have but one purpose, to help drunks get permanently sober.
- It would be entirely self-supporting.
- AA would own no property and accumulate no wealth beyond a prudent cash reserve to meet projected expenses.
- It would have no opinion on anything except its own affairs and enter no controversies, adopt no causes.
- The individual AA groups would be autonomous.
- AA would have but one ultimate authority – "God as he may express Himself in the group conscience," and all "leaders are but trusted servants, they do not govern." (That tends to deflate swollen egos.)
- Membership would be by self-election, no dues or fees required, merely a desire to stop drinking.
Thus every AA group, however new and however small, is essentially a pick-up thing, like a vacant-lot ball game in my youth. It welcomes anyone who shows up willing to play. Being willing to play in AA means having what AA's Preamble, read at the start of every meeting, calls a "desire to stop drinking."
The well-known writer Susan Cheever has a major new biography of Bill scheduled for publication by Simon and Schuster in February 2004. She thinks, and I agree, that Bill and Bob's Vermont background is a major factor in their approach to setting up AA and establishing how it would run. There is the venerable tradition of the Vermont town meeting, where things are decided by consensus and with full participation of townspeople. That is precisely how each AA group operates. Each one is autonomous "except in matters affecting AA as a whole." There is no bossing from headquarters, which consists, anyway, only of service corporations (chiefly to accomplish publishing), with no government functions at all.
It is a possibility that the governance of Protestant congregational churches – each congregation responsible for its own affairs – was also an influence on AA's founders; except that the typical emphasis on a strong pastor that is characteristic of many church structures may well have furnished Bill and Bob with an additional model of what not to do. They saw, even before Bob died in 1950, how they had become special, hardly even AA members at all, as Bill once wrote in the Fellowship's national magazine, the AA Grapevine. He wrote that he wished that he and Dr. Bob could become members of AA and not always be founders getting special attention.
And the Oxford Group perhaps provided another kind of warning: it had many and wonderful volunteer workers directed from the top, first, the OG founder Frank N.D. Buchman, and after his death, Peter Howard. When Howard died a few years after taking over, the OG (Moral Re-Armament by that time) went under the standard, top-down direction of trustees. It seems never to have had the will or the power to produce local groups everywhere, like amoebas dividing, as AA did, although its international work remains remarkable.6
One of Wilson's particular efforts in his final years was to ensure that the corporation operating the service headquarters in New York City came finally under a body of trustees of which the majority were alcoholics, which represented a change from the initial make-up, which had, "for safety's sake," in the early days of AA had a non-alcoholic majority.
Between 1950 and 1955, the year of the second every-five-years International AA Conference in Cleveland, Wilson had come to the tremendously important decision to step down as leader (he was only 60) and turn the movement over to younger people. That way he felt that AA "would be safe even from himself," as Thomsen reported.
And in fact, for the next 16 years, although Bill never wavered in his love for, and devotion to, AA, he did pursue quite other interests most of the time. Other men and women now were doing the day-to-day work of the headquarters service corporations and of the burgeoning thousands of AA groups (more than 100,000 of them worldwide by present estimates).
In my opinion the most brilliant element in AA's governance was the lodging of all power and authority in the individual group. The groups would be quite literally autonomous. This was, from a libertarian point of view, to establish the right to secession as the norm from the beginning. It is a classic AA wisecrack that "all you need to form a new group is a coffee pot and a resentment."
Elected representatives of the groups determine AA policy and rule over the service committees and corporations. In the language I noted previously, AA "leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern." Thus are the concepts leader, servant, and government linked in AA's Traditions, and so far it has worked. There has not yet, in 68 years of AA, been a usurpation of power by higher ups, because, essentially, there are no higher ups. That in turn may be because there is no real source of power in the sense of property and money. The moral control in AA issues from the principles enunciated in the Twelve Steps, and their guarantor is the threat of insobriety if anyone wanders too far from the founding principles.
And now, 54 years after the death of one cofounder and 33 years after the death of the other, AA continues to function quite smoothly, and presumably will do so as long as there are alcoholics needing its services. I am not sure what other societies could emulate the AA model, but I have the feeling quite a few should.
Bill Wilson, cofounder of AA, at right, and his first biographer, Robert Thomsen, in a 1967 photo taken at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. Photo by Tom White
- "When we come into A.A. we find a greater personal freedom than any other society knows. We cannot be compelled to do anything. In that sense our society is a benign anarchy. The word ‘anarchy’ has a bad meaning to most of us. . . . But I think that the gentle Russian prince who so strongly advocated the idea felt that if men were granted absolute liberty, and were compelled to obey no one in person, they would voluntarily associate themselves in the common interest. AA is an association of the benign sort the prince envisioned." Bill W. in A.A. Comes of Age (AA World Services, Inc., New York, 1957), page 224.
- Bill W.: My First Forty Years (Hazelden, Center City, MN, 2000).
- Bill W. by Robert Thomsen (Harper & Row, New York, 1975) page 340.
- Pass It On: Bill Wilson and the A.A. Message (A.A. World Services, Inc., New York, 1984) page 368.
- For much of the first four years of AA history, 1935–1939. the groups that were to become AA were actually elements in Oxford Group chapters in Akron and New York City. AA has always acknowledged that the spiritual principles of its recovery program came from the Oxford Group, although with certain new verbal formulations (e.g. the Twelve Steps), with a narrowing of focus to concentrate on the recovery of alcoholics (where the OG aimed at personal "change" at depth for all people), and with the innovations in structure I discuss in this article.
- I have necessarily scamped the story of the OG’s importance as the incubator of AA in the earliest days. The extraordinary story of the OG, later called Moral Re-Armament, (MRA), and now named Initiatives of Change (www.us.initiativesofchange.org/ ) is too little known, as is the story of its founder, Frank N.D. Buchman. There is a large library of books detailing its record. It is important not to confuse the Oxford Group (a 20th century phenomenon) with the 19th century Oxford Movement in the Anglican Church associated with the name of John Henry Newman.
January 9, 2004
