National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

Pop Quiz: From Hawthorne to Hemingway, Wednesday, July 27

Picture this: you are at your office’s summer get-together and good old artsy Alice brings up The Old Man and the Sea. Luckily, you came to the National Portrait Gallery’s trivia night. Instead of hiding behind those cheese and crackers because you can’t remember how the book ends, you can chime in with your knowledge of Ernest Hemingway’s unusual cats. Then, of course, the party will let loose into a frenzy of chit-chat about the latest “guitarist cat” on YouTube.

Come to the National Portrait Gallery’s Kogod Courtyard on Wednesday, July 27, to play our new collections-inspired trivia game, Pop Quiz. This month’s Pop Quiz is based on our collection of portraits featuring America’s poets, novelists, and even advice columnists.

With DJ Micah Vellian spinning up some modern sounds at 5:30 and trivia starting at 6:30, you will leave a little smarter knowing that T. C. Boyle’s self-chosen middle name is not “cheeseburger.”

Many of the trivia questions are taken from the label text of portraits that are currently on view in our “Twentieth-Century Americans” exhibition (third floor), so come early to explore the gallery and brush up on your knowledge before donning your thinking cap. If you are a true literary trivia buff, you might even head home with a prize!

If you are ready to go ahead and use your knowledge from American Lit 101, this evening will be right up your alley. To give you a head start, here is a sneak peek at the bonus question, worth 10 points!

Samuel Clemens is better known by his pen name of Mark Twain. His tales of journeys on the Mississippi River, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) were inspired in part by his own boyhood travels on the river. Twain took his name from the term that was used to signify a certain depth of a river (“mark twain” meaning mark two).

How many feet deep is a “mark twain”?

Pop Quiz trivia occurs once a month in the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard in the National Portrait Gallery. The next Pop Quiz is “Pet Rocks: American Invention and Innovation” on Wednesday, August 31, at 5:30 p.m.  

—Liz Congdon, Public Programs Intern, National Portrait Gallery

Ernest Hemingway / Waldo Peirce / Ink on paper, 1928 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Jonathan Peirce

T.C. Boyle / Ken Rosenthal / Gelatin silver print, 1986 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Samuel Clemens / John White Alexander / Oil on canvas, 1912 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

The 150th Anniversary of the Battle of Bull Run

Neither Irvin McDowell (above) nor Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard could have predicted the outcome of the battle in which they were about to engage on the morning of July 21, 1861.  The soldiers were untested.  Many of the officers were untested.  Also, the soil of Virginia had not seen large scale combat since the British sailed down the Chesapeake after torching Washington, D.C. in 1814, an event that occurred well before the lives of most of those involved in this action.  After almost a half-century of peace, Virginia would again play host to war.

McDowell commanded the Union Army of the Potomac, and his intention was to march west to where a large contingency of rebel troops were encamped at Manassas, Virginia, through which ran a small stream called Bull Run.  The thin few miles—less than thirty—from Bull Run to the White House provided the reason for an urgent campaign against the Confederate occupancy. 

Other than his participation in this coming battle, Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard (right) of the Confederate army had two things in common with Irvin McDowell.  First, they had both served in the Mexican War.  Prior to that, and perhaps more important, they were both graduates of West Point, both class of 1838.  Though both armies were, for the most part, inexperienced, their leaders were not. 

Historian Shelby Foote writes of the battle plans:

. . . Beauregard and McDowell, on opposite sides of Bull Run, had more or less identical plans, each intending to execute a turning movement by the right flank to strike his opponent's left.  If both had moved according to plan, the two armies might have grappled and spun round and round, like a pair of dancers clutching each other, and twirling to the accompaniment of cannon.

July 21, 1861 was a Sunday, and locals of the Manassas area were either in church and or just leaving church as the battle developed.   At first, they heard the sounds of a Union victory falling into place as the rebels fell back from their initial positions, but later, as the southern side was reinforced, the day grew long for McDowell's men.  One southern brigadier general, Thomas J. Jackson (below), earned his nickname "Stonewall" during the afternoon as he held his men steady in the face of the Union fire at Henry House Hill. 

