Throwback Thursday AA history post - The six articles published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in late 1939 led to tremendous growth in Cleveland's AA Group #3, but also got Clarence kicked out:

That fall Clarence smuggled freelance reporter Elrick Davis into meetings of that first Greater Cleveland group and Mr. Davis wrote a series of articles on A.A. which were published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. This resulted in over 500 calls for help to be tended by the only 13 active members...

Many members were upset by this workload and by the surreptitious manner in which it was done. So they voted Clarence out of A.A. (which was something that could be done at the time).  

(aa.cle.org)

Alcoholics Anonymous Makes Its Stand Here       [First of Six Articles]

By ELRICK B. DAVIS

Much has been written about Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization doing major 

work in reclaiming the habitual drinker. This is the first of a series describing the 

work the group is doing in Cleveland.

Success

By now it is a rare Clevelander who does not know, or know of, at least one man or 

woman of high talent whose drinking had become a public scandal, and who 

suddenly has straightened out "overnight," as the saying goes, the liquor habit 

licked. Men who have lost $15,000 a year jobs have them back again. Drunks who 

have taken every "cure" available to the most lavish purse, only to take them over 

again with equally spectacular lack of success, suddenly have become total 

abstainers, apparently without anything to account for their reform. Yet something 

must account for the seeming miracle. Something does.

Alcoholics Anonymous has reached the town.

Fellowship

Every Thursday evening at the home of some ex-drunk in Cleveland, 40 or 50 

former hopeless rummies meet for a social evening during which they buck each 

other up. Nearly every Saturday evening they and their families have a party -- just 

as gay as any other party held that evening despite the fact that there is nothing 

alcoholic to drink. From time to time they have a picnic, where everyone has a 

roaring good time without the aid of even one bottle of beer. Yet these are men and 

women who, until recently, had scarcely been sober a day for years, and members of 

their families who all that time had been emotionally distraught, social and 

economic victims of another's addiction.

These ex-rummies, as they call themselves, suddenly salvaged from the most 

socially noisome of fates, are the members of the Cleveland Fellowship of an 

informal society called "Alcoholics Anonymous." Who they are cannot be told, 

because the name means exactly what it says. But any incurable alcoholic who really 

wants to be cured will find the members of the Cleveland chapter eager to help. 

The society maintains a "blind" address: The Alcoholic Foundation, Box 657, Church 

Street Annex Post office, New York City. Inquiries made there are forwarded to a 

Cleveland banker, who is head of the local Fellowship, or to a former big league ball 

player who is recruiting officer of the Akron fellowship, which meets Wednesday 

evenings in a mansion loaned for the purpose by a non-alcoholic supporter of the 

movement. 

Cured

The basic point about Alcoholics Anonymous is that it is a fellowship of "cured" 

alcoholics. And that both old-line medicine and modern psychiatry had agreed on 

the one point that no alcoholic could be cured. Repeat the astounding fact: These are 

cured. 

They have cured each other. 

They have done it by adopting, with each other's aid, what they call "a spiritual way 

of life." 

"Incurable" alcoholism is not a moral vice. It is a disease. No dipsomaniac drinks 

because he wants to. He drinks because he can't help drinking. 

He will drink when he had rather die than take a drink. That is why so many 

alcoholics die as suicides. He will get drunk on the way home from the hospital or 

sanitarium that has just discharged him as "cured." He will get drunk at the wake of 

a friend who died of drink. He will swear off for a year, and suddenly find himself 

half-seas over, well into another "bust." He will get drunk at the gates of an insane 

asylum where he has just visited an old friend, hopeless victim of "wet brain."

Prayer

These are the alcoholics that "Alcoholics Anonymous" cures. Cure is impossible until 

the victim is convinced that nothing that he or a "cure" hospital can do, can help. He 

must know that his disease is fatal. He must be convinced that he is hopelessly sick 

of body, and of mind, and of soul. He must be eager to accept help from any source --

even God. 

Alcoholics Anonymous has a simple explanation for an alcoholic's physical disease. 

It was provided them by the head of one of New York City's oldest and most famous 

"cure" sanitariums. The alcoholic is allergic to alcohol. One drink sets up a poisonous 

craving that only more of the poison can assuage. That is why after the first drink 

the alcoholic cannot stop. 

They have a psychiatric theory equally simple and convincing. Only an alcoholic can 

understand another alcoholic's mental processes and state. And they have an 

equally simple, if unorthodox, conception of God