The Origins of Alcoholics Anonymous: How AA Was Founded in 1935

A Meeting That Changed Everything

On May 12, 1935, in a hotel lobby in Akron, Ohio, a desperate New York stockbroker named William Griffith Wilson made a phone call that would alter the course of addiction treatment history. Wilson — known to millions simply as "Bill W." — had been sober for only six months, and he was terrified of relapsing. Rather than seeking a drink, he sought another alcoholic to talk to. That search led him to Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith, a local surgeon whose drinking had nearly destroyed his career and family. Their conversation that afternoon, and the weeks of meetings that followed, gave birth to what would become Alcoholics Anonymous.

The founding of AA did not happen in a single dramatic moment. It was the culmination of years of suffering, failed attempts at sobriety, spiritual searching, and the slow crystallization of a simple but radical idea: that one alcoholic talking honestly with another could accomplish what doctors, clergy, and willpower alone could not.

Bill Wilson: The Man Behind the Movement

William Griffith Wilson was born on November 26, 1895, in East Dorset, Vermont. His childhood was marked by abandonment — his parents separated when he was ten, and he was raised by his maternal grandparents. Biographers have noted that Wilson showed signs of depression and social anxiety from an early age, traits that would follow him throughout his life and that he would later describe as part of the emotional landscape that made him vulnerable to alcoholism.

Wilson discovered alcohol during World War I, when he was stationed in the American South before deployment to Europe. He described his first drink — a Bronx cocktail at a dinner party — as a revelation: "That strange barrier that had always existed between me and other people seemed to melt away." This sense of belonging and ease, so elusive in his sober life, would drive his drinking for the next seventeen years.

By the early 1930s, Wilson's alcoholism had cost him his career on Wall Street, his health, and very nearly his marriage to Lois Burnham Wilson, who would later found Al-Anon. He was hospitalized four times at Towns Hospital in New York City, a facility that used a controversial "belladonna cure" — a combination of hallucinogenic drugs intended to produce a spiritual experience that might break the compulsion to drink. The cure did not work for Wilson in any lasting way, but his fourth admission in December 1934 produced an experience that he described for the rest of his life as a genuine spiritual awakening.

"Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light," Wilson later wrote. "I was caught up into an ecstasy which there are no words to describe... I thought to myself, 'So this is the God of the preachers!' A great peace stole over me." Whether this experience was the product of the belladonna treatment, a genuine mystical event, or some combination of the two has been debated by historians and theologians ever since. What is not debated is its effect: Wilson never drank again.

The Oxford Group and the Seeds of the Steps

Before his hospitalization, Wilson had been introduced to the Oxford Group, an evangelical Christian movement founded by American missionary Frank Buchman that emphasized personal moral inventory, confession of wrongs, restitution, and reliance on God. Wilson's friend and fellow alcoholic Ebby Thacher had gotten sober through the Oxford Group and brought its message to Wilson in the fall of 1934.

The Oxford Group's principles — which included self-examination, acknowledgment of character defects, making amends, and helping others — would form the philosophical backbone of what became the 12 Steps. Wilson was not a conventionally religious man, and he would later work hard to make AA's spiritual framework broad enough to include people of all faiths and none. But the Oxford Group gave him the raw material from which the Steps were eventually crafted.

After his spiritual experience at Towns Hospital, Wilson threw himself into Oxford Group meetings in New York, trying to carry his message to other alcoholics. For six months, he had no success. Not a single person he worked with got sober. It was in this state of discouragement that he found himself in Akron in May 1935, on a failed business trip, standing in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel with ten dollars in his pocket and a powerful urge to drink.

Dr. Bob Smith: The Co-Founder

Robert Holbrook Smith was born on August 8, 1879, in St. Johnsbury, Vermont — the same state as Wilson, a coincidence that both men later found meaningful. He was a Dartmouth-educated physician who had been struggling with alcoholism for decades by the time Wilson found him. His drinking had become so severe that his surgical colleagues had largely stopped referring patients to him, and his wife Anne had been holding the family together through sheer force of will and faith.

Smith was also a member of the Oxford Group, which is how Wilson's mutual contact, Henrietta Seiberling, was able to arrange their meeting. Unlike Wilson's previous attempts to help alcoholics, this conversation was different from the start. Wilson did not lecture Smith or offer him a cure. He simply told his own story — the obsession, the failed attempts to stop, the spiritual experience, the fragile new sobriety. Smith later said that hearing another man describe his own experience from the inside was unlike anything a doctor or minister had ever said to him. "He was the first living human with whom I had ever talked," Smith recalled, "who knew what he was talking about in regard to alcoholism from actual experience."

