Presidents Day Quiz: Miller Center Partners With Politico to Test Your Knowledge

When approached by Politico to provide quiz questions for the media company’s daily West Wing Playbook newsletter, Tom van der Voort, the media strategist for the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, wanted to take it a step further.

This was an opportunity to showcase the Miller Center’s proud brand on a large platform. Why not maximize the exposure?

“From presidential oral histories and secret recordings to detailed biographical information and an archive of key speeches, we have so many stories to offer,” van der Voort said. “So instead of saying, ‘OK, we’ll come up with questions about the presidency,’ we said, ‘What can the Miller Center bring that’s not generic trivia?’

“We wanted to dive a little deeper, and Politico was totally receptive to that.”

Miller Center Presidents Day Quiz

Question 1: Which president said, “I spent hour after hour after hour studying the structure of the federal government in preparation of the budgets and really did a lot of detailed work on the budgets because I felt that this was one of the managerial weapons or tools that I had to exert my influence in a definitive way”?

Answer:Jimmy Carter in his November 1982 oral history interview with the Miller Center.

The result was the “POTUS Puzzler.” If you’re looking to enhance your knowledge this Presidents Day, perhaps scroll through recent editions of the  West Wing Playbook, where the challenge can be found. Look for “From the University of Virginia’s Miller Center,” and you’ll find the question.

From Feb. 16: “Which president used his State of the Union message to praise his fellow Americans for ‘having performed the high and important function of electing their Chief Magistrate for the term of four years without the commission of any acts of violence or the manifestation of a spirit of insubordination to the laws’?

If it’s trivia night at a bar, maybe someone correctly guesses “John Tyler,” and the game carries on. But the Miller Center’s purpose here is to educate, not award points. While it was John Tyler who included this in his State of the Union, did you also know it came in December 1844 following Tyler’s failed bid for a second term?

That bit of information – plus a link to the Miller Center’s archive of presidential speeches – is provided at the bottom of the newsletter. It’s a tiny glimpse into the work van der Voort and two UVA student interns, second-year undergraduate Powers Trigg and fourth-year Olivia Morrison, have been doing since November.

Each week, they supply four questions (and answers) for the Playbook and its 100,000 subscribers. They’ve submitted more than 60 questions up to this point, all a collaboration between van der Voort, the students and Miller Center scholars.

“The best kind of advertisement for any brand is to demonstrate your value,” van der Voort said. “So that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re demonstrating the layers and layers of knowledge that are here.”

Miller Center Presidents Day Quiz

Question 2: Which president's one trip outside of the country during his lifetime was marred by the death of his brother?

Answer:George Washington, who accompanied his half-brother Lawrence to Barbados in the hopes the latter would overcome an aggressive strain of tuberculosis. George, then 19 years of age, contracted smallpox but was able to recover and return to Virginia in early 1752. By July, Lawrence had died.

Trigg, a government major from Kansas City, got a kick out of researching fellow Missourian Harry Truman.

“He journaled pretty regularly, and the Miller Center has a lot of his stuff,” Trigg said of the 33rd president. “He was known for taking a shot of bourbon every single day with his breakfast. That’s got to be my favorite fact. I was able to turn that in for a quiz question. It was one of the first five questions I did for my internship, and I haven’t been able to top that yet.”

Trigg, though, has learned there’s no real cap on the difficulty of any question. The newsletters’ readers are presumed to have a strong base level of presidential knowledge, he said. This, naturally, gives way to expanded research.

“You’re trying to find the best question you can,” Trigg said. “Even though the question is usually pretty short, there’s a good deal of thought that goes into it.”

The Dec. 7 question – “Which future U.S. president helped win a case forcing all New York City railroad companies to seat Black passengers without prejudice on their streetcars?” – originated with Trigg finding an interesting note about Chester Arthur within an essay on the Miller Center website.

“Powers saw that Chester Arthur’s father was an abolitionist preacher,” van der Voort said. “So, I kind of built off that, dug in a little more, and it led to the story of what Arthur did as a young lawyer in New York.”

The full answer to that Dec. 7 question was this: “Chester Arthur, who helped the plaintiff win Jennings v. Third Ave. Railroad Co. in 1855. Elizabeth Jennings had been forced out of a whites-only New York City streetcar after refusing to leave and sued with the support of the African American community.  By 1861, the New York City public transit system was fully integrated.”

Miller Center Presidents Day Quiz

Question 3: Which president told the candidates who were vying to succeed him, "I know you don't want to play politics with your country"?

Answer:In a conversation on Oct. 18, 1968, Lyndon Johnson told Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace about his plans to advance peace negotiations in Vietnam with a bombing halt. "This is in absolute confidence," he began. Shortly afterward, LBJ came to believe that the Nixon campaign was trying to undermine his efforts in order to prevent any substantial movement toward peace until after the election.

Trigg, who aspires to work on a political campaign, said he’s gained valuable experience in this internship.

“The Miller Center is awesome,” he said. “It’s a great organization. I really enjoy working there. I’m not sure I’ll ever be a historian, but the skill of trying to research and understand your audience, and writing – I can’t see why that would be a bad thing, no matter what you do.

“Plus, it’s always good to know some fast facts about presidents.”