In the founding story of Alcoholics Anonymous, the first link in the chain is not a drunk in Brooklyn or a surgeon in Akron. It is a wealthy American in Zurich, being told by Carl Jung that medicine had nothing more to offer him.
Jung founded nothing, yet AA's own account of its origins begins in his consulting room, and in 1961 Bill Wilson and the Swiss psychiatrist exchanged letters about the patient who set everything in motion. The story holds up better than most founding legends. Its dates, including the ones Wilson himself gave, do not.
A verdict in Zurich
Rowland Hazard III was born in 1881 into one of Rhode Island's oldest families, graduated from Yale in 1903 and made his career in chemicals, banking and manufacturing. He also drank heavily, and at some point traveled to Zurich to put himself in Jung's care.
What Jung told him is preserved, without Hazard's name, in the book Alcoholics Anonymous. In that telling, Jung judged Hazard a chronic alcoholic, hopeless and beyond the medicine of the day. The only chance Jung could hold out was a "vital spiritual experience," a life-changing inner event. Church membership, which Hazard had, was not the same thing.
Jung later confirmed the substance. In the 1961 correspondence he acknowledged knowing "Rowland H.," and a 1954 talk, printed in volume 18 of his Collected Works, mentions an unnamed alcoholic Oxford Group member he had treated.
The evangelists in Vermont
Shaken, Hazard turned to the Oxford Group, one of the most visible Christian evangelical movements of the 1920s and 1930s. Its members pursued Four Absolutes, honesty, purity, unselfishness and love, presented as a summary of the Sermon on the Mount, and spread their message person to person. AA's official history describes it more gently as a mostly nonalcoholic fellowship that "emphasized universal spiritual values in daily living," led in the United States by the Episcopal clergyman Samuel Shoemaker.
In 1934 Hazard and two fellow members, Shep Cornell and Cebra Graves, were summering in Glastenbury, Vermont, when they heard that Ebby Thacher was about to be committed to the Brattleboro Retreat, once called the Vermont Asylum for the Insane, because of his drinking. Graves's father was the magistrate in the case. The three men arranged for Thacher to be released into their care, and he got sober.
Thacher had an old drinking companion. Bill Wilson, a New York stockbroker who had grown up in Vermont near those same summer houses, was by late 1934 close to collapse and living on his wife's income in Brooklyn. Thacher visited, carried the Oxford Group message, and urged Wilson to settle on his own conception of God.
A light at Towns Hospital
Wilson had already been a patient several times at Towns Hospital in New York under Dr. William D. Silkworth, who taught him that alcoholism was a malady of mind, emotions and body. According to his authorized biographer, Francis Hartigan, Wilson went in for a fourth attempt to dry out and spent a harrowing night in withdrawal. He demanded that God show Himself. The room filled with light, and he pictured himself on a mountaintop with a wind passing straight through him. He never drank again.
The date is less certain than the story. A summary of Hartigan's biography places that night on November 11, 1934, while other AA histories date his release from that final stay to December 18, 1934. Accounts of the stay also record that he was given a cure containing belladonna, a plant that can cause hallucinations. That does not settle what he experienced, but it belongs in the record.
From the Oxford Group to a book
Wilson joined the Oxford Group and set out to sober up other drunks. None of them stayed sober, but he did. In 1935, in Akron, Ohio, he met Dr. Bob S., a surgeon whose own Oxford Group membership had not stopped his drinking. Wilson brought Silkworth's disease concept along with his own experience, and Dr. Bob soon quit for good. AA counts that meeting as its beginning.
Growth was slow: groups followed in New York in the fall of 1935 and in Cleveland in 1939, and four years produced about 100 sober members. Early in 1939 the fellowship published Alcoholics Anonymous, written by Wilson, setting out the Twelve Steps with the stories of thirty recovered members. By then the alcoholics had broken away from the Oxford Group, which renamed itself Moral Re-Armament in 1938.
How far AA traveled from its source is still argued. A 2012 Los Angeles Times film review credited Wilson with moving past both the era's limited medicine and its temperance moralism while borrowing Oxford Group tenets. A 2013 thesis by Andrew Feldheim observes that few people know of that evangelical origin and questions the assumption that AA is the more secular of the two. A 2014 Cornell Law Review note by Ari Diaconis goes further, arguing that AA's roots and program make it a religion under virtually any First Amendment definition, and that some courts have already treated it as one.
The dates Wilson got wrong
The Zurich chapter needs its own correction. In a 1954 recollection Wilson said Hazard went to Jung "probably in the year 1930" and stayed a whole year. His 1961 letter to Jung repeated the claim: about 1931, perhaps a year. That became the accepted timeline.
It does not hold. Richard Dubiel, working in Hazard family records at the Rhode Island Historical Society, argued in 2004 that any 1931 visit could only have fallen between June and September, perhaps lasting just weeks. Amy Colwell Bluhm and Cora Finch, working separately with Hazard papers at Yale's Beinecke Library, found that Hazard was in Jung's care for some months beginning in 1926. Wilson was probably repeating Cebra Graves's faulty memory.
Dubiel also found that Hazard was likely treated in the early 1930s by Courtenay Baylor, a lay therapist of the Emmanuel Movement, which the Episcopal clergyman Elwood Worcester had started in Boston in 1906 to treat conditions such as alcoholism through spiritual principles. Family letters hint at a relapse during a trip to Africa in 1927 to 1928, and Dubiel documents a binge in 1936. That year he joined the Episcopal Church. He died in 1945.
Trying to bottle a conversion
Jung's prescription left a practical problem: a spiritual experience cannot be scheduled. Two decades after AA began, Wilson came to believe LSD might help cynical alcoholics reach the awakening the program asked of them. On August 29, 1956, he took the drug in a supervised experiment at the Veterans Administration hospital in Los Angeles, with the psychiatrist Sidney Cohen, the psychologist Betty Eisner and his wife, Lois, present. Eisner later wrote that alcoholics reach a stage where they need a spiritual experience, "but not all of them are able to have one."
Wilson wrote to Gerald Heard that September of "a residue of assurance and a feeling of enhanced beauty." The fellowship was unconvinced. AA's own 1984 account of his life, Pass It On, records that "Most AAs were violently opposed to his experimenting with a mind-altering substance."
Wilson died of pneumonia in Miami Beach on January 24, 1971. The fellowship that grew from a psychiatrist's verdict of hopelessness now has a presence in about 180 countries. The man who heard that verdict in Zurich never joined it.