The Great Depression

To Kill a Mockingbird is set in the 1930s in Maycomb, a fictional, rural town in Alabama, in the United States. Things were quite different then to the way they are now. Apart from the obvious, like the fact that there were no mobile phones, TV, the Internet, sushi or McDonalds, there were some major social and economic differences. Maycomb County, as the author describes it, is in a state of economic decline. Communication with outlying houses depend on dirt roads, and all the county inhabitants, whether professional people or farmers, are poor.

In late 1929 the economic prosperity of the 1920s came to an end with the Wall Street Crash followed by the Great Depression. The economic boom of the 1920s rested on a fragile foundation; there was such an unequal distribution of income between the rich and the poor that when things started to falter, there were not enough people to buy goods and services to keep the economy in a healthy state.

Rural, southern towns in the United States were hit hard because they were largely reliant on agriculture. Problems with the economy had a flow-on effect to all parts of society. People lost jobs, marriages broke down, banks failed, people became homeless, businesses folded, birth rates fell, people got depressed and many people went hungry. This explains the situation of poor farmers like the Cunninghams in To Kill a Mockingbird who have no money to pay a lawyer but pay instead with produce like hickory nuts and turnip greens. As Atticus says, 'The Cunninghams are country folks, farmers, and the crash hit them hardest' (p. 23).

Find out more about the Great Depression:
The Great Depression and the New Deal
Reminiscences of the Great Depression
Wikipedia
American Cultural History