Take the Oath of Office Quiz!

As President Obama solemnly swears to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States to the best of his ability, try to answer these 10 trivia questions to the best of yours.

1. In which city did the first inauguration take place?
a) Richmond, Va.
b) New York City
c) Philadelphia
2. Which president gave the longest Inaugural Address?
a) Bill Clinton
b) George Washington
c) William Henry Harrison
3. Who was the only president to take the oath of office from a woman?
a) Lyndon B. Johnson
b) Ronald Reagan
c) George H.W. Bush
4. African-American soldiers first marched in whose inauguration parade?
a) Abraham Lincoln's
b) Ulysses S. Grant's
c) Theodore Roosevelt's
5. Which chief justice administered the most presidential oaths?
a) John Jay
b) John Marshall
c) Earl Warren
6. Inauguration Day was officially changed from March 4 to Jan. 20 thanks to the passage of the 20th Amendment in 1933.  Why?
a) It often rained on March 4.
b) Congress did not want the inauguration to fall during Lent.
c) The transition period between the election and the inauguration of the president-elect was deemed too long.
7. Which president tossed the Super Bowl coin the same day as his swearing-in?
a) Richard Nixon
b) Gerald Ford
c) Ronald Reagan
8. Which president administered the oath of office to two of his successors?
a) George Washington
b) John Quincy Adams
c) William Howard Taft
9. Who was sworn in on a Bible written in a modern foreign language?
a) Thomas Jefferson
b) Franklin D. Roosevelt
c) John F. Kennedy
10. Which president was given the oath of office by his own father?
a) John Quincy Adams
b) Calvin Coolidge
c) George W. Bush



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Answers : 1. (b) New York City was the temporary capital of the United States when Washington took the oath on April 30, 1789.
                  2. (c) Harrison's speech in 1841 was more than 8,000 words long and took nearly two hours to deliver on a cold, windy day.  He fell ill with pneumonia and died one month later. (The shortest inaugural address ---- just 135 words long --- was Washington's second).
                 3. (a) After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Johnson was sworn in aboard Air Force One by Sarah T. Hughes, a U.S. district judge.
                 4. (a) At Lincoln's second inauguration, in 1865, four companies of African-American troops and lodges of African-American Masons and African-American Odd Fellows joined the procession to the Capitol.
                 5. (b) Marshall adminstered the oath nine times from Thomas Jefferson's first inauguration, in 1801, to Andrew Jackson's second, in 1833.
                 6. (c) The old March 4 inaugural date had been selected when travel and communications were much slower, and the "lame duck" period for the outgoing president rarely caused problems.  But the long transition became an issue in 1932 during the Gereat Depression, because it meant that the next president would be unable to act until four months after his election. The 20th Amendment, first proposed in March of that year, changed the date but didn't go into effect in time for Franklin D. Roosevelt's first term.  In 1937, he became the first president inaugurated under the new rule.
                 7. (c) On Jan. 20, 1985, Reagan took the oath privately in the Entrance Hall at the White House, and later went to the Map Room to flip the coin on live television via satellite. (The 49ers won the toss, and the game.)
                 8. (c) Taft was appointed chief justice in 1921 --- eight years after his presidency --- and administered the oath of office to both Coolidge (in 1925) and Hoover (in 1929).
                 9. (b) Roosevelt used an old family Bible written in Dutch at all four of his inaugurations.
               10. (b) Coolidge was sworn in by his father, a justice of the peace, at the Coolidge family homestead in rural Vermont on Aug. 3, 1923, after he was informed that President Harding had passed away.