Point Given, Point Taken Trivia Quiz

Answer: Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt (1858 - 1919) may well have been considered the first "conservation" president for he set aside more land for national parks and preserves than all of the previous U.S. presidents combined. He signed the Antiquities Act into law in 1906 and used it to establish the first eighteen U.S. National Monuments, including Devils Tower, the Petrified Forest and the Grand Canyon. He also was instrumental in promoting the U.S. National Forest Service and establishing the first National Forest, and setting aside many game and bird preserves in the country.

Thus, his love of trophy hunting seems a tad contradictory given his commitment to conservation. After leaving the White House, Roosevelt embarked on an African safari that was promoted as a scientific expedition. He and his hunting party killed or trapped over 11,000 animals, including over 500 "big game" animals, some of which were rare white rhinos. Roosevelt was unapologetic in response to criticism of his activities: "I can be condemned only if the existence of [museums] and all similar zoological institutions are to be condemned".

Answer: Mohandas Gandhi

Mohandas Gandhi (1869 - 1948) was rather a fascinating fellow. Certainly his success in achieving India's independence from the British Empire through the advocation of non-violent means was pretty impressive, and for his achievements, he deserves the accolades he's received. But there was a dark side to Gandhi. In his autobiography he admitted to beating his wife, and in his later years, following his declaration of celibacy, he took to sleeping with young, naked women as part of experiments on abstinence. He reportedly wrote a letter to Adolph Hitler as a friend, and his quote on Hitler made in a 1940 letter was bizarre or perhaps just naive: "I do not consider Hitler to be as bad as depicted. He is showing an ability that is amazing, and he seems to be gaining his victories without much bloodshed."

But here we'll take points away from him for his view on people he considered to be beneath him: Native Africans and lower-caste Indians. While working in South Africa as an attorney, Gandhi was aghast to find that he was considered to be on the same level as native Africans. In a letter to the Natal Parliament in 1893, Gandhi wrote: "I venture to point out that both the English and the Indians spring from a common stock, called the Indo-Aryan. ... A general belief seems to prevail in the Colony that the Indians are little better, if at all, than savages or the Natives of Africa. Even the children are taught to believe in that manner, with the result that the Indian is being dragged down to the position of a raw Kaffir." In 1906, after fighting for changes in segregation on South African trains, he stated that "Thanks to the Court's decision, only clean Indians (upper caste Hindu Indians) or colored people other than Kaffirs, can now travel in the trains." When he was imprisoned in 1908 in South Africa for refusing to carry an identification card, he complained about being treated like the natives: "We could understand not being classed with the whites, but to be placed on the same level with the Natives seemed too much to put up with".

Answer: Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger (1879 - 1966) was one of eleven children in a poor, working class family, and her mother's early death after so many births and several miscarriages motivated Sanger to educate women about reproductive options. Her 1914 publication "The Woman Rebel" was so controversial that she had to flee the country rather than face prison, as any publications that mentioned contraception were considered immoral according to the Comstock Act of 1873. She returned to the U.S. after charges were dropped but later ended up in jail for distributing diaphragms to women. In 1929, she established the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control to address laws against birth control and in 1936 was successful in getting a U.S. Court of Appeals to permit birth control devices and materials to be imported into the U.S. In the 1950s, she recruited Gregory Pincus to research the possibility of a "magic pill" that would prevent pregnancy, and she lived to see not only the development of the first oral contraceptive but also the 1965 resolution of "Griswold v. Connecticut", the U.S. Supreme Court case that made birth control legal for married couples.

But the altruism of her work has been questioned. In her article "Birth Control and Racial Betterment", she admitted that she believed "in the sterilization of the feeble-minded, the insane and syphilitic" and "stopping not only the reproduction of the unfit but upon stopping all reproduction when there is not economic means of providing proper care for those who are born in health". Some have suggested that her intentions toward "racial betterment" meant that she wanted to target minority races, pointing out that she presented a speech to the KKK. Although she did speak to a KKK women's group in 1926, claiming that "any aroused group was a good group", she admitted it was one of the "weirdest experiences" she had ever encountered. But the main controversy regarding race came from a 1939 letter she had sent to Dr. Clarence Gamble of the Eugenics Society in which she discussed the Negro Project, a project to bring birth control to impoverished southern African-Americans. In the letter, she stated that she planned to get the assistance of black leaders, particularly ministers, to dispel suspicions about the nature of the project: "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members". The ambiguous nature of the sentence caused concern: Was she saying that the purpose of the project truly was to exterminate blacks or was she saying that she didn't want people to get that impression? Martin Luther King Jr. must have believed that latter because when he received a human rights award from Planned Parenthood in 1966, he praised her: "Margaret Sanger had to commit what was then called a crime in order to enrich humanity, and today we honor her courage and vision."

