100 Objects #20: AA Sobriety Chip

Imbued in the Alcoholics Anonymous sobriety chip is a hidden history of America’s relationship to gender, religion, and morality.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:45Speaker 01

  Our story begins in 1835, or maybe 1935, or maybe the last time you woke up with a hangover from the wine at the gas station, you know, Franzi's evil cousin. And you asked yourself, is this normal? Is it normal to feel this way? Let's work our way backwards.

• 2:08Roman Mars?

  Today on the show, we have the incredible comedian, writer and podcaster, Jamie Loftus.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  I can't remember a time in my life when I didn't know what Alcoholics Anonymous was. We talked about it at home like a friend that lived in the same neighborhood. Dad was going to a meeting tonight, so wait outside or in the hallway of the high school until it's over. Then walk through the cloud of cigarette smoke and friendly conversation when the AA hour, and it was always exactly an hour, was up. I can count on one hand for my entire childhood, a time where a close family member drank in front of the kids, even though pictures from before I was born were so full of alcohol that you couldn't always make out the ruddy faced, younger versions of my dad, aunts and uncles.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Later, when I went to dad for advice, he could rarely avoid just saying it directly. Take things one day at a time. Find the serenity to accept the things I could not change, the courage to change the things I could, and say it with me now, the wisdom to know the difference. These meetings were important, I thought. They'd protect our family from whatever had happened. And they and my mom's patience would keep us all together from an evil I had never seen or tasted, even though I wasn't totally sure what an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting was.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Two weeks before my dad died in 2024, he hit an incredible marker. 30 years sober from alcohol. The first five years or so spent going to AA meetings every single day. The influence AA had on my family was gigantic in ways I was told about and ways it would take me years to understand, influencing not just how my family behaved, but how we thought. But as a kid, the only tactile evidence I had that AA existed was something I was kind of obsessed with. This little album where dad kept all his sobriety chips. He, along with most AA members, started accruing these at his first meeting, right after he got out of the three days of detox that his health insurance covered.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  You collect sobriety chips the fastest in your first year clean at 24 hours, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, all the way up to a year in most groups and often annually after that. My dad was never precious about belongings, but these chips were really important to him. The rare things that my brother and I were not allowed to touch. They meant something. And if the way everyone else acted was an indicator, it was mom's support and dad's commitment to Alcoholics Anonymous that was the reason that I had a relationship with him at all. Fast forward to this year. My dad was gone. I was in my 30s and I had to face the fact that I'd developed a shaky relationship with alcohol.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  I found myself on a work trip to Iowa with one of those little white plastic chips in my hand.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  One of my own, one even flimsier than the 24 hour chip in dad's album. Our stories were really different. I hadn't hit bottom. There was no relationship with a spouse or a child on the line. I just knew I had to make a change. And even though I'm far from alone there, there's around 30 million Americans that have some degree of alcohol use disorder. I felt pretty embarrassed about it.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  And when I started looking into how that little white chip got there, I found a story that was so profoundly and infuriatingly American. It's the kind of story that really makes you want to take a drink. Embued in this little chip is a hidden history that contains centuries of Americans' relationship to morality, to religion, and even to gender, to identity. That's a pretty potent piece of plastic.

• 6:11Roman Mars?

  From 99% Invisible and BBC Studios, this is a history of the United States in 100 objects. I'm Roman Mars. Today, the Alcoholics Anonymous Sobriety Chip.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Alcoholics Anonymous wasn't born in a void in 1935. It was a response to a massive, mostly failed political movement that proved once and for all that morality is impossible to legislate. Luckily, American legislators have since learned not to do that, a fact you might agree with if you cannot read, hear or see. I'm talking about American prohibition, which ran from 1920 to 1933, about a year and a half before the first AA meetings took place. Now, I didn't learn about prohibition in school in spite of hearing a lot about the history taking place around it. Women's suffrage passes the same year as prohibition and the issue hovers around rapid

• 7:15Speaker 01

  industrialization, World War I, the Great Depression, and a massive early 20th century wave of immigration from Europe to the United States. But today, with the exception of my close personal friend Ken Burns's docu-series on the topic, prohibition has been boiled culturally down to two images, the gangster and the flapper.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  The gangster, usually Al Capone or a thinly veiled version of him, is violent, powerful and endlessly charismatic, appearing everywhere from Scarface to The Godfather to Tintin. The flapper is his counterpart, a liberated woman of the Jazz Age. Think gentlemen prefer blondes and daisy Buchanan's partying in these dank, glamorous speakeasies, drinking martinis and completely free of the responsibilities of the home. But there's so much more to this time when the law of the land constitutionally banned production, import, transport or sale of alcoholic beverages.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Passed through the 18th amendment and enforced by the cruel and inefficient Volstead Act, it's weird that we don't talk about prohibition more often. After all, it's the only constitutional amendment that's been repealed, ever. So why does it get lost in the shuffle?

