Alcoholics Anonymous Was Founded in Ohio
On this day · 10 June 1935
Two struggling alcoholics met in Akron in 1935 and built a global recovery movement on one simple idea: talk to someone who understands.
On June 10, 1935, a New York stockbroker named Bill Wilson and an Akron surgeon, Dr. Bob Smith, co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous in Akron, Ohio. The date marks Dr. Bob’s last drink, and members still treat it as the birthday of the fellowship.
Wilson had landed in Akron on a failed business trip and, fighting the urge to drink, decided that talking to another alcoholic might keep him sober. A local Oxford Group member connected him to Smith. Their meeting proved that one alcoholic helping another could succeed where willpower and medicine often failed.
One alcoholic talking to another became the foundation of recovery.
From that conversation grew a deliberately leaderless, anonymous, mutual-support model and the Twelve Steps, later spelled out in the 1939 book that gave the group its name. The approach spread far beyond alcohol, inspiring countless twelve-step programs for other addictions and compulsions worldwide.
Today AA reports nearly two million members in more than 120,000 groups across some 160 countries, making it one of the most widely copied self-help frameworks ever created.
Sources & references
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