Answer: Bob Hope

The English born Leslie Townes Hope (1903 - 2003) emigrated to the U.S. with his family when he was five years old. He started street performing as a youngster and worked briefly in a number of jobs, including stints as a boxer and a butcher, before embarking on his show business career. His first work was as a dancer in vaudeville, but comedy soon became his signature. He performed on radio and television but was probably most famous for his comedy films, particularly the series of "Road to..." films that he made with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour. Besides performing, he also hosted the Academy Awards a record nineteen times. But here we're giving him points for his fifty years of service to the USO (United Services Organizations), the organization which provides entertainment to American military personnel around the world. From WWII to the Persian Gulf War, he hosted over fifty series of shows, often in remote and dangerous locations. When John Steinbeck worked as a war correspondent during WWII, he wrote that, "When the time for recognition of service to the nation in wartime comes to be considered, Bob Hope should be high on the list. This man drives himself and is driven... He works month after month at a pace that would kill most people." He did receive recognition in 1997 when an act of Congress recognized him as an Honorary Veteran.

But his personal life was a little odd, and it's there that we'll take away points. He had a short marriage to his vaudeville partner Louise Troxell from 1933 to 1934 before marrying Dolores Reade in 1934. They reportedly married in February of 1934, but his divorce from Louise wasn't finalized until November of 1934, and apparently, there is no record of a marriage license for the ceremony, so we're not sure whether Dolores and he were really married. Ah well, we'll give them the benefit of the doubt. But what we do know is that Bob was a serial philanderer during their nearly 70 years together, with one journalist claiming that he was still carrying on affairs into his 80s. His long-term affair with actress and fellow USO performer Marilyn Maxwell was so well-known in Hollywood that she was referred to as "Mrs. Bob Hope". He also reportedly had a nearly 30 year relationship with Welsh Miss World 1961 Rosemarie Frankland, and then there was Sandy Vinger, who was reportedly his girlfriend during the 1980s; they settled out of court when she sued him in 1994, claiming that he had agreed to support her for life. So why did Dolores put up with it? For one, she was a devout Roman Catholic, and according to her daughter Linda, "She just decided that he was worth going through whatever she had to go through, to have the life and be Mrs. Bob Hope". But according to Dolores herself in a 1998 interview for "The New Yorker": "It never bothered me, because I thought I was better-looking than anybody else".

Answer: Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) was a larger-than-life figure in world history and frequently shows up on lists of the greatest Britons in history. An army officer and war correspondent in his younger years, Churchill's main achievements came in politics. He served a variety of positions in the British government in the early 20th century before becoming Prime Minister in 1940. He didn't share Neville Chamberlain's belief that "peace in our time" was possible in regards to Nazi Germany, and his speeches and radio broadcasts during WWII were a source of inspiration to the British people, particularly during the Battle of Britain. He served as Prime Minister until July 1945 and then again from 1951 to 1955, and remained in Parliament until 1964. Besides his leadership achievements, Churchill was also a Nobel-prize winning author, picking up the award in 1953.

