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)

Reprinted from the October 23, 1939, Cleveland Plain Dealer with permission.

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

By ELRICK B. DAVIS

In a previous installment, Mr. Davis outlined the plan of Alcoholics Anonymous, an 

organization of former drinkers who have found a solution to liquor in association 

for mutual aid. This is the second of a series. 

Religion

There is no blinking the fact that Alcoholics Anonymous, the amazing society of ex-drunks who have cured each other of an incurable disease, is religious. Its members 

have cured each other frankly with the help of God. Every cured member of the 

Cleveland Fellowship of the society, like every cured member of the other chapters 

now established in Akron, New York, and elsewhere in the country, is cured with the 

admission that he submitted his plight wholeheartedly to a Power Greater than 

Himself.

He has admitted his conviction that science cannot cure him, that he cannot control 

his pathological craving for alcohol himself, and that he cannot be cured by the 

prayers, threats, or pleas of his family, employers, or friends. His cure is a religious 

experience. He had to have God's aid. He had to submit to a spiritual housecleaning. 

Alcoholics Anonymous is a completely informal society, wholly latitudinarian in 

every respect but one. It prescribes a simple spiritual discipline, which must be 

followed rigidly every day. The discipline is fully explained in a book published by 

the society. 

Discipline

That is what makes the notion of the cure hard for the usual alcoholic to take, at first 

glance, no matter how complete his despair. He wants to join no cult. He has lost 

faith, if he ever had it, in the power of religion to help him. But each of the cures 

accomplished by Alcoholics Anonymous is a spiritual awakening. The ex-drunk has 

adopted what the society calls "a spiritual way of life." 

How, then, does Alcoholics Anonymous differ from the other great religious 

movements which have changed social history in America? Wherein does the 

yielding to God that saves a member of this society from his fatal disease, differ from 

that which brought the Great Awakening that Jonathan Edwards preached, or the 

New Light revival of a century ago, or the flowering of Christian Science, or the 

camp meeting evangelism of the old Kentucky-Ohio frontier, or the Oxford Group 

successes nowadays? 

Every member of Alcoholics Anonymous may define God to suit himself. God to him 

may be the Christian God defined by the Thomism of the Roman Catholic Church. Or 

the stern Father of the Calvinist. Or the Great Manitou of the American Indian. Or the 

Implicit Good assumed in the logical morality of Confucius. Or Allah, or Buddha, or 

the Jehovah of the Jews. Or Christ the Scientist. Or no more than the Kindly Spirit 

implicitly assumed in the "atheism" of a Col. Robert Ingersoll. 

Aid

If the alcoholic who comes to the fellowship for help believes in God, in the specific 

way of any religion or sect, the job of cure is easier. But if all that the pathological 

drunk can do is to say, with honesty, in his heart: "Supreme Something, I am done 

for without more-than-human help," that is enough for Alcoholics Anonymous to 

work on. The noble prayers, the great literatures, and the time-proved disciplines of 

the established religions are a great help. But as far as the Fellowship of Alcoholics 

Anonymous is concerned, a pathological drunk can call God "It" if he wants to, and is 

willing to accept Its aid. If he'll do that, he can be cured.

Poll of "incurable" alcoholics who now, cured, are members of the Cleveland 

Fellowship of the society, shows that this has made literally life-saving religious 

experience possible to men and women who, otherwise, could not have accepted 

spiritual help. Poll shows also that collectively their religious experience has 

covered every variety known to religious psychology. Some have had an experience 

as blindingly bright as that which struck down Saul on the road to Damascus. Some 

are not even yet intellectually convinced except to the degree that they see that 

living their lives on a spiritual basis has cured them of a fatal disease. Drunk for 

years because they couldn't help it, now it never occurs to them to want a drink. 

Whatever accounts for that, they are willing to call "God." Some find more help in 

formal religion than do others. A good many of the Akron chapter find help in the 

practices of the Oxford Group. The Cleveland chapter includes a number of Catholics 

and several Jews, and at least one man to whom "God" is "Nature." Some practice 

family devotions. Some simply cogitate about "It" in the silence of their minds. But 

that the Great Healer cured them with only the help of their fellow ex-drunks, they 

all admit.

....