The two men met daily for weeks. Smith continued to drink — he had a medical conference to attend and was convinced he could manage one last controlled drinking episode. He could not. On June 10, 1935, after Wilson helped him through a severe hangover with a beer to steady his hands for surgery, Robert Smith took his last drink. June 10 is celebrated by AA members worldwide as "Dr. Bob's last drink" and is considered the official founding date of Alcoholics Anonymous.

The First Group and the Writing of the Big Book

Wilson and Smith began working with other alcoholics in Akron almost immediately. Their first success was Bill Dotson, a lawyer known in AA history as "AA Number Three," who got sober in the summer of 1935 and remained sober until his death. By the end of 1935, there were small groups of sober alcoholics meeting in Akron and New York. By 1937, Wilson counted forty men who had achieved significant sobriety through the method he and Smith had developed.

It was at this point that Wilson began to think about writing down the program. The informal, word-of-mouth approach was working, but it was inconsistent. Different people were telling the story differently. Wilson wanted a text that could carry the message to people who could not attend meetings — to alcoholics in hospitals, in prisons, in remote areas. He also wanted something that would give the nascent fellowship a stable identity and a clear set of principles.

The writing of what became known as the Big Book — formally titled Alcoholics Anonymous — took place between 1937 and 1939. Wilson wrote most of the text himself, but it was reviewed and debated by the early membership in a process that was sometimes contentious. The most significant debate was over the explicitly Christian language of the early drafts. Several members, including a New York agnostic named Jimmy Burr, pushed back hard against language that seemed to require belief in a specific God. Wilson, to his credit, listened. The final text replaced "God" with "God as we understood Him" in several key passages and introduced the concept of a "Higher Power" that each individual could define for themselves. This single editorial decision would prove to be one of the most consequential in the history of addiction treatment, opening the door of AA to people of all religious backgrounds and none.

The Big Book was published on April 10, 1939. The first printing of 4,730 copies sold slowly at first. But a favorable review in Liberty magazine in September 1939 generated thousands of letters to AA's New York office, and the fellowship began to grow rapidly. By 1941, following a feature article in the Saturday Evening Post, AA had grown to 8,000 members. By the time of Wilson's death in 1971, there were more than 300,000 members in over 13,000 groups worldwide.

The Legacy of 1935

The significance of what Wilson and Smith created in Akron in 1935 is difficult to overstate. Before AA, alcoholism was widely regarded as a moral failing, a weakness of character, or a form of insanity. Alcoholics were treated with contempt by the medical establishment, condemned by the clergy, and abandoned by their families. There was no effective treatment. Hospitals could dry people out, but they could not keep them sober. The recidivism rate was essentially 100 percent.

AA introduced several ideas that were genuinely revolutionary for their time. First, it proposed that alcoholism was a disease — or at least a condition with disease-like characteristics — rather than a moral failure. Second, it demonstrated that peer support, the sharing of lived experience between people who had suffered the same condition, could be therapeutically powerful in a way that professional treatment alone was not. Third, it created a scalable, self-replicating model of mutual aid that required no professional staff, no funding, and no central authority to sustain itself.

These ideas have since been validated by decades of research. The peer support model pioneered by AA has been adopted across the spectrum of addiction treatment and has influenced the development of support groups for dozens of other conditions, from cancer to eating disorders to grief. The concept of the "sponsor" — a more experienced member who guides a newcomer through the program — anticipates what modern psychology calls "mentorship" and "social support," both of which are now recognized as critical factors in long-term recovery outcomes.

AA is not without its critics. Some researchers have questioned the evidence base for the 12-step model, and the program's spiritual framework is not accessible to everyone. Alternative approaches — including SMART Recovery, medication-assisted treatment, and secular mutual aid groups — have emerged to serve people for whom AA does not work. These alternatives are valuable and important, and Sobriety Navigator honors all pathways to recovery.

But the story of Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith in that Akron hotel lobby remains one of the most consequential meetings in the history of public health. From that conversation grew a fellowship that has helped millions of people achieve sobriety and rebuild their lives — and that continues to do so, one meeting at a time, in church basements and community centers and online platforms around the world.

Key Dates in AA's Early History

• December 1934: Bill Wilson's spiritual experience at Towns Hospital, New York.
• May 12, 1935: Wilson and Smith meet for the first time in Akron, Ohio.
• June 10, 1935: Dr. Bob Smith takes his last drink — considered AA's founding date.
• 1937: Wilson counts forty long-term sober members; begins planning the Big Book.
• April 10, 1939: Alcoholics Anonymous (the Big Book) is published.
• 1941: Saturday Evening Post article drives membership to 8,000.
• 1950: First International AA Convention; Dr. Bob Smith dies on November 16.
• 1971: Bill Wilson dies on January 24; AA has over 300,000 members worldwide.