Bill W.

For the Actor/Musician see Bill Wurts

William Griffith Wilson (26 November 1895--24 January 1971) (commonly known as Bill Wilson or Bill W.), was a co-founder of the mutual-help group Alcoholics Anonymous. The other co-founder was Dr. Bob Smith. Bill's wife, Lois Wilson became the founder of Al-Anon, a group dedicated to helping the friends and relatives of alcoholics.

Wilson was born on 26 November 1895 in East Dorset, Vermont to Gilman Barrows Wilson and Emily Griffith. After a normal childhood, Wilson turned to heavy drinking during military service in WWI. In the 1920s he was one of the first stock analysts and became quite rich until the market crashed.

One day, an old drinking friend named Ebby Thatcher arranged a visit to the Wilson house. Expecting to spend a day drinking and re-living old times Wilson was instead shocked by Thatcher's refusal to drink. "I've got religion" he reportedly said to Wilson's surprise. Thatcher had recently joined a Christian fellowship known as the Oxford Group. The Oxford Group helped alcoholics to stop drinking by performing various tasks such as making amends, acting as a witness to God's grace, admission of personal defeat, among others.

Wilson was unable to stay sober after hearing Thatcher's message. However, later while in a hospital recuperating from a drinking bout he had a religious vision (later described as a "spiritual experience"). His obsession to drink vanished at once. It is believed that Wilson connected his spontaneous release from alcoholism to the recent visit by Thatcher. This in turn inspired Wilson to seek out and bring the message of his recovery to others as Thatcher had done for him.

Wilson joined the Oxford Movement, with a personal focus on helping alcoholic prospects. He had little success for the first six months of doing so. Then he made a trip to Akron, Ohio for a business deal. The transaction failed and in a state of frustration he was tempted to drink again. Instead he camped in a phone booth at the his hotel and dialed up clergy from a church directory. He had concluded his only hope to avoid drinking was to locate a fellow problem drinker to speak with, so he made these calls looking for one. This led him to a meeting with a local surgeon named Dr. Bob Smith who also had a drinking problem. This would prove to be the start of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the date, June 10th 1935, is regarded as the date of origin for the fellowship.

Wilson realized that the best person to help an alcoholic was another drunk, not clergy members, doctors, or other people in authority, and his subsequent researches on the failure of The Washingtonians (see below), a 19th century group in which pledges to not drink were linked with American patriotism, confirmed him. Later in life, he realized that anti-authoritarianism is a benign cofactor in alcoholism and that for this reason, alcoholics would often have hidden resentments against superego voices including clergymen and doctors, unless those people in authority had their own alcoholism and would share that with the suffering alcoholic.

In 1939, after success in Akron and New York, Wilson decided to write a book that described their ideas of alcoholic recovery. In the fifth chapter, he explained "how it works" and documented the twelve steps on paper. The ideas of the steps were taken from Wilson's wide post-sobriety reading, including the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyala and expansions and alterations on six concepts from the Oxford Group but tailored more specifically to alcoholism, and purged of references to Christianity. After grappling for a proper title for the book, the title "Alcoholics Anonymous" was selected, and the movement took the same name.

There was very little success with the book at first. Then in 1941 the Saturday Evening Post dispatched a reporter, Jack Anderson, to investigate this rumored group of alcoholics talking about a recovery plan. The resulting article proved to be the spark that ignited nationwide growth of the movement.

The "success" of AA cannot be ascertained, as Wilson realized. At first to encourage prominent members of the community to join when they had the problem of alcoholism, Wilson's later notion of "anonymity" was generalized to a refusal by AA to monitor its own success rate. Within AA, individual success is measured in 24-hour periods of sobriety and it is accepted that even the long-term sober are at risk for a return to drinking, and no concept of a "cure" exists.

In fact, Wilson's method exists outside the topos of illness and disease which, in the work of the French historian and philosopher Foucault, has its own history. At its most profound, it echoes the analysis, by Derrida, of the Greek word *pharmakon* as this word is used in Plato.

The Platonic "pharmakon" can mean poison or cure, and Wilson realized that at no time could he forget the notion that he remained an alcoholic, which was to hold onto one "poisonous" idea (in a society where the confession of alcoholism wasn't the fashion statement it is today, owing to Wilson's own efforts, and was instead thought to be a self-damaging confession of personal failure and an excuse to drink more) in order to get a daily cure, or remission.

