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David Wilson's Literary Quiz
A new literary quiz each week or so, usually with a theme. This week: It was Presidents' Day a week or so ago, if anybody
noticed, so this Quiz is dedicated to our Chief Magistrates, equally respected at home and abroad. Please notice there are
ELEVEN questions this week! I say that especially to you boys at the back of the class! All the extracts are from speeches
made by the various Presidents. The only oddity is No. 11 (the most easy of difficulty to say whom is talkin'), which consists
of discombobulating but veracious extracks strungen together. Most of the others are pretty easy, too - I've given you hints
with the tough ones. And so, my fellow Americans ....
The quotations in these quizzes reflect my own tastes - Dead White Males, for the most part (Jane Austen,
of course, counts as an honorary DWM). There will never be anything wilfully obscure. If you're the sort of person who sneers
at the naïveté of the reviewers in the TLS and New York Review of Books, you'll recognize them at once.
I welcome suggestions and insults. You'll find an e-mail tag lying around somewhere. Please put QUIZ in the subject line.
David J Wilson.
Quiz No. 102
1)
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready
for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime,
or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers
of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation
of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three
and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security
more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American
experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every State house, every office
of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave
implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether
sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and
will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We
should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial
and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Answer
2)
During the contest of opinion through which we have passed the animation of discussions and of exertions
has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely and to speak and to write what they think;
but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution, all will, of
course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good. All, too, will bear
in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must
be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection
without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that
religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political
intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions. During the throes and convulsions of
the ancient world, during the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter his long-lost liberty,
it was not wonderful that the agitation of the billows should reach even this distant and peaceful shore; that this should
be more felt and feared by some and less by others, and should divide opinions as to measures of safety. But every difference
of opinion is not a difference of principle ....
Answer
3(This great American oversaw the construction of the Capitol while he was Secretary of War.)
A wrong has been inflicted on the South; those who aided in the infliction would now draw the censure
they may have anticipated, by crying aloud against all who assert your rights and claim redress for past and security against
future aggression. There could not be a more dangerous heresy than that which concedes to the majority of Congress, the right
to use all grants as in their discretion they may choose, and acknowledges the right of the States to interpose against their
federal agent only when the forms of the government are violated; in other words, for a palpable violation of the letter of
the Constitution. The federal government is a creature of grants; its powers are not limited by prohibition, but are only
co-extensive with the authority conferred. If the right of the States to interpose begins only on the palpable infraction
of the letter of the Constitution, then they have no power to guard their reserved powers, none to confine the agent in the
use of the grant to the purpose for which it was granted, and it would be difficult to conceive of a case such as is contemplated
by the phrase, palpable violation of the Constitution, in which the Supreme Court of the United States would not furnish an
adequate remedy. It is exactly in the case where the rights of the States and of the people thereof are withheld by evasion,
or invaded by fraud, which deprive them of redress by appeal to the Supreme Court as the Constitutional arbiter, that the
States have a right, which may become a duty, to interpose.
Answer
4(Almost any way you care to calculate it, he won the Presidency by the most overwhelming margin in the history of the
Republic. And his funeral procession was the occasion of an unprecedentedly great outpouring of public grief.)
The recorded progress of our Republic, materially and spiritually, in itself proves the wisdom of
the inherited policy of noninvolvement in Old World affairs. Confident of our ability to work out our own destiny, and jealously
guarding our right to do so, we seek no part in directing the destinies of the Old World. We do not mean to be entangled.
We will accept no responsibility except as our own conscience and judgment, in each instance, may determine.
Our eyes never will be blind to a developing menace, our ears never deaf to the call of civilization.
We recognize the new order in the world, with the closer contacts which progress has wrought. We sense the call of the human
heart for fellowship, fraternity, and cooperation. We crave friendship and harbor no hate. But America, our America, the America
builded on the foundation laid by the inspired fathers, can be a party to no permanent military alliance. It can enter into
no political commitments, nor assume any economic obligations which will subject our decisions to any other than our own authority.
I am sure our own people will not misunderstand, nor will the world misconstrue. We have no thought
to impede the paths to closer relationship. We wish to promote understanding. We want to do our part in making offensive warfare
so hateful that Governments and peoples who resort to it must prove the righteousness of their cause or stand as outlaws before
the bar of civilization.