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's partially because everybody thinks they know everything about it. You know, everyone just thinks, oh, we've heard all those gangster stories a million times and we don't want to listen to them anymore.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  This is Joya Deliberto, author of Firebrands: The Untold Story of Four Women Who Made an Unmade Prohibition, a book that tackles this question head on. She and most historians are sure about one thing. Prohibition was a crummy idea and it didn't work.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  I mean, it failed because it was just a bad idea from the get go. You know, it was, I mean, it's incredible that a constitutional amendment was passed instituting prohibition.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  The 18th amendment went into effect in 1920, but this was after close to a century of temperance activism. And while prohibition fails for a million reasons we can explore, what's true is that prior to prohibition, Americans drank much more alcohol. In 1830, the average person drank three times more than they did by the 2010s, the equivalent of 88 bottles of whiskey a year. And the culture around alcohol was marketed almost exclusively to men. Saloons became the social center of communities in the back half of the 1800s. There were around 250,000 of them in the US at their peak and were a place where men could get a hot lunch, connect with translators and job prospects, cast their ballots, meet

• 10:02Speaker 01

  their unions, and of course, get blackout drunk on the alcohol of whichever brewery owned the joint. And with the popularity of saloons came the country's first temperance group, the Washingtonian Society, established in Baltimore in 1840. The Washingtonians' philosophy was pretty close to what AA would be saying nearly a century later. It was composed of men with drinking problems, sharing their experiences in a group meeting and pledging abstinence. Here's writer T. S. Arthur on the group. "They were assembled in a drinking house in this city, six men, well advanced in years, who had for a long time been confirmed to drunkards, or at least so wedded to the love of strong drink.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  They had met accidentally, but in the mind of each, there was a feeling of sorrow for his enslaved and wretched condition, a strong desire to rise out of it, yet a painful, hopeless sense of weakness."

• 10:59Speaker 01

  The Washingtonians counted tens of thousands of men as members. It was so popular at the time that Abe Lincoln gave a speech to them in 1842. But after a few decades, the group's popularity waned. The culprit for their failure, it's been speculated, was the Washingtonians' entanglement in unrelated progressive political causes. And put a pin in that because AA makes a very different decision in that department. Those progressive causes happened to be the abolition of slavery, the feminist movement, and the larger temperance movement. And these causes overlapped constantly throughout the 19th into the 20th century. Frederick Douglass was a famous teetotaler, framing alcohol as a tool of oppression

• 11:43Speaker 01

  to dull the minds of enslaved people by their oppressors. "If we could but make the world sober, we would have no slavery," Douglass said in 1845, going on to explain that "all great reforms go together." And given that we only ever really see women as flapper set dressing in this era, I was very surprised at how the push to ban alcohol directly overlapped with the first wave of the American women's movement.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  The drive for the vote was completely tied up with the drive to abolish liquor.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Joya makes the case that the history of prohibition cannot be extracted from feminist history. Women found political power in the movement when most other forms of power were unavailable to them. On both sides of prohibition, women of all political persuasions are at the top of organizing.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  A woman was in charge of enforcing prohibition and a woman was the catalyst for getting it repealed. And I thought, this is a woman's story.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  So what attracted women to the temperance movement in the first place? It was a matter of pragmatism and safety. Historically, they and their children were the victims of alcoholic men.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Women didn't really drink much in the 19th century, and men drank rivers. Drinking was an enormous problem for American families because the water wasn't safe. And so, men on the farm, for example, they'd have big vats of beer that they would drink from instead of water, and they'd be drunk all the time. And they would hang out in bars, and bars were the place in the cities where men went to politic and pick up coors and get in fights and so on. And so, male drinking was an issue that interfered with women's lives and the harmony of women's lives.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Temperance was the rare cause that allowed roles in political leadership to women, while still presenting itself as a matter that affected the home. The Women's Christian Temperance Union was the biggest women's organization in the world in the late 1800s. And once a lot of these women got a taste for activism, many went on to advocate for other causes.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  And then they realized that they were never really going to be able to do anything about drinking if they couldn't vote, because they couldn't get rid of the drunken politicians, they couldn't get laws passed that would limit the hours of the bars, and so on and so forth. So it was when they realized that they needed some political clout to get rid of booze that the fight for feminism really geared up.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  But they didn't just fight for the vote. Frances Willard, for example, was president of the WCTU and a suffragist, but was also instrumental in raising the age of consent, establishing an eight-hour workday, and significant prison reform. She presented temperance as a gateway cause for feminists, assuring those who weren't sure women were ready to vote that their vote was, quote, "a weapon of protection from the tyranny of drink." Nice one, Frances. In the 1890s, public opinion around saloon culture was at an all-time low, leading to the founding of the Anti-Saloon League. While earlier movements advised moderation, the ASL focused on, quote, "getting rid of

