Harley Davidson Rides to War

is Harley Davidson on the brink. Hither everyone. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Aerial Casting, and today we're gonna talk about a company that has a good long history. Harley Davidson been around, been around for for a week or two, Yeah, for a hundred and fifteen years, more like it? Yeah, and uh and just interest a full disclosure, do not, nor have I ever owned a motorcycle. I do not nor have never owned a motorcycle either. But my family

they're all motorcyclists. My father has a Goldwing and my aunt has been a part of like Friendly motorcycle gangs and has taught motorcycle safety classes and has owned many motorcycles. Yeah, whereas my parents are teachers and would probably scold be if I were to ever even look at a motorcycle for too long. But we want to talk a little

bit about where the company Harley Davidson came from. And then, out of all the companies that started before the Great Depression, all the motorcycle companies, how is it that Harley Davidson and the Indian Motorcycle Company are the only two that that we're able to get through it? So how did Harley Davidson get started? Well, Harley Davidson got started in nineteen o one when WILLIAMS. Harley, who's only twenty one

at time, designed a blueprint for an engine on a bicycle. Yes, he was from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and so Milwaukee, Wisconsin the home of Harley Davidson. And at this point when he patents this, motorcycles were already a thing. They existed. It's not like Harley Davidson invented the motorcycle. They were pretty popular in Europe, but they were still kind of an oddity in the United States at this point. The first motorcycle made in the US was from a company called

the California motor Company. That one produced a motorcycle called the Marks Motorcycle back in eighteen nineties six. So yeah, it's the vehicle has been around for a while, but obviously they did not, you know, make a stamp to the point where they became synonymous with motorcycles. Nineteen o one, by the way, is the same year that the Indian Motorcycle Company was formed, and that would remain the arch

nemesis to Harley Davidson for the up to now. Yes, um So, in nineteen o three, just two years after this engine was designed, William Harley and Arthur Davidson, who were actually childhood friends, made the first Harley Davidson motorcycle public and they built it out of this little ten by fifteen wooden shed with their name written on the front of it. They didn't spring for a sign, at least didn't say no girls allowed. It wasn't like it was.

I mean, you don't know that, I'm guessing. So that first vehicle was essentially a motorized bicycle, so with like a like a gasoline powered engine, the bike still had pedals and still had a chain drive, and the rider was meant to ride the bike. Get it up to speed before engaging the engine. And in fact, you were supposed to even pedal a bit if you ever hit a steep incline. It couldn't go super fast. The prototype version before they started making the production model, went about

the speed of a brisk walk. I mean, the thing is you're saving some energy, which you're gonna need if you've got to pedal up a steep hill. To me, that's the part I want it taken off of me. Is a pedal assist bicycle. Well, they made three whole motorcycles that first year slow down, I know, right, so it's a very small number. But they were also building those motors by hand. This wasn't like they had some manufacturing facility. They were hand crafting these motorcycles, including the

motors themselves. Well, despite that, they opened their first dealership just a year later in Chicago, yep. And then they would find by nineteen o six they had the capital to actually invest in better manufacturing facilities. Right, They ended up getting a factory, and actual factory, not a shed. I mean it was still kind of small. It was

pretty small you have here. It was twenty eight by eight feet, yes, tiny, and they ended up tripling their workforce because it went from two people to six, and they more than tripled how many bikes they were making because now they were up to making fifty bikes ye, fifty bikes a year by nineteen o six, And in nineteen o seven they would incorporate and the company would end up doubling in size by the number of dealerships they ended up opening up more of those, and also

by the number of employees. And they also brought on another partner to the company, so it wasn't just Harley and Davidson, it was also Davidson. Yeah, it was Harley, Davidson and Davidson because it was Arthur Davidson's brother, William Davidson, who joined. So then you have to Davidson's in a Harley. Yes, I'm glad they did not change her name to Davidson

