THE HARLEY-DAVIDSON COMPANY did not spring up in isolation. It was very much a product of its time, the dawn of the Machine Age in the United States. As time went on, the founders, their children, and later management, both reacted to and worked to shape the American experience.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States was changing rapidly. As a primarily agricultural country began to industrialize, transportation hubs vied to attract factories, and young people flocked to the new, exciting urban centers.
One of these urban centers was Milwaukee, Wisconsin, located on Lake Michigan near the Menominee River. In 1900, it boasted a population of 285,315 and a diversified manufacturing base. The city had sewers, electric streetlights, public transportation, and an organized police and fire department. Freight transport by both railroad and steam-powered freighters was available. At a time when paved roads were a rarity, Milwaukee could boast sixty miles of paved streets.
These streets were often crowded by bicycle riders, especially during nice summer evenings. The first commercial bicycle, the “ordinary” with the huge front wheel, became popular in the 1870s. Much easier to ride chain-driven “safety” bicycles were on sale in 1885, and within five years a bicycle craze had swept the nation, including Milwaukee.
Nineteenth-century Americans had a penchant for social organizations, ranging from the Masons to the International Organization of Odd Fellows, and bicycle enthusiasts were no exception. The first American cycle clubs, including a club in Milwaukee, formed in 1880. These clubs attracted both men and women riders and featured social activities besides club rides, including tea parties! The bicycle clubs also pushed for better roads. Bicycle races were extremely popular, and some of the first motorcycles were built as pacers for bicycle competitions.
Nineteenth-century Americans were also optimistic that advances in technology would solve all problems, and were fascinated by the inventions that appeared every year. Not only was the late nineteenth century the beginning of the bicycle and the internal combustion engine, but it also was the time of the invention of the telephone, the motion picture, the radio, the phonograph and the electric light bulb. All over America, children wanted to grow up to be inventors.
An idyllic 1916 scene with motorcycles.
Two young people bitten by the invention bug were William Harley and Arthur Davidson. When they started experimenting with building a motorcycle in their home town of Milwaukee, motorcycles were one of the new mechanical marvels that were reshaping Western culture. They offered the average person the ability to travel, to see things, to escape. Automobiles were too expensive for the average person and—being an economical means of transportation—the motorcycle became known as the “poor man’s car.” Some people, especially young men, bought bikes for sporting purposes, and the numerous motorcycle manuals printed at the time are full of warnings of the dangers of speed and the offensiveness of noisy open pipes.
Early motorcycle enthusiasts followed the pattern of bicycle enthusiasts, and formed clubs. In fact, one of the earliest American motorcycle clubs, the Yonkers Motorcycle Club, was originally a bicycle club. It became a motorcycle club in 1903.
These motorcycle clubs, like the earlier bicycle clubs, sponsored rides and races. Early motorcycle enthusiasts were often interested in proving the reliability of their mounts, so there were a lot of distance and endurance (known as enduros) events, but races did take place. One of the first took place in Boston in 1900, with the winner straddling an Orient with a French-built engine.
Women had been a large part of the bicycle scene, and many people expected that women would take to motorcycles as they had taken to bicycles. An article in the Dealer and Repairman of April 1902 goes thoroughly into the question of how to safeguard women’s skirts (“their characteristic and fixed style of wearing apparel,” as the author of the Dealer and Repairman article put it) from getting caught in the motor or the final drive. Several American and English manufacturers built motorcycles with drop frames and skirt guards. Mrs. Eva M. Rogers was the first American woman given a mention in the motorcycle press. She entered competitions in 1903 and 1904.
Fun with sidecars. A liberated 1921 lady takes her golfing beau for a ride.
Dorothy Rice Sims, in her memoir Curiouser and Curiouser, writes about growing up in New York City and buying a motorcycle when she was a teenager. “I adored it. No other girls and few men had motorcycles then. There were no more dull afternoons in my life.” Her motorcycling was seen as one of the madcap things young society girls did.