• 15:19Speaker 01

  alcohol, period," and quickly took on quite a bit of xenophobia. Because while prohibition overlaps with women's rights in a really interesting way, it still has the same limitations of every subsequent American feminist movement. It is far too white, and it skews Christian. Saloon patrons were overwhelmingly working class, and the working class was overwhelmingly underpaid European immigrants, and the booze they were drinking was overwhelmingly German. Do you see where this is going? Regardless of the progressive coalition behind them at the start, prohibition became a pretty Protestant WASP-y cause by the early 1900s.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Immigrant communities, many of whom came from cultures that alcohol was an integral part of, were never in favor of outlawing booze and did not agree that temperance was the natural state of humanity. And frankly, they're right. There are zero seconds of recorded human history that would lead you to believe that people don't love using drugs of virtually any kind. And after years of back and forth between the wets and the dries, yes, those are how the sides self-identified. The dry coalition won out. And on January 17, 1920, they toasted with a nice glass of lukewarm water, probably,

• 16:44Speaker 01

  as the 18th Amendment was passed in the United States, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes within the US. And less than eight months after that, women got the vote. In the immediate aftermath of prohibition passing, drinking did go down in the US by about a third, according to Sexual Dynamo Ken Burns. Saloons were closed and alcohol-related deaths decreased. And there are certain states where the drinking culture remained tempered for decades to come. But in big American cities, people weren't putting the bottle down that easily.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Almost immediately, a black market developed around what would become the new saloon, the sexy little setting of all those movies, the speakeasy, and the crooked attempts to enforce prohibition with a fleet of frequently corrupt, dry agents using the Volstead Act. And at the very top of this effort was, for a moment in time, the most powerful woman in the American government.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  All of a sudden, there's a woman, Mabel Walker Willibrant, who is this young lawyer who was the head of enforcing prohibition during the Jazz Age.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Miss Mabel Willibrant was 32 when she was appointed US Assistant Attorney after an early career shaped by fighting for women convicted and punished for doing sex work. Overnight, she became an extremely powerful force in the US government and was given the massive, unpleasant task of enforcing the ban on alcohol.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  It was an impossible job, impossible to do, prohibition was impossible to enforce. So of course, they gave it to a woman. So women never did vote as a block from the get-go, but the men thought that they were going to vote as a block, and they figured they had to have some women in power so that all the women would be excited because the Republicans had given a big job to this woman. And so, they were looking for a woman, and she fit the bill. So that's how she got the job.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  Mabel and the dries were up against a nation hell-bent on drinking. The people who did continue to drink during prohibition tended to really commit and now had this rebellious politicized reason to continue to drink. And quickly, gangs of working-class men became central figures in illegal alcohol sale and consumption in larger cities. And it's here where a lot of similarities with the failed war on drugs crops up. Because alcohol is illegal to sell, and people will seek it out either way, the alcohol that is sold illegally goes through no quality check and can be cut with any number of dangerous ingredients. So today, that's cutting cocaine with fentanyl.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  During prohibition, this meant cutting booze with ingredients found in paint thinner, which resulted in thousands becoming blind or even dying. So people who drank were not just being criminalized by the government, they were more at risk than ever. Which makes it interesting that we don't really teach prohibition in schools, and even more interesting that these parallels with the war on drugs never seem to come up. I'm adjusting my tinfoil hat. Okay, by the mid-1920s, cracks had already begun to show, as the supporters of the dry side added some rather scary people to their ranks. While prohibition was initially championed by feminists, abolitionists, and unions, the

