“GHQ of the Board of Strategy for the Great Battle of ‘24” (May 20, 1924)
by John Tinney McCutcheon (1870-1949)
14 x 19 in., ink on drawing board
Coppola Collection
On the Purdue campus, where he was a student, McCutcheon (class of 1889) is memorialized in a coeducational dormitory, John T. McCutcheon Hall. The lobby displays an original of one of his drawings, a nearly life-size drawing of a young man.
After college, McCutcheon moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he worked at the Chicago Morning News (later: Chicago Record) and then at the Chicago Tribune from 1903 until his retirement in 1946. McCutcheon received the Pulitzer Prize for Cartoons in 1932.
Let me tell you about the World War Adjusted Compensation Act
Many veterans who returned to the United States at the end of World War I were disappointed to find that their old jobs had been taken by domestic workers at wage levels unknown in prewar times.
As early as 1919, the American Legion and the VFW began to lobby for what they called “adjusted compensation.” Critics of financial aid to ex-servicemen preferred to use the more derogatory term “bonus.” Advocates argued that veterans deserved a cash award to balance out the difference between their modest military pay and the high wages enjoyed by civilian war workers.
A compensation measure worked its way through Congress by the fall of 1922, but President Warren Harding vetoed it, part of a drive to avoid all unnecessary government spending. Harding’s veto of the popular measure particularly alienated the Senate Republicans, who thought the President’s defense of fiscal integrity endangered the party’s electoral prospects. You know: politics as usual.
Advocacy groups kept up the pressure and succeeded in gaining passage of the “Soldiers’ Bonus Act” in the spring of 1924. In early negotiations between Congress and President Calvin Coolidge, it became clear that the President would veto any law that proposed immediate cash payments to veterans and that the Senate would sustain that veto. The resulting legislation, popularly called the Insurance Bill, provided the veteran instead with a variety of future payment scenarios rather than cash in the short term.
On May 15, 1924, President Coolidge vetoed a bill granting bonuses to veterans of World War I saying: “patriotism…bought and paid for is not patriotism.” Congress overrode his veto a few days later. The World War Adjusted Compensation Act, or Bonus Act, was passed on May 19, 1924, and granted a benefit to veterans of World War I.