For this reason, a success metric for AA would indicate no success at all if "cure" is theorized as the goal. This should be contrasted with the strong, if undocumented in principle according to AA Traditions, probability that AA can measure success, in terms of the sobriety day, in McDonald's terms and at McDonald's scale: for there is a possibility that through AA, "billions and billions" of alcoholics have been "served", through their own efforts, a day of sobriety world-wide.

Bill Wilson (who as a young man, as a stock jobber, and in later life) was an anti-authoritarian in personal outlook who suspected that the hunger for worldly success and power was linked with common alcoholism, and some of his mottoes ("easy does it") deal with the unstilled rage for power and control, on the part of many alcoholics after their first sobriety date, which can if undealt with get a new lease on life from the sober alcoholic's increased energy levels. This is why his success is unmeasurable and unmeasured in the way that the positive and negative success of his contemporary thought leaders, from Mohandas Ghandi to Adolf Hitler, can be measured by sociologists, whether in converts, in followers, in adepts or in body counts.

Politically, Wilson was a Republican and in today's terms a conservative American. However, were he to be living today (a logical impossibility given the deep ways in which his thinking about alcoholism have become part of our culture) he'd be a libertarian or even a "liberal" Republican because in his own day, he seems to have felt that most public figures propagated a system of power and control which didn't meet human needs. By the time Communism became the Red Menace, in the early 1950s, Wilson had become personally convinced that as an AA figurehead in spite of himself, he (unlike the ordinary member) should remain silent on the issues of the day and there are no recorded opinions of Wilson on politics after the 1920s.

Orthogonal to league tables of the (good or evil) Man of the Year, Wilson remains an enigma to quantizing and anti-theoretic sociology and a fruitful source of myth and sheer rumour, and for this reason, rumours still swirl about him. Many of them are sourced in recovery movements that attempt to replace the AA paradigm with alternatives such as Alcoholics Victorious (a Christian fellowship that has attracted followers in the USA) and Rational Recovery (a formal program for returning alcoholics to the ranks of "normal" drinkers).

Note that Wilson's, and AA's, refusal to be a source of metrics about practising and sober drunks infects the ability of either Alcoholics Victorious or Rational Recovery to measure their own success for the simple reason that entry into, and success at, AA "membership" (which has no measurable criteria) could only be measured by AA...and, under Wilson's tutelage, this AA won't do. The annoyance at AA expressed by leaders of Rational Recovery point up AA's refusal to play an institutional game, and may be the source of discreditable rumours about Wilson.

In the 1940s, Wilson learned about a long forgotten fellowship of reformed drunks that came into being in the 1800s. That fellowship was called The Washingtonians. The fact that a similar movement to A.A. had once existed, and faded into obscurity, had worrisome implications for the future of A.A. It is theorized that the Washingtonians fell apart because they lost focus by branching out beyond their initial scope of alcoholic recovery into various issues of the day. Fearful of a similar fate, among other reasons, Wilson began promoting the idea that a basic set of guidelines be established defining what A.A. was and was not. This resulted in the "Twelve Traditions" that complement the twelve steps. These traditions spell out A.A. as an organization that does not issue public opinions, support or oppose causes, impose membership requirements beyond a desire for sobriety, admonishes members to remain anonymous at the public level and so on.

While Wilson recommended that AA members seek a God "as they understand God", Wilson realized that even for Christian alcoholics, or for that matter, alcoholics of other faiths, specific doctrine and specific belief could not form part of the AA message. This was the "realist" conviction that if God exists, God does so independent of doctrines which unlike God are texts "about" God, and a feature of some early religions such as Buddhism is that they invite believers to retain prior convictions, or to return to them, while accepting a new message which can be integrated with the previous beliefs.

Wilson refused numerous honors during his life, including an honorary degree from Yale University, and refused to allow himself to be on the covers of magazines. Before the twelve traditions were in place, Wilson was not shy about personal publicity. He later became an anonymous member and would later state that the principle of "public anonymity" was the greatest "spiritual principle" advanced by A.A.