• 20:22Speaker 01

  KKK leader came out in strong favor of prohibition policies, using the issue as a recruitment tool for cleaning up the neighborhood by implicating that anyone who didn't align with white Protestant nationalism was more likely to be a violent alcoholic. That is, black Americans, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, the speakeasy held potential to be a more progressive space than the saloon. Some speakeasies, not all, were racially integrated decades before Jim Crow laws ended. And it was there that jazz music and vaudeville acts could really flourish, where women could explore newfound sexual freedom. Quick sidebar here because it is so funny to me. There's this historian in the Ken Burns documentary who states confidently that it is during this sexual revolution of the 1920s that men discovered the clitoris, which is certainly a claim. He gives no sources.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Mabel Willibrant worked hard to frighten the speakeasy operators of New York and Chicago with little success, but the Anti-Saloon League had considerable political influence throughout the 20s and even helped get a dry candidate elected president in 1928 in the form of Herbert Hoover. Although it's worth saying, Herbert Hoover did drink. Imagine a politician being a hypocrite. In classic American fashion, the Drys ignored the working class, immigrants, and any non-Protestant as they tend to to this day. But in another interesting twist, one of the first people that Drys seemed to take seriously as a threat to prohibition was kind of one of them, a wealthy, white Republican woman.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  That the Jazz Age opened up the whole world of drinking to women who didn't drink before, and sexual freedom, and smoking, and all of this behavior that was considered naughty before suddenly becomes very cool. And also, the suffrage leaders and the leaders of the temperance movement were getting old, and now they were these old fogies, you know? And they were like the opposite of the glamorous, youthful, fun-loving flapper. And so, nobody wanted to follow them anymore, and that coincides with the rise of Pauline Sabin.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Pauline Sabin was the heiress to the Morton Salt Fortune, and she started one of the most effective anti-prohibition organizations in the country, an organization exclusively made up of women.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  She became convinced that prohibition had to be repealed. And there had been several organizations run by men who had been against prohibition, but they were ineffectual. They never got anywhere.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  And so, Pauline literally goes, "Hold my beer," finds a bunch of like-minded women, and starts organizing as a one-issue activist to end prohibition.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  The organization that she started was a women's organization which embraced women from all walks of life and even all races. She herself was very wealthy. She had a lot of wealthy friends. And they funded it, and they made it into something really big and forceful that the Women's Christian Temperance Union couldn't compete with. And they always came at it ahead. She fit into this idea of what a modern woman should be, which was glamorous and youthful.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  By 1929, the writing was on the wall. Between the Valentine's Day massacre in Chicago and the stock market crash, it was obvious that prohibition and the legislation of morality had not improved things. And everyone wanted a drink. In the next election, Republican Pauline Sabin endorsed Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt because FDR promised to undo prohibition, stating that his goals were to reorganize the banks, cut federal spending, and legalize 3.2 beer. And so it was. In no small part because of Sabin's organizing, on April 7, 1933,

• 24:35Speaker 01

  Americans could legally buy beer again after nearly 14 years of prohibition. By the end of that year, the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th, the only time that's happened in American history.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  So, class, did prohibition work? Most historians will give you a hard no. It treated a symptom of American society, that being excessive drinking, instead of the disease. The poor work and economic conditions, the disregard for any culture that wasn't Protestant, and the reality that parties are fun. Legislating morality just does not work. It never has. But I'm going to argue something a little grayer than that, because that's all true. And prohibition did permanently change Americans' drinking habits. With the exception of a brief window in the early 1980s, Americans' drinking habits have rarely returned to pre-prohibition levels.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  And the fight for and against prohibition did open up a lot of avenues to power that hadn't existed prior for women specifically. So by the end of 1933, alcohol was legal again, and America's relationship to it was weirder than ever. Because remember, a huge number of Americans drank their way through prohibition. So when the government stopped trying to ban alcohol, they were sort of just handing the problem back to the individual. Well, we tried. You're on your own. No meaningful public program replaced prohibition. And so, two years later, a program created by problem drinkers for problem drinkers

• 26:17Speaker 01

  starts to take shape, one that advocated for a kind of private, personal prohibition as the only way out of alcoholism. Not moderation or reducing your drinking, but banning it from your life entirely while submitting yourself to a higher power. And hey, sometimes you get this cool little chip to prove it. Their movement was called Alcoholics Anonymous, and it wouldn't be long before AA would change the way the country thought about addiction.

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• 30:06Speaker 01

  Okay, so I'm standing outside this kind of VFW-like hall with that little white chip in my hand. And now that I think about it, it's a poker chip, so probably wouldn't fly in Gamblers Anonymous. Anyway, I was kind of surprised to find it there. My relationship with alcohol was and is pretty dysregulated. Like most comedians, it's not unusual to be paid in drink tickets when you're working material out. And the habit escalated during the lockdown and solidified into a near daily ritual during the years my dad was sick. So it hadn't ruined my life, but it had become very present and it did not feel good. But what I didn't want, in spite of AA saving my dad's life, was to go to a

• 30:51Speaker 01

  meeting myself, because I'd heard there was a lot of God, a lot of black and white thinking. Not to mention that the social aspect of AA kind of reminded me of the social anxiety that contributed to my own drinking in the first place. As I understood it, a sip of anything would render that little white chip meaningless. It meant a failure, a slip. And my image of AA was a lot of guys that looked like my dad, telling the same story that my dad told. It puts me at this crossroad I found myself at over and over, because I know for a fact that for many people, AA is a life-changing force,

• 31:31Speaker 01

  and that those who AA has worked for can get a little swifty about it. And that AA does not work for everyone. It is not a safe or productive environment for everyone. And that I don't think it's fair to position a sobriety attempt as a failure because the most popular system was not effective. But here's the thing with AA. Chances are, right now, there is a free meeting down the street from you in about 20 minutes. And that's something that no program outside of the church itself can claim. So how did we get to the place where this incredibly specific, imperfect program was the option?

