FRAGMENTATION - THE CRACKS WIDEN
“An yer tell me/Over and over and over and over again/You don’t believe, we’re on the eve of destruction.” (Barry McGuire).
The postwar economic depression was still affecting the US working classes, and many goods were under regulated supply to stave off alleged communist incursions. Yet for some, the US had stepped into a consumer paradise. A sudden boom in the sales of imported motorcycles (among other things) was diagnosed by sociologists and economists as a demand for luxury items, that had hung over from the prewar period. The Victorian preoccupation with novelty had now turned into a viable market.
In the face of foreign competition, Harley-Davidson tried to spread a gospel of traditional US biking and patriotic duty. It could theoretically work because countless GIs who’d experienced biking during service now wanted their own machine. Provided of course they’d found work. But the HD ‘gospel’ would never become absolute, because many dealers and customers alike had tired of their ways.
The (business-driven) AMA racing affiliations also tried to cling to American values, under the very real threat coming from Italian and British bikes. To many US Bikers, a good bike is a good bike, no matter where it’s manufactured or by whom. However, the AMA banned British machines from racing unless the engine compression was reduced, hitting out at the very thing that made them fast - faster than the home built bikes. In 1947, they had also banned Moto Guzzi from the Daytona race. US Bikers who wanted to use European lightweights were becoming increasingly disenchanted with the formalised American bike scene. Some expressed their disapproval of the AMA by wearing the AMA patch sewn onto the seat of their trousers. And American free enterprise wasn’t what it seemed. The importers of British bikes had been compelled to form the British Motorcycle Dealers Association, to protect their interests.
From around 1947 onwards, new publications like Cycle were appearing, based on consumer interest. The new publications were quick to take up the European bike cause, and gained sympathy from their fans. Harley-Davidson replied with the patriotic American Motorcycling magazine. It favoured the awards for the best dressed bike that were common among formal clubs. As some were indulging in extra components to create a particular look, others were rediscovering the aggression of the naked bike. Some found ways to exaggerate this, and style was further commingling with practicality. Drag racing was becoming popular in late 1950’s America. In this vein, many road riders were showing a preference for similar, stripped down bikes (British machines included) over the stodgy dressed bikes. The naked machines they built and modified became known as Bobbers, bobbing being the descriptive term for cutting down the excessive cycle parts. It allegedly originated in California, giving rise to the name; California Bobber.
Some Harley dealers refused to sell parts to the riders of such machines, and unfranchised outlets emerged, that were then accused of selling stolen machines and pirated parts. Truly some of them might have been guilty, but criminality wasn’t the reason behind the moves away from the dominant American Biking scene. Independent shops began marketing spares to suit these bikes, with high performance engine-tuning parts, tiny teardrop tanks and smaller seats among other accessories. In the modifying tradition, everyone, therefore every bike, was different, and that inspired respect among other riders. Bikers would differentiate between the dresser dudes - those who bought new bikes with all the paraphernalia, and who only ever touch a tool to tighten an occasional bolt - and the bobber rider, who had gone to great pains to rework, if not rebuild the machine. The measure of a Biker in this sense was seen in the effort put into their machine.
The word motorcyclist now had a comparatively formal feel, and the use of the word Biker had increased. Although it was still mostly an innocuous colloquialism, the term Biker was also entering its culturally collective status. It was happening as some riders were now joining the so-called Outlaw racing scene, to get away from the AMA’s oppression. So whilst this might indicate that US society had bred its own contingency of anti-social types, it more clearly makes the point that many US riders were preferring a freer, more open atmosphere to racing if not biking per se. This harks back to the atmosphere in earlier US and European meetings, and indeed the street biking of those times, that had cosmopolitan values and no stigma.
As well as economically, modernity had hit the post W.W.II US badly in a social context. The cities were bigger, and greater numbers of people were finding it hard to get work. Cities are the core of human civilisations; they exude both the positive and negative aspects of society with greater intensity. People growing up in a seemingly lawless, loveless and spiritually impoverished environment, might have difficulty getting some positive focus into their lives. Whatever the reasons for societal degradation, the cause is usually found in the neglect of peoples’ values. Not just the deviants, but within mass society and other (allegedly responsible) members of the entire social infrastructure.
