“Cyclist’s Raid” by Frank Rooney, “The Best American Short Stories: 1952,” & Discovering Some Ghosts of World War II

 

“Cyclist’s Raid” by Frank Rooney,

“The Best American Short Stories: 1952,”

& Discovering Some Ghosts of World War II

 

History is the consequences of decisions in the past, and as we are supposed to draw lessons from past events as we make the decisions that will shape our future. This makes understanding what drove the decisions as important as the events themselves.

 

When one looks at the last-seventy-odd-years of USA history, most of our decisions were shaped by this Nation’s experiences during WWII, and our decisions during WWII were shaped by the events that immediately preceded it.

WWII was the largest global conflict in human history so far, and it forever changed our decision-making processes. Our first post-War President, Harry S. Truman, had also been a War-time Vice-President, and for a short time the War-time President, and eight of the next nine Presidents that followed, had served during that same conflict (this brought us all the way up to 1993, and the single outlier, Jimmy Carter, began his Military career the year after WWII ended). 

The unresolved issues of WWII created the Cold War which lasted most of the next fifty years, and that Cold War was at the heart of every significant military action the USA engaged in up to 1991. Especially notable the Korean War, which was on-going when the short story and book I will be discussing was published. Our adversaries during those conflicts were generally the WWII Veterans of other nations.

 

So, while reading these stories, other novels, or watching the movies of the early fifties, one should always keep in mind that WWII had just ended. When conscious of that, one can see the foundations of the perceptions that shaped our National decision-making that created the changes that unfolded there-after. It was a self-contradictory era, we had just started engaging in stronger official and unofficial censor of the more extreme-left-leaning ideas, but we also were increasing our embrace of more centrist left-leaning ideas, simultaneously.  

 

I developed an interest in “Cyclist’s Raid,” by Frank Rooney, while researching for a story of my own. It was once significant short story, but is now forgotten; still, it left an indelible mark on popular culture in the USA. I found out about it while looking into the Hollister Riot of 1947, which is one of the more very important events of USA history that mostly didn’t actually happen …

 

Soooo, some real history, then some fictions:

 

1.)          History

 

Motorcycle culture in the USA mostly emerged after WWII and was initially dominated by disaffected Vets of that conflict. These were men rebelling, or at least posturing at rebelling, against the fact that they had been doing world-saving work just a short-time before, but now were reduced to mundanities; many were emotionally traumatized, though PSTD is more famously associated with Vietnam Vets, both in terms of pure head-counts and per-capita, WWII Vets suffered far more and received less treatment (though long-recognized, the condition wasn’t named until 1979, during a revolution in the manners of its treatment).

Though we now remember the post-WWII years as the era of greatest economic growth in USA history, the immediate post-War landscape was scarred with endemic poverty and two serious recessions, 1945 and 1948, so many of these Vets were either un- or under-employed.

 

Hollister, California, was a town that did, and still does, welcome these semi-nomadic Bikers, especially on holiday weekends. On the weekend of July 4^th, 1947, the Bikers behaved badly. The main problem seemed to have stemmed from the fact that the popularity of the Motorcycle Clubs was expanding faster than anyone could adapt to, and that year many more Bikers arrived than had ever been seen before -- about 4,000, which was twice the population of the town. There was disorderly conduct, fights, public drunkenness, drunk driving, illegal street racing and stunts, the overwhelmed, seven-man, Police force made more than 50 arrests (which was only as many as they could get their hands on), and there were about 60 injured.

 

This became a national news story, but the importance of the story was more in its exaggeration than what actually happened. The “Hollister Riot” looms large in public imagination, remembered as being as shocking as Twin Peaks Biker Shoot-Out in 2015, but the latter incident, which involved far fewer people over a shorter period of time, featured an enormous number of guns and eight murders. In Hollister there was no gunplay, no one died, almost all the arrests were misdemeanors, almost all the injuries minor, no town’s people were hurt, and there was very little property damage. Never-the-less, the press accused the Bikers of "taking over the town," creating "pandemonium" and committing acts of "terrorism."

