100 Objects #20: AA Sobriety Chip

Sobriety chips and family history

0:00Our 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, Franzia's evil cousin. And you asked yourself, is this normal? Is it normal to feel this way? Let's work our way backwards.

0:23Today on the show, we have the incredible comedian, writer, and podcaster, Jamie Loftus. 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.

1:00Even 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. 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.

1:33They'd protect our family from whatever had happened. And they and my mom's patients 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.

1:51Two 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.

2:22This 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. 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.

2:53The 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. And I found myself on a work trip to Iowa with one of those little white plastic chips in my hand.

3:27One 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. And when I started looking into how that little white chip got there, I found a story that was so profoundly and infuriatingly American.

4:04It's the kind of story that really makes you want to take a drink. Imbued 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.

4:26From 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.

The failure of American prohibition

4:38Alcoholics 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.

5:08I'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 industrialization, World War I, the Great Depression, and a massive early 20th century wave of immigration from Europe to the United States.

5:39But today, with the exception of my close personal friend Ken Burns' docuseries on the topic, Prohibition has been boiled culturally down to two images. The gangster and the flapper. 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.

6:11Think gentlemen prefer blondes and daisy buchanons, 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. 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.

6:44After all, it's the only constitutional amendment that's been repealed. Ever. So why does it get lost in the shuffle? 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. This is Gioia Diliberto, 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.

7:17Prohibition was a crummy idea and it didn't work. I mean, it failed because it was just a bad idea from the get go. You know, I mean, it's incredible that a constitutional amendment was passed instituting Prohibition. 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.

7:47In 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 U.S. at their peak and were a place where men could get a hot lunch, connect with translators and job prospects, cast their ballots, meet their unions, and of course, get blackout drunk on the alcohol of whichever brewery owned the joint.

8:23And 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 drunkards, or at least so wedded to the love of strong drink.

9:00They 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. 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.

9:34And put it 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 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.

10:12And 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. The drive for the vote was completely tied up with the drive to abolish liquor. 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.

10:47On both sides of prohibition, women of all political persuasions are at the top of organizing. 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.

Temperance and women's suffrage

11:04So, 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. 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.

11:37And 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 pours 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. Temperance was the rare cause that allowed roles in political leadership to women, while still presenting itself as a matter that affected the home.

12:09The 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. 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.

12:49But 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.

13:19In 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 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.

13:50It 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. Immigrant communities, many of whom came from cultures that alcohol was an integral part of,

14:23were 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 17th, 1920,

14:54they toasted with a nice glass of lukewarm water, probably, as the 18th Amendment was passed in the United States, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes within the U.S. And less than eight months after that, women got the vote.

15:19In the immediate aftermath of prohibition passing, drinking did go down in the U.S. 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. Almost immediately, a black market developed around what would become the new saloon, the sexy little setting of all those movies, the speakeasy,

15:51and the crooked attempts to enforce prohibition with a fleet of frequently corrupt dry agents using the Volstead Act.

Enforcing a dry nation

15:59And at the very top of this effort was, for a moment in time, the most powerful woman in the American government. All of a sudden, there's a woman, Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who is this young lawyer who was the head of enforcing prohibition during the Jazz Age. Miss Mabel Willebrandt was 32 when she was appointed U.S. assistant attorney after an early career shaped by fighting for women convicted and punished for doing sex work.

16:31Overnight, she became an extremely powerful force in the U.S. government and was given the massive, unpleasant task of enforcing the ban on alcohol. 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 bloc from the get-go, but the men thought that they were going to vote as a bloc, 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.

17:05And so they were looking for a woman, and she fit the bill. So that's how she got the job. Mabel and the Drys 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.

17:35And 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. 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,

18:08they 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 KKK later came out in strong favor of Prohibition policies.

18:42Using 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.

19:01Meanwhile, 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

19:34that men discovered the clitoris, which is certainly a claim. He gives no sources. Mabel Willebrandt 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.

20:06In 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. 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

20:41suddenly becomes very cool. And also those 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.

Organizing to repeal prohibition

21:00And that coincides with the rise of Pauline Sabin. 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. 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.

21:31And 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. 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.

22:03And they always came at it ahead. She fit into this idea of what a modern woman should be, which was glamorous and youthful. 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,

22:36stating 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 7th, 1933, 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. So class,

23:07did 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.

23:38And 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. 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,

24:08a 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 starts to take shape. One that advocated for a kind of private, personal prohibition as the only way out of alcoholism.

24:41Not 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.