Escapism grew in a physical sense, and the road was where more and more people were finding it. The temptation to move and keep moving had also emerged in literary forms. The Catcher In The Rye, by J.D. Salinger, was a book about one youth’s intention to travel, which, although it never materialised, described the social conditions among postwar youths in the US. People below the legally drinking age were hitting the bars, and the fallibility and weaknesses of older generations were revealed, creating not so much a foundation for rebellion, as a hole for existing values to tumble into. The Catcher In The Rye was not a typical adventure travelogue, more a series of misadventures with no direction, that aptly describes life for much of America’s youth. It achieved cult status.
The jukebox had now arrived in cafés and bars, and those that had plenty of rock and roll music on them attracted throngs of youths. Such venues were the stage for the enactment of youth lifestyles. Many arrived in cars; big chrome-finned ones or hot-rods, but a contingency of motorcyclists began to dominate certain places, performing stunts, showing off their latest studded jacket, whatever. Among them were some whose lives did not revolve around bikes. They were just including them in their social make-up as an object of statement, often aggression. This created a divide within the breakaway Outlaw fraternity that was intangible to the outsider. And this befuddlement caused some people (Bikers included) to finger certain clubs and individuals, saying that they belonged in penitentiaries. This was far too sweeping.
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On both sides of the Atlantic, an upsurgence of new generations were exploring the freedom that had been won through the war. The dominant society (including the formalised bike scene) expected many things to remain the same, and the atmosphere of (won) peace into which more radical changes were occurring was therefore particularly prone to conflict. The more they repressed the alternative activities, the more essential it became to resist. After all, people were supposed to be free now. It wasn’t that anyone was rebelling against anything in particular (if at all), they just wanted out from the confines of the norm. The fact that the authorities couldn’t resist looking over the fence and shouting the odds, created politics where they weren’t wanted.
There had been an incident at a bike rally in Athol, Massachusetts, in 1939, where the fire department had used hoses to control the crowd. This had turned a delicate situation into one that only the police could quell. Outlaw riders were blamed. Societal experts purported that the motorcycle had become: “An iconoclastic sign of emotional revolt against contemporary American life”. Which isn’t that far from the truth. It was the idea that they were in the right and all Bikers in the wrong that rankled. For the genuine Biker, their machine did have a preferred message. They did not deliberately build a bike to say: “I am a communist/socialist/rebel,” whatever. It just said; “I have been prepared to perform excellently in a particular task, and my subsequent appearance happens to have a kind of mechanical aesthetic (which the owner might have embellished upon)”. The beauty of the bike spawned its own art - and culture. From the very beginning, the motorcycle had been something sacrosanct, on which people could enjoy their leisure time. It was the irrational and unjustifiable aspersions cast by mass-society (and some casual bike users) that added other meanings to the motorcycle message. To the Bikers, it now became an escape to freedom; to those who wished it (and its following) would go away, a sign of revolt.
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In the early 1950’s, the Chicago Outlaws had been formed, and their leader had tried unsuccessfully to convert it to a racing club. He failed because the biking ethos was slipping away under social and peer pressures. The Chicago Outlaws were so strong, that the Gypsy Outlaws, Columbus and Louisville Outlaws among others all assumed the name Chicago. Such amalgamations made the gangs stronger than other outfits, and also created an atmosphere in which individuals within them had to strive to ever greater feats if they were to be noticed and respected. Such acts became known as ‘showing class’, and while some were the spontaneous ideas of individuals, others became standards by which prospective members would be judged, and through which current members could elevate their status. In certain cases this allowed them to wear different insignia, which, like the markings of military officers, distinguished them from other gang company. Some took a perverse pleasure in upsetting normal people - blowing their minds - with biking stunts at inappropriate times, and sometimes offensive behaviour.
The behaviour of some gang members became a volatile area in the Biker identity argument. They believed their dedication, shown in part by the founding of clubs with rules based on the motorcycle, was greater than that among smaller gangs and non-gang members. But this social largesse was alien to the pure biking spirit. At the same time, an element of belligerent behaviour became more intolerable to the dominant culture, including many other Bikers; and not just those with Victorian attitudes. When the McCook Outlaws disbanded in 1947, the fact that many of them became police officers indicates something other than social outlawry existed among even the most extreme gang members. This move reflects something of the ex-police/military personnel who move into security.