Wilson suffered long bouts of depression before and after sobriety and engaged in psychiatric therapy. At Trabuco College in California, he became friends with Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, the founder of the College. In the 1950s, Wilson and Heard experimented with LSD, a potent psychedelic theorized to have the potential to help alcoholics and drug addicts stop their cycles of abuse. These claims have not been substantiated, and, due to the fact that LSD was scheduled by the DEA on October 27, 1970, as a Schedule I drug, they have not been investigated further.

A lifelong smoker in an era where the health hazards of cigarettes were not fully known, Wilson died of emphysema and pneumonia on 24 January 1971 in Miami, Florida. Susan Cheever's biography of Wilson claims that he repeatedly begged his caregivers for alcohol in the last days of his life, but note that in AA practice, to do so doesn't constitute a "slip", which is strictly interpreted as the physical taking of alcohol.

The phrase "Friends of Bill W." is sometimes a code for Alcoholics Anonymous.

Bill Wilson's story and his eventual founding of AA was dramatized in the 1989 TV movie My Name is Bill W., starring James Woods and James Garner.

Time magazine named Wilson to their "Time 100" list of "The Most Important People of the 20th Century", to read use this link: http://www.time.com/time/time100/heroes/profile/wilson01.html.

Like his contemporary Mohandas Ghandi-ji, Wilson seems to have been a work in progress with flaws. But like Ghandi, he incorporated those flaws in his message with an humility that isn't found in many self-appointed healers, God-wallopers, or quacks. Unlike Ghandi-ji, Wilson's problem was of unique difficulty since it was self-reflexive; Ghandi-ji's problem was the colonialist exploitation of India by Britain, but Wilson's was his propensity to drink. Wilson's efforts to apply thoughts to a wound that could themselves be iatrogenically infected by what alcoholics and Bill W call "stinking thinking" are in fact a shining example of a physician who could not cure himself, but could heal himself "one day at a time".

Literature

Bill W. (2004). The A.A. Service Manual combined with Twelve Concepts for World Service (2004-2005 Edition ed.). New York: Alcoholics Anonymous. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help)
Susan Cheever. My Name is Bill, Bill Wilson: His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous. New York: Simon & Schuster/ Washington Square Press. Template:Auto isbn (paperback). {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
Bill W. Alcoholics Anonymous. The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism (4th ed. new and rev. 2001 ed.). New York: Alcoholics Anonymous. ISBN 1-893007-16-2, Dewey 362.29 A347 2001. ('Big Book')
Bill W. Alcoholics Anonymous Comes Of Age. New York: Alcoholics Anonymous. ISBN 0-916856-02-X, LC HV5278.A78A4, Dewey: 178.1 A1c. {{cite book}}: Text "1990" ignored (help)
Bill W. (1967). As Bill Sees It. New York: Alcoholics Anonymous. ISBN 0-916856-03-8, Dewey 616.861 ASB.
Bill W. (2000). My First 40 Years. An Autobiography by the Cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Center City, Minnesota: Hazelden, 55012-0176. ISBN 1-56838-373-8, Dewey B W11w 2000.
Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. New York: Alcoholics Anonymous. 1980. ISBN 0-916856-07-0, LCCN 80-65962, LC HV5278.D62 1980.
Hartigan, Francis (2000). Bill W. A Biography of Alcoholics Anonymous Cofounder Bill Wilson. New York: Thomas Dunne Books. ISBN 0-312-20056-0, Dewey B W11h 2000.
Kurtz, Ernest (1979). Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous. Center City, Minnesota: Hazelden. ISBN 0-89486-065-8 or ISBN 0-89486-065-8 (pbk.), LC HV5278, LCCN 79-88264, Dewey 362.2/9286 or 362.29286 K87 1979.
Pass It On: The story of Bill Wilson and how the A.A. message reached the world. New York: Alcoholics Anonymous. 1984. ISBN 0-916856-12-7, LC HV5032 .W19P37x 1984, LCCN 84-072766, Dewey 362.29/286/O92.
Thomsen, Robert (1975). Bill W. New York: Harper & Rowe. ISBN 0-06-014267-7, Dewey 362.29 W112t.
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. New York: Alcoholics Anonymous. 1953. ISBN 0-916856-01-1.

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Literature