Born to Be Wild

The Rise of the American Motorcyclist

Randy D. McBee

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781469622736
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Bicycles & Motorcycles
• Index: Technology & Engineering

In 1947, 4, 000 motorcycle hobbyists converged on Hollister, California. As images of dissolute bikers graced the pages of newspapers and magazines, the three-day gathering sparked the growth of a new subculture while also touching off national alarm. In the years that followed, the stereotypical leather-clad biker emerged in the American consciousness as a menace to law-abiding motorists and small towns. Yet a few short decades later, the motorcyclist, once menacing, became mainstream. To understand this shift, Randy D. McBee narrates the evolution of motorcycle culture since World War II. Along the way he examines the rebelliousness of early riders of the 1940s and 1950s, riders' increasing connection to violence and the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s, the rich urban bikers of the 1990s and 2000s, and the factors that gave rise to a motorcycle rights movement. McBee's fascinating narrative of motorcycling's past and present reveals the biker as a crucial character in twentieth-century American life.

1: No Worthwhile Citizen Ever Climbed Aboard a Motorcycle and Gunned the Engine

The Rise of the Biker, 1940s–1970s

On March 26, 1971, at the Juilliard Theater in New York City, Harold Farberman debuted The Losers, his new opera about a young woman who meets and falls in love with a motorcyclist. At the time, the country was in the midst of a motorcycle craze, and ten times more registered bikes were on the road nationwide than there had been in 1947, when the Hollister motorcyclists first attracted attention. But at the Julliard Theater in 1971, the media’s focus was less on the popularity of motorcycling and more on the fear that the night might turn violent. As a reporter covering the event commented, “Death and tragedy have been the stock in trade of operas over the centuries [but] a new high in shock may be in store for opera goers who attend the premiere tonight of ‘The Losers.’ ” Farberman only added to the public’s anxiety surrounding motorcyclists by describing the opera’s subject as “violence” and by describing the motorcycle gang portrayed in the opera as “one of the purest manifestations of that [violence].” The opera included “a chain whip killing; a neck breaking; an initiation rite in which a boy is stripped and burned with cigarettes,” and a “sensual ballet” that “ends with the off-stage gang rape of the [gang] leader’s girl.”¹

The Losers was Farberman’s attempt at merging the European opera tradition with the American Broadway musical, although he admitted that “no one will go away from ‘The Losers’ feeling [like] they have seen ‘The Sound of Music’—or even ‘West Side Story.” Indeed, before the opera was staged, the director had to replace the actor originally cast as the boy initiated into the gang when the actor said “his religious beliefs prevented him from doing some of the things called for,” and a young woman who was cast as a waitress in a “gang hangout” had to contact “her religious counselor in Arkansas to see whether she could say certain four-letter words on stage.” The woman kept the part, but some of the words had to be changed. At the opera’s premier, uniformed policemen were stationed at the Julliard Building and the Julliard Theater, apparently because of the fear of an “attack by a real motorcycle gang.” “There was none,” one journalist was glad to report later. “All the violence was on stage.”²

This image of motorcyclists as unimaginably violent and anti-social was not uncommon in the 1960s and 1970s. By the time The Losers debuted, sensationalized stories about motorcyclists and their alleged crimes had graced the pages of newspapers worldwide for several years. Hollywood was churning out dozens of biker films in which the central characters were as sadistic as they were comical, and 1%er clubs like the Hells Angels were becoming the topic of best-selling exposés and conversations in newsrooms and classrooms alike.³

The public tagged motorcyclists as outlaws after the rally in Hollister in 1947 and after a second rally in Riverside, California, a year later. At both rallies the motorcyclists attracted attention for participating in American Motorcyclist Association (AMA)–sanctioned events without official membership in the organization and for their unruly behavior. They raced their bikes up and down the city streets, disobeyed other traffic rules and regulations, and engaged in other drunk and disorderly conduct. Scores of arrests were made in both communities, but the participants were more of a nuisance than a threat to the cities’ residents, many of whom eagerly lined the streets as spectators or participated in the days’ events.

In the growing numbers of stories about motorcyclists in the 1960s and 1970s, a new rider was emerging who stood in sharp contrast to his counterpart at Hollister and Riverside: he was routinely linked to drugs and guns, no longer confined to the small-town America that feared and loathed him, inclined to prey upon innocent bystanders, and linked to what Farberman suggested was a new standard of violence. Indeed, in the wake of the rise of the violent outlaw of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the word “biker” became synonymous with “motorcyclist,” and a “biker type” began to shape the public’s image of what a criminal looked like. For the nonriding majority, the motorcyclist’s dress, his physical size, and his behavior or the crime he was accused of committing defined a “biker type,” often without any mention of the motorcycle he was presumably riding and gave rise to a public perception about motorcyclists that was less likely to acknowledge distinctions among riders than in previous years.

