How gang violence is American violence: it shows alienation at all social levels

‘We do have this mounting violence in us.’

The enigmatic and wildly influential US journalist Hunter S Thompson first broke into the mainstream with his 1966 book Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs – a two-year-long insider’s view of the notorious California motorcycle gang. Given new life in PBS’s animated Blank on Blank series, this prescient 1967 interview by Studs Terkel finds Thompson describing how disaffection and unemployment spurred by changes in technology and the economy helped to create a wave of paranoia, alienation and violence among displaced Americans following the Second World War.