Sunday Pub Quiz

A seven question political history trivia quiz

In my continuing quest to waste my own time and help you to do the same, I have created this pub quiz about political history. The format is “These but not those”.

An example format of the prompt is:

President, Senator and Governor but not Secretary of State or FBI Director

To which the answer would be: Positions to which people are elected by vote.

Google not and see if you can answer the seven questions below. I put my answers after the jump. There could easily be more than one correct, important answer (i.e., not a trivial one like “words with an n in them”). If you don’t get my answer but have a credible alternative please post it and take the points for a correct answer.

In any event, please post your score. Good luck!

1. Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford and Harry Truman but not Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon.

2. Secretary of State, Secretary of War, Secretary of the Treasury and Attorney General but not Secretary of the Interior or Secretary of Agriculture.

3. Winfield Scott, Zachary Taylor, Henry Clay and Millard Fillmore but not Franklin Pierce or Ulysses S. Grant.

4. William Henry Harrison, James Garfield, William Howard Taft and William McKinley but not Calvin Coolidge or Chester A. Arthur

5. U.K. Prime Ministers Ramsey McDonald, Gordon Brown and Henry Campbell-Bannerman but not Tony Blair or Winston Churchill

6. James Garfield, William Henry Harrison and Franklin Delano Roosevelt but not Richard Nixon or Woodrow Wilson.

7. John Nance Garner, Harry Truman and Henry Wallace but not Alben Barkley or Thomas Dewey

ANSWERS
1. Left handed (or more properly, could function left-handed as Ford and Reagan were ambidextrous)

2. The original cabinet positions (full marks if you said posts appointed by George Washington)

3. Whig candidates for President (full marks if you just said Whigs)

4. Born in Ohio

5. Scottish Presbyterians

6. Died in office

7. Vice-President to FDR

Author: Keith Humphreys

Keith Humphreys is the Esther Ting Memorial Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University and an Honorary Professor of Psychiatry at Kings College London. His research, teaching and writing have focused on addictive disorders, self-help organizations (e.g., breast cancer support groups, Alcoholics Anonymous), evaluation research methods, and public policy related to health care, mental illness, veterans, drugs, crime and correctional systems. Professor Humphreys' over 300 scholarly articles, monographs and books have been cited over thirteen thousand times by scientific colleagues. He is a regular contributor to Washington Post and has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Monthly, San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian (UK), The Telegraph (UK), Times Higher Education (UK), Crossbow (UK) and other media outlets.

18 thoughts on “Sunday Pub Quiz”

  1. In re number 4: I think a greater differentiator than state of birth might be the fact that the first four gained the presidency by election, while the last two were VPs who succeeded upon the death of the sitting Prez.

    Come to think of it, none of the first four was ever VP at all. That’s a pretty big differentiator.

      1. The first example, as written, mentioned nothing about federal. You assumed it was implied, but I didn’t.

  4. So did you pick Harrison instead of Hayes in (4) to make it less obvious? After all, there was about a half-century after the Civil War where the President was from Ohio half the time.

    1. I put Harrison in for the same reason I put in Coolidge, so that people would not think that the answer was late 19th century Presidents. Now that I see Ken Doran’s response, I wish I had put someone else in that would have tailored it more to the Ohio answer.

          1. Definitely the most amusing part of that page:

            The following Presidents were born British subjects, as well as American citizens, after the establishment of the United States:
            Chester A. Arthur[10]
            Barack Obama[11]

      2. Credit here goes to Ken *Rhodes*, but it is good to know that I have stuck my nose in often enough in this venue that my name sticks in memory.

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