Great Depression Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
99 free Great Depression trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 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 99 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 ran from 9 March to 16 June 1933, when Congress passed fifteen major laws, beginning with the Emergency Banking Act.
Q 02By what name is 29 October 1929, the most infamous day of the crash, remembered?
Black Tuesday
Black Tuesday, 29 October, saw a record 16.4 million shares traded; Black Thursday (24 October) and Black Monday (28 October) had preceded it.
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 peaked at 381.17 in September 1929; where did it bottom out in July 1932?
41.22
The Dow closed at 41.22 on 8 July 1932, an 89 percent loss from its peak of 381.17 less than three years earlier.
Q 05How many years did it take the Dow Jones to climb back to its September 1929 peak?
25
The milestone finally came on 23 November 1954, in a very different America.
Q 06Which economist declared days before the crash that stocks had reached 'a permanently high plateau'?
Irving Fisher
Fisher, one of America's most respected economists, lost a fortune and much of his reputation.
Q 07On Black Thursday, Richard Whitney tried to calm the market by loudly bidding for which company's shares?
U.S. Steel
Whitney, the exchange's vice-president, bid $205 for 10,000 shares of U.S. Steel, well above the market; the rally lasted a day, and he was later jailed for embezzlement.
Q 08How many of America's roughly 25,000 banks had failed by 1933?
About 9,000
About 9,000 banks, more than a third of the total, failed between 1930 and 1933, freezing some $7 billion in deposits at a time when there was no deposit insurance.
Q 09Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide GDP fell by roughly what percentage?
15%
World GDP fell by roughly 15 percent in the three years after the crash; the United States did much worse, with output down by over a quarter, while world trade fell by more than half in value.
Q 10The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 raised duties on roughly how many imported goods?
Over 20,000
Smoot-Hawley raised duties on over 20,000 imported goods, lifting average tariffs to among the highest in US history; trading partners retaliated and US imports and exports both fell by more than half.
Q 11How many American economists signed the 1930 petition begging Hoover to veto the Smoot-Hawley tariff?
1,028
A petition signed by 1,028 economists urged a veto in May 1930; Hoover signed the act anyway, and US exports fell by roughly two-thirds over the next four years.
Q 12Which country was first to retaliate against Smoot-Hawley with tariffs of its own?
Canada
Canada, a leading US trading partner, struck back in May 1930 with new duties on sixteen American products; France, Italy and others followed, and world trade shrank to about a third of its pre-crash value by 1933.
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 21What name was given to the Depression's long queues of the jobless outside soup kitchens?
Breadlines
Breadlines, the queues of the jobless outside soup kitchens and charity missions, became the defining image of the early Depression, before any federal relief existed.
Q 22How many electoral votes did Hoover manage in his 1932 landslide defeat?
59
Hoover won only 59 electoral votes from six states, against 472 for his Democratic challenger.
Q 23Which song became Roosevelt's 1932 campaign anthem and one of the most famous in US political history?
Happy Days Are Here Again
'Happy Days Are Here Again', by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen from the 1930 film Chasing Rainbows, was played at the 1932 Democratic convention and stayed the party's anthem for decades.
Q 14Unemployment in which European country reached nearly 30%, helping the Nazi Party to power in 1933?
Germany
Germany had been living on American loans, which dried up after 1929.
Q 15What were the shanty towns of the homeless that sprang up across America nicknamed?
Hoovervilles
'Hoovervilles' was coined by Democratic publicist Charles Michelson to pin the shanty towns on President Hoover; St. Louis had the largest, with four separate sectors.
Q 16In Depression-era slang, what was a 'Hoover flag'?
An empty pocket turned inside out
A Hoover flag was an empty pocket turned inside out to show it held nothing; newspapers were Hoover blankets, cardboard soles Hoover leather, and a horse-drawn car a Hoover wagon.
Q 17In Canada, a horse-drawn car stripped of its engine was named after which prime minister?
R. B. Bennett
Bennett buggies were common on the Prairies, where farmers who bought cars in the 1920s could no longer afford fuel.
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
Army chief of staff Douglas MacArthur led the eviction in person on 28 July 1932; his aide that day was Major Dwight Eisenhower, and Major George Patton led the cavalry.
Q 20The Bonus Army's main shantytown stood on which marshy patch of Washington, D.C.?
Anacostia Flats
The main camp, Camp Marks on the Anacostia Flats, was built from junk-pile lumber, packing boxes and scrap tin, and was burned after the eviction.
Q 24Where did Roosevelt first use the phrase 'New Deal'?
Accepting the 1932 Democratic nomination
He first pledged 'a new deal for the American people' while accepting the 1932 Democratic nomination in person on 2 July 1932; the programme's three Rs were relief, recovery and reform.
Q 25Two days after taking office in March 1933, Roosevelt closed the financial system for four days by declaring what?
A national bank holiday
The proclamation of a national bank holiday came on 6 March 1933; when banks reopened on 13 March depositors queued to put cash back, and half the hoarded currency was redeposited within two weeks.
Q 26What were Roosevelt's evening radio talks to the nation nicknamed?
Fireside chats
The name 'fireside chats' was coined by CBS executive Harry Butcher in 1933; the president gave about 30 of them between 1933 and 1944.
Q 27What did Roosevelt's first informal radio talk to the nation, on 12 March 1933, cover?
The banking crisis
The 12 March 1933 talk explained the banking crisis in plain words on the eve of the banks reopening, and when they opened, deposits outran withdrawals.
Q 28Roughly how many young men served in the Civilian Conservation Corps between 1933 and 1942?
3 million
About 3 million young men passed through the CCC; they were paid $30 a month, most of which had to be sent home to their families.
Q 29The CCC earned the nickname 'Roosevelt's Tree Army' for planting roughly how many trees?
3 billion
The CCC planted roughly 3 billion trees between 1933 and 1942, earning the nickname; a Gallup poll three years in found 82 percent of Americans approved of the camps.
Q 30Who headed the Works Progress Administration, created in 1935?
Harry Hopkins
Harry Hopkins, the president's relief chief, ran the WPA from its creation; it built LaGuardia Airport and Oregon's Timberline Lodge and paid writers, actors and painters.