Concise Revealing Bill Wilson Biography
William Griffith Wilson (26 November 1895–24 January 1971) (also known as Bill Wilson or Bill W.), was the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), a fellowship of self-help groups dedicated to helping alcoholics recover from their disease. According to the AA Eleventh Tradition of anonymity, Wilson was and still is commonly known as “Bill W.”
Wilson achieved sobriety in 1935 and maintained it throughout his remaining 35 years. Despite the success and notoriety afforded him by the accomplishments and growth of AA under his leadership, he continued to suffer from compulsive behavior and episodes of depression. In 1955 Wilson turned over control of AA to a board of trustees, though he succeeded in modifying its role in the years before his death, shifting control to trustees who were recovering alcoholics from a board that was initially primarily comprised of non-alcoholics. In keeping with his primary interest in spiritualism (the foundation of AA principles), he and other early leaders of a the movement also considered and experimented with alternate possible cures for Alcoholism. These therapies included niacin (vitamin B3) and LSD as a means of inducing spiritual change. Wilson died of emphysema complicated by pneumonia in 1971. His wife, Lois Wilson, was the founder of Al-Anon, a group dedicated to helping the friends and relatives of alcoholics. In 1999 Time Magazine declared Bill Wilson to be one of the top twenty people among the Time 100: Heroes and Icons who exemplified “courage, selflessness, exuberance, superhuman ability and amazing grace” in the 20th century.
Childhood
Bill Wilson was born on November 26, 1895 in East Dorset, Vermont. When he was 10, his father left on a business trip that turned out to be a permanent absence, and his mother announced that she would be leaving the family to study osteopathy. Abandoned by their parents, Wilson and his sister were left in the care of their maternal grandparents. Wilson showed some talent and determination in his teen years. He designed and carved a working boomerang after dozens of failed efforts. He taught himself to play the violin by dogged persistence, pasting to the neck of the instrument a diagram of the notes. At school, after initial difficulties, he found success in sports. But he experienced a serious depression at the age of seventeen when his first love, Bertha Bamford, died from complications during surgery.
Marriage, work, and addiction
Wilson met his future wife Lois Burnham, who was four years older than he, during the summer of 1913 while sailing on Vermont’s Emerald Lake; two years later the couple became engaged. Wilson was called into the army in 1917. During military training in Massachusetts, the young officers were often invited to dinner by the locals, and Wilson had his first drink, a glass of beer, to little effect. A few weeks later at another dinner party, Wilson drank some Bronx cocktails, and felt at ease with the guests and liberated from his awkward shyness; “I had found the elixir of life,” he wrote. “Even that first evening I got thoroughly drunk, and within the next time or two I passed out completely. But as everyone drank hard, not too much was made of that.
Bill and Lois were married on January 24, 1918, just before he left to join the war in Europe as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Coast Artillery. After an uneventful military service but much exposure to wine and beer, Wilson returned to live with his wife in New York, his dependence on alcohol now fully established. He failed to graduate from law school because he was too drunk to pick up his diploma.[7] Wilson became a stock speculator and had success traveling the country with his wife, evaluating companies for potential investors. (During these trips Lois had a hidden agenda: she hoped the travel would keep Wilson from drinking. However, Wilson’s constant drinking made business impossible and ruined his reputation.
As Wilson’s drinking grew more serious, starting in 1933 he had to be committed to the Towns psychiatric hospital three times under the care of Dr. William D. Silkworth. Silkworth’s theory was that alcoholism took the form of an allergy (the inability to stop drinking once started) and an obsession (to take the first drink). Wilson gained hope from Silkworth’s assertion alcoholism was a medical condition rather than a moral failing, but even that knowledge could not help him. He was eventually told that he would either die from his alcoholism or have to be locked up permanently due to alcoholic insanity.
A spiritual program for recovery
In November 1934, Wilson was visited by an old drinking companion named Ebby Thacher. Wilson was astounded to find that Thatcher had been sober for several weeks under the guidance of the evangelical Christian Oxford Group[. Wilson took some interest in the Group, but shortly after Ebby’s visit, he was again admitted to Towns Hospital to recover from a bout of drinking. According to Wilson, while lying in bed depressed and despairing, he cried out, “I’ll do anything! Anything at all! If there be a God, let Him show Himself!”. He then had the sensation of a bright light, a feeling of ecstasy, and a new serenity. He never drank again for the remainder of his life. Wilson described his experience to Dr. Silkworth, who told him not to discount it.
Wilson joined the Oxford Group and tried help other alcoholics, but had no success. During a failed business trip to Akron, Ohio Wilson was tempted to drink again and decided that to remain sober he needed to help another alcoholic. He called phone numbers on a church directory and eventually secured an introduction to Dr. Bob Smith, an alcoholic Oxford Group member. Wilson guided Smith through through his spiritual procedure, and Smith too gained sobriety. Wilson and Smith began taking their method to other alcoholics. Wilson soon returned to New York where he founded an Oxford Group for alcoholics there.
In 1938, after about 100 alcoholics in Akron and New York had become sober, the fellowship decided to promote their program of recovery through the publication of a book, for which Wilson was chosen as primary author. The book was given the title Alcoholics Anonymous and included the list of suggested activities for spiritual growth known as the Twelve Steps. The movement itself took on the name of the book. Later Wilson also wrote the Twelve Traditions, the guidelines for AA groups. The AA general service conference of 1955 was a landmark event for Wilson in which he turned over the leadership of the maturing organisation to an elected board.
