Progressive Era
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50 free Progressive Era trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Progressive Era, roughly the 1890s to 1920, is when Americans decided that monopolies, city bosses and unsafe factories were problems government could fix. Reporters dug into corporate and political secrets, reformers moved into immigrant neighborhoods, and presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson took on big business. By the end, the Constitution had been amended four times in seven years. This quiz covers what a US history or APUSH unit on progressivism does: the journalists and photographers who exposed abuses, the reformers behind settlement houses, suffrage, temperance and civil rights, the antitrust cases, conservation, the election fight of 1912, and democratic reforms such as the secret ballot, the initiative and the direct primary. Use it to review before a test, as a ready-made multiple-choice set for class, or as a challenge if you simply like the period. Every answer comes with a short explanation, and the full set can be played or printed.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which witness to the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire later became the first woman in a presidential cabinet?
Frances Perkins
Frances Perkins went on to serve 12 years as Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of labor. Watching garment workers die in the New York blaze was a turning point in her life.
Q 02Which novel did Upton Sinclair say aimed at the public's heart and by accident hit its stomach?
The Jungle
The Jungle was written as a plea for immigrant packinghouse workers. Readers fixed on the filthy meat instead, and Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act that same year.
Q 03In which city was Theodore Roosevelt shot in 1912 before insisting on delivering his campaign speech?
Milwaukee
Milwaukee doctors found the bullet had been slowed by a steel eyeglass case and a folded 50-page speech in his pocket. Roosevelt carried it in his chest for the rest of his life.
Q 04Which state sealed women's right to vote in 1920 after its youngest legislator obeyed a letter from his mother?
Tennessee
Tennessee became the last state needed when Harry Burn, wearing the red rose of the opposition, switched sides. His mother's letter told him to "vote for Suffrage" and not keep them in doubt.
Q 05Which Hull House founder became the first American woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931?
Jane Addams
Jane Addams opened her settlement house in Chicago in 1889 to serve poor, largely immigrant families. She is remembered as the founder of the social work profession in America.
Q 06Which rock formation seen in Close Encounters of the Third Kind became the first US national monument in 1906?
Devils Tower
Devils Tower was the first use of the new Antiquities Act, which let a president protect a landmark by proclamation. Theodore Roosevelt went on to use the law on seventeen more sites.
Q 07Which institution was created after J. P. Morgan personally propped up Wall Street banks in the Panic of 1907?
Federal Reserve
The Federal Reserve meant the next bank run would not hinge on one financier pledging his own money. Woodrow Wilson signed the law creating it two days before Christmas.
Q 08Which automaker astonished rivals in 1914 by more than doubling most workers' pay to five dollars a day?
Henry Ford
Henry Ford wanted to end the turnover that had departments hiring 300 men a year to fill 100 jobs. Detroit's best mechanics flocked to him, and competitors had to raise wages too.
Q 09Which McClure's journalist exposed John D. Rockefeller's oil trust decades after it squeezed her father's business?
Ida Tarbell
Ida Tarbell grew up in Pennsylvania's oil region, where her father was a small producer hit by a secret scheme on railroad rates. Her exposé ran as nineteen magazine articles.
Q 10Which Tuskegee Institute leader caused a Southern uproar by dining with Theodore Roosevelt at the White House?
Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington was an adviser to the president, invited weeks after Roosevelt took office. The backlash was so fierce that no other African American dined there for almost thirty years.
Q 11What label did Theodore Roosevelt pin on crusading journalists in a 1906 speech, borrowing from The Pilgrim's Progress?
Muckrakers
Muckrakers was meant as a scolding: John Bunyan's Man with the Muck-rake rejects salvation to stare at filth. Roosevelt still conceded that such men were often indispensable.
Q 12Which country gave its name to the secret ballot that American states began adopting in the 1880s?
Australia
Australia's colonies brought in voting in private in 1856, with Tasmania and Victoria acting within weeks of each other. Massachusetts adopted the first statewide version in 1888.
Q 13Which Progressive Era reform let Californians remove Governor Gray Davis from office in 2003, mid-term?
The recall
Q 21Which trust, broken up by the Supreme Court in 1911, left behind the companies that became Exxon and Mobil?
Standard Oil
Standard Oil had come to control 91 percent of oil refining in the United States. The Court called it an "unreasonable" monopoly, and its New Jersey and New York arms were the two biggest pieces.
Q 22Which J. P. Morgan-backed trust did the Supreme Court order dissolved in 1904 by a five-to-four vote?
