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Quiz about Exceptionally Silly Americans
Quiz about Exceptionally Silly Americans

Exceptionally Silly Americans Trivia Quiz


A recent fabricated geopolitical study suggests that the United States possesses approximately 66.4% of the world's untapped resources of idiocy. What has been mined here in the past?

A multiple-choice quiz by coolupway. Estimated time: 5 mins.
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Author
coolupway
Time
5 mins
Type
Multiple Choice
Quiz #
101,939
Updated
Jul 23 22
# Qns
10
Difficulty
Average
Avg Score
6 / 10
Plays
3405
Awards
Top 35% Quiz
- -
Question 1 of 10
1. Re-elected President on the basis of having "kept us out of war", he promptly got us into a horrid, bloody European conflict arising from bad blood between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and their subject Slavic peoples that arguably involved no real threat to U.S. territorial interests. Who was this ultimately tragic figure? Hint


Question 2 of 10
2. He is known to have made one of the greatest political speeches in U.S. history, but the subject of this speech was what can only be described as the rather peculiar issue of "bimetallism." At the end of his life he testified as an expert witness about the Bible in a court case in which his views on scriptural inerrancy were held up to ridicule by a famous trial lawyer. Who was he? Hint


Question 3 of 10
3. One of the founding fathers of a great American industry, he was also a paranoid anti-Semitic crank who authored a book entitled "The International Jew" and published the notorious Czarist forgery "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" in the USA. Who was he? Hint


Question 4 of 10
4. In an essay published in the "New Yorker" 13 days after the 9/11 attacks, this darling of the literary left defended the attackers against accusations of cowardice, reiterated the theory, much bandied about before and since, that the 9/11 atrocity was "undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions" and posited a moral equivalency between the 9/11 hijackers and the persons behind the American bombing of Iraq. Who wrote this? Hint


Question 5 of 10
5. This New York lawyer, whose name later became virtually synonymous with "boring President", acceded to the presidency only because of the untimely death of Zachary Taylor. He later ran for the office as the candidate of the infamously racist and nativist "Know-Nothing" party, though happily only about seven people voted for him. Who was he? Hint


Question 6 of 10
6. This undeniably talented and attractive half of one of America's well-known couples (now ex) said in a 1970 speech at Duke University that "if you understood what Communism was, you would hope and pray on your knees that we would someday become Communist." Who said that? Hint


Question 7 of 10
7. He started out with a bang in the literary world with his book "Other Voices, Other Rooms"; he was a childhood friend of Harper Lee, and some have suggested that he may have helped her with parts of "To Kill a Mockingbird". By the end of his career and life, however, he had made himself a bit of a pariah even among the society types he had conspicuously courted, and his literary reputation was in decided eclipse. Who was he? Hint


Question 8 of 10
8. Undeniably one of the most brilliant statesman ever produced by the South, some of the actions and inactions of this handsome advocate of states' rights (and of state nullification of odious federal laws) may have been causes, however unintentional, of the Civil War. His last words reportedly were, "The South! The poor South! God knows what will become of her!" Who was he? Hint


Question 9 of 10
9. Once a "contendah" for the title of greatest living American actor, this screen legend appears to have veered off the path somewhere in the 70's. Several years back he launched into a semi-coherent rant on the Larry King show about "kikes" and Jewish domination of the movie industry. Who is this larger-than-life (and larger than several other things) figure? Hint


Question 10 of 10
10. This young film director, who conspicuously emulated John Ford, knocked out such astonishingly good films as "Paper Moon" and "The Last Picture Show" in the early 70s, but promptly became infatuated with a young Cybill Shepherd, dumped his wife, and arguably had done nothing in the intervening 30 years which approached the quality of his two early masterpieces. Who was he? Hint



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Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. Re-elected President on the basis of having "kept us out of war", he promptly got us into a horrid, bloody European conflict arising from bad blood between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and their subject Slavic peoples that arguably involved no real threat to U.S. territorial interests. Who was this ultimately tragic figure?

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.
2. He is known to have made one of the greatest political speeches in U.S. history, but the subject of this speech was what can only be described as the rather peculiar issue of "bimetallism." At the end of his life he testified as an expert witness about the Bible in a court case in which his views on scriptural inerrancy were held up to ridicule by a famous trial lawyer. Who was he?

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.
3. One of the founding fathers of a great American industry, he was also a paranoid anti-Semitic crank who authored a book entitled "The International Jew" and published the notorious Czarist forgery "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" in the USA. Who was he?

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."
4. In an essay published in the "New Yorker" 13 days after the 9/11 attacks, this darling of the literary left defended the attackers against accusations of cowardice, reiterated the theory, much bandied about before and since, that the 9/11 atrocity was "undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions" and posited a moral equivalency between the 9/11 hijackers and the persons behind the American bombing of Iraq. Who wrote this?

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.)
5. This New York lawyer, whose name later became virtually synonymous with "boring President", acceded to the presidency only because of the untimely death of Zachary Taylor. He later ran for the office as the candidate of the infamously racist and nativist "Know-Nothing" party, though happily only about seven people voted for him. Who was he?

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.
6. This undeniably talented and attractive half of one of America's well-known couples (now ex) said in a 1970 speech at Duke University that "if you understood what Communism was, you would hope and pray on your knees that we would someday become Communist." Who said that?

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.
7. He started out with a bang in the literary world with his book "Other Voices, Other Rooms"; he was a childhood friend of Harper Lee, and some have suggested that he may have helped her with parts of "To Kill a Mockingbird". By the end of his career and life, however, he had made himself a bit of a pariah even among the society types he had conspicuously courted, and his literary reputation was in decided eclipse. Who was he?

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".)
8. Undeniably one of the most brilliant statesman ever produced by the South, some of the actions and inactions of this handsome advocate of states' rights (and of state nullification of odious federal laws) may have been causes, however unintentional, of the Civil War. His last words reportedly were, "The South! The poor South! God knows what will become of her!" Who was he?

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."
9. Once a "contendah" for the title of greatest living American actor, this screen legend appears to have veered off the path somewhere in the 70's. Several years back he launched into a semi-coherent rant on the Larry King show about "kikes" and Jewish domination of the movie industry. Who is this larger-than-life (and larger than several other things) figure?

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.
10. This young film director, who conspicuously emulated John Ford, knocked out such astonishingly good films as "Paper Moon" and "The Last Picture Show" in the early 70s, but promptly became infatuated with a young Cybill Shepherd, dumped his wife, and arguably had done nothing in the intervening 30 years which approached the quality of his two early masterpieces. Who was he?

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.
Source: Author coolupway

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor Lanni before going online.
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