Harley Davidson. Yeah, that would have been odd. And one of the things that the company became known for, it became one of their really go to strategies was their participation, their involvement in racing, and they were really good at it too, so they won a lot of categories in racing and a lot of categories in endurance and reliability contests. Um, and this was to kind of spread the word. Yeah, it was like a marketing scheme. Yeah, because I mean

people needed reliable transportation. They needed transportation they could keep it home and take from home, and especially if they didn't live in a big city, Trains and street cars weren't as much of an option and roads were not in great shape either. No, and horses required you know, feeding and a lot of upkeeps. So they're trying to turn this motorized bicycle from kind of a novelty to something that every home needs. And at this stage, remember

we don't really have cars right there. There's some electric cars that had been made, and there were some there were some internal combustion engine cars that were being made that they were oddities, even more so than motorcycles. They were really expensive and they had very limited range, especially the electric ones. Electric cars predate internal combustion engine cars. Yeah, but people didn't want to use electric cars because I

thought they'd be too quiet and dangerous. Most come on, mostly they thought I can get up the street, but then I can't get back too. So this was one of those moments where there was not really there weren't really other options for a lot of people who needed to be able to get from place to place. So the motorcycle was actually looked at as a potential practical vehicle for a lot of people. Yeah yeah, um, and along the racing in Harley Davidson actually started their own

racing department. So Harley Davidson Owners and Harley's are kind of called hogs. I've always heard them called hogs, and I did not know why, and I love that there's a real reason. And then there's the retro fitted reason. Right, Yeah, well they say that hog stands for Harley Owners Group. Um, but the reason that I read is because there are a couple of racing guys who, when they want to race, would take the little mascot of like a hog around and take laps with a little pig. So so there

was a literal hog involved. I like that description better. And then later on we said, how will we call say that hog stands for Harley Owners Group, kind of like how Mickey Mouse Guy's name. There's there's some different possible theories here. Uh. Milwaukee was starting to get receive a lot of benefit from the fact that Harley Davidson was a growing industry out of their city. They were

the top consumer for gas and electric out of that city. Now, by nineteen seventeen, we start to see one of the most important customers that Harley Davidson would ever have. In fact, there are two big, big reasons why Harley Davidson was able to make it out of the era of the Great Depression, and one of the two is that the

US military became a really big customer for Harley Davidson. Uh. By nineteen seventeen, we're talking about World War One and the United States getting involved, and so the US signed a contract with Harley Davidson and a third of all the vehicles that Harley Davidson was producing, we're being sold to the US military. Yeah. Well a year later, half of all of their motorcycles were being sold to the

military for World War One. That's like two motorcycles. That's a credible So we also got a point where the company formed a an actual quartermaster's school, a way of training military on how to work on Harley Davidson so that they could remain in good service even overseas. Yeah, and they kept this school even after the war, and they they molded it to fit their needs at whatever time,

they were using it for service, for sales, for management. Um. The school lasted until nineteen uh and it's still kind of around, but now it's called Harley Davidson University. And it's funny. I like the little note you have here. The war comes to a conclusion and the first American to enter Germany post war rode upon Harley Davidson. Yes, also at this point in nineteen seventeen, in or Is It Diversify sold more than just motorcycles. They also sold bicycles. Yep,

that's not bad. No, no, it's not so. The next thing I personally laughed at was that in nineteen nineteen they released a sports model which act really got a lot of popularity overseas internationally. Oh and it's cylinder set up made it pretty quiet, which harley Is apparently were known for being quiet. They actually had the nicknames Silent Gray Fellows Gray for the paint color they had when

they were first being made. And it's just funny to me because now Harley's are like the loud motorcycle, right, that's the stereotype, revving up the engine and creating this incredibly loud racket. But yeah, the early Harley's were known for being very quiet. By Harley Davidson had climbed the top of the heap that there were other motorcycle companies that were around at the same time as Harley Davidson and Indian, but they they were first place. They were

the largest in the world. And not only did they have dealerships in the United States, they had dealerships in lots of countries, sixty seven countries. Yes. In fact, international sales would become incredibly important. Yea. And even nowadays they still have a lot of international sales. Yes. Now that we've set the foundation for Harley Davidson, let's shake things up right. So we have a company. It's it's gone to the top of its industry. It's doing really well overseas.

