100 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 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Wall Street crash that is usually taken as the start of the Great Depression happened in which year?
1929
The Dow lost almost half its value in two months, sliding from 381 to 198.
Q 02By what name is 29 October 1929, the worst day of the crash, remembered?
Black Tuesday
A record 16.4 million shares changed hands; Black Thursday and Black Monday had come the week before.
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
That was an 89 percent loss from the September 1929 peak.
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
He bid $205 for 25,000 shares; the rally lasted a day, and Whitney later went to Sing Sing for embezzlement.
Q 08How many of America's roughly 25,000 banks had failed by 1933?
About 9,000
Around $7 billion in deposits was frozen in failed banks by April 1933; there was no deposit insurance yet.
Q 09Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide GDP fell by roughly what percentage?
15%
The United States did much worse, with a 30 percent contraction, and world trade fell by more than half.
Q 10The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 raised duties on roughly how many imported goods?
Over 20,000
Economists petitioned Hoover in their hundreds to veto it, and Henry Ford called it 'an economic stupidity'.
Q 11How many American economists signed the 1930 petition begging Hoover to veto the Smoot-Hawley tariff?
1,028
US exports fell from about $5.2 billion in 1929 to $1.7 billion in 1933 as trading partners retaliated.
Q 12Which country retaliated first against Smoot-Hawley, with duties on about 30% of US exports?
Canada
Cuba, Mexico, France, Italy and Australia followed, and world trade shrank to a third of its 1929 level 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 21Who defeated Herbert Hoover in the 1932 presidential election?
Franklin Roosevelt
He carried 42 of the 48 states with 57 percent of the popular vote.
Q 22How many electoral votes did Hoover manage in his 1932 landslide defeat?
59
He took just six states; the result ended seven decades of Republican dominance dating back to 1860.
Q 23Which song became Roosevelt's 1932 campaign anthem and one of the most famous in US political history?
Happy Days Are Here Again
Roosevelt also broke precedent by flying to Chicago to accept the nomination in person.
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
Democratic publicist Charles Michelson coined the jab; 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
Newspapers were Hoover blankets, cardboard soles were Hoover leather, and a car pulled by horses was 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 wanted early payment of bonus certificates not due until 1945; Congress finally paid out in 1936, over Roosevelt's veto.
Q 19Which general led the troops that cleared the Bonus Army's camp from Washington in July 1932?
Douglas MacArthur
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
Camp Marks 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
The three Rs of the programme 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
When banks reopened on 13 March, depositors queued to put their cash back; half of it was redeposited within two weeks.
Q 26What were Roosevelt's evening radio talks to the nation nicknamed?
Fireside chats
CBS executive Harry Butcher coined the term; Roosevelt gave about 30 of them between 1933 and 1944.
Q 27What was the subject of Roosevelt's very first fireside chat?
The banking crisis
The talk went out on 12 March 1933, the night before the banks reopened; wartime chats drew more than half the country.
Q 28Roughly how many young men served in the Civilian Conservation Corps between 1933 and 1942?
3 million
They were paid $30 a month, of which $25 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
An April 1936 Gallup poll found 82 percent of Americans approved of the camps.
Q 30Who headed the Works Progress Administration, created in 1935?
Harry Hopkins
The WPA built LaGuardia Airport and Oregon's Timberline Lodge and paid writers, actors and painters.