Great Depression Trivia
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95 free Great Depression trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Sixty Great Depression trivia questions covering the crash of 1929 and the decade that followed. The quiz runs from Black Tuesday and the bank failures through Hoovervilles, the Bonus Army and the Smoot-Hawley tariff, into Roosevelt's New Deal (the bank holiday, fireside chats, the CCC, WPA, TVA and Social Security), the Dust Bowl and the Okies, and the culture of the era: The Grapes of Wrath, Migrant Mother, 'Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?', Monopoly and Bonnie and Clyde. A few questions look abroad, to Germany, Britain's Jarrow March and Canada's Bennett buggies. It is written for students, teachers and history buffs. The questions start easy (who beat Hoover in 1932?) and get genuinely hard (how many economists petitioned against Smoot-Hawley?), and every question carries a difficulty score. Every answer has been checked against a Wikipedia article or primary source, and each question links to the page it came from, so you can see the evidence.
30 of 95 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What name is given to the burst of New Deal legislation passed in spring 1933?
The Hundred Days
The Hundred Days first meant Congress's special session of March to June 1933, not the president's opening weeks: Roosevelt popularised the phrase himself in a radio address that July.
Q 02By what name is 29 October 1929, the most infamous day of the crash, remembered?
Black Tuesday
Black Tuesday saw some 16 million shares change hands, more than the machinery could handle, so stock tickers were still printing the day's prices hours after the market had closed.
Q 03At the depth of the Depression in 1933, roughly what share of the US workforce was unemployed?
25%
Even in 1940, with war orders arriving, the rate was still around 15 percent.
Q 04The Dow Jones lost roughly how much of its value between its 1929 peak and its 1932 low?
90%
90% is the round figure for an 89% fall: the crash itself took almost half the Dow's value by mid-November 1929, and a slow slide over the next three years took most of the rest.
Q 05The Dow did not regain its September 1929 peak until which president was in the White House?
Eisenhower
Eisenhower was nearly two years into his presidency when the Dow finally closed above its 1929 high, on 23 November 1954, a wait of just over 25 years.
Q 06Which economist declared days before the crash that stocks had reached 'a permanently high plateau'?
Irving Fisher
Irving Fisher, a Yale professor, said it in a New York speech reported on 16 October 1929; the crash that began the following week cost him much of his fortune and his reputation.
Q 07On Black Thursday, Richard Whitney tried to calm the market by loudly bidding for which company's shares?
U.S. Steel
U.S. Steel was the stock Whitney, the exchange's vice-president, chose for his show of confidence, bidding $205 a share, well above the market, with the big banks' money; in 1938 he went to Sing Sing for embezzlement.
Q 08Roughly how many American banks had gone under by 1933?
About 9,000
About 9,000 banks, more than a third of the country's 25,000, had closed; with no deposit insurance yet, some $7 billion of their customers' money was frozen inside them.
Q 09Which future general, then a cavalry major, led the horsemen who charged the Bonus Army in 1932?
George Patton
George Patton led the 3rd Cavalry against the veterans; one of the marchers, Joe Angelo, had once saved the wounded Patton's life in battle, and Patton brushed him off when he called the next day.
Q 10What became of both sponsors of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1932?
Both lost their seats
Both lost their seats: Willis Hawley was denied renomination by his own party, and Reed Smoot, after five terms in the Senate, went down in that November's Democratic sweep.
Q 11Roughly how many American economists signed the 1930 petition urging Hoover to veto the Smoot-Hawley tariff?
1,000
1,000 in round numbers: the petition carried 1,028 names when it reached Hoover in May 1930, and he signed the tariff the following month all the same.
Q 12Which country struck at Smoot-Hawley before it was even signed, raising its own tariffs in May 1930?
Canada
Canada did not wait for Hoover's signature: its new duties hit American goods a month before he signed, and in 1932 it turned to closer trade ties within the British Empire.
Q 13Which country stopped exchanging its currency for gold in September 1931?
Britain
Countries that left gold early, like Britain, recovered sooner; the US did not follow until 1933.
Q 21Hoover won just 59 electoral votes in 1932, four years after trouncing which Democrat with 444?