In the next few years, motorcycle factories began to look for commercial applications for their products. As early as 1905, and definitely by 1908, police departments purchased motorcycles for traffic control. While police motorcycles in Britain are traditionally small-capacity machines, American police motorcycles were, from the start, heavy-duty two-wheelers with large engines, built to endure fast riding over bad roads all day, every day. Police sales and service became a major profit center for many dealerships. The need to design motorcycles that would stand up to ten-hour shifts catching speeders and burglars encouraged American motorcycle factories to build heavy, powerful machines that could outrun contemporary automobiles on straight roads, but were less adaptable for sport use.
At the same time, motorcycle racing became a popular spectator sport. In 1908, promoters began using wooden “velodrome” circular tracks for motorcycle racing. The first motordrome track specifically built for motorcycle racing opened in January 1909 in Los Angeles. The motorcycles that competed on these board tracks were basically engines mounted in bicycle frames. With safety equipment yet to be invented, and centrifugal forces tending to spin the bike and rider out of the bowl, the motordromes were incredibly dangerous. Most of the top riders only survived a few years. The American public began to associate motorcycles with recklessness and death.
The San Francisco Police Department, c. 1920. Sales to police departments and service of police motorcycles were, and are, an important profit center to local dealerships.
W. E. “Eddie” Hasha was a young rider from Texas who began to make a name for himself on the board tracks, riding an Indian. On September 8, 1912, he died in a wreck that claimed the lives of another rider and five spectators. This accident made the front page of The New York Times and began the decline in the reputation of motorcycling as a sport.
Although Harley-Davidson avoided racing on a factory level for the first ten years that the company was in existence, Walter Davidson did compete in “enduros.” In 1908, he won the Federation of American Motorcyclists national endurance run. This victory put Harley-Davidson on the map. The national motorcycle press was impressed by both Walter and his motorcycle, and wrote favorably of both. Production tripled that of 1907: in 1908 Harley-Davidson built 450 motorcycles, and ramped production up to 1,149 units in 1909. By 1911, a Harley-Davidson advertisement claimed, “Nearly one third of all the motorcycles sold in America are Harley-Davidsons.”
This ad of 1914 announces technological advances.
A motorcycle advertisement from 1915. By 1915, Harley-Davidson had decided that outreach to sport riders was important enough to field a factory racing team.
Harley-Davidson advertising emphasized economy and reliability. The company presented its bikes as “Silent Grey Fellows,” that would not scare horses or annoy neighbors. One 1911 ad stated, “In one section of Indiana, one out of eight farmers own a motorcycle. These farmers have realized the economy, the convenience and the pleasure of this best of road steeds.”
There was a sea change in American motorcycling shortly before World War I. Henry Ford’s Model T made automobiles available to many American families, relegating the previously popular sidecars to enthusiasts and cutting into the market for motorcycles as commuter vehicles. Many of the one hundred US motorcycle factories in business in 1913 went into other industries or ceased manufacturing altogether. The sport-bike market became increasingly important for the remaining motorcycle factories, and in 1915, Harley formed a factory team to enter longdistance races. Although other factories had faster bikes, “they only count the winners at the finish,” and Harley quality control, superior race management and thorough preparation brought the Milwaukee team home in the lead time after time.
Harley also explored sales to the military and sales to commercial users. As early as 1912, the company sold motorcycles to the Japanese military. The first Harley-Davidsons to be sold to the US Army were used for an expedition into Mexico to chase after revolutionary leader Pancho Villa. While the factory made significant sales to the World War I American Expeditionary Force, most American military bikes were supplied by Indian for that conflict. As a result, Harley was able to build civilian motorcycles during the war years, keep its dealers afloat, and emerged after Armistice Day in considerably better shape than its arch-rival.
By this time, there were only three major American motorcycle companies: Excelsior (which also built the Henderson four-cylinder machine), Indian and Harley-Davidson.
Harley-Davidson advertisement from World War I. This ad fudges the facts: Harley did not supply most of the doughboys’ motorcycles—Indian did. Harley managed to produce enough bikes to keep its dealers supplied, even during the war years.
Motorcycling and Harley-Davidson moved into the 1920s, branching in three different directions. Racing drew huge crowds, but was basically a spectator sport. The company won every National Championship race in 1921, decided that it had reaped all the good publicity from racing it needed, and stopped factory support for the National team in 1922—a decision helped along by the economic downturn of 1920–21, which cut into sales.
