Harley-Davidson’s VL line arguably rescued the Motor Company from the wrath of the Great Depression.

Everything’s relative. Right now, Harley-Davidson is fighting to sustain its share of today’s fast-changing global marketplace, with its 2023 overall sales declining by five per cent year-on-year to 168,050 motorcycles, against the 329,776 machines that the Motor Company’s dealers shifted worldwide in 2014. Back then, few people either inside the company or out could have imagined that, 10 years later, Harley sales would have declined by half — one of the most dismal records of the world’s top 20 manufacturers. 

By contrast, H-D’s leading rival for the crown of the world’s No.1 luxury motorcycle manufacturer, BMW, increased its deliveries from 115,215 bikes and maxi-scooters in 2013 to 208,528 units in 2023. No wonder the Harley-Davidson stock price has all but halved in value from its all-time high 10 years ago of $58.23 on April 30, 2014 to $34.69 as of May 10, 2024.

But disappointing as those stats must be to any investors holding Harley stock, America’s No.1 isn’t currently facing an existential threat. At some stage things will stabilize long enough for the Motor Company to become an appealing takeover target for some company with the resources to turn this iconic brand around. That’s quite unlike Harley’s previous dance with death in the early 1930s, during the Great Depression, which followed the Wall Street Crash on October 29, 1929, when its very survival was genuinely at risk.

For with the devastating effects of the Depression reaching cataclysmic proportions in the U.S., where by mid-1932 one-third of the workforce — around 15 million people — was unemployed, 5,000 banks had failed, countless small businesses were closing down every day, and mass starvation was a genuine threat with soup queues a fact of everyday life, it’s a wonder that any motorcycle production took place at all. With Cleveland going out of business late in 1929, and owner Ignaz Schwinn announcing the immediate end of Excelsior-Henderson production in March 1931 with the famous statement that “Boys, today we quit,” this left just two remaining motorcycle manufacturers in the United States: Indian and Harley. 

Indian Production Slump

But even after Indian’s guardian angel E. Paul DuPont took over the company in 1929, and set about rebuilding it, total Indian production for 1933 at its Springfield, Mass., plant was a paltry 1,657 motorcycles, compared to an average of 8,000 bikes per year manufactured by Indian alone all through the Roaring ’20s. 

Annual production had declined to just 4,635 bikes built in 1929, after the depredations of the previous management, under whose misdirection the once-profitable Indian firm was bled dry to support loss-making diversification into non-bike related companies…