Seven Cleveland Plain Dealer Newspaper articles
that led up to a sermon by Rev. Lupton
Regarding Mr X and Alcoholics Anonymous
Mr. X was Clarence Snyder

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full text of Lupton Sermon is below

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Lupton Sermon

Reprinted from the October 21, 1939 Cleveland Plain Dealer with permission

Alcoholics Anonymous Makes Its
Stand Here

By ELRICK B. DAVIS

Much has been written about Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization doing major
work in reclaiming the habitual drinker. This is the first of a series describing the
work the group is doing in Cleveland.

Success

By now it is a rare Clevelander who does not know, or know of, at least one man or
woman of high talent whose drinking had become a public scandal, and who suddenly has
straightened out "over night," as the saying goes-the liquor habit licked. Men who have
lost $15,000 a year jobs have them back again. Drunks who have taken every "cure"
available to the most lavish purse, only to take them over again with equally spectacular
lack of success, suddenly have become total abstainers, apparently without anything to
account for their reform. Yet something must account for the seeming miracle. Something
does.

Alcoholics Anonymous has reached the town.

Fellowship

Every Thursday evening at the home of some ex-drunk in Cleveland, 40 or 50 former
hopeless rummies meet for a social evening during which they buck each other up. Nearly
every Saturday evening they and their families have a party � just as gay as any other
party held that evening despite the fact that there is nothing alcoholic to drink. From time
to time they have a picnic, where everyone has a roaring good time without the aid of
even one bottle of beer. Yet these are men and women who, until recently, had scarcely
been sober a day for years, and members of their families who all that time had been
emotionally distraught, social and economic victims of another's addition.

These ex-rummies, as they call themselves, suddenly salvaged from the most socially
noisome of fates, are the members of the Cleveland Fellowship of an informal society
called "Alcoholics Anonymous." Who they are cannot be told, because the name means
exactly what it says. But any incurable alcoholic who really wants to be cured will find the
members of the Cleveland chapter eager to help.

The society maintains a "blind" address: The Alcoholic Foundation, Box 657, Church
Street Annex Postoffice, New York City. Inquiries made there are forwarded to a
Cleveland banker, who is head of the local Fellowship, or to a former big league ball
player who is recruiting officer of the Akron Fellowship, which meets Wednesday
evenings in a mansion loaned for the purpose by a non-alcoholic supporter of the
movement.

Cured

The basic point about Alcoholics Anonymous is that it is a fellowship of "cured"
alcoholics. And that both old-line medicine and modern psychiatry had agreed on the one
point that no alcoholic could be cured. Repeat the astounding fact:

These are cured.

They have cured each other.

They have done it by adopting, with each other's aid, what they call "a spiritual way of
life."

"Incurable" alcoholism is not a moral vice. It is a disease. No dipsomaniac drinks because
he wants to. He drinks because he can't help drinking.

He will drink when he had rather die than take a drink. That is why so many alcoholics die
as suicides. He will get drunk on the way home from the hospital or sanitarium that has
just discharged him as "cured." He will get drunk at the wake of a friend who died of
drink. He will swear off for a year, and suddenly find himself half-seas over, well into
another "bust." He will get drunk at the gates of an insane asylum where he has just visited
an old friend, hopeless victim of "wet brain."

Prayer

These are the alcoholics that "Alcoholics Anonymous" cures. Cure is impossible until the
victim is convinced that nothing that he or a "cure" hospital can do, can help. He must
know that his disease is fatal. He must be convinced that he is hopelessly sick of body,
and of mind � and of soul. He must be eager to accept help from any source � even
God.

Alcoholics Anonymous has a simple explanation for an alcoholic's physical disease. It was
provided them by the head of one of New York City's oldest and most famous "cure"
sanitariums. The alcoholic is allergic to alcohol. One drink sets up a poisonous craving that
only more of the poison can assuage. That is why after the first drink the alcoholic cannot
stop.

They have a psychiatric theory equally simple and convincing. Only an alcoholic can
understand another alcoholic's mental processes and state. And they have an equally
simple, if unorthodox, conception of God.