Ray Weishaar, Harley-Davidson racing star. He helped to popularize the nickname “Hog,” referring to Harley motorcycles, by carrying the team mascot, a miniature pig, around on victory laps. His death in 1924 was one factor that caused the factories to change to smaller engines in an effort to keep racing speed down.
Another part of the reason that Harley pulled out of track racing may have been that the company did not believe that National racing—which took place on racing specials with little relationship to the road machines—sold bikes. Hillclimbing, which in America consists of a fast blast up an almost vertical unpaved hill, was more likely to be attractive to amateur competitors who would buy motorcycles and parts for their motorcycles from the local dealer.
One of these amateur (or semi-amateur) hillclimbers was Dudley Perkins, the San Francisco, California, Harley dealer. He got married shortly after World War I and promised his wife he would stop road racing, which scared her. Instead, he took up hillclimbing, and became so good at it that he supported his dealership with his winnings in tough times.
Commercial uses of motorcycles multiplied, especially in crowded cities. In addition to police uses, commercial sidecars were built in a huge variety of forms, and became very popular for urban deliveries. Harley started building package trucks (commercial sidecars) in 1916. By 1921, Harley’s package trucks came in four different models. Businesses would often buy a package truck chassis and build a custom box on it, as an advertising display. Motorcycle combinations delivered bread from the bakery in a package truck shaped and painted to look like a loaf of bread and candy from the candy shop in a carriage-shaped package truck with lace curtains in the windows.
Dudley Perkins, the San Francisco Harley-Davidson dealer, at a hillclimb in the 1920s. American hillclimbs involved a fast blast up an almost vertical hill, the rougher the track the better.
The motorcycle club scene, which had been very popular up through World War I, declined in the 1920s as one-time commuters turned to Model Ts and other inexpensive automobiles. Harley management was not happy with this development, and devoted considerable time and energy to restarting motorcycle clubs, which were often one-brand associations centered around the local dealer. Clubs went on rides together, developed club uniforms and organized social events, such as dances. The social aspect of motorcycle club life drew in many people, and motorcycling became popular as a leisure-time activity. Harley sales tell the story: while the factory only sold 11,460 motorcycles in 1921 (partly due to the recession in that year), sales were back up to 17,648 in 1924 and remained good until 1931, when the Depression hit Main Street.
An advertisement for package trucks. In the 1920s, these commercial sidecars were popular all over the United States for urban commercial deliveries.
The Depression was good and bad for motorcycle culture. Excelsior/Henderson ceased production, Indian barely escaped bankruptcy, and Harley-Davidson cut production to the bone and had to lay off many of its workers. However, the motorcycle clubs remained active. Gasoline was cheap and unemployed workers, with time on their hands and a motorcycle bought when times were better, worked out ways to improve it.
The existence of a large group of poor boys with fast motorcycles was exploited by fly-by-night promoters who could rent the county horse-racing track for very little, advertise a race and offer a few dollars in prize money, and be sure of a crowded field and many spectators interested in excitement and entertainment. With no safety provisions and few rules, the injury toll mounted.
This 1938 ad emphasizes the social side of motorcycling.
Motorcycle clubs sponsored a lot of social events. These invitations date from before World War II.
These races were known as “outlaw” races. The term was first printed in the Bicycling World and Motorcycle Review in 1907, and simply meant racing that took place without sanction from the national motorcycle association, which in the 1930s was the American Motorcycle Association (now known as the American Motorcyclist Association). The AMA was worried that there would be a repeat of the board-track debacle, where spectators lost interest after the well-publicized deaths of major competitors. The AMA, Indian and Harley-Davidson all wanted racing to be a safe, clean sport that would meet popular approval.
The result was the AMA announcing a new form of competition known as Class C. Class C racers had to be owned by the person riding the motorcycle. The machine had to be stock, with a working gearbox, clutch, rear fender and chain guards. Maximum displacement was restricted, depending on the event, and only 80-octane pump fuel was allowed. AMA-chartered clubs were encouraged to help out at race meets. Class C events offered better prize money, safer and cleaner competition, and a level playing field, where the private owner had a chance to place.
