Reading 3 of 10 free1776 Club · all 10 storiesWednesday, June 10
1935Featured · This day in history
Dr. Bob's Last Drink: The Founding of Alcoholics Anonymous
Robert Holbrook Smith had checked himself into hospitals and sanitariums more than a dozen times and still could not stop drinking. The Akron, Ohio, surgeon met Bill Wilson — a New York businessman who had found sobriety through the Oxford Group — on May 12, 1935, and the two spent hours talking in a way that neither a doctor nor a clergyman had managed to reach Smith before. Smith relapsed once, at a medical convention in Atlantic City, but on June 10, 1935, he took what became his last drink and walked into surgery. That date is now AA's founding day, still marked every June in Akron.
AA began in an Akron living room and spread through a single Saturday Evening Post article in 1941 that tripled its membership in a year. By 2021, 73 percent of AA's nearly two million members lived in the United States and Canada. The organization reshaped how American medicine, law, and culture understand addiction — moving alcoholism from a moral failing to a treatable condition — and seeded every major twelve-step program that followed.
Did you know
QWhy did Dr. Bob's last drink actually happen on the morning of his surgery — and what did he take?
Smith had already committed to performing an operation on June 10, 1935, before he and Wilson had fully reckoned with the relapse at Atlantic City. He was, by his own account, in no condition to operate. Wilson and Anne agreed he should go through with the surgery rather than cancel on a patient. Smith took a single bottle of beer before leaving the house — enough, he said, to steady his hands and get through the procedure. He walked out of that operating room and never drank again. The date is now AA's founding anniversary, observed every year in Akron as Founders Day, with tours of the historical sites and thousands of members sharing recovery stories.
QHow did a Swiss psychiatrist's conversation with a Rhode Island socialite indirectly help create AA?
Rowland Hazard, a wealthy Rhode Islander, sought treatment from Carl Jung in Zurich in the early 1930s. Jung told him frankly that medicine had nothing more to offer — his only hope might be a spiritual conversion within a religious community. Hazard joined the Oxford Group, achieved sobriety, and carried that message to Ebby Thacher, an old drinking companion of Bill Wilson's. Thacher brought the Oxford Group's approach to Wilson, who found sobriety and eventually carried it to Dr. Bob in Akron. Jung never knew the chain he had set in motion. Wilson wrote to Jung near the end of the psychiatrist's life to tell him; Jung wrote back that he recognized the link.
QWho invented the sobriety coin tradition in AA, and what were they handing out first?
The tradition traces to Sister Ignatia, a Catholic nun who worked alongside Dr. Bob at St. Thomas Hospital in Akron helping alcoholic patients. When patients were discharged, she pressed a small medal — a Sacred Heart medallion — into their hands as a tangible reminder not to drink. The gesture was informal, personal, and entirely her own idea. It gradually became the coin system AA uses today, with different colored chips marking sobriety milestones from twenty-four hours to multiple decades. Sister Ignatia is estimated to have helped more than 15,000 patients during her years in Akron and later in Cleveland, making her one of the most consequential figures in early AA history despite holding no formal role in the organization.
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1692tragedy
Bridget Bishop Becomes the First Person Hanged in the Salem Witch Trials
Colonial Massachusetts in the spring of 1692 was a colony in the grip of fear — accusations of witchcraft had been spreading through Salem since February, and the courts were ready to act. Bridget Bishop, an English-born woman whose black clothing and unconventional manner had long made her a target of Puritan suspicion, was examined on April 19, accused of bewitching five young women, and brought to trial on June 2. Eight days later, the jury returned its verdict, and on June 10, 1692, Bishop was hanged — the first person executed in what would become the most notorious witch trial in American history, and the first woman recorded to die by hanging in the colony.
The Salem trials left a specific mark on American law and memory. By 1702 the Massachusetts General Court had declared the proceedings unlawful, and by 1711 the colonial legislature annulled the convictions — early American institutions correcting themselves in writing, on the record. That self-correction became a template. The last Salem conviction, against Elizabeth Johnson Jr., was not officially exonerated until 2022, a reminder that the legal cleanup took 329 years to finish.
Did you know
QWhat happened when a jury examined Bridget Bishop's body for proof of witchcraft — and then examined it again?
