Quotes from Elliott J. Gorn

It was not just on the farms that the pressures of four years of failure were building. Thirteen million workers were unemployed in 1933. Industrial production that year was half of its 1929 total, according to the Federal Reserve. Gross national product also had been cut in half, Detroit produced one third the number of automobiles, and stocks had lost three quarters of their value.

Boxers, then, embodied a distinctly working-class version of the American dream, providing models of upward mobility within bounds acceptable to the street culture.

Boxers responded to a violent world by embracing violence, by accepting brutality and returning it with interest, by being as tough and savage as life itself.