But Churchill's concern for the British Empire apparently did not extend to the native denizens who lived in countries ruled by the British. Racism in prior generations was not necessarily the exception, but Churchill had a reputation for being extreme in his views, with his doctor, Lord Moran, stating that "Winston thinks only of the colour of their skin" when dealing with other races. And while having racist beliefs is one thing, because of his position, Churchill had the ability to act on them. In 1919, while serving as Secretary of State for War, he reportedly authorized the use of chemical gas on the Kurds in British-held Iraq to squash a rebellion, claiming that he was "strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes". While there isn't definitive proof that chemical gas was actually used, the quote isn't in question - it was included in a 1919 War Office memorandum. In his defense we'll point out that Churchill made a poor choice of words in stating "poisoned gas" because he was referring to tear gas or lachrymatory gas, as he called it in his memorandum. However, he later urged Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard to continue "experimental work on gas bombs, especially mustard gas, which would inflict punishment upon recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury upon them." There is evidence that Churchill did authorize the use of a more toxic gas called diphenylaminechloroarsine [DM] against the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1919, but by 1932, he had backed away from any enthusiasm for chemical weapons: "The attitude of the British Government has always been to abhor the employment of poison gas. As I understand it, our only procedure is to keep alive such means of studying this subject as shall not put us at a hopeless disadvantage if, by any chance, it were used against us by other people". Let's move on to India where an estimated two to three million people died in the Bengal famine of 1943. Churchill had a negative opinion of the natives of India, famously stating, "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." Field Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell, the Viceroy of India was frustrated in his attempts to get food to the region: "Apparently it is more important to save the Greeks and liberated countries than the Indians and there is reluctance either to provide shipping or to reduce stocks in this country", and Leopold Amery, the Secretary of State for India added that "Winston may be right in saying that the starvation of anyhow under-fed Bengalis is less serious than sturdy Greeks, but he makes no sufficient allowance for the sense of Empire responsibility in this country". Churchill received blame because not only were large amounts of food exported from India for consumption in Europe, but a scorched earth policy was enacted that was intended to prevent the Japanese from obtaining food if they invaded. Called the Denial Policy, it resulted in boats being removed from coastal Bengal and rice stocks being seized. According to author Madhusree Mukerjee, "The United States and Australia offered to send help but couldn't because the war cabinet was not willing to release ships. And when the US offered to send grain on its own ships, that offer was not followed up by the British." The British government's response to the famine according to a War Cabinet meeting of 24 April 1944 was: "The Prime Minister said that it was clear that His Majesty's Government could only provide further relief for the Indian situation at the cost of incurring grave difficulties in other directions....At the same time his sympathy was great for the sufferings of the people of India." Churchill's actions in suppressing the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s were also controversial. The Mau Mau rebellion was pretty brutal with horrific atrocities committed on both sides, but Churchill allowed not only the Mau Mau to be targeted but also anyone who was sympathetic to their cause (which was largely to get back the land that had been taken from the native Kenyans). He referred to the Kenyans as "blackamoors" and permitted any dissenters to be squashed by having them thrown in concentration camps. One of those rounded up was Hussein Onyango Obama, the grandfather of former U.S. president Barack Obama. He was held and tortured for two years, according to his wife. Churchill's defenders point out that the actions were carried out by those in charge in Kenya, not by Churchill; in fact the "Winston Churchill Project" only lists a few benign comments made by Churchill on the topic of the Kenya uprising, but the suppression occurred on Churchill's watch, and he approved the removal of Kenyans from the fertile lands in favor of British settlers.

Answer: Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson's (1743 - 1826) significance in the early years of the United States can't be denied: He was the main author of the Declaration of Independence and served several public roles for the fledgling country: The first Secretary of State, the second vice president, and the third president. He also served as the minister to France and as the governor of Virginia. Besides his life in public service, he was also a bit of Renaissance man, speaking several languages and pursuing several disciplines such as horticulture and architecture, and he even founded the University of Virginia. He was also a prolific author, and many of his works projected a liberal mindset, in particular with regards to slavery. He called it a "moral depravity" that corrupted both master and slave. He had verbally attacked the British for encouraging the slave trade prior to independence, and he worked to have slave importation banned in Virginia. He tried to get federal legislation passed that would have banned slavery in new territories after 1800 but was unsuccessful. As an attorney, he had represented both slaves and free Africans, sometimes pro bono.

But despite these noble acts, Jefferson himself owned slaves, having inherited nearly two hundred of them, and he believed Africans to be of inferior intelligence. While serving in the Virginia House of Burgesses, he sought to prevent free blacks from entering the colony and wanted to banish black children and exile white women who had children with black men. While he later proposed banning slavery, he didn't want the freed slaves to remain in the U.S. - he proposed to train them and ship them to the Dominican Republic. But perhaps the most hypocritical action of Jefferson was with regards to interracial relationships. He proclaimed that "the amalgamation of whites with blacks produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of the excellence in the human character, can innocently consent" while he was carrying on a relationship with one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings, who also happened to be the half-sister of his late wife. Although he denied the relationship at the time, DNA testing has since proved that at least one of Hemmings' children was fathered by Jefferson.