 

2.)          The short story

 

The most inflammatory press reports inspired some very fine fiction, which shouldn’t be a surprise; fiction is a lie after all, so often starting with a good lie creates more impressive fiction than a bland truth.  Two examples:

 

In 1979 a troubled young man, James Dallas Egbert III, disappeared from his college dorm after a failed suicide attempt. After an extensive and much-publicized search, he contacted investigators as to his whereabouts, but didn’t return to school or his patents. He then succeeded in his third suicide attempt the next year. The press incorrectly reported his troubles related to his obsession with the "Dungeons and Dragons" role-playing-game, claiming he'd withdrawn into delusional fantasy-world he created in the tunnels beneath campus. The mostly false reporting inspired a huge amount of fiction: A 1981 novel by Rona Jaffe, “Mazes and Monsters,” which became a film by the same name in 1982. Another 1981 novel by John Coyne, “Hobgoblin.” A 1983 episode of the TV show “The Greatest American Hero.” And a 1984 novel by Neal Stephenson, “The Big U.”

 

In 2008 there was a widely reported story that 18 girls attending the same High School entered a “pregnancy pact”; they would become pregnant without entering into relationships with the babies’ fathers and then leave their parent’s homes and raise the children communally. Again, this story was largely untrue, but it still generated a lot of media: Episodes of the TV crimes shows “Law and Order SVU” and “Bones” in 2008 & 2009 respectively. A Lifetime TV docudrama of dubious fidelity to the written record, “The Pregnancy Pact” in 2010. A more straight-forwardly fictional film, “El Pacto,” also 2010. A novel by Barbara Delinsky, “Not My Daughter,” yet again in 2010. And another straightforwardly fictional film, “17 Girls” in 2011.

 

“Cyclist’s Raid” was inspired by, but not based on, the Hollister Riot. It published in “Harpers” magazine in 1951 and managed to find a place in the 1952 edition of “The Best American Short Stories” edited by Martha Foley and Joyce F. Hatman. Rooney’s story didn’t follow either the true incident or the news reports especially carefully and wasn't really obligated to. 

It was set in a town that was unfamiliar with Motorcycle Culture, included only on Motorcycle Club instead of a half-dozen, and made no mention of the Bikers mostly being Vets; there are oblique hints that the Bikers too young to have participated in WWII. The story was playing on national fears of increased Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime but chose not to follow the already existent trends of that growing national hysteria.

 

In my reading of events that took place before I was born, it seems as if terror of Juvenile Delinquency began before the problem was truly a crisis. True, by the time we reach the 1960s, Juvenile Crime, and Violent Crime in general, were skyrocketing, but in terms of crime stats, the late-1940s and early 1950s seem a sedate period. Still, there’s no denying that the era’s young were as restless as the young-ish returned Vets. Regarding the young, there was a lot of attention paid to the newly emerging musical genre, Rock & Roll, which struck horror into the hearts on the USA’s parents and blue noses. In 1947 Roy Brown's song "Good Rocking Tonight" created both public sensation and scandal, and many now cite it as the first official R&R song. In 1951, Disc-Jockey Alan Freed gave a name to the new musical genre. Brown was a Black man, and Freed, though a White guy, made history by playing recordings of popular songs by the original Black artists instead of the more acceptable cover-versions by White artists.

 

Rooney, an author I know nothing about, didn’t jump on more common, racially charged, hyper-conservative bandwagon when expressing his alarm over Youth Crime (the Bikers seem too young to be Vets but were obviously too old to be Juvenile Delinquents). He was most concerned with Groupthink, Vigilantism, and the ghosts of WWII. Though his Bikers don't appear to be Vets, the story’s POV character, Joel Bleecher, was. Joel had been scarred by the war, which revealed to him the savagery of men sucked into a Mob Mentality, and the narrative unsubtly implied a connection between Motorcycle Culture and the Hitler Youth, “He [Joel] was a small-town man who hated the way men surrendered individuality to obtain the perfection of the unit.”

