The Disappointed Friend

The first proof that A.A. would never become a temperance movement came from a man who was disappointed to discover it. Bill W. wrote (A.A. Comes of Age): "Sometime in 1940 a temperance worker at Toronto showed the A.A. book to an alcoholic who had resisted all other attempts at rescue." That worker was George Little, a minister as well as a temperance man, and by every reasonable expectation A.A. should have been his natural ally. It was full of people with first-hand evidence of what drink does to a life. He had personally put the book in the first Toronto member's hands. Instead he watched his strange new flock take no interest at all in getting everybody dry; they insisted they were concerned only with local drinkers who actually wanted A.A. Bill W. recorded the outcome plainly: "Here it was definitely proved for the first time that A.A. could never become a dry crusade, a fact which has since puzzled many a worker in the dry cause." Puzzled is a generous word. A friend who had done A.A. a genuine kindness found that the kindness bought him no say — and A.A.'s answer to him in 1940 is the same answer it gives everyone now.