The public’s changing perception about motorcyclists also reflected their relationship to the communities in which they organized their rallies. Motorcycling was based on what riders called a “gypsying” subculture that revolved around “tours” or rallies that became increasingly popular in the pre- and postwar years.⁴ The most popular rallies that today attract hundreds of thousands of riders were first organized during the first half of the twentieth century: Laconia in 1916, Hollister in 1936, Daytona in 1937, and Sturgis in 1938.⁵ Organizers suspended many of these rallies during World War II, but they resumed with the end of hostilities and became the site of the controversy surrounding motorcyclists in the period immediately after the war.⁶ Motorcyclists’ mobility and their connection to a “gypsy” subculture encouraged the public to associate these men with transients, or any men who had a complicated and ambiguous relationship to work—bums, hoboes, tramps, vagrants. Yet the labor these men contributed economically to these small towns and their experience with wage work were familiar to these communities and to all motorcyclists who shared similar humble backgrounds. The motorcyclist’s status as a transient was at the root of why some people feared him and why others embraced him. By the 1960s and 1970s, words like “tramp” were still used to describe motorcyclists, and the public remained fascinated with motorcycle culture. But violence had become such an overwhelming characteristic of the motorcyclist that the public struggled to imagine him as anything but a threat, and finding a common class experience was much more difficult than it had been when the motorcyclist first attracted national attention and when he was often accepted as a transient.

HOLLISTER

A gypsy tour is an organized motorcycle event that generally takes place over a weekend or a holiday and includes the ride to the event, often along a scenic route, and the one or two days of competitions, including races, hill climbs, dirt-track events, and field meets (stake races, plank riding, and slow races). The AMA, which was established in 1924 as an outgrowth of the Motorcycle and Allied Trades Association, sponsored gypsy tours.⁷ The first gypsy tour connected to Hollister was held in 1935 at Bolado Park, ten miles south of town. Over the years the event grew from a one-day race to a three-day event with parades, dances, hill climbs, controlled stunts, and races. In an article about the Hollister Rally, Cycle magazine explained that the “AMA used the Hollister event as a pattern during the 1930s for other gypsy tours throughout the country” and also noted the enthusiasm with which the town’s residents welcomed the cyclists.⁸

The event in Hollister was suspended in 1940 as war spread across the world. The rally in July 1947 was the first one since the war ended in 1945. The cyclists began arriving for the rally on Thursday to watch the races and to participate in the weekend of planned events. By Friday, the number of riders was estimated at about 2,000, and by Saturday, the press claimed, between 4,000 and 5,000 riders had converged on the town of fewer than 3,000 residents. Most of these motorcyclists camped on the city’s edges, but about 500 gathered along the town’s main street, San Benito Street, and engaged in what one historian has described as an “uproarious, drunken binge.”⁹ Some motorcyclists used San Benito Street as a drag strip. Others performed stunts to the roar of the crowd, and the streets became littered with beer bottles as “hundreds [of motorcyclists and spectators] loosed bottle barrages.” According to San Francisco Chronicle staff writer C. J. Doughty, the town’s seven-man police force could not contain the “riot,” leading Hollister police lieutenant Roy L. McPhail to send out a formal request for backup. Forty highway patrol officers, commanded by Captain L. T. Torres, arrived shortly after dusk. “Armed with tear gas guns, the officers herded the cyclists into a block on San Benito Street, between Fifth and Sixth streets, placed a dance band on a truck and ordered the musicians to play.”¹⁰ The Highway Patrol’s ploy apparently worked. With the band and the dancing distracting the motorcyclists, calm returned to Hollister as quickly and as abruptly as it had allegedly disappeared.

