AA Promotional Pamphlet from 1943

This is a rare early AA pamphlet that was published by the Alcoholic Foundation, Inc. in 1943.

This pamphlet includes several Big Book stories including The Doctor’s Nightmare, Women Suffer Too, and Bill’s Story. Also included is the article; Medicine, Religion and Alcoholics Anonymous and also a book review by Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick.

Below you can read a portion of the introduction to the pamphlet. This excerpt gives great insight into how the Alcoholic Foundation was communicating with the fellowship of AA and potential members.

Alcoholics Anonymous

“THE purpose of this booklet is to show how thousands of us, who were once hopeless alcoholics, have recovered from our malady. We have found a way of life which no longer compels us to drink. Alcoholics Anonymous is the great reality which has expelled our obsession.

Banded together in groups, or sometimes working alone, we aim to help fellow drinkers recover their health. Not being reformers, we offer our experience only to those who want it. There are no fees - "A.A." is an avocation. Each member squares his debt of gratitude by helping other alcoholics to recovery. In so doing, he maintains his own sobriety.

Rapidly growing, we number thousands of ex-drinkers who are now to be found in hundreds of American and Canadian communities. Our first member recovered in 1934. We believe that two-thirds of us have laid a foundation for permanent sobriety as more than half have had no relapse at all, despite the fact many had been considered incurable.

This approach to alcoholism is based upon our own drinking experience, what we have learned from medicine and psychiatry, and upon spiritual principles common to all creeds. By combining these resources, the recovery rate among alcoholics who want to stop has been very greatly increased.

We think of alcoholism as an illness; an obsession of the mind coupled to an "allergy" of the body. It is a shattering sickness— physical, emotional and spiritual. How to expel the obsession that compels us to drink against our will is the problem of every alcoholic.

The only requirement for A. A. membership is an honest desire to stop drinking. We feel that each man's religious views, if any, are his own affair. While every shade of opinion is found among us we take no position, as a group, upon controversial questions. No particular point of view is demanded of anyone. Our sole aim is to show sick alcoholics who want to get well how they may do so.

Perhaps you would like to write us for assistance. If you do not know any A.A. members, please address The Alcoholic Foundation, P.O. Box 459, Grand Central Annex, New York 17, N. Y. Your inquiry will be in confidence if you so request and it will reach the Central Office which is maintained by the Trustees of The Alcoholic Foundation as our National Headquarters. The Trustees are seven in number; four are interested professional and business men, and three are members of Alcoholics Anony-mous. As Trustees, none receive compensation for their services.“

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Here is the complete book review by Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick:

BOOK REVIEW

by DR. HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK

Alcoholics Anonymous. Works Publishing Inc., Grand Central Annex, P.O. Box 459, New York 17, N. Y. 400 pages. $3.50

THIS extraordinary book deserves the careful attention of anyone interested in the problem of alcoholism. Whether as victims, friends of victims, physicians, clergymen, psychiatrists, or social workers, there are many such, and this book will give them, as no other treatise known to this reviewer will, an inside view of the problem which the alcoholic faces. Gothic cathedral windows are not the sole things which can be truly seen only from within. Alcoholism is another. All outside views are clouded and unsure. Only one who has been an alcoholic and has escaped the thraldom can interpret the experience.

This book represents the pooled experience of one hundred men and women who have been victims of alcoholism-many of them declared hopeless by the experts-and who have won their freedom and recovered their sanity and self-control. Their stories are detailed and circumstantial, packed with human interest. In America today the disease of alcoholism is increasing. Liquor has been an easy escape from depression. As an English officer in India, reproved for his excessive drinking, lifted his glass and said, "This is the swiftest road out of India," so many Americans have been using hard liquor as a means of flight from their troubles until to their dismay they discover that, free to begin, they are not free to stop. One hundred men and women, in this volume, report their experience of enslavement and then of liberation.

The book is not in the least sensational. It is notable for its sanity, restraint, and freedom from over-emphasis and fanaticism. It is a sober, careful, tolerant, sympathetic treatment of the alcoholic's problem and of the successful techniques by which its co-authors have won their freedom. The group sponsoring this book began with two or three ex-alcoholics, who discovered one another through a kindred experience. From this personal kinship a movement started, ex-alcoholic working for alcoholics without fanfare or advertisement, and the movement has spread from one city to another. This book presents the practical experiences of this group and describes the methods they employ.

The core of their whole procedure is religious. They are convinced that for the hopeless alcoholic there is only one way out—the expulsion of his obsession by a Power Greater Than Himself. Let it be said at once that there is nothing partisan or sectarian about this religious experience. Agnostics and atheists, along with Catholics, Jews, and Protestants, tell their story of discovering the Power Greater Than Themselves. "Who are you to say that there is no God?" one atheist in this group heard a voice say when, hospitalized for alcoholism, he faced the utter hopelessness of his condition. Nowhere is the tolerance and openmindedness of the book more evident than in its treatment of this central mater on which the cure of all these men and women has depended. They are not partisans of any particular form of organized religion, although they strongly recommend that some religious fellowship be found by their participants. By religion they mean an experience which they personally know and which has saved them from their slavery, when psychiatry and medicine had failed. They agree that each man must have his own way of conceiving God, but of God Himself they are utterly sure, and their stories of victory in consequence are a notable addition to William James Varieties of Religious Experience.

Altogether the book has the accent of reality and is written with unusual intelligence and skill, humor and modesty mitigating what could easily have been a strident and harrowing tale.

HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK.”

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This pamphlet is in excellent condition. There is minimal wear with only light page toning. There is no writing, markings or tears to the pamphlet. The original staples are still in the fold and are lightly rusted.

Please view all of the photos for the conditions.