Audie Murphy was born into a large sharecropping family in Hunt County, Texas, and left school in fifth grade to pick cotton. After Pearl Harbor, his sister helped him falsify his birth date so he could enlist, though the Army, Navy and Marines first turned him down for being underweight. He fought in Sicily, at Anzio, in the liberation of Rome and in southern France. At 19, near Colmar in January 1945, he single-handedly held off a company of German soldiers for an hour, then led a counterattack while wounded, earning the Medal of Honor. He went on to an acting career, playing himself in the 1955 film To Hell and Back, and died in a plane crash in 1971.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.