 

3.)          The movie version

 

The story was bought by Hollywood and loosely adapted as the film, “The Wild One,” in 1953, Written by John Paxton, with the un-credited contributions by Ben Maddow, and Directed by László Benedek. In the film version, Joel’s character doesn’t appear, and the head of one of the Motorcycle Gangs, Johnny Strabler, becomes the central, and most sympathetic, character. Johnny was played by Marlon Brando in what is now one of his most famous roles.

 

It’s very much a ‘50s drama, intelligently written but more polemic in tone than the story it’s based on. It contains neither direct or indirect references to WWII, and even though Brando was old-enough to have served, he'd been rejected by the draft board, he looked far-younger than his almost thirty-years. Some of the Bikers were clearly middle-aged, but most were younger than Brando, their slang was younger still; their behavior was quite child-like until it became menacing.

Though 1955’s “Blackboard Jungle” is often credited and the first dramatic film to incorporate R&R in the soundtrack, “The Wild One’s” Jazz score, mostly by Leith Stevens, was close enough, especially in the boisterous bar-room scenes.

 

The film was hugely influential, encouraging mass hysteria over Motorcycle Culture, but also inspiring many to emulate the anti-hero played by Brando, Johnny. R&R Artist Elvis Presly and Actor James Dean would adopt Brando’s sideburns, his Perfecto-style black-leather jacket and 1950 Triumph Thunderbird 6T motorcycle became top sellers. The English R&R band, The Beatles, took their name from one of the Gangs in the film even though it was technically illegal for anyone in that country to watch the movie. 

The plot’s mythological version of the Hollister Riot was started being endlessly recycled and is now a movie cliché, but I’m unaware of anything very similar to it unfolding in the real-world until the 1990s, when some Motorcycle Gangs had evolved into sophisticated Organized Crime groups, embraced White Nationalist Politics, and the intra- and inter-gang violence started exploding all over the world. 

The film also gave us one of the most famous dialogue exchanges in history:

 

Stupid girl: "Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?"

Johnny: "What've you got?"

 

4.)          Some of the ways that WWII changed the USA

 

WWII changed everything about how we viewed ourselves, probably more than the prior conflict of WWI, though today they could now easily be considered as a single, continuous, War, lasting almost a half-century. The two Wars, and the Great Depression in between, created vast internal migrations in the USA, bolstered by an influx of immigrants; these immigrants were notably unwelcome here until WWII, and then that period of welcoming proved short-lived.

 

That War also brought about a realignment in our collective morality, an extension of the process of this Nation redefining itself that began during the Great Depression. All the political and social the trends that created by, or at least associated with, Liberal President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933 were brought into greater fulfillment with the realization of increased infrastructure investment and centralization of power in the Federal government that the Global Conflict required. Roosevelt's successors, Truman and Dwight De Eisenhower, we both, by nature, more Conservative, but they continued to boldly walk the same policy paths FDR had blazed.

 

The War also left our communities more densely populated. Pre-planned Suburbs (the proto-typical post-War suburb, Levittown, Long Island, began settling in 1947, the same year as the Hollister Riot but on the other side of the country) began to replace more traditional Small Towns as the alternative to Cities, and the Cities themselves were growing ever-larger. Our increasing industrialization drove an improved standard of living, created a new consumer culture, and many communities that had long wallowed in endemic poverty improved tremendously. The Labor movement had become stronger during the terrible years of the Depression, but far-stronger-still during the full-employment of the War years, and by the 1950s it seemed gravy-train would go on forever (a few recessions not with-standing).

 

Vast internal migrations were facilitated by the infrastructure investment that made the post-War suburbs possible, and all these worked together to change the image of our families. The extended families that had defined the USA (well, the whole world really) gave way to more and more Nuclear Families, as brand-new communities sprang up wherein mother, father, and children were physically distant from grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. One could say we had become a nation of pioneers again, except now we were traveling on paved roads, moving into already built houses with manicured lawns, well-funded school districts, and reliable electricity; this had to be shocking because the era of the wagon train had so recently ended (covered wagons were still the vehicle of choice of many internally emigrating US residents as late as 1915, and perhaps later than that).

