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The Oxford Group and Alcoholics Anonymous: Part 4
More Oxford Group Parallels
The Seventh Step
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Let's review a few things before we proceed: This is the fourth article in a continuing series detailing the story of the Oxford Group and Alcoholics Anonymous. The Oxford Group ideas are certainly not the only source of the principles of A.A.'s "spiritual" program. But the Bible is the primary source of both Oxford Group and A.A. ideas. And, if you want to see the "original" A.A. program, as it was described by an objective observer, you need to read the Frank Amos report to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., quoted at some length in DR. BOB and the Good Oldtimers (AA World Services, Inc., 1980), pp. 128-36.

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In 1938, Frank Amos was soon to become one of A.A.'s first non-alcoholic trustees. He went to Akron only after the pioneer A.A. program had been established as highly successful and had been developed primarily by Dr. Bob and the Akron pioneers. Prior to Bill Wilson's writing of the earliest Big Book drafts, Amos spent a week in Akron and interviewed physicians, a judge, the AAs, their families, and others to get the facts. As you will see from the Amos report, the "Program," as Amos found and described it, contained no Steps, and focused primarily on the Bible, Quiet Time, and Dr. Bob as the leader to whom pioneers were looking for guidance. Interestingly, Amos did not mention the Oxford Group.

To understand the Oxford Group's importance in A.A., you need to look primarily not at Akron, but rather at what Rev. Sam Shoemaker was teaching Bill Wilson and a couple of others on the New York scene. You need also to see the remarkable resemblance between the earliest A.A. program in New York and what the Oxford Group - on the East Coast - was reading, writing, teaching, and doing. Note at the outset that East Coast Oxford Group activities, including inter-continental teams, house-parties, and large meetings - in which Bill Wilson himself briefly participated - were far different from the single "clandestine lodge" with an "old fashioned prayer meeting" conducted by the "alcoholic squad of the Oxford Group" that was the Akron focus. [Cp. Dr. Morris Martin's Always a Little Further, (2001), pp. 102-03, 92-93, 88-89, 71, 61, 51; and DR. BOB and the Good Oldtimers, pp. 121, 101, 117]. The Oxford Group program in the East and abroad was simply not the "old fashioned prayer meeting" for drunks that was held at the T. Henry Williams home in Akron.

Yet the twenty-eight ideas of the Oxford Group (of which I wrote at some length in The Oxford Group and Alcoholics Anonymous) did become the primary content of the "spiritual program of recovery" Bill incorporated in the "basic text" of the First Edition of the Big Book in 1939. For that Oxford Group program - fashioned by Dr. Frank Buchman, articulated in the East by Rev. Sam Shoemaker, and as Bill fleshed it out in the Big Book and the Twelve Steps in 1939 - look then to the Oxford Group as the primary source.

Actually, A.A.'s own literature has thoroughly documented this point about the New York approach. [See Pass It On (AA World Services, Inc., 1984)]: (1) "... Lois and Bill did not become immediately disillusioned with the Oxford Group or with its principles, from which Bill borrowed freely," Pass It On, p. 169; (2) "Bill was about to write the famous fifth chapter, "How It Works.'... It was heavy with Oxford Group principles... ." Pass It On, pp. 196-97; (3) "Bill's first three steps were culled from his reading of James, the teachings of Sam Shoemaker, and those of the Oxford Group." Pass It On, p. 199; (4) See also Pass It On, pp. 167, 197-99, 264-65, 284-85, 352-53, 211; (5) Later, Alcoholics Anonymous recorded, in Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age and The Language of the Heart, Bill's increasingly open acknowledgments that almost all the material in Bill's Twelve Steps had come from the Oxford Group. Compare Dr. Bob's statement: "I didn't write the Twelve Steps. I had nothing to do with the writing of them... We already had the basic ideas, though not in terse and tangible form. We got them... as a result of our study of the Good Book" (DR. BOB and the Good Oldtimers, pp. 96-97).

In addition, I established three important facts during my eleven years of research: (1) Bill actually asked Rev. Sam Shoemaker, Jr., to write the Twelve Steps, but Sam declined. (2) There are at least twenty-eight Oxford Group principles that impacted on the Big Book, the Steps, and the A.A. Fellowship. (3) Both in Sam Shoemaker's writings and in those of other Oxford Group activists of the 1930's and before, you can find dozens of expressions that closely parallel those in many pieces of A.A. literature including the Big Book. In sum, then, if you want to understand the Big Book, the Twelve Steps, the "Slogans," and the A.A. Fellowship, as Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob understood them when the Big Book was published in 1939, you need to know the Oxford Group-Shoemaker writings as well as their sources in the Bible itself. And I firmly believe that the most authentic and comprehensive study and detailing of those topics can be found in my two titles, The Oxford Group and Alcoholics Anonymous: A Design for Living That Works, 2d ed. (http://www.dickb.com/Oxford.shtml) and New Light on Alcoholism: God, Sam Shoemaker, and A.A., 2d ed. (http://www.dickb.com/newlight.shtml).

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