Exceptionally Silly Americans Trivia Quiz

Answer: Woodrow Wilson

The Serb Princip shoots Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Bosnia. What did it have to do with the US? We ostensibly tossed our hat into the ring because of German U-boat misadventures on the high seas... a flimsy pretext for entering a war that would claim nearly 50,000 American lives. Wilson, whose first wife died while he was in the White House, remarried quickly, leading to the joke of the day that the second Mrs. W. was so surprised by the proposal that she "fell out of bed".

His struggle with the Senate over the League of Nations broke him physically, and for a time his second wife. Edith, functioned as the de facto President of the United States.

Answer: William Jennings Bryan

Bryan's famous "Cross of Gold" speech at the 1896 Democratic convention stands alongside the Gettysburg Address and Webster's March 7, 1850 oration in the annals of great American speechifying, but 20-20 hindsight suggests that the silver issue was something of a red herring. Bryan, from Nebraska, was known as the "Boy Orator of the Platte", and the wag who first noted that the Platte River is "six inches deep and six miles wide at the mouth" should be no less famous than Bryan was. Later on, Clarence Darrow eviscerated a much older, though not much wiser Bryan at the famous Scopes trial.

Answer: Henry Ford

Ford didn't exactly make his feelings a secret; he also expounded his noxious views in the "Dearborn Independent" for a couple of years running. Though most know the general outlines of the story, Neil Baldwin's "Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate", published in 2001, documents the history in amazing if sometimes nauseating detail. In the "Onion's" hilarious "Our Dumb Century", the headline story for February 19, 1915 is "Henry Ford Unveils New Line of Anti-Semitic Autos."

Answer: Susan Sontag

Ross and Shawn must have been spinning in their graves. No one has ever put forth a convincing case that Ms. Sontag is not in fact Noam Chomsky in a gray fright wig. She is mentioned, by the way, in one of the finer movie moments of the 1980's, Crash Davis' soliloquy in "Bull Durham": "...I believe in the soul, the dawn, the evening, the small of a woman's back... that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap..." (Unfortunately, these wonderful sentiments issued from the mouth of Kevin Costner.)

Answer: Millard Fillmore

Fillmore's presidency was not exactly a watershed in American history. He is probably most significant for having NOT done something, namely NOT vetoing the Compromise of 1850 as Taylor almost certainly would've had he lived. The anti-Catholic Know-Nothings, calling themselves the American Party, ran Fillmore against Buchanan and Fremont in 1856 in what has to have been the worst selection of presidential candidates ever placed before the American people. Fillmore polled less than a million votes.

Answer: Jane Fonda

She ended her marriage to the hardly-less-nutty Ted Turner, and became, so we're told, a born-again Christian. Buddhism and crystal-gazing can't be far away for her at this point. None of the answers approached the fervor of "Hanoi Jane", who also claimed that reports of North Vietnamese atrocities occasioned on U.S. POWs were hogwash.

Answer: Truman Capote

Capote could write, although the fantastic success of his "In Cold Blood" was accompanied by ominous mutterings that he was squandering his talents. He devoted the better part of the 1960s and much of the 1970s to fawning over the idle rich, while also working on a roman a clef, to be entitled "Answered Prayers", which skewered them. Though publication was postponed for over 15 years, an excerpt was printed in "Esquire" magazine and Capote was then generally shunned by the same people he had so conspicuously courted... a tragic, but still somewhat ridiculous figure in the world of belles lettres. (He is "Dill" in "To Kill A Mockingbird".)

Answer: John C. Calhoun

Calhoun had one of the greatest minds of the day, but his "people" skills were somewhat lacking, and this cost him greatly. While Jackson's VP, he allowed his snooty wife Floride to entangle him in the infamous "Petticoat War", which earned him Jackson's undying enmity and pushed him far to the right politically.

The unabashed nullification schemes he later espoused would have rendered the "United States" a toothless tiger. Old Hickory's dying regret, by the way, was that he had not "shot Clay and hanged Calhoun."

Answer: Marlon Brando

Famously refused an Oscar in 1973 and sent one Sacheen Littlefeather, ostensibly a Native American, to pick up the award in his place and prattle on about mistreatment of the Indians. It emerged later that "Littlefeather" was an actress named Maria Cruz; she now claims part-Indian ancestry, though depending on the websites one checks, the "part" may be Yaqui, Apache or nonexistent. Brando's vaporizings about the Jews were aired in 1996.

Answer: Peter Bogdanovich

The wife he dumped, Polly Platt, was heavily involved in both "Paper Moon" and "The Last Picture Show", and has gone on to conspicuous success on a number of other Hollywood projects, leading some to speculate that she might have had a much greater hand in Bogdanovich's early success than might have been believed.

This sad story is laid out in wonderful detail in Peter Biskind's excellent book, "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls"-- a must-read for anyone who remembers what movies were like before the space-monster guys came along.