Toward the end of the day, the Confederate forces changed their posture from defensive to offensive, and in so doing, sent the Union Army of the Potomac over Bull Run again, this time in retreat.   As Walt Whitman recorded, "The national forces at the last moment exploded in a panic and fled from the field."  In the disarray following the disaster, the Union army regrouped weakly in Washington, according to Whitman, "…baffled, humiliated, panic-struck."       

Over sixty thousand men fought in this first large battle of the war, with the total killed, wounded, and missing coming to almost five thousand.  The casualties were massive, but that number would be few compared to the battles to come.

—Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery, Catalog of American Portraits

 

Irvin McDowell / Mathew B. Brady / Photograph, c. 1862 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mrs. F.B. Wilde

Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard / Unidentified artist, Copy after:  Charles DeForest Fredricks / Engraving on paper, c. 1862 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Stonewall Jackson / M. & N. Hanhart Lithography Company, active 1855 –1863 / Lithograph with tintstone on paper, c. 1863 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

Cited:

Foote, Shelby.  The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume One, Fort Sumter to Perryville.  New York: Random House, 1958.

Whitman, Walt.  Poetry and Prose.  ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Literary Classics of the United States (Penguin Putnam), 1982.

Betty Ford: A Legacy among First Ladies

The White House is not a residence for the meek or the timid; the White House of Gerald and Betty Ford was no exception. President Ford was a star athlete turned politician, while Mrs. Ford was a gifted dancer turned political support team. The Fords stepped up the Washington political and social ladder more than two and a half decades, beginning with Gerald Ford’s election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1948.

During her husband’s twenty-four years in Congress, Betty Ford tended to family—the Fords had four children—and she also worked on a voluntary basis with many organizations, both in the community and in the capital. Two separate scandals in the Nixon administration were the impetus for Gerald Ford’s relocation from Congress to the White House.

Gerald Ford had served for nearly twenty-five years in the House of Representatives when President Richard M. Nixon asked him—by then Ford was the House minority leader—to serve as vice president upon the resignation of Spiro Agnew in the autumn of 1973. When Nixon resigned in August 1974, Ford became the first man to become president without having been elected either to the presidency or the vice presidency.

As first lady, Betty Ford never felt the constraints of politics when she decided to speak on an issue. Her voice was often antithetical to that of her husband, and she left no room to wonder what she meant.

In an age when a subject like breast cancer was a conversational taboo, Mrs. Ford was forthright in discussing her condition when it was diagnosed and, later, in talking about the need for support in such times of crisis. In November 1975, she spoke to the American Cancer Society in New York:  

Cancer wherever it strikes the body, also strikes the spirit, and the best doctors in the world cannot cure the spirit. Only love and understanding can accomplish this important role. All of us can give love and support to our friends who have cancer. We can open our hearts and our minds to dealing with the fears that the victims have, and also the fears many of us have of the disease itself.

Betty Ford's gift was her honesty. When her family encouraged her to seek treatment for pharmaceutical and alcohol dependencies, she openly brought her struggles into a national conversation. Like her public discussion of breast cancer, her frankness in speaking of alcoholism and addiction saved innumerable lives.

With Ambassador Leonard Firestone, Mrs. Ford established the Betty Ford Center, an addiction treatment and recovery facility, in 1982. For her advocacy, Betty Ford received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991.

—Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery, Catalog of American Portraits

 

Elizabeth "Betty" Ford / Everett Raymond Kinstler / Oil on canvas, 1996 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Everett Raymond Kinstler

 

Cited:

“First Lady Betty Ford's Remarks to the American Cancer Society, New York City. Friday, November 7, 1975” 

 

Ronald Wilson Reagan: Humor in the Highest Office

Our new exhibition “One Life: Ronald Reagan” is open through May 28, 2012.

In Changing Places, David Lodge’s 1975 satire of American and British academic life in the late 1960s, Lodge discusses the disparity between the youth culture and the establishment at a fictitious California university:

By the year of 1969, Euphoric State had perhaps reached its peak as a centre of learning, and was already in the process of decline—due partly to the accelerating tempo of disruption by student militants, and partly to the counter-pressure exerted by the right-wing Governor of the State, Ronald Duck, a former movie-actor.