 

During the Great Depression there were real fears that the USA would fall into Revolution: Capitalism had apparently failed while Fascism and Socialism/Communism were on the march here and throughout the world. FDR’s New Deal had carved a third path, borrowing a bit from Socialism but still clinging to the Capitalistic model, and soon after, the War came. By War’s end, Fascism was dead as a world-political and economic force, and the seemingly victorious Communism had disgraced itself. Russia’s Joseph Stalin had initially allied himself with Germany’s Adolf Hitler, actively assisted the Nazis during their brutal invasion of Poland, committed his own acts of Genocide that were then-recognized though not completely appreciated (we now know Stalin murdered more civilians than Hitler), and displayed equal world-conquering lustfulness. Worse, Stalin was still in power, while Hitler was safely dead.

 

Anti-Communism was a significant force in the USA even before WWI, but after the WWII it became truly impassioned, though this seemed some-what at odds with our more centrally controlled economy, embrace of the Federal legislation of morality, and (temporary) greater openness to immigrants, but these were things we would only do in ways that didn’t seem Communistic. As a nation we were groping to define our new idea of good, a place where a Republican President like Eisenhower (who took Office the same year “Cyclists’ Raid” was published) would prove more successful in bringing the Civil Rights movement to Washington than both the Democrats who directly preceded him.

 

The classic SF film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” released in 1956, was an unapologetically political film, but whose politics? It was an attack on blindly conformist tyrannies that could just as easily been interpreted as Anti-Communist or Anti-McCarthyist. The “McCarthy Era” was named for Sen. Joe McCarthy even though most of the meat-and-potatoes of that era’s official Anti-Communist interventions were the work of a body he had no say in, the House Un-American Activities Committee. HUAC started Blacklisting politically impure members of the film industry in 1947, again, the year of the Hollister Riot. With “Invasion of the…” we had a Director, Don Siegel, who was famously Conservative and supported the Blacklist, working its Screenwriter, Daniel Mainwaring, was just as famously Liberal and fought against the Blacklist. In the ‘50s the USA wanted to shout to the world who we were; also make ourselves more like who we said we were than we actually were; but all we really knew for sure what we actually were, only that we didn’t want to be either Nazis or Commies.

 

War-time jobs liberated many Blacks, and as a potent Black middle-class emerged, they created an undeniable political force demanding the equal rights they’d always been denied. Earlier, Blacks had been Heroes during WWI, but returning home found themselves even more aggressively persecuted than before. The nearly defunct Klu Klux Klan would suddenly re-emerge are a National political force even as the War raged, and one year after the War ended, Blacks were barred from enlistment in the Military. Even when allowed back in in 1932, they were denied combat and chain-of-command roles. Then, during WWII, this discrimination was dismantled by FDR, though the Military was still segregated. Blacks returned from WWII Heroes again – but this time, with more economic clout, they weren’t going to tolerate their fortunes being reversed again.

 

Though the struggle for Civil Rights has been on-going in the USA since even before there was a USA (it probably began when the first European tried to establish a colony on Native American land in 1587), there is a distinct period of time called the “Civil Rights Era.” Depending on which Historian you read, that began either 1948, when President Truman ended segregation in the US Military once and for all, 1955, when Martin Luther King Jr rose to national prominence because of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or 1957, when President Eisenhower started using his Executive Branch muscle to enforce Supreme Court Civil Rights rulings and push for new Federal Civil Rights legislation. As the Truman date is the only one prior to the publication of Rooney’s story and the book it was reprinted in, that’s the one that has most bearing on this essay.

 

Probably the most important change in the USA brought about by WWII was the “Baby Boom,” which has more than a little baring on our fears of Juvenile Delinquency. Our boys came back from War as men, and these men wanted two things: First, they wanted to prove they are really men in this new peace-time context, to succeed at being husbands, fathers, providers, masters of their castles. Second, they want to have sex. Lots of sex. This has some baring on the "wanting to be fathers" thing.

