I Was a Teenage Opportunist Who Preyed on Lil’ Anarchists
Selling ‘The Anarchist’s Cookbook’ in a pre-Columbine world
Deaths have a tendency to shake loose memories. William Powell wrote The Anarchist’s Cookbook in 1969 at the tender age of 19. Powell died of a heart attack in July of 2016, but the world didn’t learn of his death until March 29, 2017.
Powell expressed remorse for the book in later years and a new documentary and 2013 editorial for The Guardian serve as his last words on the subject.
“My motivation at the time was simple; I was being actively pursued by the U.S. military, who seemed single-mindedly determined to send me to fight, and possibly die, in Vietnam,” Powell wrote in The Guardian. “I wanted to publish something that would express my anger. It seems that I succeeded in ways that far exceeded what I imagined possible at the time.”
Succeed he did. The Anarchist’s Cookbook spread far and wide, selling more than two million copies. In the early days of the internet, the book circulated on usenet groups and bulletin board services. People downloaded the manual, remixed it, printed it out and shared it with friends.
I should know. I made a ton of cash selling copies of the thing to my classmates in middle school.
I don’t remember how much exactly, but I know it was a couple of hundred bucks — a lot of money when you’re in your teens. Our crew split it three ways and it still felt like all the money in the world at the time. We got caught, of course, but in retrospect our timing was perfect.
This was pre-Columbine. Public schools in the mid-to-late 1990s didn’t yet live in fear of black trench coats, Marilyn Manson and kids passing around subversive reading material. Me and my two conspirators were fucking lucky, is what I’m saying.
Given everything that I and my school district experienced in the months after Columbine, it’s a damn good thing someone ratted out our little publishing enterprise a year before the shooting.
One of my conspirators — I’ll call him T — had older brother who found the notorious book floating around on the internet. He printed out a hard copy and gave us a 3.5-inch floppy disc containing the manual. We flipped through it, laughed, made some “napalm” out of gasoline and styrofoam and then figured we could make good money selling copied discs at $3.50 a pop.
T was a notorious fire-bug and he led the charge on most of our backyard experiments. The most I ever did was light some gooey “napalm” clusters out in the woods before stomping them out with my feet. T did much more and almost set his house on fire.
He’s a successful financial analyst, now.
To write The Anarchist’s Cookbook, Powell went into the New York Public Library and collected publicly available information from military manuals, firearms guides and chemistry textbooks.
He was an original aggregator — it’s not that this info wasn’t out there, it’s just that Powell was the first person to put it all in once place.
Since then, authorities inevitably find the book in the homes or possession of assorted mass shooters and terrorists. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh had a copy, as did members of the Black Liberation Army and Weather Underground cops scooped up in the mid-’80s. Columbine shooter Eric Harris had a copy.
“The Cookbook has been found in the possession of alienated and disturbed young people who have launched attacks against classmates and teachers,” Powell wrote in The Guardian. “I suspect that the perpetrators of these attacks did not feel much of a sense of belonging, and the Cookbook may have added to their sense of isolation.”
Powell mellowed out as he aged, turning from an angry young man to a worldly teacher who focused on disadvantaged youth in Africa and the Middle East. “I do not know the influence the book may have had on the thinking of the perpetrators of these attacks, but I cannot imagine that it was positive,” Powell wrote. “The continued publication of the Cookbook serves no purpose other than a commercial one for the publisher. It should quickly and quietly go out of print.”
I helped keep the damn thing in print, in my own way, back when I was much younger and much less wise. I don’t think of myself as a rebel or an anarchist. I didn’t want to blow up the school, but I did want to make a quick buck. I’m not Powell in this analogy, I’m the greedy publishers. I’m not proud of it.
The pall of The Anarchist’s Cookbook lingered around Powell for the rest of his life. As news of his death hit the world, his obituaries noted his service to children, but the headlines all called him the author of the the notorious manual. That’s his legacy.
When I was a kid, one of our customers ratted us out. I never found out the details of the betrayal and it doesn’t much matter. Administrators brought us into a room, grilled us and told us not to do it again. I think they called our parents, but I don’t remember going to detention or my parents grounding me. I imagine a middle-schooler selling copies of The Anarchist’s Cookbook today would face immediate expulsion.
Again, this was before Columbine.
We got lucky. A year or so after the adults caught us, two angry young men walked into their school in Littleton, Colorado and killed 13 people before turning the weapons on themselves. Months after the incident, fear and terror paralyzed my town.
It was my freshman year of high school and someone began calling in bomb threats to local schools. It was a month or so before the end of the year and we hadn’t taken our finals. We never would, that year.
Someone from a payphone would call in a bomb threat on the middle school then administrator would bus those kids to the high school. Then the mad bomber would call again and threaten the high school. Kids went home. Parents pulled their students from school. The district caved to the threats and shut down the entire district.
We made national news — and terrorism won.
I couldn’t help but think of The Anarchist’s Cookbook. The version we sold included supplementary material compiled on the internet and attributed to “The Jolly Roger.” I dug it up today when I read about Powell’s death and found this gem right at the top —
“One of my favorites for getting out of a class or two is to call in a bomb threat,” the text read. “Tell ’em that it is in a locker. Then they have to check them all, whilst you can slip away for an hour or two. You can even place a fake bomb (in any locker but YOURS!). They might cancel school for a week while they investigate (of course, you will probably have to make it up in the summer).”
We didn’t have to make anything up over the summer … but we also didn’t have lockers the next year. After the bomb threats, things at Allen High School got quite totalitarian. There’s a shot of us in Michael Moore’s documentary Bowling for Columbine. But that’s another story.
At the time, I didn’t think about those copies of The Anarchist’s Cookbook I’d sold a year or two before. I was a kid, I was just excited to get out of school early and there was a new Star Wars movie on the horizon.
Reading about Powell’s death took me back and made me think … did I plant that idea in the heads over the people who called in the bomb threats? Did one of my floppies end up in the hand’s of a would be suburban terrorist?
I’ll never know and there’s no way to know. Luckily, in my case, the bombs weren’t real and no one got hurt. Powell had far more weighing on his mind as he passed from life to death. I was very lucky.
Stay defiant.
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