While the media latched on to Doughty’s initial story and printed other sensational accounts, the AMA and the writers at Motorcyclist objected to the mainstream press’s coverage. Writers at both American Motorcycling (the official publication of the AMA) and Motorcyclist admonished its readers to consider carefully the sensationalism that was rampant in newspaper and radio reports and to weigh the evidence objectively. A writer at American Motorcycling went so far as to explain that all mention of Hollister was withheld from the July 1947 issue because “we had to have time to secure unprejudiced first hand reports on the affair.” “We know,” the writer added, “that much modern newspaper practice glories in the sensational and some reporters are trained to studiously distort and varnish in order to create lurid stories for their readers.”¹¹

The motorcycle press also pointed to nonriders who participated in the rally and contributed to the supposed mayhem. Motorcyclist and American Motorcycling argued that local “toughies,” also referred to as a “much larger group of non-motorcycling hell-raisers,” shared the blame for Hollister’s problems and pointed as well to “mercenary minded bar-keepers.” The outside “toughies” were thought to be intentionally unruly, expecting that the cyclists would be blamed for any misbehavior, and published accounts of arrests do include Hollister residents.¹² The motorcycle press also implicated barkeepers because, reports charged, they viewed the rally merely as a way to fill their coffers and unscrupulously sold their wares with little concern for their effect on the motorcyclists or the town. Barkeepers in Hollister, the press reported, stopped selling beer as the motorcyclists became unruly to end the bottle barrages that were allegedly wreaking havoc in the downtown area, although they continued to sell whiskey under the assumption that the motorcyclists could not afford to drink it, a subtle but clear indication of the average rider’s humble origins.¹³

Yet both publications accepted that something had gone awry at Hollister. Amid their protestations, they blamed a “small minority” of motorcyclists, or, as the AMA put it, a “sad band of parasites.”¹⁴ They were the “same old element that so frequently besmirches motorcycle gatherings.” In the words of the writer at American Motorcycling, they were “hell-raisers,” “real bravados,” and the “few riders” who “decided to make a race track out of the street.” There was a “certain type,” the writer lamented, “who can only be happy when he is drinking and raising Cain.”¹⁵ “Let’s be realistic in this matter,” asserted the writer at Motorcyclist. “Unfortunately there was foundation for the story and we would be unwise to attempt to side-step the facts.” The writer at American Motorcycling actually referred to the gypsy tour as the “Hollister holocaust,” even as he urged objectivity. “We are simply doing what we should do—setting forth all of the material that has been gathered through a careful and thorough investigation based on official reports from enforcement officers.”¹⁶

The “certain type” the AMA complained about did not receive a common name in American Motorcycling, Motorcyclist, or the Hollister Free Lance. It was not until a year later, after a rally in Riverside, California, attracted similar negative press coverage that the enduring label “outlaw” emerged.

The city of Riverside was actually the site of two motorcycling events that garnered negative press coverage. The first occurred on Labor Day weekend, two months after the Hollister Rally, in conjunction with the national championship races sponsored by the American Motorcycle Association and the California Highway Patrol, and the second took place a year later over the Fourth of July weekend at an amateur racing meet sponsored by the Sheriff’s Training Association at the Box Spring Tourist Trophy track just five miles from Riverside.¹⁷ The first incident attracted less media coverage, primarily in regional papers, and was not picked up by the Los Angeles Times. According to one report, six thousand motorcyclists were in town for the racing and an unreported number of them descended on Riverside. They “roared about the downtown streets at breakneck speeds,” there was “considerable drinking and a dozen persons were jailed on charges of drunkenness, fighting or refusal to disperse,” the streets “became littered with broken beer bottles, [and] chunks of rubber from screaming tires burned in impromptu ‘getaway’ races and ‘spin-a-circle’ riding.” To handle the confusion downtown, the writer alleged, “the police blocked off two blocks of Eight street . . . and let the riders roar.” One article concluded that the “situation was similar to a motorcycle madhouse at Hollister . . . over the July 4 holiday.”¹⁸

The turn of events that took place a year after Hollister made the national news, and press reports suggested that the motorcyclists were even more unruly than they had been the previous year. One article described the rally as an “invasion,” this time claiming that 5,000 “wild riding” motorcyclists, “most of them drunk,” “thundered and roared up and down Riverside streets for three days before harried police officers finally turned the tide and restored some semblance of order.” Another report claimed that many of the riders were “ ‘veterans’ of the Hollister invasion last year . . . [who] were going to make a similar night of it in Riverside.” The press alleged that the trouble started after participants began “drifting back into the city” as the races wound down and gathered along 8th Street between Market and Main streets. As was the case at Hollister, the riders organized drag races down the city’s streets, using traffic lights as the starting signal and blocked off traffic so they could “spin circles in the middle of main intersections.” According to initial reports, motorcyclists “trampled” the hood of a car, broke some of its windows, and “manhandled” the occupants after the driver honked his horn at some cyclists who were blocking the road. Later accounts did not contradict the report but indicated that the automobilist had actually run into one of the motorcyclists.¹⁹

Just as it had after Hollister, the motorcycle press denounced the media’s coverage as biased and argued that a “lunatic fringe” of riders were responsible for the disorder. Mainstream coverage of the Riv...