This new form of competition took off within a year or two of its introduction. It encouraged the motorcycle clubs, and the number of AMA clubs rocketed from sixty-two in 1928 to 671 in 1938. Class C racing also encouraged motorcycle sales, since Class C racing encouraged spectators to get involved, and not just watch. As times gradually got better, more people were able to afford a motorcycle, and Harley-Davidson sales improved, though not to 1929 levels. Then, the Japanese military dropped bombs on Pearl Harbor.
Harley-Davidson had to stop most civilian production, but received the US military contract for motorcycles. The factory was running twenty-four hours a day for months. World War II also introduced thousands of men, and some women, to motorcycles, and military training gave them the skills to keep a motor running and improve it. When the war was over, surplus motorcycle sales were a cheap way for an ex-GI to acquire some wheels and start riding.
The early days of Class C racing. These men are the winners of the 1935 200-mile Oakland Speedway event. Jim Young won on a Harley-Davidson. Windy Lindstrom (third place on Harley) started his competition career as a hillclimber and went on to do well in TT and flat-track competition.
What few talked about in the heady days after Victory in Japan was that millions of veterans, most of whom were barely out of their teens, had been through a horrifying, stressful and frightening experience. Many “blew off steam” through drinking and partying. Francis Clifford, a racer and trackside wrench during the 1940s, remembered an American Legion convention in San Francisco, with thousands of people drunk in the streets and naked women hanging out of windows.
Some veterans came home, bought a motorcycle and joined a club populated with fellow veterans who understood what they were going through. The Boozefighters was founded in 1946 by John Cameron, who owned a trucking company, and Wino Willie Forkner, who had spent the war as a waist gunner on B-24s. Although the Boozefighters liked to party hard, they thought of themselves as a social organization. They had honorable discharges, jobs, and wives or girlfriends.
The central California town of Hollister had hosted Gypsy Tours for years before the war, and resumed the event in 1947. A Gypsy Tour was a motorcycle rally that featured camping, music, field events and races for entertainment. About 3,500 people showed up, with a large percentage being women accompanying husbands and boyfriends. Both AMA and non-AMA “outlaw” clubs were there, including the Boozefighters. According to those who were there, the event was not much out of the ordinary, even for the time. There were arrests Friday and Saturday night for public drunkenness and similar offenses. Riders were drag racing on Main Street for a short time. When it was over, the mayor invited the bikers back the next year.
Wino Willie Forkner said in an interview that he saw a Life photographer and the owner of a local theater setting up the shoot for the infamous photograph showing a drunk young man on a motorcycle surrounded with broken beer bottles. The photo made the cover of Life, and shocked the nation with its story of “motorcycle hooliganism.”
As seen in this article, Harley-Davidson WLA sidevalves were extensively used for messengering, military police duty and reconnaissance during World War II..
This motorcycle is set up similarly to many of the bikes that were at Hollister in 1948. The dice shift knob was a very popular accessory. California riders, with less rain to deal with, often removed fenders as unnecessary.
The Hollister incident would have been a footnote but for a short story, very loosely based on the 1947 rally, that became a movie in 1953 starring Marlon Brando. The Wild One convinced many people that motorcyclists were dangerous hooligans. It became socially unacceptable for women to ride. The few that did joined the Motor Maids, an all women’s motorcycling group started in 1940 by Linda Dugeau and Detroit Harley-Davidson dealer Marjorie Robinson, which is still very active.
By that time, American motorcycling was in decline. Most veterans had settled down to raise a family and traded the motorcycle for a washing machine. Harley-Davidson went from selling 29,612 motorcycles in 1948 to 15,882 in 1951. Sales continued to decline in the 1950s. The few veterans who were unable to rejoin society maintained their membership in outlaw clubs. Riders who were unable to hold down a normal job in the conformist 1950s gravitated to criminal activity to raise money. The outlaw clubs became increasingly violent. The national press was happy to publicize anything these very small clubs did.