Reprinted from the October 23, 1939 Cleveland Plain Dealer with permission

Alcoholics Anonymous Makes Its
Stand Here

By ELRICK B. DAVIS

In a previous installment, Mr. Davis outlined the plan of Alcoholics Anonymous, an
organization of former drinkers who have found a solution to liquor in association
for mutual aid. This is the second of a series.

Religion

There is no blinking the fact that Alcoholics Anonymous, the amazing society of ex-drunks
who have cured each other of an incurable disease, is religious. Its members have cured
each other frankly with the help of God. Every cured member of the Cleveland Fellowship
of the society, like every cured member of the other chapters now established in Akron,
New York, and elsewhere in the country, is cured with the admission that he submitted his
plight wholeheartedly to a Power Greater than Himself.

He has admitted his conviction that science cannot cure him, that he cannot control his
pathological craving for alcohol himself, and that he cannot be cured by the prayers,
threats, or pleas of his family, employers, or friends. His cure is a religious experience. He
had to have God's aid. He had to submit to a spiritual housecleaning.

Alcoholics Anonymous is a completely informal society, wholly latitudinarian in every
respect but one. It prescribes a simple spiritual discipline, which must be followed rigidly
every day. The discipline is fully explained in a book published by the society.

Discipline

That is what makes the notion of the cure hard for the usual alcoholic to take, at first
glance, no matter how complete his despair. He wants to join no cult. He has lost faith, if
he ever had it, in the power of religion to help him. But each of the cures accomplished by
Alcoholics Anonymous is a spiritual awakening. The ex-drunk has adopted what the
society calls "a spiritual way of life."

How, then, does Alcoholics Anonymous differ from the other great religious movements
which have changed social history in America? Wherein does the yielding to God that
saves a member of this society from his fatal disease, differ from that which brought the
Great Awakening that Jonathan Edwards preached, or the New Light revival of a century
ago, or the flowering of Christian Science, or the campmeeting evangelism of the old
Kentucky-Ohio frontier, or the Oxford Group successes nowadays?

Every member of Alcoholics Anonymous may define God to suit himself. God to him may
be the Christian God defined by the Thomism of the Roman Catholic Church. Or the stern
Father of the Calvinist. Or the Great Manitou of the American Indian. Or the Implicit
Good assumed in the logical morality of Confucius. Or Allah, or Buddha, or the Jehovah
of the Jews. Or Christ the Scientist. Or no more than the Kindly Spirit implicitly assumed
in the "atheism" of a Col. Robert Ingersoll.

Aid

If the alcoholic who comes to the fellowship for help believes in God, in the specific way
of any religion or sect, the job of cure is easier. But if all that the pathological drunk can
do is to say, with honesty, in his heart: "Supreme Something, I am done for without
more-than-human help," that is enough for Alcoholics Anonymous to work on. The noble
prayers, the great literatures, and the time-proved disciplines of the established religions
are a great help. But as far as the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous is concerned, a
pathological drunk can call God "It" if he wants to, and is willing to accept Its aid. If he'll
do that, he can be cured.

Poll of "incurable" alcoholics who now, cured, are members of the Cleveland Fellowship
of the society, shows that this has made literally life-saving religious experience possible to
men and women who, otherwise, could not have accepted spiritual help. Poll shows also
that collectively their religious experience has covered every variety known to religious
psychology. Some have had an experience as blindingly bright as that which struck down
Saul on the road to Damascus. Some are not even yet intellectually convinced except to
the degree that they see that living their lives on a spiritual basis has cured them of a fatal
disease. Drunk for years because they couldn't help it, now it never occurs to them to
want a drink. Whatever accounts for that, they are willing to call "God."

Some find more help in formal religion than do others. A good many of the Akron chapter
find help in the practices of the Oxford Group. The Cleveland chapter includes a number
of Catholics and several Jews, and at least one man to whom "God" is "Nature." Some
practice family devotions. Some simply cogitate about "It" in the silence of their minds. But
that the Great Healer cured them with only the help of their fellow ex-drunks, they all
admit.

