Members Sold It First

The first people to sell recovery with A.A.'s name on it were A.A. members. That is not an outside accusation; it is the Fellowship's own record of the years after the Saturday Evening Post article of March 1941 made it famous. Membership jumped by thousands within the year, and the pins on the office wall map showed scores of new groups a week — most with no experienced member in them, nothing to steer by but the book and the mail. Into that vacuum came trouble: committees quarreled, orators held forth, groups split wide open, whole groups got drunk. And then the worst of it — Bill W. wrote (A.A. Comes of Age) that some members turned professional, "selling A.A. therapy for money to new prospects." His summary of the era: "Such was the beginning of a truly frightening experience that lasted a long time." Hold on to what that means. The threat this Tradition answers was never an invading industry; in 1941 there was no recovery industry to invade. The discovery was simpler and worse: when A.A. spreads faster than its principles, somebody inside will try to sell it — before any outsider ever does. The Tradition is not a wall built against outsiders. It is a mirror, written by people who had watched themselves.