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Let's go back to 1935. It's two years after prohibition was repealed, and if you were a problem drinker, babe, that's none of the government's business anymore. You're on your own. Which left a lot of people at a loss of where they could turn. As the story goes, we're in Akron, Ohio, at the Mayflower Hotel, and a 39-year-old man named Bill Wilson, Bill W. in AA canon, is in town for a business trip after flopping out of Wall Street and law school because of his drinking. And he's feeling very tempted to go to the bar. But instead of giving in, he calls the nearest church and asks them if he can get in touch with other people trying to maintain sobriety so that he can vent and stay accountable.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Eventually, he gets connected with Robert Smith, Dr. Bob in the AA EU. And Dr. Bob is also trying to stay sober in a post-prohibition world. He'd taken advantage of the 18th Amendment loophole that allowed doctors like himself to, um, prescribe alcohol. And Dr. Bob and Bill W. sat in a mutual friend's living room for five hours, just drinking coffee and talking. They found it really helpful. And a month later, AA was officially in motion. The first few years of the group were called AA's Flying Blind era. So no 12 steps yet, none of the traditions we associate with the program today. It was just a bunch of

• 33:41Speaker 01

  alcoholics trying to stay sober by sticking together and having community. It's interesting to point out that this is both very similar to the Washingtonians, and both Bill W. and Dr. Bob insist they had never heard of the group. But what they were familiar with was a Christian movement called the Oxford Group, which wasn't about alcoholism at all, but did focus on living a more pure, Christian life. And this extended to sobriety. And you can see the influence of the Oxford Group in what eventually becomes the principles of AA. They were an anonymous group. They used the confession-like practice of sharing. They had tenets that functioned similar to steps. And they upheld the concept of surrendering

• 34:25Speaker 01

  over to God's plan while maintaining that they were not a religion. They're just a spiritual group, guys. They just happen to mention God, Jesus, and Christianity across their literature. Moving on. Bill W. and Dr. Bob took these ideas and applied them to alcoholism specifically, developing over the next few years what would become the core tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous and its 12-step program. We don't have time for them all, but here are some relevant highlights. This was a program of complete, unwavering abstinence, that alcoholics generally hit bottom or admitted we were powerless over

• 35:05Speaker 01

  alcohol. There would be no centralized leadership, and all branches of AA would be self-run and self-funded by their members. That members should connect with a sponsor, which is another recovering alcoholic with more sobriety time, to serve as a sort of spiritual advisor. That the group viewed alcoholism as a progressive disease, and that alcoholics may have an allergy to the substance. And finally, that recovery was a lifelong process, and there was no such thing as a full cure to alcoholism. They eventually settled on the name Alcoholics Anonymous. Some members were calling it the 100-Men Corporation. And by all accounts,

• 35:48Speaker 01

  most early members of AA were white guys like the founders. And the alcoholic recovery process was developed with them in mind specifically. So they weren't saying, "No girls engaged," but it is heavily implied in the way that their core text is written. Their core text is called Alcoholics Anonymous. It was first published in 1939, has been revised several times, and has since sold over 37 million copies. By members, it is often referred to as "The Big Book." And you can see exactly how the founders thought about women in that first 1939 edition

• 36:31Speaker 01

  of The Big Book, where all of AA's tenets are laid out. After seven chapters that cover the founders' stories, the disease model of addiction, and agnosticism, the eighth chapter is entitled "Two Wives." Buckle in. If he gets the sense that you are a nag or a killjoy, your chance of accomplishing anything useful may be zero. Say you do not want to be a wet blanket, that you only want him to take care of his health. If you cooperate rather than complain, you will find his excess enthusiasm will tone down. This is just scraping the surface, but you get the feeling. Keep in mind, this original chapter was written by Bill W., a man who would prolifically cheat on his wife Lois for the remainder

• 37:13Speaker 01

  of his one human life, in spite of her unwavering support and co-founding of the Al-Anon program. In fact, Bill W. is probably the most famous example of men in recovery preying on women in recovery, to the point that his behavior has a shorthand in AA to this day: 13th stepping. It's basically a cheeky way to say that there is a pattern across AA's history of elder members sexually preying on newly sober converts, almost always men preying on women, and in Bill W.'s case, required AA to enforce a "founders' watch" to make sure that his

