100 Objects #20: AA Sobriety Chip

99% Invisible

Jamie Loftus explores the history of the Alcoholics Anonymous sobriety chip, tracing its connection to the broader American landscape of mor

Key takeaways

• The sobriety chip's origins may be linked to a nun named Sister Ignatia using medallions for patients.
• Prohibition was deeply intertwined with the first wave of American women's suffrage movements.

Main topics

• Alcoholics Anonymous history
• American Prohibition era

Notable quotes

Take things one day at a time.

Conclusion

The episode highlights how the AA chip serves as a potent symbol of bo

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) For many of us, going further isn't a choice. It's a feeling we can't ignore. Because ambition has a way of outgrowing where it began. Turning dreams into direction. Every journey brings us closer to the life we imagine. So, where will your journey take you? Etihad. Beyond Borders. Speaker 4 (0:30) 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, Francia's evil cousin, and you asked yourself, is this normal? Is it normal to feel this way? Let's work our way backwards. Speaker 2 (0:53) Today on the show, we have the incredible comedian, writer, and podcaster, Jamie Loftus. Speaker 4 (0:59) 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. 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. Speaker 4 (2:21) 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. 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. I found myself on a work trip to Iowa with one of those little white plastic chips in my hand. 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. Speaker 2 (4:12) And even though I'm far from alone there, Speaker 4 (4:14) 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. It'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. From Speaker 2 (4:57) 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. Speaker 4 (5:17) 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, Speaker 1 (5:37) or see. Speaker 4 (5:38) 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 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' 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. Think gentlemen prefer blondes and Daisy Buchanans partying in these dank... glamorous speakeasies, drinking martinis, and completely free of the responsibilities Speaker 2 (6:52) of the home. Speaker 4 (6:54) 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. After 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... Partially because everybody thinks they know everything Speaker 3 (7:24) about it. Everyone just thinks, oh, we've heard all those gangster stories a million times and we don't want to listen to them anymore. Speaker 4 (7:32) This is Joya 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. Prohibition was a crummy idea and it didn't work. Speaker 3 (7:50) I Speaker 4 (7:51) mean, it failed because it was just Speaker 3 (7:52) a bad idea from the get-go. I mean, it's incredible that a constitutional amendment was passed instituting prohibition. Speaker 4 (8:02) 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 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. And with the popularity of saloons came the country's first temperance group, the Washingtonian Society. Speaker 2 (9:00) established in Baltimore in 1840. Speaker 4 (9:02) The Washingtonians' philosophy was pretty close to what A.A. 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. 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. Speaker 4 (9:44) 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 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. Speaker 3 (10:56) The drive for the vote was completely tied up with the Speaker 4 (11:02) 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. On both sides of prohibition, women of all political persuasions are at the top of organizing. Speaker 3 (11:24) A woman was in charge of enforcing prohibition and a woman was the catalyst for getting it repealed. And I thought, this is a Speaker 4 (11:32) woman's story. 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. Speaker 3 (11:46) 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 whores 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. Speaker 4 (12:30) 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. Speaker 3 (12:51) 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 Speaker 4 (13:17) really geared up. But they didn't just fight for the vote. Frances Willard, for example, was