Freedom Riders

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 5, 1999 | by Sean Paige

In addition to the MIA/POW issues, bikers also become heavily involved in fighting helmet laws, which they cite as a serious encroachment of their freedom. "It's just stifling to put on a helmet," says Keith R. Ball, editorial director at Easyriders, Inc., a California publisher of biker magazines. "The whole experience of riding a motorcycle is about freedom, and then someone tells you you have to strap that thing on." Ball is on a roll. "Growing up blue-collar, I was always taught that the Democrats were the people's party," he tells Insight, "only to discover, when we started working for motorcyclist

rights, that the ideology that went along with our notion of freedom is often reflected in the Republican Party."

Bikers-rights activists also are involved in high-occupancy-vehicle, or HOV, lane issues and in fighting off the ban-the-motorcycles moods that occasionally seize communities -- particularly gated ones.

Inescapably, to talk motorcycles in America is to talk about the Harley-Davidson Motor Co. of Milwaukee one among a tiny pantheon whose corporate story has become part of the American legend. Born in 1903, at the dawn of a transportation revolution being wrought by the Wright brothers and Henry Ford, Harley-Davidson grew up with the century -- surviving the Depression, playing an important part in two world wars, and weathering times of uncertainty and foreign competition to emerge a powerhouse.

At low ebb and under siege by competitors from Japan, the company received a helping hand in its rebuilding effort from President Reagan, who in the early 1980s raised tariffs on Japanese bikes to prevent their dumping on the U.S. market. This move gave the slumping company time to get back on its feet. Today Harley boasts more than $2 billion in annual net sales and is a standard of American excellence.

But most of the credit for Harley's resurrection seems to go to the revered Willie G. Davidson, grandson of one company founder who today serves as the corporate vice president for design. Although the company at one time kept its outlaw customers and customizers at arm's length -- even for a time forbidding its service centers from customizing its motorcycles -- Yates says Davidson "began to go to biker rallies like Sturgis [South Dakota] and Daytona in the mid-1970s and began to be friendly with the great outlaw motorcycle designers." Soon he "began adapting" their modifications into production models, says Yates, and a new Harley-Davidson was born. The company no longer decried the "1 percenters" who chopped up its bikes (thus, the term "chopper" which is the motorcycle equivalent of a hot rod) but celebrated the individualizing of its machines and recognized the renegade mystique as a marketing asset.

That unique, made-in-America story line is a large part of what endears the brand to hard-core bikers. "Because of the fact that they were the only bikes made in America, there was an underdog quality to Harleys, representing another embattled component of the American Dream," says Yates. "Most veterans ride Harley-Davidsons," a Rolling Thunder biker tells Insight, "because they're American-made and they sound really great."