Reprinted from the October 24, 1939 Cleveland Plain Dealer with permission

Alcoholics Anonymous Makes Its
Stand Here

By ELRICK B. DAVIS

In two previous articles, Mr. Davis told of Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization
of former drinkers, banded to overcome their craving for liquor and to help others
to forego the habit. This is the third of a series.

Help

The ex-drunks cured of their medically incurable alcoholism by membership in Alcoholic
Anonymous, know that the way to keep themselves from backsliding is to find another
pathological alcoholic to help. Or to start a new man toward cure. That is the way that the
Akron chapter of the society, and from that, the Cleveland fellowship was begun.

One of the earliest of the cured rummies had talked a New York securities house into
taking a chance that he was really through with liquor. He was commissioned to do a
stock promotion chore in Akron. If he should succeed, his economic troubles also would
be cured. Years of alcoholism had left him bankrupt as well as a physical and social
wreck before Alcoholics Anonymous had saved him.

His Akron project failed. Here he was on a Saturday afternoon in a strange hotel in a
town where he did not know a soul, business hopes blasted, and with scarcely money
enough to get him back to New York with a report that would leave him without the last
job he knew of for him in the world. If ever disappointment deserved drowning, that
seemed the time. A bunch of happy folk were being gay at the bar.

At the other end of the lobby the Akron church directory was framed in glass. He looked
up the name of a clergyman. The cleric told him of a woman who was worried about a
physician who was a nightly solitary drunk. The doctor had been trying to break himself of
alcoholism for twenty years. He had tried all of the dodges: Never anything but light wines
or beer; never a drink alone; never a drink before his work was done; a certain few
number of drinks and then stop; never drink in a strange place; never drink in a familiar
place; never mix the drinks; always mix the drinks; never drink before eating; drink only
while eating; drink and then eat heavily to stop the craving � and all of the rest.

Every alcoholic knows all of the dodges. Every alcoholic has tried them all. That is why an
uncured alcoholic thinks someone must have been following him around to learn his
private self-invented devices, when a member of Alcoholics Anonymous talks to him.
Time comes when any alcoholic has tried them all, and found that none of them work.

Support

The doctor had just taken his first evening drink when the rubber baron's wife telephoned
to ask him to come to her house to meet a friend from New York. He dared not, his wife
would not, offend her by refusing. He agreed to go on his wife's promise that they would
leave after 15 minutes. His evening jitters were pretty bad.

He met the New Yorker at 5 o'clock. They talked until 11:15. After that he stayed "dry"
for three weeks. Then he went to a convention in Atlantic City. That was a bender. The
cured New Yorker was at his bedside when he came to. That was June 10, 1935. The
doctor hasn't had a drink since. Every Akron and Cleveland cure by Alcoholics
Anonymous is a result.

The point the society illustrates by that bit of history is that only an alcoholic can talk
turkey to an alcoholic. The doctor knew all of the "medicine" of his disease. He knew all
of the psychiatry. One of his patients had "taken the cure" 72 times. Now he is cured, by
fellowship in Alcoholics Anonymous. Orthodox science left the physician licked. He also
knew all of the excuses, as well as the dodges, and the deep and fatal shame that makes a
true alcoholic sure at last that he can't win. Alcoholic death or the bughouse will get him in
time.

The cured member of Alcoholics Anonymous likes to catch a prospective member when
he is at the bottom of the depths. When he wakes up of a morning with his first clear
thought regret that he is not dead before he hears where he has been and what he has
done. When he whispers to himself: "Am I crazy?" and the only answer he can think of is:
"Yes." Even when the bright-eyed green snakes are crawling up his arms.

Then the pathological drinker is willing to talk. Even eager to talk to someone who really
understands, from experience, what he means when he says: "I can't understand myself."

Reprinted from the October 25, 1939 Cleveland Plain Dealer with permission

Alcoholics Anonymous Makes Its
Stand Here

By ELRICK B. DAVIS

In three previous articles, Mr. Davis has told of Alcoholics Anonymous, an
organization of former drinkers banded to break the liquor habit and to save others
from over drinking. This is the fourth of a series.

