The Men Who Built America
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40 free The Men Who Built America trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Men Who Built America is History's 2012 docudrama about the handful of tycoons who turned a country recovering from civil war into an industrial giant. Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford made fortunes in railroads, oil, steel, finance and cars, and spent much of their lives trying to outdo, outbid or ruin one another. This quiz follows the story the series tells. There are questions on how each man got his start, the stock fights and price wars, the bridge that had to prove it would stand, the flood and the strike that stained reputations, the battle over how to electrify the country, the election the tycoons paid for, and the trust-busting that followed. A few questions cover the show itself, including its narrator and its follow-up series. It suits students who watched the series in history class and want to check what stuck, teachers looking for a ready-made review, and anyone who enjoys Gilded Age history. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which animal was led across St. Louis's new Eads Bridge in 1874 to show the public its steel arches were safe?
An elephant
An elephant borrowed from a travelling circus did the job, because people believed the animals refused to step on unsound structures. Andrew Carnegie's Keystone Bridge Company had erected the steel.
Q 02Which nickname, shared at first with other steamboat owners, belonged to Cornelius Vanderbilt alone by the late 1840s?
The Commodore
The Commodore was then the highest rank in the US Navy, a fitting title for the man who dominated steamboats on Long Island Sound. He sold his last ships in 1864 to concentrate on railroads.
Q 03Which lamp fuel was the main product of John D. Rockefeller's Ohio refineries, long before cars needed gasoline?
Kerosene
Kerosene was about 60% of what a refinery got from crude oil, and rivals dumped the rest in rivers. Rockefeller burned the leftover gasoline as refinery fuel and sold the other by-products.
Q 04Andrew Carnegie's money built more than 2,500 of which public buildings, most of them in the United States?
Libraries
Libraries were his thanks to a local colonel who opened his own 400 books to working boys every Saturday night. The teenage Carnegie had been one of those boys.
Q 05Which private detective firm sent 300 armed agents by river barge to retake Carnegie's Homestead steel works in 1892?
Pinkerton Agency
Pinkerton Agency men were handed Winchester rifles and towed upriver overnight, but the strikers were waiting on the bank. After a day of gunfire the agents raised a white flag.
Q 06Which Pennsylvania town was wiped out in 1889 when the South Fork Dam, owned by a club of Pittsburgh tycoons, failed?
Johnstown
Johnstown lost 2,208 people, and the relief effort was among the first major actions of Clara Barton's newly organised American Red Cross. The club's members were never found liable for damages.
Q 07Which inventor quit Thomas Edison's machine works and later licensed his AC motor patents to a Pittsburgh rival?
Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla got $60,000 in cash and stock plus a royalty on every horsepower his motors produced. He then spent a year as a consultant in the buyer's Pittsburgh labs.
Q 08Which Ohio Republican won the White House in 1896 after Standard Oil and J. P. Morgan each gave his campaign $250,000?
William McKinley
William McKinley barely left home, running a front-porch campaign from Canton while delegations of voters came to him by rail. His opponent toured 18,000 miles by train and still lost.
Q 09Which Ford car, nicknamed the Tin Lizzie, became the first automobile that middle-class Americans could afford?
Model T
Model T sales passed 15 million before production ended in 1927, a record that stood until the Volkswagen Beetle overtook it in 1972. Henry Ford watched the 15 millionth leave the factory himself.
Q 10In which country was Andrew Carnegie born in a weaver's cottage before emigrating to Pennsylvania at the age of twelve?
Scotland
Scotland got some of his earliest gifts: Carnegie built swimming baths for his hometown of Dunfermline in 1879. He was away on a trip there when the 1892 Homestead lockout turned violent.
Q 11Which actor, a son of actress Colleen Dewhurst, narrates The Men Who Built America and its 2018 Frontiersmen follow-up?
Campbell Scott
Campbell Scott broke through on screen in the 1989 film Longtime Companion and went on to star in Singles. His father was the actor George C. Scott.
Q 12Which coke magnate did Andrew Carnegie make chairman of his steel company, leaving him to face the Homestead strikers?
Henry Clay Frick
Henry Clay Frick controlled the coke ovens that Carnegie's furnaces depended on, which is how he became a partner. The two men came into conflict after the deadly strike.
Q 13Which associate of Emma Goldman shot and stabbed Carnegie Steel's chairman in his office during the Homestead strike?
Q 21Which steelmaking method did Andrew Carnegie adopt at his Edgar Thomson works to turn out cheap steel rails by the ton?
Bessemer process
Bessemer process converters burned the excess carbon out of molten pig iron with a blast of air. Carnegie named the works after J. Edgar Thomson, then president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which bought its first rails.
