April 16

April 16 – AM          Page 51-52, We Agnostics, Chapter 4

Even in the present century, American newspapers were afraid to print an account of the Wright brothers’ first successful flight at Kitty Hawk.  Had not all efforts at flight failed before?  Did not Professor Langley’s flying machine go to the bottom of the Potomac River?  Was it not true that the best mathematical minds had proved man could never fly?  Had not people said God had reserved this privilege to the birds?  Only thirty years later the conquest of the air was almost an old story and airplane travel was in full swing.
But in most fields our generation has witnessed complete liberation of our thinking.  Show any longshoreman a Sunday supplement describing a proposal to explore the moon by means of a rocket and he will say, “I bet they do it—maybe not so long either.”  Is not our age characterized by the ease with which we discard old ideas for new, by the complete readiness with which we throw away the theory or gadget which does not work for something new which does?

April 16 – PM          Page xviii-xix, Foreword to Second Edition (1955)

In the spring of 1940, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. gave a dinner for many of his friends to which he invited A.A. members to tell their stories.  News of this got on the world wires; inquiries poured in again and many people went to the bookstores to get the book “Alcoholics Anonymous.”  By March 1941 the membership had shot up to 2,000.  Then Jack Alexander wrote a feature article in the Saturday Evening Post and placed such a compelling picture of A.A. before the general public that alcoholics in need of help really deluged us.  By the close of 1941, A.A. numbered 8,000 members.  The mushrooming process was in full swing.  A.A. had become a national institution.
Our Society then entered a fearsome and exciting adolescent period.  The test that it faced was this:  Could these large numbers of erstwhile erratic alcoholics successfully meet and work together?  Would there be quarrels over membership, leadership and money?  Would there be strivings for power and prestige?  Would there be schisms which would split A.A. apart?  Soon A.A. was beset by these very problems on every side and in every group.  But out of this frightening and at first disrupting experience the conviction grew that A.A.’s had to hang together or die separately.  We had to unify our Fellowship or pass off the scene.