 

USA birth rates started dropping precipitously in 1919 during a deep post-WWI malaise now referred to as the “Lost Generation.” It started to rise again immediately post-WWII in 1945, and the increase was enormous. Those being born in between 1945 to 1951 would be too young to be Bikers in Rooney’s story, but his was a tale of disaffected youth, and there were of course those who lived through WWII but were too young to fight and these now-twenty-somethings saw no meaningful cause without the World Conflict, an idea that would dig deeper and deeper into the USA’s idea of itself as the years rolled on. Rooney’s story was written after, and likely influenced by, two landmark novels about Juvenile Delinquency, 1949’s "Duke" and 1950’s “Tomboy” by Social Worker and turned Novelist Hal Ellson. The full impact of Ellson’s works would not be felt until 1954: Psychiatrist Frederick Wertham published his non-fiction, “The Seduction of the Innocent,” that cited Ellson’s work and successfully created institutional censorship in the comic book industry; the publication of Harlan Ellison’s first novel, “The Web of the City,” which was also inspired by Ellson and then adapted to an episode of the popular TV show “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” in 1964; and finally the National Book Award Nominated novel “Bad Seed” by William March, which, unlike Ellson, Wertham, or Ellison, threw Eugenics into the increasing fears of out-of-control youth, and became a multiple Oscar-nominated film in 1956. The pseudo-science of Eugenics wasn’t invented in the USA, but achieved remarkable legitimacy during the inter-War years, and USA’s version of Eugenics in-turn influenced Hitler’s Genocidal indulgences. Though the post-WWII USA was strong in its commitment to prove we weren’t Nazis, the seldom spoken of Eugenics laws remained in effect, and enforced, all the way up to 1978.

 

5.)          The rest of “The Best American Short Stories: 1952”

 

I highly recommend this on-going series, any of the editions really, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find them in used bookstores; they are highly prized and fly off the shelves. I got this one specifically for Rooney’s story through an inter-library loan. I’m a painfully slow reader and occupied with other things, including reading other books, so I failed to finish this volume before I was required to return it (I love libraries, but prefer to buy books and stack them in my home rather than borrow and return them). I did get a significant way through it though, reading 12 of the 29 tales. The stories were diverse, but some clear patterns emerged when taking them as a group.

 

Print magazines were more abundant in the 1950s than now, and the short story was a more important form back then. The main fictional genres, SF,F&H, Crime, Adventure, and Romance, where more abundant in terms of the volume than what is more commonly referred to as “mainstream fiction” (or more obnoxiously referred to as “literary fiction”) but this anthology predictably pulled nothing from the various genre magazines, only from the more respectable “slicks.” Though this didn’t mean there was no genre work, but it did mean there was very little of it. Among those I read, “Cyclist’s Raid” was the only Crime story. The only SF was Ray Bradbury’s “The Other Shoe,” and at the time, he and Robert Heinlein were among the only SF genre writers regularly published in the “slicks.” The only horror-story, “The Other River,” by Robert O. Brown, was decidedly non-genre, concerning a night of delusion, paranoia, and violence that a Vet with PTSD inflicted on himself after binge-drinking. There were love stories, but only “The Motion of Forgetfulness is Slow” by Charles Edward Eaton, contains the tropes of the Romance genre, and it wasn’t that very good. There was also a surprising lack of Adventure stories, especially since WWII permeates most of the tales, but WWII is treated in the context of the pre- and post-War, so no tales of combat, and not even one story mentioned the then-on-going Korean War.

 

Googling the names of most of the Authors, I noted men out-numbered women, but not to a shocking degree. One minority, Jews, were better represented than their national census numbers might suggest. There was only one non-white author in the collection, an Asian. There were no Hispanics even though they were, and still are, the USA’s largest minority. There were no Blacks even though we were already into the Civil Rights Era, Richard Wright was already a giant in USA literature and James Baldwin (then in France) was well on his way to becoming one. Virtually all the tales are about White people; Blacks were generally regulated to being, not secondary, but tertiary characters; all other ethnic groups were even rarer. There’s a connectivity in the handling of the Black characters in that their reality is seen through the discomfort they create in Whites dealings with themselves. Segregation is casually treated as it was still the national-norm, and the word “nigger” is also casually used -- but the latter casualness is deceptive, for example: the protagonist of “The Other River” refers to the Black section of town as “nigger houses,” but when finally face-to-face with an individual Black man the word switches to “negro.”

