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How did A.A. grow from two people?

In short:

  • By going out and finding more alcoholics. After Bill W. and Dr. Bob met in Akron in 1935, the two of them phoned a hospital and asked for a prospect (p. 156). That man became the third member, and the three went looking for a fourth (p. 158).
  • Each person who recovered did the same for the next. The Big Book, written in 1939, describes about a hundred people reached this way (p. xiii).
  • Dr. Bob, speaking in 1948, gave the same account: "We immediately started to look around for prospects."
  • There was no advertising and no program to join. The fellowship was what grew up around people rescuing drunks.

The Big Book's account (1939)

Chapter 11, "A Vision for You," tells the story without names; footnotes added in later editions identify the people.

  • One man, alone and shaky. In 1935 a man sober "but a few months" (p. 154) was stranded in a strange city after a business failure. Tempted by a hotel bar, he thought of "those other alcoholics" (p. 154) and phoned a clergyman to find one (pp. 154–155). That led him to Dr. Bob (p. 155 footnote).
  • The second. Dr. Bob had one more binge, then set out to face the people he feared and has not had a drink since (pp. 155–156).
  • The third, found on purpose. "Both saw that they must keep spiritually active" (p. 156). They called a hospital's head nurse and asked for "a first class alcoholic prospect" (p. 156): a lawyer who had been in eight times in six months and was strapped to his bed. By the third day he had given his life to God's care; he walked out a free man in June 1935 and never drank again (p. 158).
  • The fourth. "So, you see, there were three alcoholics in that town, who now felt they had to give to others what they had found, or be sunk" (p. 158). "After several failures to find others, a fourth turned up" (p. 158).
  • Then more. "A year and six months later these three had succeeded with seven more" (p. 159). They began to meet one night a week, so new people had a time and place to bring their problems (pp. 159–160). By 1939 the Akron meeting drew "sixty or eighty as a rule" (p. 161), with something similar happening in an eastern city and in "Little clusters of twos and threes and fives" elsewhere (p. 162).

The book expected this to go on the same way: readers "will approach still other sick ones" (p. 153), and one member alone in a new city, working with a doctor and a hospital, would soon have "friends galore" (p. 163). The 1939 Foreword counts "more than one hundred men and women who have recovered" (p. xiii).

Dr. Bob's account (a talk given in 1948)

Dr. Bob's last major talk, given in Detroit in December 1948, was printed in the Grapevine in 1973 and is now in the pamphlet The Co-Founders of Alcoholics Anonymous (P-53, pp. 9–20).

He says that before Akron, Bill "had not created a single convert, not one" (P-53). He himself had done everything the Oxford Group asked and still got drunk every night. What they hadn't told him was the thing Bill did that Sunday, "attempt to be helpful to somebody else" (P-53). After his last drink on June 10, 1935: "We immediately started to look around for prospects" (P-53). The first was Bill D., then "three prospects dumped in our laps almost simultaneously" (P-53). Dr. Bob talked with men in hospital beds for hours at a time. Later, "As we grew, we began to get offshoots, one in Cleveland" (P-53).

Later accounts (dated, read with care)

  • Foreword to the Second Edition (1955). After meeting Dr. Bob, the two men "set to work almost frantically upon alcoholics arriving in the ward of the Akron City Hospital" (p. xvii). When Bill went back to New York in the fall of 1935, a second group "promptly took shape" there, and a third started in Cleveland in 1937 (p. xvii); membership was about 100 when the book came out in the spring of 1939 (p. xvii). Then magazine articles brought floods of letters, and by the end of 1941 there were about 8,000 members (p. xviii).
  • A.A. Comes of Age (1957). Bill recalls the New York side: meetings in his Brooklyn parlor and trips to the Calvary Mission and Towns Hospital "in the feverish search for more prospects" (Comes of Age, 1957). In November 1937 he and Dr. Bob counted results in Dr. Bob's living room and figured "upwards of forty alcoholics were staying bone dry" (Comes of Age, 1957). What struck them was a chain: "one alcoholic carrying the good news to the next" (Comes of Age, 1957).

What it shows

In the earliest sources the fellowship isn't the starting point. The rescue is. Two men had to find a third, or there would never have been more than two, and every member after that was found the same way: a drunk in a hospital or a home, reached by someone who had recovered. The meetings came afterwards, as a place for the people being found. That is the work Chapter 7 describes (pp. 89–103).

Read it yourself

Sources

Source Pages Date
Alcoholics Anonymous, Chapter 11, "A Vision for You" 153–164 1939 (footnotes added in later editions)
Alcoholics Anonymous, Foreword to the First Edition xiii 1939
Dr. Bob's last major talk, in P-53 The Co-Founders of Alcoholics Anonymous P-53 pp. 9–20 talk given December 1948; first printed in the Grapevine, June 1973; pamphlet © 2017
Alcoholics Anonymous, Foreword to the Second Edition xv–xviii 1955
A.A. Comes of Age, "Recovery: The First Legacy" our copy is a scan without reliable printed page numbers 1957 (Bill W.'s account of events in 1935–37)

Big Book page numbers are from the fourth edition (2001).

Recovery Starts is independent and not affiliated with Alcoholics Anonymous. Quotations are brief and cited. The Big Book, P-53 and A.A. Comes of Age are © A.A. World Services, Inc.; Dr. Bob's talk in P-53 is © AA Grapevine, Inc.

These pages answer questions about A.A. from A.A.'s own published literature, read in full, with every quote checked word for word against the page it cites. Recovery Starts is independent and not affiliated with Alcoholics Anonymous. What we read, and when each source was written.