Another of Hollywood’s contributions to the Hell’s Angels lore is the name. The Angels say they are named after a famous World War I bomber squadron that was stationed near Los Angeles and whose personnel raced around the area on motorcycles when they weren’t airborne. There are others who say the Angels got their name from a 1930 Jean Harlow movie based on some scriptwriter’s idea of an Army Air Corps that may or may not have existed at the time of the First World War. It was called Hell’s Angels and no doubt was still being shown in 1950, when the restless veterans who founded the first Angel chapter at Fontana were still trying to decide what to do with themselves. While the name might have originated before any Hell’s Angel was born, it was lost in the history of some obscure southern California military base until Hollywood made it famous and also created the image of wild men on motorcycles — an image that was later adopted and drastically modified by a new breed of outcasts that not even Hollywood could conceive of until they appeared, in the flesh, on California highways.
The concept of the motorcycle outlaw was as uniquely American as jazz. Nothing like them had ever existed. In some ways they appeared to be a kind of half-breed anachronism, a human hangover from the era of the Wild West. Yet in other ways they were as new as television. There was absolutely no precedent, in the years after World War II, for large gangs of hoodlums on motorcycles, reveling in violence, worshiping mobility and thinking nothing of riding five hundred miles on a weekend. . . to whoop it up with other gangs of cyclists in some country hamlet entirely unprepared to handle even a dozen peaceful tourists. Many picturesque, outback villages got their first taste of tourism not from families driving Fords or Chevrolets, but from clusters of boozing city boys on motorcycles.
In retrospect, eyewitness accounts of the Hollister riot seem timid compared to the film. A more accurate comment on the nature of the Hollister riot is the fact that a hastily assembled force of only twenty-nine cops had the whole show under control by noon of July 5. By nightfall the main body of cyclists had roared out of town, in the best Time style, to seek new nadirs in sordid behavior. Those who stayed behind did so at the request of the police; their punishment ranged from $25 traffic fines to ninety days in jail for indecent exposure. Of the 6,000 to 8,000 people supposedly involved in the fracas, a total of 50 were treated for injuries at the local hospital. (For a better perspective on motorcycle riots it helps to keep in mind that more than 50,000 Americans die each year as the result of automobile accidents.)
Nobody has ever accused the Hell’s Angels of wanton killing, at least not in court. . . but it boggles the nerves to consider what might happen if the outlaws were ever deemed legally responsible for even three or four human deaths, by accident or otherwise. Probably every motorcycle rider in California would be jerked off the streets and ground into hamburger.
For a lot of reasons that are often contradictory, the sight and sound of a man on a motorcycle has an unpleasant effect on the vast majority of Americans who drive cars. At one point in the wake of the Hell’s Angels uproar a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune* did a long article on the motorcycle scene and decided in the course of his research that there is something about the sight of a passing motorcyclist that tempts many automobile drivers to commit murder.
* Now defunct
Nearly everyone who has ridden a bike for any length of time will agree. The highways are crowded with people who drive as if their sole purpose in getting behind the wheel is to avenge every wrong ever done them by man, beast or fate. The only thing that keeps them in line is their own fear of death, jail and lawsuits. . . which are much less likely if they can find a motorcycle to challenge, instead of another two-thousand-pound car or a concrete abutment. A motorcyclist has to drive as if everybody else on the road is out to kill him. A few of them are, and many of those who aren’t are just as dangerous — because the only thing that can alter their careless, ingrained driving habits is a threat of punishment, either legal or physical, and there is nothing about a motorcycle to threaten any man in a car.* A bike is totally vulnerable; its only defense is maneuverability, and every accident situation is potentially fatal — especially on a freeway, where there is no room to fall without being run over almost instantly. Despite these hazards, California — where freeways are a way of life — is by long odds the nation’s biggest motorcycle market.