The Chicago motorcyclists had previously called a Biker a rider, and the motorcycle a bike, thus they referred to themselves as Bikeriders. This shows how strong localized pockets of Bikerdom were, with their own particular nuances that might or might not be later absorbed into the whole. In his book, The Bikeriders, published in 1968, author and photographer Danny Lyon presented a collection of photographs and passages, on and by various Outlaw riders. The images are mostly of short-haired, tattooed men wearing denim and leather. Their hair is often styled with a coif. The lifestyles they describe only refer in part to motorcycling. Most of the dialogue discusses violence against other people, and unfortunate incidents in the armed forces.
Lyon’s book also includes comment from a dealer and racer, one Johnny Goodpaster. He notes the newspaper reportage on an accident, in which a pedestrian stepped into the path of a bike and was killed. The article dredges the past, mentioning how the rider had been shot in a store robbery. But he wasn’t part of it, he was a bystander. Other inferences of delinquency in the news story created a negative view. He compares this to another write up, concerning four fatalities caused by drunken driving in a car, which only got a few lines.
Goodpaster also comments on how ordinary people believed that biking lead to some kind of ‘obscene motivation’, and that the Japanese manufacturer Honda had done a good job in later years in dispelling this. He notes how some people describe bigger bikes as looking obscene. This could be attributed to the Freudian suggestion concerning an association of the penis with motorcycles; or might allude to antisocial behaviour by motorcyclists.
In conclusion, Goodpaster notes how people react differently to certain things. It’s OK to crash your light aircraft anywhere, endangering life, but a minor indiscretion on a bike invokes hatred. He stated: “If you’re on a motorcycle and weave in and out of the traffic a little bit, even though it’s safe, you’re a menace to the highway. ‘Cause anybody in their right mind knows what a 300 pound motorcycle can do to a 7000 pound Cadillac.”
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During this time, in states like Texas, racism was at its ugliest, with separate schools for blacks and whites. The state of California, however, allowed people of all races to be integrated. It was becoming a leading think tank in new and rationalised human attitudes and behaviour, so it was natural for people who were against inhuman attitudes to gravitate towards such places. Many American ex-servicemen had settled in California, and they actively sought to retain the camaraderie they’d experienced during the Second World War. There is nothing particularly sinister in that, but the behaviour of military personnel on leave has always been noted to be exuberant. It is arguably true that ex-servicemen were now out of place in the society they had left to defend. Whether you walked or were dragged in off the street, joining the armed services could be assimilated to being jailed. People were thrust into unknown and sometimes disagreeable company. They were then disciplined, subdued and excited - the gamut of emotions was activated but had to remain indiscernible. Taught to kill, many then exercised that ability and lived through horrors. They, and their families are often left with nothing more than a photograph to remind them of those they’d lost. All that patriotic, military pride, punched out in a blink. It made people question whether anything was sacred any more.
Some would say that armed experiences are no excuse nor reason for anti-social behaviour. Hadn’t the parents of these people instilled some inkling of spiritual survival; To thine own self be true? Some believed they were to their own selves being true, but it often doesn’t manifest as might be expected.
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In early days, the image of a Biker as an aviator was based in a practicable use of clothing. By the time W.W.II was reaching a close, the aviator had become a fighter-pilot: a leather-clad hero in a breed apart from society. The begoggled and helmeted appearance of fighter-pilots in monochrome photos is comparable with similarly dressed motorcyclists. In their own alienation, this image became a desirable romanticism for subsequent generations. It became modified over the years; jet fighter pilots with enclosed helmets and darkened visors held inspiration for nuclear-age Bikers, then space-age technology gave us the heroic flyers depicted in films like Star Wars. Notwithstanding the RAF’s class problems and the racial tensions within the USAF, the actual and mediated appearances of Bikers in the latter half of the 20th century had an heroic if somewhat militant cachét. Having previously been an unconscious evolutionary process, it became a conscious effort; academics call it a postmodern recreation of identity.
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Many ex-service people formed their own bike clubs, and would ride and drink together. They joined the existing Outlaw racing scene, preferring its informality, and despite them wearing club insignia, there was no antagonism between clubs. Territory was not an issue, because they all roamed where ever they could in search of entertainment. The AMA’s official roving race calendar (known as the Gypsy Tour) included the General Clubman’s meeting at Hollister. July 4th 1947 was its first appearance since being suspended during the war. The arrival of the meet was welcomed by the townsfolk, as it brought extra income into their farming community. Bike racing was as important to them as the rodeo and livestock fair that also enjoyed the hospitality of Hollister. So the town previously famous for its garlic crop, wasn’t at all unfamiliar with large social events.