• 37:51Speaker 01

  sexual impropriety did not tarnish AA's reputation. Feeling safe? I sure am. What I find really revealing about this chapter is not just that it's misogynist, it's that it casts women in the same role as in prohibition. It is assumed that women are the victims of alcoholics, the emotional support system and caretakers for alcoholics, and not alcoholics themselves. Around the time The Big Book was published, AA's popularity started exploding, particularly after a big article in the Saturday Evening Post in

• 38:30Speaker 01

  1941 called "Alcoholics Anonymous: Freed Slaves of Drink, Now They Free Others." At the time of this article, there were about 2,000 members in AA, and within two weeks, the office had received nearly 1,000 requests for more information. Within a year, membership quadrupled. Within a decade, AA had over 100,000 members. And since no alternative group was growing on this scale, people who felt othered by AA's foundational principles, and if chapter eight for wives is any indication, that would be over half the country, they would have to find or create a space for themselves within AA.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  But women who tried to join AA groups early on were often blocked by members or their wives. They were accused of coming to AA to get dates, or were seen as a promiscuous threat to men's sobriety, which is confusing in so many ways. Like, the logic is, "Hey, baby, wanna see a woman at her absolute lowest? Get a life." And as women continued to try to join AA, there was a lot of internal resistance. There's an article in the AA Journal, it's called "The Grapevine," it's published to this day, from 1946, that I think illustrates this point really well. The opening sentence, which is written by a conveniently anonymous author, says,

• 39:57Speaker 01

  "Now that women form an increasing membership in Alcoholics Anonymous, there seems to be a general feeling that they not only have a specialized problem, but like the purple cow we'd rather see, they are one." Oh, this absolute murderer's row of lazy misogynist talking points is used to explain why this writer believes most women drop out of AA, refusing to consider alternatives, like, "The 12 system may not be effective for everybody," or, and I'm just taking a shot in the dark here, "Maybe women were uncomfortable around people like this freak who was roasting them in the organization's newsletter." Still, they kept trying. But one woman in particular, Marty Mann, managed to stick

• 40:42Speaker 01

  it out. Marty is often referred to as the first woman to achieve long-term sobriety in AA, and she would ultimately become one of the organization's most public faces, essentially working as a lobbyist for the group, something she took a lot of criticism for, because by speaking publicly about her experience, she was breaking the fundamental tenet of anonymity. And while this wasn't spoken about at the time, she was also an early, prominent queer member of AA. Marty was a lesbian who hung out with Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, and it's because of her that women are finally acknowledged as alcoholics as well in the second edition of The Big Book, in which Marty Mann writes

• 41:23Speaker 01

  a chapter entitled "Women Suffer Too." Boy, do they. But thanks to Marty, the book acknowledges that the "two wives" chapter is outdated, that women can be alcoholics too. But regardless, "two wives" remains in The Big Book to this day. Just take it out, fellas, it's not Psalms. And of the many contributions women have made to AA over the years, it turns out the chip itself may have originated with a nun. I was actually surprised to learn that sobriety chips, something that I felt was so central to the program, isn't actually official AA canon, nor a part of its official history. Chips are basically a local custom

• 42:06Speaker 01

  that began in the 1940s and are often credited to a nun named Sister Ignatia, who worked with Dr. Bob at a hospital where alcoholics would dry out. When the patients were released, she would give them a Sacred Heart medallion, which she asked them to return before they took their first drink. There are other versions of this story, but this one sticks out to me because it so clearly strikes on how present both women and religion were at a foundational level of AA, even if their texts and history resist that reading. Just as in the prohibition era, a complicated array of women are moving the cause forward and are all but erased by history as it's presented today. And of course, the ways

• 42:48Speaker 01

  in which people have been othered in pursuit of those chips doesn't stop with gender, it's anyone who isn't a white Christian man, which is still true today. The numbers bear this out. In 2022, AA membership was largely concentrated in America and Canada, was nearly 88% white and about 2/3 men. And you don't need me to tell you that this does not square with the respective populations in these countries.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  And my theory is the reason that this is, is very much baked into American history at the time of AA's founding, which has given it a stink that is very hard to get rid of.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  There have been some efforts by AA to welcome Black members with various pamphlets and inclusive groups, but remember, this group took off in the early 1940s, long before Jim Crow policies were formally dismantled. While Bill W. is said to have welcomed Black alcoholics into meetings as early as 1940, Dr. Bob and other white members objected to this, and Black alcoholics were only permitted to attend AA meetings as guests. Bill W. reflected on this in 1984's "Pass It On," writing, "Along with you, I feel very deeply about this race business. Save this question, I suppose AA is the most democratic society in the world. All men should have an equal

• 44:09Speaker 01

  opportunity to recover from alcoholism. That is the shining ideal, but unhappily, it may not be achieved in our lifetime."

