People don't realize that 65-70% of the parts on a new Harley are sourced from offshore, and think they're buying "American made". They're buying an American brand with a long history and the only American motorcycle brand that's more than 20-25 years old.

The "Made in America" thing goes back to post-WWII when Japanese imported goods began coming on to the American market. In the 1950s and 1960s, that usually meant "cheap junk", as American products from ovens to televisions to odds and ends were union-made when union labor was the vast majority of our labor force. People were well paid and American made products were sturdy. "Buy American Made" was a union slogan that was repeated ad-nauseum until it became part of the zeitgeist of the place. Of course, most Hondas and Toyotas sold in the US today are built here, but you still get people who think the most reliable cars on the planet are somehow junk because it's a Japanese company.

The "Buy American" idea with Harley has that history behind it, but also goes back to the early 80s when Japanese bike companies were "dumping" large displacement bikes on the market below cost, trying to put Harley Davidson all the way out of business, depsite the fact that they'd lost most of the market to well built Japanese bikes. The federal govt. had to step in and put punitive import tariffs on Japanese bikes over 750ccs while Harley borrowed millions of dollars to retool and reengineer their bikes. "Buy American" was trotted back out to save the last remaining American motorcycle manufacturer.

Of course there's a bunch of people everywhere on earth who think things without actually understanding why or the history behind what the group-think tells them to believe (from religion to politics to motorcycles to pickup trucks). I buy Harley because I love Harleys, not because 30-35% of the parts on the bike are American made.