Understanding

What gets the pathological drinker who finally has reached such state that he is willing to
listen to a cured rummy member of Alcoholics Anonymous, is that the retrieved alcoholic
not only understands what only another alcoholic can understand, but a great deal that the
unreformed drunk thinks no one else could know because he has never told anyone, and
his difficulties or escapades must be private to his own history.

Fact is the history of all alcoholics is the same; some have been addicts longer than others,
and some have painted brighter red patches around the town � that is all. What they
have heard in the "cure" hospitals they have frequented, or from the psychoanalysts they
have consulted, or the physicians who have tapered them off one bender or another at
home, has convinced them that alcoholism is a disease. But they are sure (a) that their
version of the disease differs from everyone else's and (b) that in them it hasn't reached
the incurable stage anyway.

Head of the "cure" told them: "If you ever take another drink, you'll be back."
Psychoanalyst said "Psychologically, you have never been weaned. Your subconscious is
still trying to get even with your mother for some forgotten slight." Family or hotel
physician said "If you don't quite drinking, you'll die."

Reproof

Lawyers, ministers, business partners and employers, parents and wives, also are
professionally dedicated to listening to confidences and accepting confessions without
undue complaint. But the clergyman may say: "Your drinking is a sin." And partner or
employer: "You'll have to quit this monkey business or get out." And wife or parent: "This
drinking is breaking my heart." And everyone: "Why don't you exercise some will power
and straighten up and be a man."

"But," the alcoholic whispers in his heart. "No one but I can know that I must drink to kill
suffering too great to stand."

He presents his excuses to the retrieved alcoholic who has come to talk. Can't sleep
without liquor. Worry. Business troubles. Debt. Alimentary pains. Overwork. Nerves too
high strung. Grief. Disappointment. Deep dark phobic fears. Fatigue. Family difficulties.
Loneliness.

The catalog has got no farther than that when the member of Alcoholics Anonymous
begins rattling off an additional list.

"Hogwash," he says. "Don't try those alibis on me. I have used them all myself."

Understanding

And then he tells his own alcoholic history, certainly as bad, perhaps far worse than the
uncured rummy's. They match experiences. Before he knows it the prospect for cure has
told his new friend things he had never admitted even to himself. A rough and ready
psychiatry, that, but it works, as the cured members of the Cleveland Chapter of
Alcoholics Anonymous all are restored to society to testify. And that is the reason for the
fellowship's weekly gatherings. They are testimonial meetings. The members meet to find
new victims to cure, and to buck each other up. For years their social and emotional life
has all been elbow-bending. Now they provide each other a richer society to replace the
old. Hence, the fellowship's family parties and picnics.

Never for a moment do they forget that a practicing alcoholic is a very sick person. Never
for a moment can they forget that even medical men who know the nature of the disease
are apt to feel that failure to recover is a proof of moral perversity in the patient. If a man
is dying of cancer, no one says: "Why doesn't he exercise some will power and kill that
cancer off." If he is coughing his lungs out with tuberculosis, no one says: "Buck up and
quit coughing; be a man." They may say to the first: "Submit to surgery before it is too
late;" to the second: "Take a cure before you are dead."

Religion

Retrieved alcoholics talk in that fashion to their uncured fellows. They say: "You are a
very sick man. Physically sick � you have an allergy to alcohol. We can put you in a
hospital that will sweat that poison out. Mentally sick. We know how to cure that. And
spiritually sick.

"To cure your spiritual illness you will have to admit God. Name your own God, or define
Him to suit yourself. But if you are really willing to 'do anything' to get well, and if it is
really true � and we know it is � that you drink when you don't want to and that you
don't know why you get drunk, you'll have to quit lying to yourself and adopt a spiritual
way of life. Are you ready to accept help?"

And the miracle is that, for alcoholics brought to agreement by pure desperation, so
simple a scheme works.