• 44:19Speaker 01

  Black AA meetings became more common over time, but the overall group's racism very much persisted. In 1945, an all-black St. Louis meeting elected not to make it public knowledge out of fear of white AA members. In a pamphlet, "AA for the Black and African American Alcoholic," most anonymous stories have some admission that they assumed the group was only for old white guys, and that they did not feel comfortable or welcome. And to be clear, these are not issues that went away. While there are plenty of all-black AA groups that have been extremely helpful for members, as recently as 2021, a Black member and writer named Maya Richard Craven wrote about her racial trauma being treated

• 45:01Speaker 01

  as what is referred to as "an outside issue" by white members. And this hearkens back to the Washingtonians, which, as we said before, were thought to have failed as a larger coalition because they "got political." AA elects not to do this, and so what is being invoked to Richard Craven is a general AA policy to keep politics out of their meeting. And the definition of "politics" is absolutely stated from a white patriarchal standpoint. This pattern is repeated over and over again, in Indigenous communities, in queer communities, and in non-English-speaking communities. It's not for lack of effort internally throughout

• 45:44Speaker 01

  the years. Today, there are meetings for all of these groups, but it's understandable why people perceive AA as not really being for them. Like so many American inventions, 12-step programs have had to be retrofitted for marginalized people, rather than created with them in mind. So for better or worse, not much has changed about AA or 12-step programs, except that they've grown tremendously. Currently, AA is estimated to be somewhere in the 2 million member range, although the whole anonymous thing does make it difficult to track. And that doesn't account for how influential the 12-step model is, and how ingratiated Alcoholics Anonymous has become in American life.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Today, nearly 100 years after AA's founding, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration estimates that over half of rehab centers in the United States use 12-step curriculums, which means that if you are arrested on a DUI charge and sentenced to 52 weeks of substance abuse treatment by a court, 12-step meetings are going to be the most accessible and, chances are, affordable option. And the fact that AA is so ubiquitous becomes a bit of a problem when you think about all that God talk I referenced.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  Okay, we have to talk about America and religion. I'm sorry, we do. And I know we do, because while AA has consistently said it is not a religion, courts have found, going back to the 1990s, that a judge cannot sentence someone to going to AA meetings specifically, because to do so would be unconstitutional under the First Amendment, specifically with regards to freedom of religion. But even so, AA's own records indicate that around 150,000 people attending meetings each year are doing so to address a court order, not necessarily of their own volition, which is a common criticism coming from those advocating for alternatives to AA. And if you're collecting chips, I think it's important to be honest

• 47:50Speaker 01

  about this religious aspect. Alcoholics Anonymous has consistently claimed they are not a religion, but their second step is, "We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity." Okay, don't yell at me, but it's sounding a little religious. No? Okay, let's go to the third step. "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him." You guys... Was the fourth step. "Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves." Okay, I like this one. Moral, maybe a little loaded, but it kind of sounds like therapy. Okay, fifth step.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  "Admit it to God, to ourselves, and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs." Guys, it's a religion, come on. God, higher power, and prayer are mentioned in half of the 12 steps, and a form of spiritual surrender is referenced in all but four, two steps that involve taking that searching and fearless moral inventory, and two steps that concern making amends with people a member has harmed while actively drinking. The Big Book itself functions as a religious text, down to the number of AA meetings that center around it, similar to a Bible study. But the program talks their way around its clear similarities

• 49:10Speaker 01

  to Christianity in an interesting way. AA says it's a spiritual organization that is welcoming of an individual's conception of a higher power, the care of God as we understood Him, as the third step says. There's plenty of AA literature that explains that this is what makes the organization accessible to a person of any faith, including atheists and agnostics. There are secular branches of AA, but that doesn't change that AA is an organization that's rooted in Christianity, in its literature, and how it thinks. To state the obvious, this is not out of step with America at all. Christianity appears

