What does Walter Cunningham represent in To Kill a Mockingbird?

There are actually two Walter Cunninghams in To Kill a Mockingbird--a father and a son by the same name. Needless to say, they both seem to represent the hard-working, but poor and hungry farmers of the United States in the 1930s. Since the stock market crashed in October of 1929, Americans suffered through the Great Depression for over a decade. The majority of Americans were farmers or associated in some way with the agricultural industry. As a result, many we hungry for a very long time. When Jem asks his father if they are as poor as the Cunninghams, Atticus responds by saying the following:

"Not exactly. The Cunninghams are country folks, farmers, and the crash hit them the hardest" (21).

As a result, certain signs can be seen in the novel that demonstrate how hard hit the Cunninghams really were. For example, Walter Cunningham, Jr. shows up to the first day of school with a clean shirt, mended overalls, no shoes, hookworms, and no money for lunch. The boy's home life can be understood from these symbolic details. First, he's clean, so he has caring parents who value cleanliness; second, he has a mother who can mend clothing; third, he has hookworms because he has no shoes; and finally, they don't have money to buy shoes let alone lunch. The Cunninghams, like most Americans at the time, are good people who have values, who work hard for what they get, but they also go hungry. 

Another example of how hard things are for the Cunninghams financially is how the father needed Atticus as his attorney to help him with his debts. Farmers retain their farms by mortgaging them one year at a time with the hopes that the crops will make up for it at harvest time. If this happens over a period of years, things just get worse for them because they drown deeper and deeper in debt. As a result, Mr. Cunningham cannot pay Atticus with money, so he had to pay him with whatever goods and services he could offer. For example, Mr. Cunningham paid Atticus with stovewood, hickory nuts, similax, and holly (20-21). Therefore, the Cunninghams represent hard working Americans and the suffering they endured during the toughest financial depressions in American history. By reading about the Cunninghams in To Kill a Mockingbird, people today can get a realistic idea of what many Americans had to deal with in the financially stricken United States of the 1930s.