"The only requirement
for A.A. membership is a desire to stop drinking."
This Tradition is packed
with meaning. For A.A. is really saying to every serious drinker, "You are
an A.A. member if you say so. You can declare yourself in; nobody can keep you out.
No matter who you are, no matter how low you've gone, no matter how grave your
emotional complications - even your crimes - we still can't deny you A.A. We
don't want to keep you out. We aren't a bit afraid you'll harm us, never mind
how twisted or violent you may be. We just want to be sure that you get the
same great chance for sobriety that we've had. So you're an A.A. member the
minute you declare yourself."
To establish this
principle of membership took years of harrowing experience. In our early time,
nothing seemed so fragile, so easily breakable as an A.A. group. Hardly an
alcoholic we approached paid any attention; most of those who did join us were
like flickering candles in a windstorm. Time after time, their uncertain flames
blew out and couldn't be relighted. Our unspoken, constant thought was
"Which of us may be the next?"
A member gives us a vivid
glimpse of those days. "At one time," he says, "every A.A. group
had many membership rules. Everybody was scared witless that something or somebody
would capsize the boat and dump us all back into the drink. Our Foundation
office* asked each group to send in its list of `protective' regulations. The
total list was a mile long. If all those rules had been in effect everywhere,
nobody could have possibly joined A.A. at all, so great was the sum of our
anxiety and fear.
"We were resolved to
admit nobody to A.A. but that hypothetical class of people we termed `pure
alcoholics.' Except for their guzzling, and the unfortunate results thereof,
they could have no other complications. so beggars, tramps, asylum inmates,
prisoners, queers, plain crackpots, and fallen women were definitely out. Yes
sir, we'd cater only to pure and respectable alcoholics! Any others would
surely destroy us. Besides, if we took in those odd ones, what would decent
people say about us? We built a fine-mesh fence right around A.A. "Maybe
this sounds comical now. Maybe you think we oldtimers were pretty intolerant.
But I can tell you there was nothing funny about the situation then. We were
grim because we felt our lives and homes were threatened, and that was no
laughing matter. Intolerant, you say? Well, we were frightened. Naturally, we
began to act like most everybody does when afraid. After all, isn't fear the
true basis of intolerance? Yes, we were intolerant."
How could we then guess
that all those fears were to prove groundless? How could we know that thousands
of these sometimes frightening people were to make astonishing recoveries and
become our greatest workers and intimate friends? Was it credible that A.A. was
to have a divorce rate far lower than average? Could we then foresee that
troublesome people were to become our principle teachers of patience and
tolerance? Could any then imagine a society which would include every
conceivable kind of character, and cut across every barrier of race, creed,
politics, and language with ease?
Why did A.A. finally drop
all its membership regulations? Why did we leave it to each newcomer to decide
himself whether he was an alcoholic and whether he should join us? Why did we
dare say, contrary to the experience of society and government everywhere, that
we would neither punish nor deprive any A.A. of membership, believe anything,
or conform to anything?
The answer, now seen in
Tradition Three, was simplicity itself. At last experience taught us that to
take away any alcoholic's full chance was sometimes to pronounce his death
sentence, and often to condemn him to endless misery. Who dared to be judge,
jury, and executioner of his own sick brother?
As group after group saw
these possibilities, they finally abandoned all membership regulations. One
dramatic experience after another clinched this determination until it became
our universal tradition. Here are two examples:
On the A.A. calendar it
was Year Two. In that time nothing could be seen but two struggling, nameless
groups of alcoholics trying to hold their faces up to the light.
A newcomer appeared at
one of these groups, knocked on the door and asked to be let in. He talked frankly
with that group's oldest member. He soon proved that his was a desperate case,
and that above all he wanted to get well. "But," he asked, "will
you let me join your group? Since I am the victim of another addiction even
worse stigmatized than alcoholism, you may not want me among you. Or will
you?"
There was the dilemma.
What should the group do? The oldest member summoned two others, and in
confidence laid the explosive facts in their laps. Said he, "Well, what
about it? If we turn this man away, he'll soon die. If we allow him in, only
god knows what trouble he'll brew. What shall the answer be - yes or no?"
