The story of Harley-Davidson and the domestic motorcycle market is one of the gloomiest chapters in the history of American free enterprise. At the end of World War II there were less than 200,000 motorcycles registered in the United States, very few of them imports. During the 1950s, while H-D was consolidating its monopoly, bike sales doubled and then tripled. Harley had a gold mine on its hands — until 1962-63, when the import blitz began. By 1964 registrations had jumped to nearly 1,000,000 and lightweight Hondas were selling as fast as Japanese freighters could bring them over the ocean. The H-D brain trust was still pondering this oriental duplicity when they were zapped on the opposite flank by Birmingham Small Arms, Ltd., of England. BSA (which also makes Triumphs) decided to challenge Harley on its own turf and in its own class, despite the price-boosting handicap of a huge protective tariff. By 1965, with registrations already up 50 percent over the previous year, the H-D monopoly was sorely beset on two fronts. The only buyers they could count on were cops and outlaws, while the Japanese were mopping up in the low-price field and BSA was giving them hell on the race track. By 1966, with the bike boom still growing, Harley was down to less than 10 percent of the domestic market and fighting to hold even that.
With all its machinery and thinking geared to 1,200-cubic-inch engines, the company has little hope of competing on the light and middleweight markets until at least 1970. . . but they still have plenty of muscle in the heavyweight class, and in 1966 Harleys were winning as many big races as BSAs or Triumphs.
This hazy equality has not been maintained, however, in the market place. Most H-D racers are custom-built originals, made to order for some of the best riders in America and with much larger engines than their British competitors. Harley has yet to come up with a production model that can compete with Japanese or European imports — on the street, the track or in dirt — in terms of weight, price, handling ability or engine size.
There is surely some powerful lesson in the failure of Harley-Davidson to keep pace with a market they once controlled entirely. It is impossible to conceive of a similar situation in the automobile market. What if Ford, for instance, had been the only American manufacturer of autos at the end of World War II? Could they have lost more than 90 percent of the market by 1965? A monopoly with a strong protective tariff should be in a commanding position even on the Yo-Yo market. How would the Yo-Yo king feel if he were stripped, in less than a decade, of all his customers except Hell’s Angels and cops?
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In a prosperous democracy that is also a society of winners and losers, any man without an equalizer or at least the illusion of one is by definition underprivileged.
— Sr. Cazador, a sporting type of sorts, with a knowledge of triggers and a good eye for the openings
They’re a bunch of mean-hair fairies, that’s all. They’re enough to make anyone sick.
— San Francisco drag queen
A Hell’s Angel who lived on Thirty-seventh Street in Sacramento was continually being complained about for making suggestive comments to women who passed by his house. . . Let’s make it, baby, or Hey, beautiful, come sit on Papa’s face. A patrolman, checking on one of these complaints, first threatened the outlaw with jail and then asked him contemptuously if he couldn’t find something better to do. The Angel thought for a moment and then replied: Not unless it was to be fucking a cop.
— From a conversation with a Sacramento policeman
The current boom in lightweight bikes relates to outlaw motorcycles the same way the bogus Hell’s Angels Fan Club T-shirts relate to the real Hell’s Angels. The little bikes are fun, handy and relatively safe. . . while the big ones are two-wheeled bombs, and the outlaws who ride them would rather walk than be seen on a Honda, Yamaha or Suziki. Safety and respectability are the last things they want; their machines are dangerous, temperamental and expensive in every way;* there has never been an outlaw who saw his bike as anything but a King Kong equalizer, and there has never been one, either, who had anything but contempt for the idea of good clean fun. . . which is one of the reasons they shun even the minimum safety measures that most cyclists take for granted. You will never see a Hell’s Angel wearing a crash helmet. Nor do they wear the Brando-Dylan-Style silver-studded phantom leather jackets, commonly associated with motorcycle hoodlums and leather fetish cults. This viewpoint is limited to people who know nothing about motorcycles. Heavy leather jackets are standard even for New York’s Madison Avenue Motorcycle Club, an executive-level gang whose members include a dentist, a film producer, a psychiatrist and a United Nations official. Ted Develat, the film producer, has lamented the image problem that he and the others run into with their leather jackets. But if you’re practical you have to dress that way, he explained. If you take a skid, it’s a lot cheaper to shred that leather than to scrape off your own skin.