McCutcheon was also famous for the folksy cartoons of rural life at the fictional town of Bird Center. Syndicated columnist O. O. McIntyre once wrote of McCutcheon: "No cartoonist of his or any other time has so influenced public thought and clarified it for better thinking about affairs at home and abroad." Among his most famous cartoons were the 1931 Pulitzer Prize –winning editorial cartoon, "A Wise Economist Asks a Question" and "The Colors", one of his most famous wartime cartoons, which depicts in four panels the scenes of a peaceful harvest, dead soldiers on a battlefield, a group of mourners, and the soldiers' gravestones that is accompanied by his four-line poem. Other memorable cartoons are "Mail Call", which depicts a soldier who did not receive mail standing in the middle of a crowd of happy soldiers who did, and "The Mysterious Stranger", about Missouri's defection from the Democratic ranks of the Solid South to join the Republicans.