Hell’s Angels. A Strange and Terrible. Saga by Hunter S. Thompson

Soon after the Post article appeared, the Associated Press put this item on the wire, with a Detroit dateline: A gang of seven teen-age terrorists — 13, 14 and 15 years old — has been broken up, police said yesterday. Police said the boys perpetrated arson, armed robbery, burglary and cruelty to animals. The gang usually wore hoods, made of pillowcases. They called themselves ‘The Bylaws’ and named Jews, Negroes and Frats (well-dressed students) as hate objects.

Several months earlier the United Press International wire car­ried this item, from Dallas, headed: MOB BLOCKS RESCUE.

Firemen attempting to reach a burning home in south Dallas Thursday night were blocked by a group of 60 yelling, heckling youths who refused to move out of the street.

The firemen called police. Several carloads of police, using dogs, finally dispersed the young hecklers, whom they described as wild punks.

The youths threatened and fought with police.

Firemen who then were able to make their way into the burning house found the limp form of Patrick Chambers, two. But it was too late. The child was pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital.

His mother, Mrs. Geneva Chambers, 31, and a neighbor, Mrs. Jessie Jones, 27, were hospitalized in shock.

If your police want trouble, they’ve come to the right place and we’ll take care of you, too, a fire department spokesman quoted one of the youths as saying.

Firemen said when they tried to revive the baby on the lawn, several youths ran up and tried to stomp on the dead baby.

A woman and two men, part of the growing crowd of 400 per­sons, were arrested.

Police said the woman scratched and slapped a policeman. The men jumped on policemen trying to prevent the woman from attacking the officer.

As you were, I was

As I am, you will be.

— H. Himmler

(quotation scrawled

on a wall at a Hell’s Angel party)

Now, looking for labels, it is hard to call the Hell’s Angels anything but mutants. They are urban outlaws with a rural ethic and a new, improvised style of self-preservation. Their image of themselves derives mainly from Celluloid, from the Western movies and two-fisted TV shows that have taught them most of what they know about the society they live in. Very few read books, and in most cases their formal education ended at fifteen or sixteen. What little they know of history has come from the mass media, beginning with comics. . . so if they see themselves in terms of the past, it’s because they can’t grasp the terms of the present, much less the future. They are the sons of poor men and drifters, losers and the sons of losers. Their backgrounds are overwhelmingly ordinary. As people, they are like millions of other people. But in their collective identity they have a peculiar fascination so obvious that even the press has recognized it, although not without cynicism. In its ritual flirtation with reality the press has viewed the Angels with a mixture of awe, humor and terror — justified, as always, by a slavish dedication to the public appetite, which most journalists find so puzzling and con­temptible that they have long since abandoned the task of under­standing it to a handful of poll-takers and experts.

The widespread appeal of the Angels is worth pondering. Unlike most other rebels, the Angels have given up hope that the world is going to change for them. They assume, on good evi­dence, that the people who run the social machinery have little use for outlaw motorcyclists, and they are reconciled to being losers. But instead of losing quietly, one by one, they have banded together with a mindless kind of loyalty and moved outside the framework, for good or ill. They may not have an answer, but at least they are still on their feet. One night about halfway through one of their weekly meetings I thought of Joe Hill on his way to face a Utah firing squad and saying his final words: Don’t mourn. Organize. It is safe to say that no Hell’s Angel has ever heard of Joe Hill or would know a Wobbly from a bushmaster, but there is something very similar about the attitudes. The Industrial Workers of the World had serious blueprints for society, while the Hell’s Angels mean only to defy the social machinery. There is no talk among the Angels of building a better world, yet their reactions to the world they live in are rooted in the same kind of anarchic, para-legal sense of conviction that brought the armed wrath of the Establishment down on the Wobblies. There is the same kind of suicidal loyalty, the same kind of in-group rituals and nicknames, and above all the same feeling of constant warfare with an unjust world. The Wobblies were losers, and so are the Angels. . . and if every loser in this country today rode a motorcycle the whole highway system would have to be modified.