It had this incredible uh sale to the United States military during World War One. The problem starts in the nineteen twenties, so it's not yet the Great Depression that starts in nine But the nineteen twenties, something else, a pair of something else has happened. First, there was a bit of a recession, but not the depression yet that ended up curtailing a lot of consumer spending. People stopped

spending as much money on stuff. But the other thing was a guy, a little guy named Henry Ford comes out with a brand new product, the Model T. Yeah, so now cars are a competitor. It was cheaper and more practical the motorcycles. Yes, like I said, the electric car had not made a whole lot of headway, it

did precede these internal combustion engine cars. The Model T was able to succeed where other cars had failed, largely because Ford was creating this assembly line approach that really brought down the costs of manufacturing, so he could sell the cars that much cheaper and still make a profit. So Ford was a genius, a true genius from both an engineering and a business perspective, and that he was able to bring costs down to make a car affordable

to more Americans. And as a result, they saw, Hey, there's this other vehicle, and I can put stuff in it. I can put somebody else in it too. This was something that the average person could actually go out and buy. And so, yeah, a Model T ended up taking a big chunk out of Harley Davidson's domestic sales in the United States. Yeah, I actually got to see a Model T once at an anti car show up in North Georgia. Yeah, every now and then on the streets you might see

one go by. Someone says, stored them. They are pretty cool. I'm not a gearhead, but I'm gonna want to be gearhead. So here we have this new form of transportation and it's threatening the very business model of Harley Davidson. And that's that's the big one punch. The big two punch is just about to hit, and we'll talk about that in just a minute, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right, we got the model t Harley Davidson has been knocked by that. What

is their response? What do they look for? Well, one of the big things that they did is they started convincing police departments to use their motorcycles as like a quick compact way to enforce law. Um. And this actually was really really good for Harley Davidson because cops, you know, they put on their motorcycle boots and their little saddle bags, and the general public thought they looked like cowboys. And I thought that was pretty cool, and everybody wanted to

be this like quote unquote modern cowboy. I think that really helped shape the look that we see around motorcycle culture too. Yeah, it's it's um how they kind of modeled their whole accessory and clothing department to sell to the public. So this this floats them over the slump that they hit when they ford. But then they also started to depend very heavily upon those overseas markets. So in the mid nineteen twenties, more than fifty five per

cent of their sales were to foreign markets. So it's an American company, but they're getting more than half of their revenue from overseas sales, mostly in Australia and New Zealand. You're brave to try to accent I would not be able to do it. I have to get up the wick in the morning. Uh So, one way the company was able to boost sales domestically was again through those community events like the racing events and motorcycle clubs as well.

Harley Davidson was very much encouraging motorcycle clubs because it was a way to kind of have a grassroots marketing campaign. But they also they depended heavily on their on their dealerships. There was a dealer guy named Bill nuth or Bill Nuhs kay in ut h. He was in Milwaukee, and he created something that as I was looking into it was repeatedly described as something like a circus, side show and motorcycle festival all combined, called Nuth's College college spelled

with a cave. I mean, that's a college I'd like to go to. Yeah, just saying apparently. There was a lot of good food and a lot of trick writing and then motorcycle writing tips and things like that. So it was educational and it was also entertaineding and it was a community event. So again it was all about let's show people how cool motorcycles are and we can

help increase sales that way. Yeah, And in nine, sales were increasing and more than twenty two thousand motorcycles were being produced a year, which is not a huge jump from previous years if you look at today's production limits, but it's still something worth remarking on. Yes, and then the big number two punch hits. This is the Great Depression. So on October ninety nine, what we also call it Black Tuesday, that's when the stock market collapsed in the

United States. Investors offloaded a collective sixteen million shares across all companies. And this was the first real, big, major event of what we call the Great Depression. But it wasn't until nineteen thirty nine that historians would say the United States truly recovered from the Great Depression. It's you know, it's easy to fall, it's a lot harder to climb back up, This is true. And to make things work. This depression was way more than just a problem for

the United States. It was a worldwide problem. The US experienced it early, but other nations followed suit, and a lot of foreign countries were starting to create very high import taxes as a way to generate money for the governments, but in another way to help kind of uh slow down imports and rely more on internal resources. Right, So, seeing import taxes go as high as sometimes fifty hurt companies like Harley Davidson that were really dependent on those

overseas markets. And when Jonathan says hurt, he means really hurt, because their sales dropped to less than one fifth of what they had been prior to the Great Depression. Yeah, this is a point where the company really was on the verge of bankruptcy. And so what do you do when your company is in these gyres straits. Well, one thing you do is you tightened the belt, you lay people off. Yeah, so a lot of people lost jobs.

