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.”
― Elliott J. Gorn, Dillinger's Wild Ride: The Year That Made America's Public Enemy Number One

“Ideally, the ring was also a true democracy, in which men succeeded or failed under conditions of perfect quality of opportunity. But as a market place of violence, boxing symbolically mocked the liberal belief that atomistic competition led to social good. After all, bloodied bodies were what the ring “produced.” Spectators identified with those boxers who best represented their ethnic group, neighborhood, or trade. Personal toughness, local honor, drunken conviviality, violent display - every bout upheld these powerfully antibourgeois values. Bare-knuckle fighting was thus a transitional phenomenon, incorporating old values and new. The prize ring’s form was “modern” - achievement-oriented, meritocratic, egalitarian - but its content “premodern” - ascriptive, nonrational, hierarchical.”
― Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America