At first the elders could
look only at the objections. "We deal," they said, "with
alcoholics only. So went the discussion while the newcomers fate hung in the
balance. Then one of the three spoke in a very different voice. "What we
are really afraid of," he said, "is our reputation. We are much more
afraid of what people might say than the trouble this strange alcoholic might bring.
As we've been talking, five short words have been running through my mind.
Something keeps repeating to me, `What would the Master do?'" Not another
word was said. What more indeed could be said?"
Overjoyed, the newcomer
plunged into Twelfth Step work. Tirelessly he laid A.A.'s message before scores
of people. Since this was a very early group, those scores have since
multiplied themselves into thousands. Never did he trouble anyone with his
other difficulty. A.A. had taken its first step in the formation of Tradition
Three.
Not long after the man
with the double stigma knocked for admission, A.A.'s other group received into
its membership a salesman we shall call Ed. A power driver, this one, and brash
as any salesman could possibly be. He had at least and idea a minute on how to
improves A.A. These ideas he sold to fellow members with the same burning
enthusiasm with which he distributed automobile polish. But he had one idea
that wasn't so salable. Ed was an atheist. His pet obsession was that A.A.
could get along better without its "God nonsense." He browbeat
everybody, and everybody expected that he'd soon get drunk - for at the time,
you see, A.A. was on the pious side. There must be a heavy penalty, it was
thought, for blasphemy. Distressingly enough, Ed proceeded to stay sober.
At length the time came
for him to speak in a meeting. We shivered, for we knew what was coming. He
paid a fine tribute to the Fellowship; he told how his family had been
reunited; he extoled the virtue of honesty; he recalled the joys of Twelfth
Step work; and then he lowered the boom. Cried Ed, "I can't stand this God
stuff! It's a lot of malarkey for weak folks. This group doesn't need it, and I
won't have it! To hell with it!"
A great wave of outraged
resentment engulfed the meeting, sweeping every member to a single resolve:
"Out he goes!"
The elders led Ed aside.
They said firmly, "You can't talk like this around here. You'll have to
quit it or get out." With great sarcasm Ed came back at them. "Now do
tell! Is that so?" He reached over to a bookshelf and took up a sheaf of
papers. On top of them lay the foreword to the book "Alcoholics
Anonymous," then under preparation. He read aloud, "The only
requirement for A.A. membership is a desire to stop drinking." Relentlessly,
Ed went on, "When you guys wrote that sentence, did you mean it, or didn't
you?"
Dismayed, the elders
looked at one another, for they knew he had them cold. So Ed stayed. Ed not
only stayed, he stayed sober - month after month. The longer he kept dry, the
louder he talked - against God. The group was in anguish so deep that all
fraternal charity had vanished. "When, oh when," groaned members to
one another, "will that guy get drunk?"
Quite a while later, Ed
got a sales job which took him out of town. At the end of a few days, the news
came in. He'd sent a telegram for money, and everybody knew what that
meant! Then he got on the phone. In those days, we'd go anywhere on a Twelfth
Step job, no matter how unpromising. But this time nobody stirred. "Leave
him alone! Let him try it by himself for once; maybe he'll learn a
lesson!"
About two weeks later, Ed
stole by night into an A.A. member's house, and unknown to the family, went to
bed. Daylight found the master of the house and another friend drinking their
morning coffee. A noise was heard on the stairs. To their consternation, Ed
appeared. A quizzical smile on his lips, he said, "Have you fellows had
your morning meditation?" They quickly sensed that he was quite in
earnest. In fragments, his story came out.
In a neighboring state,
Ed had holed up in a cheap hotel. After all his please for help had been
rebuffed, these words rang in his fevered mind. "They have deserted me. I
have been deserted by my own kind. This is the end . . . Nothing is left."
As he tossed on his bed, his hand brushed the bureau near by, touching a book.
Opening the book, he read. It was a Gideon Bible. Ed never confided any more of
what he saw and felt in that hotel room. It was the year 1938. He hasn't had a
drink since.
Nowadays, when old timers
who know Ed foregather, they exclaim, "What if we had actually succeeded
in throwing Ed out for blasphemy? What would have happened to him and all the
others he later helped?"
So the hand of Providence
early gave us a sign that any alcoholic is a member of our Society when he
says so. *In 1954, the name of the Alcoholic Foundation, Inc., was changed to
the General Service Board of Alcoholics Anonymous, Inc., and the Foundation
office is now the General Service Office.