People who kept their jobs, some of them saw their wages getting cut, their hours getting cut, their work getting cut because company slowed production. Yeah. There was an account I read by a guy named Joseph Borgan, who was a He worked in the riveting department of Harley Davidson during this time, and he said that there was one two week period where his take home pay wass for

two weeks work. I mean, in the twenties and thirties, that's a little more than it is now, but still not nearly enough, not not enough for it to be like two weeks worth of wages. And their production fell eighty one from nine to nine thirty three, that period of the most severe downturn in the Great Depression. Industrial production in the United States in general, across all industries fell by So this was not something unique to Harley Davidson.

It was affecting lots of companies. Some were able to manage a little better than others because they were making necessities that people absolutely required, but no one was doing great. The gross domestic product for the entire country fell. Unemployment was hitting rates of up to It was not good. No, it was not good. So Harley Davidson did a few things to get through this. Uh. They started selling their blueprints and their tools and their machinery to Japan so

that Japan could create its own motorcycles. Yes, they were marketed under the Riku oh yes line r I k U O Yes. And And the other thing Harley Davidson did is because they had built up dis good reputation with the military and the police departments. Is they still maintain those relationships and maintained sales to those particular areas. Yes,

and that helped a little bit. Now, the common consumer might not be able to buy a motorcycle, but the government still was and they were still doing this work with Japan as far into it as the mid to late thirties, although as tensions were building leading up to World War Two that that relationship would break down. Uh. The military designs were different, obviously from the consumer ones. It turns out that if you are designing a vehicle for the military, it has to be a little more

heavy duty than your average consumer vehicle. Yes. Well, even though in World War One motorcycles were kind of designed for combat, and in World War Two they were designed for like career services. You still need something that's reliable. And by nine pretty much every single US motorcycle company that was not Indian or Harley Davidson ceases to exist.

The Great Depression was a large part of that, But there was also the issue of which motorcycles were seen as being the best performers, right, because all those races were frequently being won by people who were either on an Indian motorcycle or a Harley Davidson motorcycle. Now, Harley did sweep a lot of races. I'm just going to

reiterate that. Yeah, all though part of that might be because Harley Davidson also had a reputation for brow beating motorcycle uh organizations, racing organizations to tweak the rules in such a way that it favored Harley Davidson motorcycles over other him Indian motorcycles. Yeah, so some of the practices in order to stay a float and now granted, you know,

desperate times, but still kind of shady. Uh So they continued to encourage bike clubs to promote motorcycles and try and boost sales and they pressured the American Motorcycle Association to tweek those rules. I was just talking about, uh, And it's interesting I read one report that said, in hindsight, the Great Depression forced Harley Davidson to reevaluate how it would market motorcycles to h the American market because this this sequence the Great Depression and World War Two meant

that a law of their overseas markets were cut off them. Yes, and so they realized that we can't as a company really survive if that is how we turn our focus. Because when things go south, are are revenue source is completely gone, we need to look how how can we market more to Americans as well? Yeah? Yeah, And then a lot of those companies that would have otherwise stuck

around got scared off by the Great Depression. Some of them were worried that the downturn was gonna last eight ten years, whereas the downturn lasted four years, and then the Great Depression itself lasted a full decade. Because the recovery period was so long that some people were thinking things were just gonna keep getting bad, they were not

going to get better. And so you had a lot of business owners saying all right, we're just gonna bail now, we're getting out the industry and we're going to focus on doing something else that is got a better chance of success. Yeah. Yeah, but Harley didn't. UM. Two, they created a three wheel server car, which, unlike their previous three beal vehicles, UM, wasn't meant to carry large amounts of product. Basically, yeah, it wasn't a delivery service. No. No,