Q 22Which financier, allied with Jim Fisk, beat Cornelius Vanderbilt in the Erie War by flooding the market with new shares?
Jay Gould
Jay Gould then bribed New York legislators to legalise the watered stock. Vanderbilt lost more than $7 million and recovered most of it only by threatening to sue.
Q 23Which New York City station did Cornelius Vanderbilt begin building in 1869 as the Manhattan hub of his railroads?
Alexander Berkman
Alexander Berkman served 14 years in prison for the attack. His wounded target survived, and even stopped a deputy sheriff from shooting the attacker on the spot.
Q 14Which inventor of the railway air brake backed alternating current against Thomas Edison's direct current system?
George Westinghouse
George Westinghouse won the contract to light the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition with AC, then installed the first large-scale AC power plant at Niagara Falls in 1895.
Q 15Which company did J. P. Morgan's bank help create in 1892 by merging Thomas Edison's firm with rival Thomson-Houston?
General Electric
General Electric dropped the inventor's name because Morgan judged Thomson-Houston the stronger business and put its managers in charge of the new company.
Q 16Which Nebraska Democrat ran for president in 1896 on free silver and attacks on the eastern moneyed interests?
William Jennings Bryan
William Jennings Bryan was only 36, the youngest major-party nominee in American history. He ran twice more, never won, and ended his career prosecuting the 1925 Scopes trial.
Q 17Which New York governor did Republican bosses steer into the vice presidency in 1900 to get a reformer out of their way?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt was president after only six months in the job, and in 1902 his Justice Department sued J. P. Morgan's Northern Securities railroad trust.
Q 18Which anarchist shot the US president in a receiving line at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo?
Leon Czolgosz
Leon Czolgosz hid a .32 revolver under a handkerchief wrapped around his hand. He was tried, convicted and executed within eight weeks of the shooting.
Q 19Which company, the first billion-dollar corporation, did J. P. Morgan form in 1901 around Andrew Carnegie's mills?
U.S. Steel
U.S. Steel was capitalised at $1.4 billion, far more than any other industrial firm, and gave Morgan about two-thirds of the American steel market.
Q 20Which law did the Supreme Court apply in 1911 when it ruled Standard Oil an unreasonable monopoly and ordered a breakup?
Sherman Antitrust Act
The Sherman Antitrust Act ruling made its target richer: Rockefeller held about a quarter of the shares in every successor company, and their value roughly doubled.
Grand Central Depot
Grand Central Depot rose on 42nd Street and was replaced in 1913 by Grand Central Terminal, where a statue of Vanderbilt faces down Park Avenue.
Q 24In which Southern city did Cornelius Vanderbilt's $1 million gift found a university that carries his name?
Nashville
Nashville got the money through family ties: Vanderbilt's second wife talked him into the gift, and it went to a bishop who was married to her cousin.
Q 25What did John D. Rockefeller start building in 1877 so his oil no longer had to ride Tom Scott's Pennsylvania Railroad?
Pipelines
Pipelines turned a freight customer into a rival, so the railroad hit back by buying refineries of its own. Rockefeller answered with a price war and won: the railroad sold him its oil interests.
Q 26Which oil brand did Standard Oil of New Jersey, the core of Rockefeller's empire, take as its name in the 1970s?
Exxon
Exxon was the renamed Jersey Standard, the holding company at the centre of the trust. Even after the 1911 breakup stripped away over half its value, it was the country's second-largest corporation.
Q 27Which metal did J. P. Morgan and the Rothschilds sell to the US Treasury in 1895 as its stockpile ran dangerously low?
Gold
Gold came in a sale of 3.5 million ounces that Morgan built on an old Civil War statute. The rescue saved the Treasury but hurt President Grover Cleveland with his party's populist wing.
Q 28Which patent lawyer collected royalties from US carmakers until Henry Ford beat his automobile patent on appeal in 1911?
George B. Selden
The court fight lasted eight years and filled 14,000 pages. George B. Selden lost with less than two years left to run on a patent he had first filed for in 1879.
Q 29What daily wage did Henry Ford announce for his factory workers in 1914, more than doubling what most of them earned?
$5
$5 a day ended the turnover that had some Ford departments hiring 300 men a year to fill 100 jobs. Detroit's best mechanics flocked to his plants instead.
Q 30Which production method did Henry Ford introduce in 1913, cutting a car's build time from over 12 hours to 93 minutes?
Moving assembly line
Moving assembly line production sent a finished Ford out of the Highland Park plant every three minutes. The savings let the company keep cutting the price of its cars.