A Brief History of the National Council on Alcoholism Through Pictures - History of the National Council on Alcoholism

Wilbur Mills

The 38-year Congressional career of Wilbur D. Mills, an Arkansas Democrat who was chair of the all-powerful House Ways and Means Committee, ended in 1974 after police stopped him driving drunk with companion Fanne Foxe, who proceeded to jump in the Washington Tidal Basin. Mills was actually elected to his final Congressional term the following month, but he lost his committee chair. Mills' initial, glib comment on his behavior was, "Don't go out with foreigners who drink Champagne." Later, his more sober explanation was, "I drank booze, and I mixed the drinks with some highly addictive drugs." After his political career, Mills became a prominent alcoholism lecturer and an NCA board member. As a recovered alcoholic, Mr. Mills explained: "I thought it was a failure on my part. It's a disease from which you can recover and gain back your position in life."

Harold E. Hughes and Mercedes McCambridge

Harold Hughes was an Iowa truck driver, former alcoholic and Kennedy Democrat. He became governor of Iowa from 1963 to 1969, the last Democrat to hold that office. As a Senator, he was known as "Mr. Addiction," and pushed through the 1970 Hughes Act creating the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (which, as NCA lore has it, Smithers sold to President Nixon). He also became a board member of the NCA in 1975. Initially, the NIAAA was highly dependent on the NCA for expertise and the NCA on the NIAAA for money — "As a result, the 1976 NCA's budget peaked at $3.4 million, nearly five times what it had been before the passage of the Hughes Act" (National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, 50th Anniversary).

Between establishing the NIAAA and joining the NCA board, Hughes quit the Senate to work for two religious foundations and established a religious retreat. Hughes described becoming involved with Harold Mulford, an Iowa sociologist and alcoholism activist (one of my heros) in the mid-1960s. But whereas Mulford describes this as the time when he helped to create a wonderful community-based alcoholism treatment system in Iowa, Hughes describes it as a time when he and Mulford began pushing the medical community into dealing with alcoholism.

Mulford, a very gentle man, seems not very fond of Hughes, or certainly of his role in the alcoholism field. For Hughes, the great expenditures and medical dominance of alcoholism that occurred in the 1970s was a Godsend. For Mulford, the cascading monies from the federal and state governments bypassed a self-help, inexpensive, community-based effort in favor of costly, ineffective medical treatments. Almost a decade after retiring from the Senate and his religious phase, Hughes returned to Iowa to create the Harold Hughes Center and became a private alcoholism treatment entrepreneur. According to Mulford, this made Hughes a good deal of money. Hughes died in 1996.

Mercedes McCambridge was an Oscar-wining actress who was an early female celebrity alcoholic for the NCA and who in 1969 became its first honorary chair.

Conversation with Senator Harold Hughes, Addiction, 92:137-149, 1997.

H.A. Mulford, Treating alcoholism versus accelerating the natural recovery process: A cost-benefit comparison, Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 40:505-513, 1979.

H.A. Mulford, Enhancing the natural control of drinking behavior: Catching up with common sense, Contemporary Drug Problems, 321-334, 1988.

Mary Baker (center) with R. Brinkley and Adele Smithers in 1992

Although there was little mention of Adele in NCA and Smithers affairs, after Brinkley's death in 1994 Adele assumed the direction of the Smithers Foundation and became a hard-line defender of abstinence treatment. Speaking on behalf of the NCADD when Moderation Management made the news, Adele intoned, "Millions of Americans have recently seen life-threatening stories in the media claiming that people with alcohol problems don't have to stop drinking completely to get better."

Also, Adele seems to have had a large role in the hiatus in 1993-1995 in contact between the Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies and the refusal of funding for Rutgers by Smithers after that point due to Rutgers' initiation of a brief intervention, controlled-drinking clinic. Among the last letters exchanged between the Smithers Foundation and Rutgers preceding this rough patch was one discussing me, following my article analyzing the relationship between Smithers and Rutgers in Addictive Behaviors.