 

Immigrants, an ever-growing percentage of the USA since the prior century, were increasing in numbers even faster since the end of WWII, but largely absent from this book. Invisible in most stories is the extended family, the Nuclear Family seems to have already dominated how the USA viewed itself. There’s little depiction of poverty, working-class, or lower-middle-class life; among the lead-characters in the stories, the petite- and grand-bourgeoisie predominate. There’s very little overt politics, and of what there is, there’s no expression of Conservative ideas and ideals, the literary crowd seems Liberal leaning. Anti-Fascism is common enough, but that era’s fashionable Anti-Communism isn’t.

 

Almost any story has three elements, plot, character, and setting, and the balance of those elements dictate the story’s style more than anything else. Given this anthology’s bias against genre tales, it is not surprising that these stories are mostly not heavily plot driven. There is an abundance of interesting characters, but still, setting seems to be more important over-all. The Editors clearly loved the USA’s regionalist traditions and chose tales that define characters as much, or more, in terms of their relationship to their environments as much as their relationship to each other. The Deep-South set, “That Lovely Green Boat” by Bill Berge, lingers long on a river that runs through the protagonist’s rural backyard. The West Coast urban set, “Children of Ruth” by George P. Elliot, devotes much of its narrative real-estate to Ruth’s town house, built by her dead father; it was the longest and most ambitious story, but, unfortunately, described emotional states even more polemically than the even movie version of “Cyclist’s Raid.”

 

With so few crime stories, Juvenile Delinquency doesn’t much come up, but Baby Boomers enjoying the growing affluence that their parents were not born into it, leads the Boomers to be viewed harshly. Several stories express attitudes that the kids of the early 1950s as being given everything, but appreciating nothing. “Cyclist’s Raid” implies this, “Children of Ruth” stated it explicitly, and both expressed disdain for Motorcycle Culture.

 

So, the best in the anthology (as far as I read):

 

“That Lovely Green Boat” by Bill Berge, a pastoral tale of sexual awakening set along the lazy Mississippi.

 

“The Other River,” by Robert O. Brown, the only horror story, but without any monsters or supernatural elements, just the terror of a successful man losing grip on himself.

 

“The Lost” by Kay Boyle, one of only a few stories that were set outside the USA, on a European estate converted into an orphanage for children displaced by the just-concluded WWII. Most of these children had traveled with US Infantry units as they marched across Europe, now they had to wait to learn if they will be sent-back to their War-torn countries or relocated to the USA. There are no Black characters, but the USA’s prejudices against Black Vets is important to the plot.

 

“The Other Foot” was the only story I was familiar with before opening the volume, because I grew-up on Author Ray Bradbury’s work. It’s one of his Martian stories, but it came after the classic fix-up novel “The Martian Chronicles,” published two years before. It’s the story that addressed Civil Rights most directly, and the only one with Black central characters. Time has been unkind to it, it seems pandering and over-optimistic now, but I bet it was bold in its day: it creates a situation where Blacks are the ruling majority and Whites must come begging for aide. I’m not surprised that the only real Civil Rights story in the anthology would also be the only SF. Another Author, Rod Serling, is now mostly remembered as a Producer of SF,F&H programs on TV, but before the late-1950s he showed only modest interest in those genres; he’d become increasingly frustrated by stupid censorship so he created the landmark TV program, “The Twilight Zone” in 1959 because he realized that only in the realms of fantasy could he talk about real things. Bradbury provided screenplays that show’s first season.

 

“The Unborn Ghosts” by Nancy Cardozo, describes an idyllic Fourth of July in New England, but subtly darkens it with the parents talking about how unlikely it was that Hitler’s adventurism in Europe was escalate into another Global Conflict, and the fact the oldest son was approaching Military age.

 

“The First Face” by Elizabeth Enright, a short-short describing an exhausted new mother’s first views of her just-born child.

And, of course, I really enjoyed "Cyclist's Raid."