Answer: Martin Luther

The multi-talented Martin Luther (1483 - 1546) was a composer, priest, monk and a German professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg. He had been studying to become a lawyer in tune with his father's wishes when he reportedly experienced a life-changing event: He was caught in a thunderstorm and was nearly hit by lightning, but he believed was spared because he called out to Saint Anne to save him. He decided to become a monk and devoted a few years to monastery life before returning to university to get his doctorate in theology. But he became disenchanted with the Roman Catholic Church, challenging in particular the concept of "indulgences" which allowed people to purchase away their sins. Luther summarized his complaints in his "Ninety-five Theses", which led to his excommunication from the church and the establishment of Protestantism. Luther was successful in disseminating his vision of Christianity by taking advantage of Johannes Gutenberg's printing press and by writing in German rather than Latin or Greek so that the average reader could understand the material.

But Martin Luther apparently was a pick-and-choose follower of Jesus's teachings because the man was a brazen anti-Semite. In his early years, Luther at least seemed to remember that Jesus himself was a Jew, and he was somewhat tolerant in his views towards the religion in the hopes of converting Jews to Christianity. But he apparently abandoned that plan and went on full assault with his later writings. His 1543 treatise, "On the Jews and Their Lies", read like a Nazi how-to guide: He advocated stripping Jews of their rights and their belongings and either forcing them to work as slave labor, expelling them, or killing them. His eight-point plan for dealing with Jews included setting fire to their schools and synagogues, destroying their homes, and preventing Rabbis from teaching "on pain of loss of life and limb". Luther's link to Nazism is studied to this day. Most scholars seem to agree that Luther's comments on Jews were largely forgotten over the years until the Nazis decided that his views were suited to their purpose, with Lutheran researcher Uwe Siemon-Netto positing that the Nazis were anti-Semites before seizing on Luther's works. However a study by Richard Geary in 1993 found that the Nazi party received significantly more votes from the Lutheran areas of Germany than the Catholic regions in the pre-Hitler days, and once the Nazis rose to power, the Lutheran ministers were quick to justify the treatment of Jews in Luther's name. Lutheran Bishop Martin Sasse exalted Luther as "the greatest anti-Semite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews", and he celebrated Kristallnacht: "On 10 November 1938, on Luther's birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany". Whatever the level of influence, there is no doubt that the Nazis admired Luther's position on Judaism: Luther was frequently quoted in Nazi literature, and Julius Streicher, the editor of the Nazi newspaper "Der Sturmer", had a first edition version of "On the Jews and Their Lies" that was displayed in a glass case during the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg. In the latter part of the 20th century, the Lutheran church distanced itself from its namesake's anti-Semite views, with the Lutheran World Federation issuing a 1982 declaration that "we Christians must purge ourselves of any hatred of the Jews and any sort of teaching of contempt for Judaism". A 1994 statement from the Church Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America mentioned Luther specifically: "We who bear his name and heritage must acknowledge with pain the anti-Judaic diatribes contained in Luther's later writings. We reject this violent invective as did many of his companions in the sixteenth century, and we are moved to deep and abiding sorrow at its tragic effects on later generations of Jews".

Answer: Mother Teresa

Born into an Albanian family in what is now Skopje, Macedonia, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu (1910 - 1997) became Sister Mary Teresa in Dublin in 1928 before heading off to India as a member of the Sisters of Loreto. She was sent to Kolkata (Calcutta) where she worked as a teacher in a girls' school, eventually becoming the principal of the school. She gained the title of "Mother" after taking her Final Profession of Vows in 1937, and in 1948, she left the school to follow a new calling to work in the slums of Kolkata. In 1950, she founded the Missionaries of Charity, which was devoted to providing "wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor" through clinics, soup kitchens, orphanages, and schools. She occasionally worked outside of India, including a 1982 trip to Beirut to rescue disabled children during the Lebanese Civil War and a 1985 trip to New York where she established a home for those afflicted with AIDS. For her work, she received numerous awards including the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize. Following her death from heart disease, she was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2003, and she was canonized by Pope Francis in 2016.