it was like a tricycle. It was like a police tricycle. But it was really popular with the police. In fact, they used them until nineteen seventies. Yep. I love the note here about the reverse controls. Why Why did these vehicles have reverse controls? Um? So that meter maids could drive the car and mark cars for ticketing at the same time. Yeah, making a little chalk mark on the wheel so that you can test it when you come back and see if the car has been moved or not. Yeah. Yeah,

fun times, I mean pretty now. Ninety three the last year of the downturn. Remember, just a few years earlier they had produced twenty two thousand bikes. Three was a very different story. Yeah, they only produced four thousand bikes, but they did start producing more interesting bikes. Uh. They started adding an eagle image to their gas tank and made their lettering just a little bit fancier and started uh selling their bikes in a variety of colors. Yep.

And they had done some custom jobs before, but now they were starting to look at that more seriously. Uh. And they were also still doing well on the racist circuit at that time, right, yes, yes, uh. And they also came out with a popular bike in six, the e L which was nicknamed the Knucklehead because I had these two little valves at these little caps on it

that looked like a little knuckles, little knuckles. Um. And it was twice as powerful, and I had an all new suspension and tank and frame, and people really like this model. It was. It was a very popular model for a while, and it bumped their production back up to ten thousand bikes a year, still less than half of where they had been, but they were starting to

recover a little bit. Yes. And also as a sort of a side effect of the Great Oppression, you started seeing things like the gas prices were dropping, and so it made motorcycling a little less of a luxury because you didn't have to, you know, the the gas prices weren't exorbitant, so that helped a little bit. Yeah. So if you could afford a motorcycle and you're unemployed because of the Great Depression, because everybody's laying people off, and you've got all this time to spend, well, now you

can afford gas at ly. Now. The real thing that helped Harley Davidson turn everything around had nothing to do with all of those marketing campaigns. Really had to do with with world politics, something that Harley Davidson had not played into at all, and it would turn out to be what really saved the company. And we'll tell you all about that just a second, but first let's take

another quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright, So, the big event that really helps Harley Davidson come back from the brink, it was on this sort of shaky recovery ground. The big thing that helped them was actually World War Two. Yeah. During during World War Two, they shipped almost ninety thousand military motorcycles overseas called w L as the w L A, also known as the Liberator. This is my favorite Harley

Davidson design by far. It was if I were to own a Harley Davidson, I would want either a w l A or a replica of a w I mean it is, you know, and a lot of people after the war have had the same opinion as you. You know, they were they were tough, they were sturdy. They have a little bit of a retro field now and they're still pretty swank, So I don't blame you. I even like the olive drab version of like you don't even

need to paint it up for me. So they ended up actually winning awards for the design of their motor cycles. They were very dependable, and they were very useful for the military, and they're pretty boss. They are pretty boss. They had some cool things that were specific for military use, like heavy duty racks, secondary black outlining, and fork mounted machine gun scabbards. Would you want one with all that? I don't need all. Don't donate the scabbards. But yeah,

they pretty much catered only to the military by two. Yeah, so much so that each civilian dealer just got one new bike that year in ninety two, and people had to start recycling their pistons to get replacement parts. And like I said, World War two is the real reason that Indian and Harley Davidson were able to survive past the Great Depression when so many of their contemporary could

not do that, when so many other companies folded. A few companies tried to make a go of it after the Great Depression downturn, like they actually started a motorcycle moy in between the Great Depression and World War Two. But Indian Harley Davidson were the ones that landed those military contracts. Right. So you get to World War Two and then the United States starts to ration various types of resources because they needed them for the war effort.