Beginning with his tenure as governor of California (1967–75), Ronald Reagan was hit with a barrage of jokes, most of them weak attempts at discrediting the man whose career had taken him from Hollywood to Sacramento, from the sound stage to the podium. Even as president of the United States, Ronald Reagan would bear the brunt of such humor.

One of the ghosts of Reagan’s acting career—the chimpanzee Bonzo from the 1951 film Bedtime for Bonzo—was a constant theme attached to Reagan’s political career, for better or for worse. In a December 1980 post-election article from People magazine, David Sheff wrote:

The name Bonzo stayed alive in part because Bedtime’s director, Fred De Cordova, went on to produce The Tonight Show—and became the brunt of innumerable Bonzo jokes from Johnny Carson. Bedtime was also a popular ad hominem weapon among Reagan’s critics during his years in the California statehouse and became a favorite at campus "Dump Ron" rallies. For that reason, Brickman charges, Republicans among the Universal Pictures brass tried to tie up all the Bedtime prints when Reagan began his presidential bid.

Reagan, however, could take the jokes and dish them out as well. Actor and director Clint Eastwood shared with Reagan a simian cinematic experience when he starred in the 1978 film Every Which Way But Loose and its 1980 sequel, Any Which Way You Can, in which Eastwood played a rambling, fighting mechanic, Philo Beddoe, whose companion is a chimpanzee, Clyde. When Eastwood ran for mayor of Carmel, California, in 1986, President Reagan asked, “What makes him think a middle-aged actor who’s played with a chimp, could have a future in politics?’”

One of the president’s comments did not tickle the collective funny bone. On August 11, 1984, before his weekly radio talk, President Reagan joked, “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” The comment was widely received as irreverent and hostile.

At most other times, Ronald Reagan’s sense of humor and theatricality served him well. In his 1988 State of the Union address, the president emphasized the need for a more understandable and accessible budget. During the speech, Reagan noted, “Last year, of the thirteen appropriations bills due by October 1st, none of them made it. Instead, we had four continuing resolutions lasting forty-one days, then thirty-six days, and two days, and three days, respectively. And then, along came these behemoths.” As he spoke, he began pulling tomes of fiscal legislation from a large pile beside the podium. The president continued:

This is the conference report—1,053 page report weighing fourteen pounds. Then this—a reconciliation bill six months lat, that was 1,186 pages long, weighing fifteen pounds; and the long-term continuing resolution—this one was two months late and it’s 1,057 pages long, weighing fourteen pounds. That was a total of forty-three pounds of paper and ink. You had three hours—yes, three hours—to consider each, and it took three hundred people at my Office of Management and Budget just to read the bill so the government wouldn’t shut down. Congress shouldn’t send another one of these. No, and if you do, I will not sign it.

The effect was both startling and funny, as Reagan set the volumes aside, shaking his right wrist as though the weight of the resolutions was slightly painful to handle. And while the aisle in the chamber clearly marked the political division on the budgetary process, the president had made his point with a humorous efficacy.

Throughout his political career, Ronald Reagan used humor to take the sharp edge off serious messages, and he also used it to alleviate the hurt of detractors. Reagan’s age was the subject of many jokes during his presidency, and in a famous moment during the October 28, 1984, presidential debate with former Vice President Walter Mondale, President Reagan spun the issue in his own favor, deadpanning, “I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” In another instance, he noted, “Thomas Jefferson once said, ‘We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.’ And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying.”

—Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery, Catalog of American Portraits

 

Ronald Wilson Reagan, / Diana Walker / Chromogenic print, 1986 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Diana Walker

 

Cited:

Lodge, David.  Changing Places.  New York: Penguin Group, 1975.

Sheff, David.  “Two Ex-Screenwriters Turn the 1980 Election into Boomtime for Bonzo and Their Own Bonanza,” People, December 15, 1980.

State of the Union Address, January 25, 1988 (text, video)

The Second 1984 Presidential Debate, October 28, 1984