But Mother Teresa had her critics, both while she was alive and after her death. Author Christopher Hitchens, one of her greatest critics, stated in 2003: "She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction". In 2015, RSS (Hindu Nationalist organization) Chief Mohan Bhagwat stated that: "It's good to work for a cause with selfless intentions. But Mother Teresa's work had ulterior motive, which was to convert the person who was being served to Christianity". Hitchens agreed: "It was by talking to her that I discovered, and she assured me, that she wasn't working to alleviate poverty. She was working to expand the number of Catholics. She said, 'I'm not a social worker. I don't do it for this reason. I do it for Christ. I do it for the church.'" To that end, according to former member of the Missionaries of Charity Susan Shields, the sisters were ordered to secretly baptize the dying into Christianity at Mother Teresa's clinics. Besides questionable religious recruiting practices, Mother Teresa was also criticized for accepting large donations from dubious characters such as the Duvalier family in Haiti and Charles Keating of the U.S. 1980s Savings and Loan fiasco. As Hitchens pointed out in his 2003 article: "This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor". And then there's the question of where that money went. She wouldn't consent to financial audits on the donations, and the facilities she raised funds for apparently never saw the money. In 1994, the British medical journal "The Lancet" published a negative account of the care provided at and the condition of Mother Teresa's facilities, and in 2013, researchers at the University of Montreal published a meta-study that highlighted the shady financial dealings of her charity and the poor care provided to her patients. Hitchens summed it up in his 2003 article: "Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been - she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself - and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?"

Answer: Alexander Graham Bell

Bell (1847 - 1922) was born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland. His mother was nearly deaf, and his father, who was an expert on the mechanics of voice, worked on providing speech applications to the deaf. His father had invented a universal alphabet called "Visible Speech" which he had hoped would be used to help the deaf communicate. Bell joined the family business at the age of 16, and in 1870, he moved with the family to Canada before leaving for Boston. In Boston, he taught deaf children how to speak using Visible Speech and even opened a school to train teachers how to teach deaf children. There he met electrician Thomas Watson with whom he would work on his design for the telephone. Although Bell ultimately received credit for inventing the telephone, several others were working on the invention at the same time, and Bell had to endure over 500 court challenges to his patent of the technology.

But Bell was also a eugenicist, and he believed that the intermarriage of deaf people resulted into deaf children. While he didn't propose a ban on intermarriage, believing it to be impractical, he did advocate keeping deaf people apart. In his 1884 paper "Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race", Bell decried that deaf people were forming clubs to socialize together and that deaf people marrying deaf people would lead to a deaf race. He thus petitioned state legislatures to ban sign language, believing that it encouraged communication among the deaf rather than communication with the non-deaf: "The lack of articulate speech should also be noted as an indirect cause of segregation in adult life, operating to separate deaf-mutes from hearing persons". He wanted deaf children to be taught by hearing teachers so that they would be forced to learn to speak rather than sign, and he wanted to ban residential schools for the deaf, preferring day schools so that the deaf would interact with the hearing for a part of each day: "Nearly one-third of the teachers of the deaf and dumb in America are themselves deaf, and this must be considered as another element favorable to the formation of a deaf race - to be therefore avoided".

Answer: W.E.B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868 - 1963) had been born into a middle-class family in Massachusetts. He considered himself to be mulatto ("a flood of Negro blood, a strain of French, a bit of Dutch, but, thank God! No 'Anglo-Saxon'"); his great-grandfather had been a slave who earned his freedom by fighting on the colonial side in the American Revolutionary War. He had a comfortable childhood with educational advantages, but when he moved to Tennessee in 1885 to study at Fisk University, he encountered the discrimination of Jim Crow laws, and from then on, he devoted himself to fighting against racism and the mistreatment of blacks in the U.S. He published the first case-study of an African-American community in 1899: "The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study", and he argued against any solution short of full equality for African-Americans, which pitted him against other black leaders such as Booker T. Washington, who were willing to accept incremental improvements.

Some criticism is leveled at Du Bois for his enthusiasm for communism. It's true that Du Bois came to see communism as a means to achieve full equality for all citizens, but hey - that's a political opinion, and we're not going to deduct points for this. No, our beef with Professor Du Bois is that he allowed himself to be used as a tool by the Nazis. Du Bois had studied in Germany in the 1890s and was an admirer of German culture so it's not surprising that he jumped at the offer of a five-month-long trip to Nazi Germany in 1936. However the trip was sponsored by the Oberlaender Fellowship, an organization sympathetic to Nazi Germany, and by his own admission, his writings were censored while he was there, and he was limited to studying what they desired him to see. He reported that he was impressed with the achievements that Hitler had managed during his time in office, particularly the development of quality housing and highways. He said that he saw "no trace of race-hatred" toward blacks but admitted that persecution of the Jews was regrettable. However he believed that the treatment of the Jews was legal and open as compared with the treatment of blacks in the U.S: "The situation is regrettable, but not comparable to that of the Negros". He later tried to back-pedal from his earlier comments on the treatment of the Jewish people in Germany: "It is an attack on civilization, comparable only to such horrors as the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade. It has set civilization back a hundred years." Unfortunately, the damage was done.