• 49:51Speaker 01

  in what we are told are secular spaces all the time. "One Nation Under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 during the Cold War. The Girl Scouts still pledge to "serve God and my country," and that's not to get into the conservative Christian values that have trickled into crucial legislation. We could be here all day. Let's not forget that the likely creator of the chip was a nun.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  So suppose you are not responsive to AA, and maybe you just want to drink less without surrendering yourself to God. What are your options? The good news is, they exist, but they're harder to find, and none that I've heard of involve those cool chips. Alternatives include programs like Moderation Management and Smart Recovery. Smart Recovery takes a secular cognitive behavioral approach to sobriety, and most courts will accept it the same as they accept AA. There's harm reduction, which seeks to reduce how much of a substance you use without demanding abstinence and trying to remove this process from shame.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  There are also medication options, most notably naltrexone, which has a solid track record of reducing alcohol cravings, though these cost money or require health insurance. So while there are alternatives, the difficult thing about accessing them is, both in free, down-the-street AA and behind the gabled walls of fancy rehab clinics, are pretty thoroughly sold on 12-step programs as the option, capital O, making these alternatives much harder to come by or to find. And that's to say nothing of cost, because AA is probably the largest mutual aid support network in the country outside of the church itself, and is not going to be beat in that department.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  So I'm standing with this little white chip in my hand. That's right, we're back. And I'm trying to decide what it means. Because of how AA keeps records, it's not really possible to know how effective the program is, though that will never stop people from trying. In the late 2000s, there was a very controversial and contested study on 12-step programs that rated them as low as 7% effective. But most recently, a thorough review of all of the existing studies done in 2020 showed that 42% of people participating in AA are completely abstinent a year later. And that's great, as long as you don't think too hard about the number of people who are affected by alcohol use disorder,

• 52:30Speaker 01

  who may not feel welcome, or that the program could ever be for them. But at the end of the day, all you have to go on is your own experience. Because as I said before, when AA works for someone, it really works. It's something that my own family was completely changed by. And for many, many members, finding the community, the spiritual practice, the sponsorship, or any combination of the three is miraculous. But what seems to work the best is the community. That's what studies consistently show about AA, the effectiveness of its community and structure, a place to go and people to talk to that are not connected to using.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  And no matter how you feel about AA, it is inescapably American. It's a dogma that insists it isn't dogma. It's connected to this lineage of government as religion, and it so often fails to create or maintain the safe, inclusive environment that it's spent nearly a century marketing itself as having. A fear of being judged by God and by your peers, of losing those chips you spent all that time and energy committing to, the necessity that you view yourself as powerless. While researching this episode, I've been to AA meetings in three states. I've been to Smart Recovery. I've been to Moderation Management. Hell, I've been to the sober faction at the Satanic Temple.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  They have Zoom meetings. And I've gotten something different out of all of them. I like hearing people's stories, even if I personally wouldn't get biblical about it. I like the idea of taking a searching and fearless inventory of myself, even if I don't think a sponsor should be the one to decide whether I've successfully done so or not. I like the CBT practice of talking through alternative coping. But I take that little white chip I got that day in Iowa around in my wallet. It probably wouldn't mean a hell of a lot in an AA setting, but I have it with me as a reminder that I have the power to decide what it means. So much of the prohibition era was about women getting a modicum of power,

• 54:40Speaker 01

  and I just cannot sit with the idea that a century later we are being asked to walk down the street and give it away. The chip is a chance to pause before acting, a reminder that I have choices and that there is a community out there. It's a reminder that the community that saved your dad might have changed the family's lives, but that doesn't mean it's your solution. It's a reminder that you have to choose, because policing morality will get you nothing but repealed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. It's a reminder that everyone, every single person, deserves an accessible option that works for them, even though that is not remotely the history of the United States.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  So for now, I'm hanging on to the chip, and I'm going to keep working on it. One, uh, it's hard to avoid saying it, and I'm going to keep working on it in 24-hour increments.

• 55:41Roman Mars?

  Jamie Loftus is an Emmy-nominated comedy writer, New York Times bestselling author, and podcaster. Her first novel, The Tower, will be available in June 2027. It's currently available for preorder right now. Go get it. Everything Jamie does is insightful and funny and cannot be missed.

• 55:59Roman Mars?

  This was our 20th episode of our 100-episode series. And so we're going to take a quick two-week break. And one of the projects that we'll be doing on our break is going through your emails and researching them as potential episodes. So this is a great time to send in your suggestions about what objects you think tell the history of the country. You've already made some great suggestions, and you'll hear those stories in future weeks. And I don't want to spoil them for you, but they're super good. Thank you so much for sending those in. If you want some direction or guidance about things we're looking for right now, we're specifically looking for objects that tell the history of labor struggles in the United States, or something that might bring us into the Great Depression, or capture something about the history of immigration,

• 56:41Roman Mars?

  or tell an important tale from American science. So if you have any ideas about those or any other stories, send them to us at [email protected]. We'll be back in your feed in three weeks.

• 56:57Roman Mars?

  A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. It's hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars. This episode was produced by Jamie Loftus. This series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Mixing by Charlie Brandon King. Fact-checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real. From 99% Invisible, our executive producer is Cathy Tu. From BBC Studios, our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our production coordinator is Shan Pelé. And the production manager is Mabel Finnegan Wright. Artwork by Stefan Lawrence. 99% Invisible is part of the SiriusXM Podcast family,

• 57:39Roman Mars?

  headquartered in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. And BBC Studios is headquartered in beautiful White City, West London.

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