Northern Securities
Northern Securities had put the Great Northern, Northern Pacific and Burlington railroads under one roof. Roosevelt's suit was among the first to aim antitrust law at a corporation instead of a union.
Q 23Which 1914 law did Samuel Gompers hail as labor's 'Magna Carta' for declaring that human labor is not a commodity?
The recall had removed only one governor before Davis, North Dakota's Lynn Frazier in 1921. Californians replaced Davis with the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Q 14Which state approved the initiative and referendum in 1902 and lent its name to that 'System' of direct lawmaking?
Oregon
Oregon's campaign was run by William U'Ren's Direct Legislation League, which had been pressing for citizen lawmaking since 1898. The group went on to win a direct primary in 1904.
Q 15Which Wisconsin governor won the direct primary and a tax law that made railroads pay nearly double?
Robert La Follette
Robert La Follette, known as "Fighting Bob", later spent two decades in the Senate. Running for president as a third-party candidate in 1924, he took 16.6 percent of the vote.
Q 16Which amendment, ratified in 1919, is the only one in American history ever to be repealed?
Eighteenth
The Eighteenth Amendment banned the making, transport and sale of liquor nationwide. It lasted until December 1933, when the Twenty-first cancelled it.
Q 17Which federal levy, struck down by the Supreme Court in 1895, was made constitutional by an amendment in 1913?
Income tax
Income tax was struck down in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust, the ruling the amendment overturned. Until then federal revenue came mostly from tariffs, which reformers said fell hardest on the poor.
Q 18Who chose United States senators before a 1913 amendment handed that power directly to voters?
State legislatures
State legislatures sometimes deadlocked so badly that seats sat empty: an Indiana stalemate left one vacant for two years. Critics also charged that Senate seats were being bought and sold.
Q 19Which Montana Republican became the first woman elected to Congress, four years before women's suffrage went nationwide?
Jeannette Rankin
Jeannette Rankin, a lifelong pacifist, voted against war with Germany in 1917. Back in the House in 1941, she cast the only vote in Congress against war with Japan after Pearl Harbor.
Q 20Which state joined the Union in 1890 as the first to let women vote, a right its territory granted in 1869?
Wyoming
Wyoming's head start gave it the official nickname the Equality State and the state motto Equal Rights.
Clayton Act
The Clayton Act allowed injunctions in labor disputes only when property damage was threatened. Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, also called it labor's Bill of Rights.
Q 24Which 1890 law against monopolies is named for the younger brother of the Union general who marched through Georgia?
Sherman Act
The Sherman Act honors John Sherman of Ohio, its principal author, who sat in the Senate for nearly 32 years. His brother William Tecumseh was the more famous of the pair.
Q 25Which president brought more antitrust cases in four years than Theodore Roosevelt managed in seven?
William Howard Taft
William Howard Taft even took on U.S. Steel. His lawsuits helped drive a wedge between him and Roosevelt, who had handpicked him and then challenged him for the 1912 Republican nomination.
Q 26Which animal nickname stuck to the Progressive Party of 1912 after Theodore Roosevelt boasted he felt as strong as one?
Bull Moose
Bull Moose became the party's emblem after Roosevelt lost the Republican nomination in June 1912. That November he took 27.4 percent of the vote, finishing ahead of the sitting Republican president.
Q 27Which Socialist won six percent of the 1912 presidential vote and ran again in 1920 from a prison cell?
Eugene V. Debs
Eugene V. Debs was serving ten years for a 1918 speech in Canton, Ohio, urging resistance to the military draft. He still drew 3.4 percent of the vote from behind bars.
Q 28Which name did Theodore Roosevelt give his program of conservation, corporate regulation and consumer protection?
Square Deal
The Square Deal got an early test when Roosevelt negotiated a compromise to end the 1902 coal strike, which was threatening the nation's energy supply. He decided workers needed a fair shake too.
Q 29Which slogan did Woodrow Wilson campaign on in 1912 and then use as the title of a 1913 book?
The New Freedom
The New Freedom set Wilson against Theodore Roosevelt's rival program, chiefly over how to handle monopolies. In office the phrase came to cover his reforms, such as the farm loan banks of 1916.
Q 30In which city was William McKinley shot at the Pan-American Exposition in 1901, making Theodore Roosevelt president?
Buffalo
Buffalo was hosting the fair when an anarchist shot McKinley twice as he shook hands with the public. The president died eight days later of gangrene.