He was a graduate of the Taft School and received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University in 1903, where he was a member of the Elihu Club at the time it became a secret Senior Society.

"[2] Hazard married Helen Hamilton Campbell (1889–1946), a graduate of Briarcliff Manor College and daughter of a Chicago banker, in October 1910.

Although he briefly served in the Rhode Island state senate (1914–1916), Rowland Hazard III was primarily a businessman throughout his career.

[6] Rowland III was instrumental in completing his father's ambition to play a leading role in the formation of the Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation (later AlliedSignal, then Honeywell following a 1999 merger with that company[7]).

Later in his career, he became an executive vice president of the Bristol Manufacturing Company, a maker of precision instruments based in Waterbury, Connecticut.

[8] His own efforts at recovery were markedly influenced by his consultation with pioneering psychologist Carl Jung and his subsequent involvement with the Oxford Group, one of the most highly visible Christian Evangelical movements of the 1920s and '30s.

Dubiel further suggests that Rowland may have also been treated by Courtenay Baylor, a lay therapist of the psycho-spiritual therapeutic effort known as the Emmanuel Movement.

By late 1934, Wilson was on the verge of total alcoholic collapse, living off his wife's income in the couple's Brooklyn, New York, home, when Ebby paid him a visit.

Bill Wilson went on, with Dr. Robert H. ("Dr. Bob") Smith of Akron, Ohio, to carry the Oxford Group message of spiritual recovery to other alcoholics.

In a 1954 recollection of his early life and the beginnings of AA, Bill Wilson stated that "A well-known American businessman named Rowland Hazard had gone to Zurich, Switzerland, probably in the year 1930 [...] as the court of last resort [...].

[19] This confusion of the historical record appears to have been subsequently resolved by researchers Amy Colwell Bluhm[20] and Cora Finch[21] who, though working independently, were both aided substantially by Hazard family letters and papers in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

It appears likely that Wilson was simply repeating Cebra G.'s (inaccurate) recollection of the dates of Rowland's initial treatment by Jung.

In his 2004 work, Dubiel also discovered evidence that Rowland was likely treated in the early 1930s by Courtenay Baylor, himself a recovering alcoholic and proponent of the so-called Emmanuel Movement.

Dubiel notes that Rowland's later years "appear to have been prosperous enough,"[8] and included his joining the Episcopal Church in 1936, in which he remained active for the rest of his life.