“A Penny to Spare”: The Question of Charity and the Rise of Social Security

Eudora Welty’s artistic career is linked from the start to the Great Depression; her first published short story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” appeared in May 1936 in Manuscript, a little magazine, in the midst of the government’s attempts to remedy the country’s economic suffering. Welty worked for the Works Progress Administration in the summer and fall of 1936, which was one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs (Marrs 52). As a junior publicity agent for the relief agency, Welty traveled through rural Mississippi writing reports for the agency while taking photographs avocationally and learning about the places and people of her native state.

In her recollections of this time, Welty highlights her response to the great poverty she encountered in her travels. She was deeply moved. In fact, she identifies “seeing one family, living by the side of the road” as a catalyst for her writing; “That was when I really started writing stories,” she says (qtd. in Prenshaw 17). Given Welty’s auspicious beginnings as a writer during a time of great economic crisis and political change, it is surprising to find only a handful of studies on the relationship between her fiction and the economy.¹ Welty is generally left out of literary histories that directly address the social and political issues of the time, in part because she had not yet been noticed as a significant writer during the 1930s when her short stories began to appear, and in part because early critics and reviewers were quick to label Welty as a southern writer who primarily drew on the inner landscapes of her imagination.

The trend of downplaying matters of social and political relevance in Welty’s fiction begins in 1941 with the publication of her first story collection, A Curtain of Green. Although reviewers noted Mississippi as a specific location for her stories, they claimed that the stories with their “preoccupation with the abnormal and grotesque” have no relation to any actual events of the time (Feld 4). Marianne Hauser, reviewing for the New York Times Book Review, is exemplary in this judgment: “the background of most of the stories is a small town in Mississippi, the author’s native State,” and, she asserts, “there are no wars going on behind the scenes, no revolutions or headline disasters. The tragedies that Miss Welty invokes occur in the backyards of life. She needs no outside stimulus to recreate the depths of human suffering” (5). Arthur J. Carr concurred that Welty’s stories “are to be apprehended as metaphors … not as statements directly related to current events or drawn from a concern with a political future” (16). They are, he continues, “highly imagined stories,” corresponding to the “images in her mind” (16). The image of Welty as a writer whose imagination primarily concerns the regional and not the national stage persisted well into contemporary assessments of Welty’s work.²

Until recently, narrowly regional concerns coupled with what Peggy Whitman Prenshaw calls Welty’s “practice of relocating, or displacing, the public and the political spheres to private and moral ones” have shrouded the ways in which Welty’s fiction engages national issues and international political concerns (11). In their groundbreaking collection of essays, Eudora Welty and Politics: Did the Writer Crusade?, Harriet Pollack and Suzanne Marrs conclusively demonstrate that Welty’s fiction is “anything but ‘apolitical’” (223). Of the essays that move beyond locating Welty’s “politics” primarily in the contexts of racial segregation, southern paternalism, or feminism, Barbara Ladd’s is especially suggestive for Welty’s response to the federal investment in economic and cultural life of the 1930s and ’40s. Ladd argues that Welty’s work is “deeply if subtly engaged with some of the most pressing political issues of the twentieth century, most notably with questions of the nature and import of nationalism in the modern world and related questions concerning the impact of the State on private life” (156). Indeed, Welty’s life was impacted, both personally and professionally, by the state, especially by the New Deal. Her first...