Everyone knows the biker gang Hells Angels—one of the few white gangs in the country that is not a prison gang. Culturally interesting on its own.
The history of their name, though, is even better—a tour through aviation lore, Jacobean plays, Howard Hughes, and more. 🧵/1
One of the first Hells Angels (you may miss the apostrophe, they don't), Arvid Olson, named the crew when it formed in 1948.
He'd flown with the Flying Tigers B-17 squadron in WW2, who named the 303rd bombardment group after a 1930 Howard Hughes film about WW1 aviation. /2
That film, Hell's Angels, was titled by its director, who was coining a term that would come to be synonymous with daring exploits and camaraderie.
Hughes directed but also took over a dogfighting scene from a timid stunt pilot. He crashed on set, badly fracturing his skull. /3
Just two years later, the anti-communist conspiracy author William Guy Carr wrote "Hell's Angels of the Deep"—a maritime memoir about his experiences submarining in World War I.
Carr seems to have based his title on Hughes, though it's not clear. /4
The name could simply be a literary reference. Howard's uncle, Rupert Hughes, was a famous man of letters and president of the anti-communist American Writer's Association.
Many plays dating back to the Jacobean era would use the term to mean just "demons." /5
As an early pilot, Hughes would be no stranger to the principalities of the air. Aviators at the time often reported strange sightings aloft—incorporeal beings, a sense of intrusion on the aerie plane.
Charles Lindbergh, for example, reports what he saw and heard in 1927:
/6
But a look at pulp fiction from 1929 brings the naming question back down to earth.
A fictional British squad in the foreign legion, Hell's Angels, featured in the stories of Warren Hastings Miller (editor of Field and Stream, and another anti-communist). /7
The "netflix" of its day, Pulp was read by nearly every boy and man in America—meaning the Foreign Legion, Flying Tigers, Hughes, and the Angels are bound up in a single thread. /8
The thread's literary apotheosis perhaps came when Hunter S. Thompson wrote of the biker gang in his road memoir.
"The Menace is loose again ... like Genghis Khan on an iron horse, a monster steed with a fiery anus ..." /9
The Hells Angels are a warrior band that is self-consciously romanticized. From the first origins of the name, the gang is literary—a playful reference to what came before.
This might be common to all gangs, but this is a topic for a future thread. /End
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.