The final years
During the last years of his life, Wilson ceased attending AA meetings on the grounds that he would always be asked to speak as the co-founder rather than as an alcoholic. Wilson’s life was continuously slowed by smoking which brought on emphysema and later pneumonia. He continued to smoke while dependent on an oxygen tank in the late 1960s. Though he had nothing to drink for the last 35 years he continued to crave alcohol and on his death bed demanded whisky, which his attendants refused him. During the last days of his life, Wilson was visited by colleagues and friends who wanted to say goodbye. Wilson died of emphysema and pneumonia on 24 January 1971 en route to treatment in Miami, Florida.
Marital difficulties
Wilson was serially unfaithful to his wife Lois. Wilson ‘s affairs with women caused controversy and concern within AA and it was common knowledge in New York AA circles. His interest in younger women increased with his age, and caused Barry Leach and other friends of Wilson to form a “Founders Watch”. People were assigned to keep an eye on Wilson during the socializing that followed AA functions and to separate and steer away those young women who caught Wilson’s interest. Wilson, like many in his generation, could be sexist, but he was also “capable of treating the women who worked with him with dignity and respect”. In the mid 1950s he began an affair with Helen Wyn, a woman 22 years his junior, “in duration, intensity and scope” this was different from his other affairs. Wilson at one point discussed divorcing Lois to marry Helen. Wilson with determined perseverance was able to overcome the AA trustees objections, and renegotiated his royalty agreements with them in 1963, which allowed him to include Helen Wynn in his estate. He left 10% of his book royalties to Helen and the other 90% to his wife Lois. In 1968 with Wilson’s illness making it harder for them to spend time together, Helen bought a house in Ireland.
Alternative cures and spiritualism
In the 1950s Wilson experimented with LSD in medically supervised experiments with Gerard Heard and Aldous Huxley. With Wilson’s invitation his wife Lois, Father Dowling, and Nell Wing also participated in experimentation of this drug. Later Wilson wrote to Carl Jung, praising the results and recommending it as validation of Jung’s spiritual experience. (The letter was not in fact sent as Jung had died.)
At a parapsychology meeting in the 1960s, Wilson met Abram Hoffer and learned about the potential mood-stabilizing effects of niacin. Wilson was impressed with experiments indicating that alcoholics who were given niacin had a better sobriety rate, and he began to see niacin “as completing the third leg in the stool, the physical to complement the spiritual and emotional.” Wilson also believed that niacin had given him relief from depression, and he promoted the vitamin within the AA community and with the National Institute of Mental Health as a treatment for schizophrenia. However, Wilson created a major furor in AA because he used the AA office and letterhead in his promotion.
For Wilson, spiritualism (communicating with the spirits of the dead) was a life-long interest. One of his letters to his spiritual adviser Father Ed Dowling suggests that while Wilson was working on his book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions he felt that spirits were helping him, in particular a 15th century monk named Boniface. Wilson believed that the living could communicate with the dead and kept a “Spook Room” in his basement, where he along and others would conduct seances with a Ouijiboard, as well as experiment with automatic writing. Despite his conviction that he had evidence for the reality of the spiritual world, Wilson chose not to share this with AA.
Wilson’s legacy
Wilson bought a house that he and Lois called Stepping Stones on an 8-acre estate in Bedford Hills, New York in 1941, and he lived there with Lois until he died. After Lois died in 1988, the house was opened for tours and is now on the National Register of Historic Places.
Wilson was a man of many great strengths and just as great weaknesses. He loved being the center of attention, but after the AA principle of anonymity had become established he refused an honorary degree from Yale University and refused to allow his picture, even from the back, on the cover of Time. Wilson’s persistence, his ability to take and use good ideas, and his entrepreneurial flair. are revealed in his pioneering escape from an alcoholic ‘death sentence’, his central role in the development of a program of spiritual growth, and his leadership in creating and building AA, “an independent, entrepreneurial, maddeningly democratic, non-profit organization.”
Wilson is perhaps best known as a synthesist of ideas, the man who pulled together various threads of psychology, theology, and democracy into a workable and life-saving system. Aldous Huxley called him “the greatest social architect of our century,” and Time magazine named Wilson to their Time 100 List of The Most Important People of the 20th Century. Wilson’s self description was a man who “because of his bitter experience, discovered, slowly and through a conversion experience, a system of behavior and a series of actions that works for alcoholics who want to stop drinking.”
In a review of Susan Cheever’s My Name Is Bill, John Sutherland summed up Wilson’s character and life as follows:
Despite his program’s insistence on “rigorous honesty”, Bill W. lived a lie. He had innumerable affairs and a long-term mistress with whom he contemplated eloping to Ireland (the scandal would probably have destroyed Alcoholics Anonymous). Susan Cheever’s final judgement is unblinking but forgiving: “Bill Wilson never held himself up as a model: he only hoped to help other people by sharing his own experience, strength and hope. He insisted again and again that he was just an ordinary man”. An ordinary man who nonetheless did one extraordinary thing.