A few British motorcycles had been imported to the United States since the late 1920s, but the trickle of foreign bikes became a flood after the war, both due to interested veterans who had seen these lightweight, easy handling bikes in Europe and due to corporate intrigue that eventually led in 1953 to the demise of Indian motorcycle manufacturing in the United States. The British importers worked hard to improve the image of motorcycling, but it was an uphill battle. The AMA also promoted a squeaky-clean image, and AMA-chartered motorcycle clubs steered as far away from the outlaws as possible. AMA clubs promoted racing, rallies and enduros. They took part in Fourth of July parades, and at least one organization—the Shriners—organized a drill team, showcasing close-formation riding and stunts. However, the average person still associated motorcycles with drunken riots.
Hells Angels logo. The most famous “one percenter” club.
Change was coming from the east. In 1959, the Honda Motorcycle Company established a beachhead in Los Angeles and poured its tremendous resources—Honda was at that time the largest motorcycle company in the world—into making motorcycling respectable in America. Within a few years, it had succeeded, and “nice people” all over the country started riding bikes.
Harley-Davidson was an unexpected beneficiary of the “You meet the nicest people on a Honda” campaign. The company had been augmenting its income with sub-contracting work for General Motors, but sales started rising in 1964, and were up to 25,328 by 1965.
Increasingly, middle-class people were riding motorcycles as an enjoyable hobby, while fantasizing that they were pirates in black leather. They took part in big rallies in Sturgis, South Dakota, Daytona Beach, Florida, and Laughlin, Nevada, where they could make noise, drink beer and pretend to be outlaws for a few days before going back to the day job. The ranks of the actual “one percenter” clubs (a term that started with angry letters to the editor by AMA members in the late 1940s) grew somewhat during the 1960s and 1970s, but always stayed small. Disaffected young men joined the Hells Angels, the Pagans and the Sons of Silence for the same reasons their World War II forebears had—difficulty in fitting into civilian society.
In the late 1970s, a group of Harley riders centered around the York, Pennsylvania, Harley-Davidson motorcycle assembly plant started an informal association of friends. This group formalized its association in 1980 as the York County Harley-Davidson Owners Association. Technically an “outlaw” group, as it is not affiliated with the AMA, the YCHDOA goes on rides, holds parties, and raises a lot of money for charity. It is believed that Harley-Davidson used this group as a model to create the factory-sponsored Harley Owners Group riding clubs in 1983. The concept—a social organization based on a specific brand of motorcycle, which offered its members community, an opportunity to participate in charity events, pride in America, and an identity—was extremely successful. Motorcycle clubs have often historically been centered around a dealership, but Harley-Davidson took the dealership-centered club to a new level. HOG members wear “colors,” a vest with club identification on the back often associated with one percenters, but HOG chapters have a positive image in the community, due to their emphasis on charity work. There are now more than 1,400 HOG clubs around the world, and HOG has been studied by marketers as the most successful community building effort ever engaged in by a company.
A romantic image of an outlaw motorcyclist in a cartoon from the late 1960s or early 1970s.
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, 3 percent of the American population has a motorcycle license, but Harley-Davidson has a new concern—the aging of the American biker. Fewer young people are interested in motorcycling. Harley-Davidson management, as usual, is working hard to make sure it holds off this latest threat. The company says its efforts to target younger riders as well as women and minorities are paying off.
In 2011, for the fourth straight year, Harley-Davidson captured the largest share of the US motorcycle market among young adults aged between eighteen and thirty-four, women, black and Hispanic riders, as well as among its core rider group, according to a news release from Harley-Davidson. More than one-third of new Harley sales in the US in 2011 were to riders new to the brand, according to the release. The total number of women motorcycle riders has continued to climb, from about 4.3 million in 2003 to 7.1 million in 2009, with Harley making the most effort to attract women of any major motorcycle manufacturer. Commentators have said that the number of women riding their own bikes at Sturgis, for example, has seemed to grow over the past few years.
Today, the social side of Harley-Davidson—group rides, rallies and clubs—is as important as ever. Identification with motorcycling and Harley-Davidson provides a source of community in a rapidly shifting world. After one hundred and ten years, Harley-Davidson faces the future, confident it will beat new challenges and survive. After all, what other company has its logo tattooed on so many arms?
American motorcycle meets have included field events as far back as anyone can remember. Most involve balance, and there are tests of skill for the passenger as well. Here, the object is to toss the hoop over the pole. The rider is on a customized Twin Cam.