We are ready to associate ourselves with the nations of the world, great and small, for conference,
for counsel; to seek the expressed views of world opinion; to recommend a way to approximate disarmament and relieve the crushing
burdens of military and naval establishments ....
Answer
5)
Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions,
the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in
the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it - we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look
into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of
conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction,
but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.
Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore,
we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations
to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of
all men, and to become the world's leading space-faring nation.
We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won,
and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology,
has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States
occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater
of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected
against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of
war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile
to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again.
But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain. Why, 35 years
ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not
because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies
and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we
intend to win, and the others, too.
It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low
to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the Office of the Presidency.
Answer
6)
The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore
that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more
noble than mere monetary profit.
Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill
of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits.
These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to
minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.
Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the
abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride
of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to
a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only
on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it
cannot live.
Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This Nation asks for action, and action
now.
Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely
and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would
treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate
and reorganize the use of our natural resources.
Answer
7(He bore a close relationship to his predecessor-but-one.)
It is a plain dictate of honesty and good government that public expenditures should be limited by
public necessity, and that this should be measured by the rules of strict economy; and it is equally clear that frugality
among the people is the best guaranty of a contented and strong support of free institutions.
One mode of the misappropriation of public funds is avoided when appointments to office, instead of
being the rewards of partisan activity, are awarded to those whose efficiency promises a fair return of work for the compensation
paid to them. To secure the fitness and competency of appointees to office and remove from political action the demoralizing
madness for spoils, civil- service reform has found a place in our public policy and laws. The benefits already gained through
this instrumentality and the further usefulness it promises entitle it to the hearty support and encouragement of all who
desire to see our public service well performed or who hope for the elevation of political sentiment and the purification
of political methods.
The existence of immense aggregations of kindred enterprises and combinations of business interests
formed for the purpose of limiting production and fixing prices is inconsistent with the fair field which ought to be open
to every independent activity. Legitimate strife in business should not be superseded by an enforced concession to the demands
of combinations that have the power to destroy, nor should the people to be served lose the benefit of cheapness which usually
results from wholesome competition. These aggregations and combinations frequently constitute conspiracies against the interests
of the people, and in all their phases they are unnatural and opposed to our American sense of fairness. To the extent that
they can be reached and restrained by Federal power the General Government should relieve our citizens from their interference
and exactions.
Loyalty to the principles upon which our Government rests positively demands that the equality before
the law which it guarantees to every citizen should be justly and in good faith conceded in all parts of the land. The enjoyment
of this right follows the badge of citizenship wherever found, and, unimpaired by race or color, it appeals for recognition
to American manliness and fairness.
Answer
8)
I tell you, my countrymen, here tonight, though the power of hell, death and Stevens with all his
powers combined, there is no power that can control me save you the people and the God that spoke me into existence. In bidding
you farewell here tonight, I would ask you with all the pains Congress has taken to calumniate and malign me, what has Congress
done? Has it done anything to restore the Union of the States? But, on the contrary, has it not done everything to prevent
it?
And because I stand now as I did when the rebellion commenced, I have been denounced as a traitor.
My countrymen here to-night, who has suffered more than I? Who has run greater risk? Who has borne more than I? But Congress,
factious, domineering, tyrannical Congress has undertaken to poison the minds of the American people, and create a feeling
against me in consequence of the manner in which I have distributed the public patronage.
While this gang - this common gang of cormorants and bloodsuckers, have been fattening upon the country
for the past four or five years - men never going into the field, who growl at being removed from their fat offices, they
are great patriots! Look at them all over your district! Everybody is a traitor that is against them. I think the time has
come when those who stayed at home and enjoyed fat offices for the last four or five years - I think it would be more than
right for them to give way and let others participate in the benefits of office. Hence you can see why it is that I am traduced
and assaulted. I stood by these men who were in the field, and I stand by them now.
Answer
9)
I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the
founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn
manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.
This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions
of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but,
in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural
to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful
despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually
incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief
of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his
own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely
out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of
a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates
the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally
riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government
itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and
will of another.