Cleveland alone has 50 alcoholics, all former notorious drunks, now members of
Alcoholics Anonymous to prove it. None is a fanatic prohibitionist. None has a quarrel
with liquor legitimately used by people physically, nervously, and spiritually equipped to
use it. They simply know that alcoholics can't drink and live, and that their "incurable"
disease has been conquered.

Reprinted from the October 26, 1939 Cleveland Plain Dealer with permission

Alcoholics Anonymous Makes Its
Stand Here

By ELRICK B. DAVIS

In previous installments, Mr. Davis has told of Alcoholics Anonymous, an informal
society of drinking men who have joined together to beat the liquor habit This is the
last of five articles.

No Graft

It is hard for the skeptical to believe that no one yet has found a way to muscle into
Alcoholics Anonymous, the informal society of ex-drunks that exists only to cure each
other, and make a money-making scheme of it. Or that someone will not. The complete
informality of the society seems to be what has saved it from that. Members pay no dues.
The society has no paid staff. Parties are "Dutch." Meetings are held at the homes of
members who have houses large enough for such gatherings, or in homes of persons who
may not be alcoholics but are sympathetic with the movement.

Usually a drunk needs hospitalization at the time that he is caught to cure. He is required
to pay for that himself. Doubtless he hasn't the money. But probably his family has. Or his
employer will advance the money to save him, against his future pay. Or cured members
of the society will help him arrange credit, if he has a glimmer of credit left. Or old friends
will help.

At the moment members of the Cleveland Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous are
searching the slum lodging houses to find a man, once eminent in the city's professional
life. A medical friend of his better days called them in to find him. This friend will pay the
hospital bill necessary to return this victim of an "incurable" craving for drink to physical
health, if the society will take him on.

The society has published a book, called "Alcoholics Anonymous," which it sells at $3.50.
It may be ordered from an anonymous address, Works Publishing Co., Box 657, Church
Street Annex Postoffice, New York City; or bought from the Cleveland Fellowship of the
society. There is no money profit for anyone in that book.

It recites the history of the society and lays down its principles in its first half. Last half is
case histories of representative cures out of the first hundred alcoholics cured by
membership in the society. It was written and compiled by the New York member who
brought the society to Ohio. He raised the money on his personal credit to have the book
published. He would like to see those creditors repaid. It is a 400-page book, for which
any regular publisher would charge the same price. Copies bought from local Fellowships
net the local chapters a dollar each.

The Rev. Dr. Dilworth Lupton, pastor of the First Unitarian Church of Cleveland, found in
a religious journal an enthusiastic review of the book by the Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick,
and sent it to the president of the local Fellowship. It has been similarly noted in some
medical journals.

The Foundation

To handle the money that comes in for the book, and occasional gifts from persons
interested in helping ex-drunks to cure other "incurable" drunks, the Alcoholics
Foundation has been established, with a board of seven directors.

Three of these are members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Four are not alcoholics, but New
Yorkers of standing interested in humane movements. Two of them happen also to be
associated with the Rockefeller Foundation, but that does not associate the two
foundations in any way.

First problem of the Cleveland Fellowship was to find a hospital willing to take a drunk in
and give him the medical attention first necessary to any cure. Two reasons made that
hard. Hospitals do not like to have alcoholics as patients; they are nuisances. And the
society requires that as soon as a drunk has been medicated into such shape that he can
see visitors, members of the society must be permitted to see him at any time. That has
been arranged. The local society would like to have a kitty of $100 to post with the
hospital as evidence of good faith. But if it gets it, it will only be from voluntary
contributions of members.

Meantime the members, having financed their own cures, spend enormous amounts of
time and not a little money in helping new members. Psychiatrists say that if an alcoholic is
to be cured, he needs a hobby. His old hobby had been only alcohol. Hobby of
Alcoholics Anonymous is curing each other. Telephone calls, postage and stationery,
gasoline bills, mount up for each individual. And hospitality to new members. A rule of the
society is that each member's latch string is always out to any other member who needs
talk or quiet, which may include a bed or a meal, at any time.