It was at the ‘47 event that a number of freer thinking and riding bikers arrived. They consisted of gangs with names like Boozefighters, Galloping Gooses, Satan’s Sinners, Satan’s Daughters and Winoes. In the army barracks, some of these people had learned to drink and swear harder than the pre-war Biker contingencies that had descended on the town. Besides these particular riders, thousands of others had arrived in Hollister from San Francisco, Los Angeles and as far away as Florida. American Bikerdom was a big thing to squeeze into one town, and by Friday evening, the main street - San Benito - was packed with Bikers, many of them falling over each other in drunken horseplay.
What happened next was relatively insignificant. It was the way in which the media reported it that created a myth. The cavorting of Bikers at Hollister was attributed by the media to some kind of rebellion. To place a rebel (aggressive) on a motorcycle (aggressive and sexually deviant) made an excellent story-line, true or no, and that indiscretion took decades to rectify. The press wrote of riots and violence that had not taken place, perpetrated by demonic motorcyclists who were hell-bent on anti-social activity.
Catherine Dabo and her husband owned the best hotel in Hollister. She said that: “The motorcycles were parked on the streets like sardines. I couldn’t believe how pretty some of them were. A bike rode in the door, all along the bar and through the doors into the hotel lobby. Every room was full. We had people sleeping in the halls and the lobby, but they were great people. We had more trouble some regular weekends....The town was small and if there had been a riot, I’d have known about it.” Mrs. Dabo also noted that she wasn’t scared. Everyone paid for their rooms, food and drinks. She said: “If you like people, they like you. My husband and I always stood up for Bikers; they were good people.”
A Boozefighter named Cameron noted that there were claims of three thousand Bikers being there, and believed that most were outside of town at a dirt-track race. But he and his friends were enjoying themselves in town, drag racing, doing power circles and crowding onto bikes to see how many could ride on one machine. Racing and power circling (causing the bike’s rear tyre to spin up whilst the bike turns in a tight circle) in a busy town, were dangerous stunts. But in a biking atmosphere, people know what to expect.
Cameron also states that: “The cops were playing it cool. Basically, they didn’t arrest anybody unless they did something to deserve it.” He had watched some members of the Boozefighters arriving in a Model T Ford. It was over-heating and one of them was trying to urinate into the radiator (to cool the engine) as they drove along. That person was arrested, and one Wino Willie, who was the founder of the Boozefighters, went to try and get him out of jail. He was apparently so drunk that he was also arrested. Both were released a few hours later. Cameron concluded that he started to sober up on Saturday night because he was riding home next day. He hadn’t seen anything that amounted to riot.
Gil Armas was also a Boozefighter. He and his friends would meet to go riding, to the races, whatever, and would join up with other bike clubs - he mentions the 13 Rebels and Jack Rabbits as other such outfits. He said that: “In those days, if you rode a motorcycle, then anybody that rode a motorcycle was your buddy. We were just into throwing parties.” He said that there were so many bikes at Hollister that the police blocked off the road. He added that: “In fact, they sort of joined in... We had a tug-of-war... Tempers flared when somebody stole a cop’s hat, but it all blew over.”
Armas noted the arrests for drunk and disorderly, and that someone had tried to bail them out - according to him there was no attempt to break anyone out, as media interpretations alleged. He said that a few clubs asked the papers to print a retraction about their inflated stories, but of those that did, it was so small it was easy to miss - not like the previous headlines they’d run. He said that on Sunday, police with riot guns told them to pack up and leave. The initial reaction of the Bikers was to laugh, as there was no riot going on, but they complied.
The American press had relished the Hollister non-event. The San Francisco Chronicle used headlines like: Havoc in Hollister and Riots...Cyclists take over town. However it was Life magazine’s coverage that was particularly poignant in the whole issue. They had printed a full-page photo of a drunk on a motorcycle, with a beer in each hand. However the involvement of a local projectionist, Guy Deserpa, completely blows the media out. When he got off from work, he was met by his wife, and they had a walk through town just to see what was happening. He noticed two men scraping bottles together into a heap. They then positioned a motorcycle amid the bottles. Shortly afterwards a drunken rider emerged from a bar, with a bottle of beer in each hand. The two men got him to sit on the bike with the beers while they took his photograph.
