FREEDOM AND POSTWAR MOBILITY: 1946-1958
INDIAN CHIEF
1,206 cc, 1948, United States
Collection of Doug Strange
The rocky homecoming of American World War II veterans enriched American motorcycle mythology. Their wartime world fostered a camaraderie among motorcycle platoons that would form the root of motorcycle gangs like Marlon Brando's in the film The Wild One (1954). The juiced-up Army bike with the everyman-sounding moniker "Bob-Job," became the vehicle for their flight. Combat veterans roamed America's roads in cohesive groups; the forerunners of the maligned American motorcycle gang, these vets did Easy Rider long before Hollywood did. The counterpoint to the "Bob-Job" was the Vespa: Brando in leather against Audrey Hepburn in a billowing skirt in Roman Holiday (1953). Born of the need for cheap personal transportation in the chaos of postwar Italy, the Vespa zipped into the collective cultural psyche. Socially acceptable yet still romantic, it epitomized suburbia's embrace of the motorbike. |
The end of
warfare did not mean the end of war. The term cold war
supplanted the phrase world war, with perhaps even
greater cultural reverberation. The enemy could no longer
be conquered simply by massive mobilization and mass
patriotism; rather, the big bombs were as elusive and
invincible as the air through which they might travel.
Nuclear became society's operative word. The anxiety
provoked by the perils of nuclear war spawned the
American fixation on the nuclear family. The resulting
insularity, best characterized by planned, homogeneous
communities like Levittown, New Jersey, followed a
pattern--the disintegration of the old patterns of human
social relationship, and with it, the snapping of the
links between generations. War planning, family planning,
and economic planning sucked the spontaneity out of the
postwar world. Political and social conformity became
law. |
Imme R100 99 cc, 1949, Germany Deutsches Museum, Munich |
AJS E-95 499 cc, 1953, United Kingdom The Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum Birmingham, AL |
In this context, the GIs' uncomfortable homecoming became all the more jarring, suburbanization all the more unavoidable, and social rebellion all the more predictable. The motorcycle became the vehicle for all shades of rebellion--from the vigilantism of hardcore biker gangs to the softer, almost sexy poses of suburban housewives daring to mimic Hollywood starlets. Fine machine--from dainty Vespas to daunting Harleys--became the metaphor on which America would ride into one of the most tumultuous eras the young country had ever known. The anxieties of postwar society forecast the chaos of the 1960s, and the motorcycle became the cultural icon that tracked the societal meltdown. |