25:07Okay, 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 it 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

25:38during 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 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,

26:09a 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 and that those who AA has worked for can get a little swifty about it. And that AA does not work for everyone.

26:41It 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,

27:11imperfect program was the option?

The founding of alcoholics anonymous

27:15Let'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 Cannon, is in town for a business trip after flopping out of Wall Street and law school because of his drinking.

27:45And 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. Eventually, he gets connected with Robert Smith, Dr. Bob in the AAEU. 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.

28:18And 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.

28:33The 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 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

29:04a 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 over to God's plan while maintaining that they were not a religion. They're just a spiritual group, guys.

29:36They just happened 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

30:07over 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

30:38as 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, 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 in gays, but it is heavily implied in the way that their core text is written.

The big book and early exclusion

31:08Their 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.

31:26And you can see exactly how the founders thought about women in that first 1939 edition 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 To 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

31:57to 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 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

32:28in recovery, to the point that his behavior has a shorthand in AA to this day. Thirteenth 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 quote-unquote founder's watch to make sure that his sexual impropriety did not tarnish AA's reputation. Feeling safe?

32:58I 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.

33:28Particularly after a big article in the Saturday Evening Post in 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

33:59was growing on this scale people who felt othered by AA's foundational principles and if chapter 8 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. 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.

34:30Which is confusing in so many ways. Like the logic is hey baby want to see a woman at her absolute lowest? I 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 Now that women form an increasing membership

35:01in 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

35:32around 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 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

36:02about 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 a chapter entitled Women Suffer Too. Boy do they! But thanks to Marty the book acknowledges that the Two Wives chapter

36:33is 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.

Sister ignatia and the sobriety chip

36:55I 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 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

37:26but 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 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.

37:57Which 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 two-thirds men. And you don't need me to tell you that this does not square with the respective populations in these countries. 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.

38:28There 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

38:59Pass 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 opportunity to recover from alcoholism. That is the shining ideal. But unhappily it may not be achieved in our lifetime.

39:20Black 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 the 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

39:52AA 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 as what is referred to as an outside issue by white members. And this harkens back to the Washingtonians, which, as we said before, were thought to have failed as a larger coalition because they, quote unquote, got political. AA elects not to do this, and so what is being invoked

40:22to 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 the years. Today, there are meetings for all of these groups, but it's understandable why people perceive AA as not

40:54really 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

41:2512-step model is, and how ingratiated Alcoholics Anonymous has become in American life. 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

41:55accessible 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.

Higher powers and court mandates

42:07Okay, 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

42:38doing 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 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.

43:08No? 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. What's 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. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

43:38Guys, it's a religion. Come on. God, higher power, and prayer are mentioned in half of the twelve 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 is 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.

44:08But the program talks their way around its clear similarities 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

44:38that 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 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 in my country, and that's not to get into the conservative Christian

45:09values 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. So suppose you are not responsive to AA, and maybe you just want to drink less without surrendering yourself

Modern alternatives to twelve steps

45:26to 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

45:57abstinence and trying to remove this process from shame. 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,

46:29making 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.

46:48So 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

47:18showed 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 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

47:48completely 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. And no matter how you feel about AA, it is inescapably American.

48:20It's 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

48:50episode, 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. 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

49:21talking 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, 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

49:52pause 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

50:23United States. So for now, I'm hanging on to the chip, and I'm going to keep working on it, one, it's hard to avoid saying it, and I'm going to keep working on it, in 24-hour increments.

Credits and upcoming projects

50:42Jamie 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, but is currently available for pre-order right now. Go get it. Everything Jamie does is insightful and funny and cannot be missed. 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

51:14potential 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, or tell an important

51:44tale from American science. So if you have any ideas about those or any other stories, send them to us at 100objects at 99pi.org. We'll be back in your feed in three weeks.

51:59A History of the United States and 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 Riel. From 99% Invisible, our executive producer is Kathy Tu. From BBC Studios, our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney

52:29Harrell. Our production coordinator is Shan Pillay. And the production manager is Mabel Finnegan-Wright. Artwork by Stephen Lawrence. 99% Invisible is part of the SiriusXM podcast family, headquartered in beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. And BBC Studios is headquartered in beautiful, white city, West London. I'm Matt Harris. I'm John time to have aよう ushi, a współprimant house,

53:00overlapping, identifies, County Eastern Philadelphia, 共ots, slash, along with Amy Brown and this episode was of Southern because of a new 1950 have a new world if you're not and it's going to the even the Hawaii to Ан