And that meant that if you were a company and you were in manufacturing, you had to hope you could maybe transition to manufacturing stuff for the military, because chances are you were not going to get the raw materials you needed to make the stuff for regular civilians. Yeah, and the military already had their peeps, yep. So Indian Harley Davidson land those contracts. These other companies had not

landed the contracts. They could not get access to the raw materials, and so a lot of them ended up going out of business because they literally couldn't get the stuff to build anymore. This is also around the same time that the Japanese company, the Sanchio Corporation, which was parent company to the rick U Motorcycle Company, cut ties with Harley Davidson because obviously the Japanese government and the

United States government were at odds. Yes at this point, yes, but at least they had gotten Harley Davidson through the depression. Another thing that bolstered Harley Davidson after wars that when soldiers, when the soldiers were done with the war, they came back to the States and they were really fond of these motorcycles they were riding on, and they wanted to be able to still ride on these motorcycles, so they

all bought their own. Yeah, although of course the motorcycles for civilian use were very different from the ones that were made for the military. So we saw the rise of a couple of different types of culture in the motorcycle world that really came to fruition in the post World War Two era. One of those was the whole bobbers and choppers. So bobbers and choppers are altered motorcycles.

You take a factory motorcycle, you take a motorcycle right off the factory line, and if you're talking about a bobber you're talking about someone who is removing pretty much anything that's not necessary to make the motorcycle go. Yes, and it strips it down to essentially the types of motorcycles that the soldiers were using during World War Two.

So you're removing things like side view mirrors and wind screens and front brakes and stuff that a lot of us would consider to be pretty important components to your average cycle. Yeah. And you know it was really popular or mod these bikes for racing. Yes, but also it kind of brought to rise the outlaw motorcycle culture. Yes, because soldiers oftentimes have trouble reacclimating to civilian life, and so they get on their motorcycles and they go out

and cross. They'd be a little row they'd be a little rowdy, sometimes more than a little raw. Yeah, they do. They do some some things they weren't supposed to, and this actually made Harley's reputation kind of go down. They suffered a little bit from this. This is also where we started to see like not just motorcycle clubs, but

but actual biker gangs. Yeah. So you see the rise of various gangs that would become things like the Hell's Angels, and you would get this outlaw biker culture that associated motorcycles with illegal activities. Yes, everything everything from violent crime to uh to drug distribution, that kind of stuff. It was a real pr problem, yes, yes, so much so that Harley had to start subcontracting work for GM to make up for that hit in their revenue. But the

company today is still churning out motorcycles. It's interesting because you know, I talked about earlier how more than fifty of their sales were in international markets, and by they had almost gotten back to that same space. Yeah, of their sales were overseas last year. Yeah. And uh there are more than a thousand Harley clubs around the world. Yeah, and they do a lot of charity work, which is kind of cool. Yep. The average buyer age, I love this.

The from article The rich buyer age of Harley Davidson is so I still got a few years, Ariel before I have to go out. You do, or you could do it now, but you have a few years. Throw the average off. I gotta I gotta be respectful of the average. So lately, Harley has been having a few issues again with government policies, terrificios and things like that, and just the US market has been suffering some losses in general as people look for more pragmatic, environmentally friendly

ways to travel. There are new motivators for vehicle choice, and that has taken a chunk out of the potential consumer base for Harley david Yes, and Harley's plans on how to regain this market have been kind of vague, but we do know that they're working on electronic motorcycle. Originally they were talking about kind of releasing it in twenty nineteen and that's been pushed back to it's probably

just to get it nice and perfect. Yeah, and we know that there's been talk about Harley Davidson relocating headquarters in the wake of things like tariffs. I mean, when you have a company that has a lot of its business overseas and that's where it's healthy market is, then that's a real issue. And there's been a pretty public battle there has been. I mean, I would say that Harley Davidson is on the brink again. In fact, we may have to do another episode about Harley Davidson and

the modern era in the future. But it was interesting looking into this. Motorcycles are one of those things that I've always thought were super cool. But I just can't imagine that I would ever own one, not for any negative reason. I just it's hard for me to think of myself as being cool enough to ride a motorcycle. I mean, coolness shouldn't factor into it. It shouldn't, but it does. But you know what would be super cool? What would be super cool? If we wrap up this episode,

let's do that. That's it for Harley Davidson. Join us for a totally new conversation about a totally different company that faced the Brink. I have been Jonathan Strickland and I have been aerial casting. Bye bye. If you would like to learn more about what we've talked about, as well as keep track of all of our episodes, make sure you visit our website at The Brink Podcast dot show