So, from my understanding, a lot of the basis of biker culture is brotherhood. How did the outlaw clubs come from this?
As a related question, does anyone have a book recommendation for outlaw biker clubs/biker culture in general? Thanks!
Edit: One thing I want to say is that I'm not implying that all bikers are now outlaws. I was just wondering specifically how normal post-ww2 biker clubs progressed into the outlaw clubs we know of today.
A good book to start out with is the book Hell's Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club (2000).
Sonny Barger was the founder of the Hell's Angels outlaw motorcycle gang in Oakland California.
From that book, he talks of a lot of GI's coming back from world war 2 and Korea, forming clubs.
Your question has a problem in that it makes a statement about biker culture that is inaccurate. Outlaw clubs are just one group of many groups of people who ride motorcycles and call themselves bikers.
People become criminals and some of these people organize themselves into groups. It is likely that people that participate in organized criminal activity and the organizations they associate with have done so for similar reasons. Study organized crime, not biker culture.
Biker culture can include a pretty diverse group of people, including many who choose to call themselves motorcycle enthusiasts, simply to disassociate themselves from the "biker" label, many who embrace the counter culture biker label, yet function quite well in our society, and many variations between these two.
But criminals are criminals, no matter what their hobbies.
I cannot speak to the outlaw part, but I can speak to the brotherhood aspect with just a simple personal example:
I've been broke down in a car and no one stops unless I'm waving people down.
I've been broke down on a bike, sitting waiting for someone I've already called to come help me, and within the 30 or so minutes it took for them to arrive, I will have had 5-6 people stop and check on me because they also ride.
They all say the same thing, "I'll never leave a biker stranded, I'll always stop and make sure they are ok."
And I've made quite a few u-turns myself to check as well.
Edit to add:
Take that above mentality, and add some personal connection with people you actually know and care about, it's easy to see a group come together to "help" someone who...maybe was in a rough spot and had to resort to "alternate means" by doing something illegal, and then it just snowball from there. Purely hypothetical, but there might be some basis in there.
A couple bad apples and the whole group is considered outlaws..
And now, to patriots and representations of "true americans"?