1946 -1952
Freedom and postwar mobility
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.
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.
Fuente: Museo Guggenheim
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