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God and Spirituality A.A. Meetings in Akron and Cleveland 1938-1942 A.A. Meetings in Akron and Cleveland 1938-1942 Glenn F. Chesnut San Francisco & South Bend http://hindsfoot.org The Hindsfoot Foundation is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1993 for the publication of materials on the history and theory of alcoholism treatment and the moral and spiritual dimensions of recovery. Mailing address at: 4141 Deep Creek Rd., Lot 216, Fremont, California 94555. E-mail address at: [email protected] Front cover: home of T. Henry and Clarace Williams. After the first A.A. group was started in Akron in the summer of 1935, all the Akron alcoholics were expected to show up every week at the Wednesday night Oxford Group meeting at T. Henry and Clarace Williams’ home at 676 Palisades Drive in Akron, Ohio. These mandatory Wednesday Oxford Group meetings continued until October 1939, when the Akron members of the “alcoholic squad” withdrew from the Oxford Group and began holding their Wednesday formal meeting (now restricted to alcoholics and their spouses) at Dr. Bob’s house. Copyright © 2017 by Glenn F. Chesnut All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Printed in the United States of America Table of Contents Part I. The Documents 1. The Combination of Four Different Spiritual Traditions 3 2. Akron: February 1938, Oxford Group meeting at T. Henry and Clarace Williams’ home 8 3. Dr. Bob and Clarence Snyder in the Hospital: February 1938 13 4. Cleveland A.A. meetings: May-November 1939 15 5. The 1942 Akron Manual: the end of Oxford Group practices 17 6. Early Akron Member J. D. Holmes: Memories from 1936–1938 24 7. Bill Wilson — Cleveland A.A. and the break with Oxford Group 30 8. The Appendix in the Second Edition of the Big Book: 1941 33 9. Bill Wilson in the NCCA Blue Book 39 10. The 1942 Reading List in the Akron Manual: Part One 51 11. The 1942 Reading List in the Akron Manual: Part Two 68 Part II. Four Different Spiritual Traditions 12. Early American Frontier Revivalism 87 13. The Oxford Group 94 14. A Brief Note on the Protestant Fundamentalist Movement 114 15. CLASSICAL PROTESTANT LIBERALISM PART ONE: The Enlightenment and Schleiermacher 119 16. CLASSICAL PROTESTANT LIBERALISM PART TWO: Bushnell and Harnack 137 17. CLASSICAL PROTESTANT LIBERALISM PART THREE: The Upper Room 153 18. Emmet Fox: Sermon on the Mount and New Thought 163 19. Emmet Fox: His Life 173 20. Emmet Fox: Influence of Hinduism and the Doctrine of Karma 182 Notes 195 v T. Henry and Clarace Williams’ living room. After the first A.A. group was started in Akron in the summer of 1935, all the Akron alcoholics were expected to show up every week at the Wednesday night Oxford Group meeting at T. Henry and Clarace Williams’ home at 676 Palisades Drive in Akron, Ohio. These mandatory Wednesday Oxford Group meetings continued until October 1939, when the Akron members of the “alcoholic squad” withdrew from the Oxford Group and began holding their Wednesday formal meeting (now restricted to alcoholics and their spouses) at Dr. Bob’s house. vi A.A. MEETINGS 1938–1942 1 Part I The Documents 2 GLENN F. CHESNUT In October 1939, the Akron members of the “alcoholic squad” withdrew from the Oxford Group and began holding their Wednesday evening formal meeting at Dr. Bob’s house (where they continued to meet until January 1940, when the meetings became so big they had to start holding them at the King School). Dr. Bob’s living room A.A. MEETINGS 1938–1942 3 CHAPTER 1 The Combination of Four Different Spiritual Traditions In early Akron A.A., members were expected to show up every day, six days a week, at Dr. Bob’s house, (a) in the morning for a short service led by Dr. Bob’s wife Anne, based on a reading from the Southern Methodist meditational booklet called The Upper Room, together with coffee and discussion as to how everyone was getting along, (b) or in the evening, when everyone would sit around in the kitchen or living room, and talk about any problems they had had during the day. (c) Or an A.A. member could drop by Dr. Bob’s office at any time during the day and talk with him one-on-one there. But all the recovering alcoholics were also expected to show up every week at the Wednesday night Oxford Group meeting at T. Henry and Clarace Williams’ home at 676 Palisades Drive in Akron, Ohio: This was an Oxford Group meeting, not an A.A. meeting per se. The hosts of the meeting — T. Henry and Clarace Williams — were not alcoholics themselves, and neither were many of the other 4 GLENN F. CHESNUT people who regularly attended that Wednesday night meeting. Henrietta Seiberling, who was not an alcoholic of course, often played a role in leading the Bible study at the meeting (it was at her house in Akron, as we remember, that Bill W. and Dr. Bob had their first meeting on May 12, 1935). This weekly meeting at T. Henry and Clarace Williams’ home already contained a mixture of elements from four different religious and spiritual traditions: 1. Oxford Group practices This included such things as the use of automatic writing, the Four Absolutes, “checking,” and so on. 2. American frontier revivalism We see them making new alcoholics go through an American frontier revivalist style surrender to God / Jesus on their knees. This is one way of interpreting the Third Step Prayer from page 63 of the Big Book: “God, I offer myself to Thee — to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will ….” Many people who come to A.A. still do this prayer on their knees, and visitors to Dr. Bob’s house in Akron can still frequently be seen kneeling beside the bed in an upstairs bedroom and repeating a prayer of surrender to God, along with a prayer for God’s help. We need to remember that the final working manuscript of the Big Book, as it was typed up in February 1939, gave the Seventh Step as “Humbly, on our knees, asked Him to remove our A.A. MEETINGS 1938–1942 5 shortcomings — holding nothing back.” The frontier revivalist style of surrender ourselves to God was still on their minds. But in the printed version which came out in April 1939 (the first printing of the first edition of the Big Book), the phrase “on our knees” was removed, and the seventh step was changed to read simply “Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.” We see A.A. from 1938 to 1942 progressively becoming less and less influenced by American frontier revivalism. 3. The Upper Room In February 1938, the group gathered at the Williams’ house would read from a Bible devotional at the beginning of the meeting, usually the Southern Methodist meditational booklet called The Upper Room, which taught people to turn to the religion of the heart. The people in Nashville, Tennessee, who edited the little booklet were strongly opposed to inflicting hundreds of doctrines and rules and dogmas on everyone, and were very hostile to the custom practiced in some churches, of continually threatening people with hellfire and eternal damnation to try to get them to come to church and follow their long lists of religious rules. The Upper Room taught a spirituality of the “educational variety” (as the American Methodists called it), that is, a slow steady process (insight by insight) in which I let God (and God’s people) love me until I could learn to love myself and others. Its watchword was: “God is love.” The Southern Methodists regarded the central part of the Bible passage in 1 John 4 (verses 7–8, 10–12, 16b–19, and 20) as one of the most important parts of the Bible, and a perfect expression of their core beliefs: 6 GLENN F. CHESNUT Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us .... Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. 4. Emmet Fox’s Sermon on the Mount Newcomers were instructed to read Emmet Fox, The Sermon on the Mount, a book that came out of what was called the New Thought tradition. Fox’s little pieces on “The Golden Key” and “Staying on the Beam” were also popular reading in A.A.
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