There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the
government and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This within certain limits is probably true; and in governments
of a monarchical cast, patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the
popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is
certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess,
the effort ought to be by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform
vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.
Answer
10)
We cannot, we must not, refuse to protect the right of every American to vote in every election that
he may desire to participate in. And we ought not, and we cannot, and we must not wait another eight months before we get
a bill. We have already waited a hundred years and more, and the time for waiting is gone.
So I ask you to join me in working long hours - nights and weekends, if necessary - to pass this bill.
And I don't make that request lightly. For from the window where I sit with the problems of our country, I recognize that
from outside this chamber is the outraged conscience of a nation, the grave concern of many nations, and the harsh judgment
of history on our acts.
But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far
larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for
themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it's not just Negroes, but really
it's all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome.
Answer
11)
Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways
to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.
I wish you'd have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it .... I'm sure
something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with
answer, but it hadn't yet .... I don't want to sound like I have made no mistakes. I'm confident I have. I just haven't —
you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.
For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three non-fatal shootings. And, folks, this is unacceptable
in America. It's just unacceptable. And we're going to do something about it.
There's no doubt in my mind that we should allow the world worst leaders to hold America hostage,
to threaten our peace, to threaten our friends and allies with the world's worst weapons.
The ambassador and the general were briefing me on the - the vast majority of Iraqis want to live
in a peaceful, free world. And we will find these people and we will bring them to justice.
You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.
I want to thank you for the importance that you've shown for education and literacy.
Answer
1)
Dwight David Eisenhower. From his last speech as President, 1960. An easy one to start with! You know, I can remember
the days when Ike was routinely derided - “The Great Golfer,” and so forth. But it's no accident that his two
terms now seem like the Golden Age.
Back to Question 1
2)
Thomas Jefferson. From his First Inaugural, 1801. He was simply the best.
Back to Question 2
3)
Jefferson F. Davis. From a speech to the electors of Lowndes County, Missouri, 1850. My second favourite American President!
[A voice from the back of the hall: He was never President of the United States!] Oh, shut up.
Back to Question 3
4)
Warren Gamaliel Harding. From his Inaugural, 1921. It's faintly possible that Harding was the first African-American
POTUS. His political opponents certainly did their best to spread that rumour.
Back to Question 4
5)
John Fitzgerald Kennedy. From a speech made at Rice University, 1962. The Apollo Program was just about the only thing
Kennedy ever started which worked worth a damn - probably because he let Lyndon Johnson run it.
Back to Question 5
6)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From his First Inaugural, 1933. That's two easy ones in succession .... This week has seen
the death of Arthur Schlesinger, which is my cue to mention that his three-volume history of the Roosevelt years, The Age
of Roosevelt, is absolutely bloody brilliant.
Back to Question 6
7)
Stephen Grover Cleveland. From his Second Inaugural, 1893. Not the best-remembered of Presidents, although he was well
above average in ability. Presidents were men of rectitude in those days! The ones who weren't out-and-out crooks, anyway.
Back to Question 7
8)
Andrew Johnson. From a speech made in Cleveland, Ohio, 1866. A much-slandered and much-underestimated President. He
never went to school, and was taught to read and write by his wife. He was a tough guy, a man of principle, but perhaps a
little too easily riled.
Back to Question 8
9)
George Washington. From his Farewell Address, 1796. Every schoolboy knows that Washington was six foot three - but
did you know that Jefferson was only half an inch shorter? I didn't, till I saw it in Wikipedia just now.
Back to Question 9
10)
Lyndon Baines Johnson. From his speech to the Congress, 1965, on the day before the introduction of his Civil Rights
bill. If you're a great President, it doesn't matter if you're a complete toe-rag. That doesn't mean that the American people
should go out of their way to vote for a complete toe-rag, though. Whoops! Too late!
Back to Question 10
11)
I can't quite bring myself to write his name. Sorry. Hail to the Chief!
P.S. A final bonus trivia question! Who was the first President who was born in the United States of America? You give
in? Well - look him up. He was President from 1837 to 1841.
Back to Question 11
Don't bottle up your contempt and fury. Mail to davidjw@mindspring.com
Return to Start
Last Updated: 2 March 2007
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