Alcoholics Anonymous - Oxford Group Origins

Oxford Group Origins

AA sprang from The Oxford Group, a non-denominational movement modeled after first-century Christianity. Some members ("Groupers") found the Group a help in maintaining sobriety, one of whom was Ebby Thacher, Wilson's former drinking buddy and a Grouper who followed the evangelical bent of the Group. Thacher presented himself to Wilson saying he had "got religion" and was sober, and Wilson could do the same if he set aside objections to religion and formed, instead, a personal idea of God, "another power" or "higher power".

Surprised that Thacher was sober, and sensing a "kinship of common suffering", Wilson, though drunk at the time, attended his first Group gathering. Within days Wilson admitted himself to the Charles B. Towns Hospital, but not before drinking four beers on the way – the last time Wilson got drunk. Under the care of Dr. William Duncan Silkworth (an early benefactor of A.A.), Wilson's detox included the deliriant belladonna. At the hospital in a state of despair Wilson experienced a bright flash of light which he felt to be God revealing himself.

After discharging from the hospital, Wilson joined the Oxford Group and recruited other alcoholics to the Group. Wilson's early efforts to help others become sober were ineffective, prompting Dr. Silkworth to suggest that Wilson place less stress on religion and more on "the science" of treating alcoholism. Wilson's first success came during a business trip to Akron, Ohio, where he was introduced to Dr. Robert Smith, a surgeon and Oxford Group member who was unable to stay sober. After thirty days of working with Wilson, Smith drank his last drink on June 10, 1935, the date marked by AA for its anniversaries.

While Wilson and Smith credited their sobriety to working with alcoholics under the auspices of the Oxford Group, a Group associate pastor sermonized against Wilson and his alcoholic Groupers for forming a "secret, ashamed sub-group" engaged in "divergent works". By 1937 Wilson separated from the Oxford Group. Historian Ernest Kurtz described the split:

more and more, Bill discovered that new adherents could get sober by believing in each other and in the strength of this group. Men who had proven over and over again, by extremely painful experience, that they could not get sober on their own had somehow become more powerful when two or three of them worked on their common problem. This, then—whatever it was that occurred among them—was what they could accept as a power greater than themselves. They did not need the Oxford Group.

In 1955, Wilson acknowledged AA's debt, saying "The Oxford Groupers had clearly shown us what to do. And just as importantly, we learned from them what not to do." Among the Oxford Group practices AA retained were informal gatherings, a "changed-life" developed through "stages", and working with others for no material gain. AA's analogs for these are meetings, "the steps", and sponsorship. One legacy not drawn from the Group was anonymity, which came about due to AA wishing to avoid the publicity-seeking practices of the Oxford Group and to not promote, Wilson said, "erratic public characters who through broken anonymity might get drunk and destroy confidence in us."