Alcoholics Anonymous Founded: A New Path to Recovery

Dr. Robert Smith took his last drink on June 10, 1935, and that date became the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. Smith, a proctologist in Akron, Ohio, had been destroying his medical practice and his marriage with whiskey for over a decade. Six weeks earlier, a New York stockbroker named Bill Wilson had shown up at his door, introduced by a mutual friend, with a proposition that sounded absurd: one drunk could help another drunk get sober by sharing his own story of failure and recovery. Wilson had gotten sober five months earlier through a combination of a spiritual experience during detox at Towns Hospital in New York and the influence of the Oxford Group, a Christian fellowship that emphasized personal transformation through confession, restitution, and service to others. Wilson had been trying to sober up other alcoholics ever since, with no success. He traveled to Akron on a business trip that collapsed, found himself alone in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel fighting the urge to walk into the bar, and instead called local churches asking to be connected to another alcoholic. The meeting between Wilson and Smith lasted six hours. Wilson did not lecture. He told his own story: the drinking, the failures, the humiliations, the moment of clarity. Smith recognized himself in every detail. The two men began meeting daily, and within weeks, Smith’s drinking stopped. They visited alcoholics at Akron City Hospital, repeating the process. The method was radically simple: one alcoholic talks honestly to another. No professional credentials, no fees, no hierarchy. Wilson and Smith codified the approach in 1939 with the publication of the book Alcoholics Anonymous, which outlined the twelve steps of recovery and gave the organization its name. The book sold slowly at first, but a favorable article in the Saturday Evening Post in 1941 produced a flood of letters. By the time Smith died in 1950, AA had 100,000 members. Current membership exceeds two million people in 180 countries. The organization’s foundational insight, that peer support among people who share the same affliction is more effective than clinical treatment alone, has been adapted by over 200 other twelve-step programs addressing everything from narcotics addiction to compulsive gambling.