A jury of women convened during Bishop's trial found what they described as a third nipple on her body — at the time, considered a near-certain mark of a witch, believed to be a teat used to suckle a familiar spirit. The find was entered as evidence. Then the jury examined her a second time. The nipple was not there. The court proceeded anyway. The disappearing evidence did nothing to slow the verdict, a detail that captures how little the outcome depended on any particular proof. The decision, as Cotton Mather's own account makes clear, had been reached before the examination began.
QHow long did it take for the last person convicted in the Salem witch trials to be officially exonerated?
Elizabeth Johnson Jr. was convicted during the Salem witch trials in 1693. She was not officially exonerated until 2022 — 329 years later. The Massachusetts colonial legislature had annulled most convictions in 1711, but Johnson was inadvertently left off the list, possibly because she had no descendants to petition on her behalf. A group of eighth-grade civics students in North Andover, Massachusetts, researched her case and successfully lobbied the state legislature to pass a resolution clearing her name. She had no living relatives to receive the news.
QWhy is it difficult to know whether Bridget Bishop actually ran a tavern in Salem — and why does it matter?
The tavern story has followed Bishop into nearly every account of the Salem trials, used as evidence of her disreputable lifestyle. The problem is that Salem in the 1690s had another woman named Sarah Bishop, and historians have noted that records attributed to Bridget may belong to Sarah instead. The mix-up matters because the tavern detail — like the torn coat and the unusual clothing — helped build the portrait of a woman outside Puritan norms, and that portrait was the real engine of her conviction. How much of it was accurate, and how much was projection onto the wrong person, remains an open question.
1964civil-rights
The 72-Day Filibuster Breaks: Senate Clears the Way for the Civil Rights Act of 1964
Since March 30, the Senate floor had been held hostage — eighteen Southern Democrats and one Republican running the longest filibuster in Senate history to kill a bill that would outlaw discrimination in public life. On June 10, 1964, West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd closed out a 14-hour, 13-minute speech, the final act of 72 days of obstruction. The Senate voted 71 to 29 to end debate, and nine days later passed the Civil Rights Act on a 73-to-27 tally. President Lyndon Johnson signed it into law on July 2.
U.S. Senate Chamber, U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C.Story page →
The American Throughline
The Civil Rights Act rewrote the legal relationship between the federal government and its citizens, outlawing discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and federally assisted programs. Its passage also began realigning American politics: the South, a Democratic stronghold since Reconstruction, drifted steadily Republican over the following decades — a transformation that continues to define the country's electoral map. Every major civil rights statute since, including the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, was built on its framework.
Did you know
QHow did a senator who couldn't speak cast one of the most consequential votes in Senate history?
Senator Clair Engle of California had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and was largely unable to speak by the time of the cloture vote on June 10, 1964. Senate staff wheeled him into the chamber specifically for the roll call. When the clerk reached his name, Engle raised his arm and pointed to his left eye — a wordless signal his colleagues and the clerk understood as an affirmative vote. His 'aye' was counted. The final tally to end the filibuster was 71 to 29, meaning every single vote was load-bearing. Engle died just weeks later, in July 1964, shortly after Johnson signed the act into law.
QWho was the only Southern senator to vote for the Civil Rights Act — and why does that matter?
Of the Senate's Southern delegation, only Ralph Yarborough of Texas voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act on June 19, 1964. Every other senator from the former Confederate states voted no, a bloc that included some of the longest-serving and most institutionally powerful members of the chamber. Yarborough's vote was a political risk in Texas — he faced continued opposition from the state's conservative wing — but it made him a singular figure in the final tally of 73 to 27. The near-unanimity of Southern opposition, and Yarborough's isolation within it, illustrated exactly the regional fault line the act's passage would eventually rupture.
QWhat did Johnson say about Kennedy's memory when he pushed the civil rights bill, and why was the timing significant?
In his first address to a joint session of Congress following Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, Lyndon Johnson made the civil rights bill the centerpiece of his appeal: 'No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.' Johnson understood something tactically precise — Kennedy's death had generated a moment of national grief that could be converted into legislative will. The bill had been stalled before the assassination. By invoking Kennedy directly, Johnson put opponents in the uncomfortable position of blocking what the country had just turned into a martyred president's legacy.