Smith
Smith, New York's governor Al Smith, lost 444 to 87 in 1928; four years later Hoover carried only six states and lost even California, his home state.
Q 22Which song became Roosevelt's 1932 campaign anthem?
Happy Days Are Here Again
Happy Days Are Here Again was written for the film Chasing Rainbows, shot in the summer of 1929; by the time the film came out, after the crash, the song was already a hit, and Roosevelt's campaign took it up in 1932.
Q 23Where did Roosevelt first use the phrase 'New Deal'?
Accepting the 1932 Democratic nomination
Q 14American loans had propped up which European economy until 1929, when their loss sent its unemployment toward 30%?
Germany
Germany had rebuilt in the 1920s on American credit; when the loans stopped, unemployment neared 30% in 1932 and voters deserted the centre for the extremes.
Q 15What were the shanty towns of the homeless that sprang up across America nicknamed?
Hoovervilles
Hoovervilles got their name from Charles Michelson, the Democratic Party's publicity chief, who wanted the shanty towns pinned on President Hoover; the word was in print by 1930.
Q 16In Depression-era slang, what was a 'Hoover flag'?
An empty pocket turned inside out
An empty pocket turned inside out was a Hoover flag, a bitter joke at the expense of a president who had made his name organising food relief for occupied Belgium.
Q 17In Canada, a horse-drawn car stripped of its engine was named after which prime minister?
R. B. Bennett
R. B. Bennett was prime minister from 1930 to 1935, when Prairie farmers who could no longer afford gasoline hitched horses to their cars and named the result after him.
Q 18The 'Bonus Army' that camped in Washington in 1932 was made up of veterans of which war?
World War I
They were World War I veterans seeking early payment of bonus certificates not due until 1945; Congress finally paid the bonus four years after the march, over a presidential veto.
Q 19Which general led the troops that cleared the Bonus Army's camp from Washington in July 1932?
Douglas MacArthur
Douglas MacArthur took charge in person and, though Hoover twice sent word not to cross the river to the veterans' main camp, sent his men over that night.
Q 20The Bonus Army's main shantytown stood on which marshy patch of Washington, D.C.?
Anacostia Flats
Anacostia Flats, across the river from the Navy Yard, held the veterans' largest camp; it went up in flames on the night of the eviction, and who lit the fire has never been settled.
Accepting the 1932 Democratic nomination, he pledged 'a new deal for the American people'; he had broken with tradition by flying to the convention to accept in person.
Q 24Two days after taking office in March 1933, Roosevelt closed the financial system for four days by declaring what?
A national bank holiday
A national bank holiday was proclaimed at 1 a.m. on 6 March 1933; when banks began reopening a week later, depositors queued to put back the cash they had been hoarding.
Q 25What were President Roosevelt's evening radio talks nicknamed?
Fireside chats
Fireside chats was a CBS man's phrase, coined in a press release in May 1933; there was no fireside, since Roosevelt spoke from behind a desk crowded with microphones in the White House.
Q 26When a second Bonus Army reached Washington in 1933, whom did the new president send to meet the veterans?
Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt went out to the camp, lunched with the veterans and listened to their songs; most of them then took the administration's offer of jobs in the Civilian Conservation Corps.
Q 27Civilian Conservation Corps recruits earned $30 a month on what condition?
Most went to family
Most went to family: $25 of the $30 was sent to a recruit's dependants, so each of the nearly three million young men who served was supporting a household while he worked.
Q 28'Roosevelt's Tree Army', the CCC, planted roughly how many trees between 1933 and 1942?
3 billion
3 billion is the usual count, and one estimate says 3.5 billion; Roosevelt had created the corps for forestry work and to check soil erosion, which is why its men were set to planting on such a scale.
Q 29Who headed the Works Progress Administration, created in 1935?
Harry Hopkins
Harry Hopkins, a former social worker, had run Roosevelt's relief programme in New York when he was governor; at the WPA he insisted that the jobless be given work, not a dole.
Q 30Which New York airport, opened in 1939, was built with WPA money and labour?
LaGuardia
LaGuardia grew out of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's fury at landing in Newark on a ticket that said New York; the WPA, which put some 8.5 million people to work in all, helped build it.