Deserpa felt that things weren’t as they should be, and moved around against a wall so that he would be in the picture. He didn’t think the men would continue, but they did, and he appeared in Life magazine. He said that the Bikers: “Weren’t doing anything bad, just riding up and down whooping and hollering, not doing any harm at all.” Deserpa’s simple act, of getting into that media image, along with the witness accounts, is the undoing of the inflated news reportage on Biker Rebels at Hollister. It is also the unraveling of an entire subculture that might never have happened, had the media not loved the idea so much. That is not to say there were never any disreputable people on bikes. It was the media who put sinister overtones onto all Bikers, in the same way they’d made baddies out of Indians and cowboy outlaws on black horses.
Other Hollister witnesses include Mary Lou Williams who took her young daughters to watch the riders. She had no more reason to fear them than the cowboys, who according to her were just as bad when the rodeo was in town. Harry Hill, of the US Air Force, noted that things had got rowdier since before the war. He said the town was a mess, but there was: “No real evidence of any physical damage; no fires or anything like that.”
At the time, the truth about Hollister didn’t emerge - or was at least ignored - and consequently the biking scene became a source of scoops for journalists, particularly those with loose enough values to write something rather than nothing at all. This pejorative stereotyping was protested by the formal as well as informal Biker groups, but it was already becoming the foundation for an ocean of Hollywood untruths. The truth lay buried for so long, that twenty-five years after event, Life republished the fake article, and were again hammered by Bikers. Letters poured in from the traditional sector protesting that the AMA had nothing to do with the riot, and it was the responsibility of a minority within the minority. They were quick to clear their own name, but still felt animosity towards those who rode free, ignoring the actual untruth underlying the entire reportage - there had been no riot.
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A filmic version of the events at Hollister, called The Wild One (Columbia Pictures), loosely told the story. The intention had been to make a docu-drama, but the movie moguls were not too happy to see their swash-buckling heroes replaced with anti-heroes, who spoke in the drawl and colloquialisms of contemporary youth. Despite the point of the film being to soften the generation gap, a story had to be made that suited Hollywood conventions. It was changed, partly because the American film censors would have regarded the original plot as communist subterfuge. Whatever the original version’s effect might have been, the altered version had far-reaching impacts - of a kind perhaps not expected by Director Lazlo Benedek or Producer Stanley Kramer, though Hollywood might have known better.
Kramer and Benedek had spoken to some Bikers - not the actual ones from Hollister, to get some idea of what they were all about. It was one of these who, in answer to the question: “What are you rebelling against?” had said: “What you got?” This question and answer were used in the film. They sum up the fact that in real life, there might have been nothing in particular going on beyond a search for excitement. But that search was creating antagonism from the public, who were now interpreting Bikers as a deviant stereotype. Brando was the typical rebel without a cause, and his role in the film contributed to the baddie image in US Biker movies that was hard to dispel. A caption on the screen as the film begins, states something of the maker’s original intent. It read: “This is a shocking story. It could never take place in most American towns - but it did in this one. It is a public challenge not to let it happen again.” Inevitably, even though it had never really happened, it did happen again.
In a café scene, some gang members used be-bop expressions like ‘ooze’ and ‘Daddio’. An old gentleman serving at the bar gets into a discussion with them about television, and states that: “Everything today is pictures.” He adds that you can’t understand what they’re saying, and that they probably don’t understand themselves anyway. A cute irony, considering how the making of the film had been manipulated, not to mention Marlon’s incomprehensible drawl.
There was no glorifying of negative behaviour, neither was there any acclaim for decent behaviour. The film just shuffles along from one non-event to the next. Inconclusive and soft by later film standards, The Wild One had a great impact on its contemporaneous US youth audiences, and on their UK counterparts, when the censors there relented, some fifteen years later.
When The Wild One was originally released in the spring of ‘54, the AMA had picketed theatres. They had objected to Brando, the star of the movie, using a cut down Triumph, as it allegedly undermined American bike marques. They might have done more good by protesting what the film (miss)represented. Over the 1950’s and 60’s, the ideology behind rebel Biker gangs was actuated in increasingly greater strengths. In the UK and America, the genuine Biker had become eclipsed by events both mediated and actual.