What does "We are people who normally would not mix" say?

The paragraph it sits in

Chapter 2 opens by saying the members know "thousands of men and women who were once just as hopeless as Bill" (p. 17), and that nearly all have recovered. Then it describes them (p. 17):

1. "We are average Americans." (p. 17) Every part of the country and many of its occupations are represented, along with many political, economic, social and religious backgrounds (p. 17).
2. "We are people who normally would not mix." (p. 17)
3. "But there exists among us a fellowship, a friendliness, and an understanding which is indescribably wonderful." (p. 17)
4. They compare themselves to passengers on a great liner just after rescue from shipwreck, when "camaraderie, joyousness and democracy pervade the vessel from steerage to Captain's table." (p. 17) Unlike the passengers, their joy "does not subside as we go our individual ways." (p. 17)

So the line isn't a complaint or a warning about differences. It's the first half of a contrast: people who would not normally mix, and yet a fellowship among them.

What the book says holds them together

This is the part usually left off when the line is quoted. The shipwreck image is about a shared danger, and the book says that shared danger is real but not enough: the feeling of having shared "a common peril" is one element in what binds them, "But that in itself would never have held us together as we are now joined." (p. 17)

The next paragraph names what does: "The tremendous fact for every one of us is that we have discovered a common solution." (p. 17) They have "a way out on which we can absolutely agree, and upon which we can join in brotherly and harmonious action." (p. 17) And "This is the great news this book carries to those who suffer from alcoholism." (p. 17)

The same chapter goes straight on to what that solution makes possible between strangers: an ex-problem drinker who has found it "can generally win the entire confidence of another alcoholic in a few hours." (p. 18) A little later it names the attitudes that let unlike people work together: "real tolerance of other people's shortcomings and viewpoints and a respect for their opinions are attitudes which make us more useful to others." (pp. 19–20)

The same picture at the end of the book

Chapter 11 comes back to the shipwreck. Describing the early members' life together, it says "Social distinctions, petty rivalries and jealousies—these are laughed out of countenance." (p. 161) The reason it gives: "Being wrecked in the same vessel, being restored and united under one God, with hearts and minds attuned to the welfare of others" (p. 161), the things that matter so much to some people no longer signify much to them (p. 161).

How later forewords read the line (dated)

• 1955. The Foreword to the Second Edition doesn't quote the line, but it makes a similar claim: "Alcohol being no respecter of persons, we are an accurate cross section of America" (p. xx). It lists members' religious affiliations and says more than 15% are women (p. xx).
• 2001. The Foreword to the Fourth Edition quotes the line by page number and says that in 1939 it "referred to a Fellowship composed largely of men (and a few women) with quite similar social, ethnic, and economic backgrounds." (p. xxiii) It says the words proved more visionary than the founders could have imagined, and that the fourth edition's stories represent a membership widened in "age, gender, race, and culture" (p. xxiii).

There's a difference between the two descriptions. The 1939 text itself speaks of "many political, economic, social, and religious backgrounds" (p. 17); the 2001 Foreword calls the 1939 members "quite similar" in "social, ethnic, and economic backgrounds" (p. xxiii). The two lists aren't the same, and the books don't reconcile them. A reader can note both: the 1939 writers saw themselves as a mixed lot, and A.A. looking back in 2001 saw them as much less mixed than the membership later became.

What a later biography adds (dated)

Pass It On (1984), the A.A.-published biography of Bill W., quotes the passage while describing the first men Bill worked with in New York, Hank P. and Fitz M. It says Bill and Dr. Bob "were able to form close friendships with all sorts of people; the common bond was alcoholism and their own deep gratitude for their sobriety." (Pass It On, 1984) It also guesses at the source of the image: in reaching for the liner metaphor, Bill "was probably recalling his World War I experience aboard the Lancashire." (Pass It On, 1984) That is the biographers' "probably," not something Bill wrote.

See: Was the Big Book written only for men? Is A.A. for women? · How did A.A. grow from two people?

Read it yourself

• Chapter 2, "There Is a Solution" (pp. 17–29; the line on p. 17): https://www.aa.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/en_bigbook_chapt2.pdf
• Chapter 11, "A Vision for You" (p. 161): https://www.aa.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/en_bigbook_chapt11.pdf
• Foreword to the Second Edition (p. xx): https://www.aa.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/en_bigbook_forewordsecondedition.pdf
• Foreword to the Fourth Edition (p. xxiii): https://www.aa.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/en_bigbook_forewordfourthedition.pdf
• The full books are sold by A.A. World Services: https://onlineliterature.aa.org

Sources

Recovery Starts is independent and not affiliated with Alcoholics Anonymous. Quotations are brief and cited; the Big Book is © A.A. World Services, 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.