Wall Street Crash of 1929
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Wall Street Crash of 1929 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
In the autumn of 1929, share prices on Wall Street fell faster and further than anyone alive had seen. Fortunes built over a decade of easy credit vanished in days, and the shock rippled out to banks, farms and factories around the world. This quiz covers the story from both ends, cause and effect. It asks how ordinary savers came to be gambling with borrowed money, who tried to stop the slide and who profited from it, and which laws and agencies were created so that it could not happen the same way again. It is written for history students revising the interwar years, for investors curious about the most famous collapse of all, and for anyone who enjoys a story about confidence and its limits. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What nickname is given to October 29, 1929, when panicked investors traded some 16 million shares in a single day?
Black Tuesday
Black Tuesday wiped out about $14 billion of stock value, and some shares found no buyers at any price.
Q 02Shanty towns built by the homeless after the 1929 crash were mockingly named after which US president?
Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover, in office when the market fell, was widely blamed for the slump, so the camps became Hoovervilles. An empty pocket turned inside out was a Hoover flag.
Q 03Which risky 1920s practice left brokers' loans by August 1929 larger than all the US currency in circulation?
Buying on margin
Buying on margin meant putting down part of a share's price and borrowing the rest from a broker. When prices fell, lenders called in the money and forced sales fed the panic.
Q 04Which politician was governor of New York, home of Wall Street, when the stock market crashed in October 1929?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt had been governor for under a year, and weeks before the crash he set up a state committee to look into utility securities. He won the White House in 1932.
Q 05The Dow Jones did not climb back to its September 1929 peak until which US president was in office?
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight D. Eisenhower was in the White House when the index finally passed its old high in November 1954, a full 25 years after the peak.
Q 06By the time the Dow Jones hit bottom in July 1932, roughly how much of its 1929 peak value had vanished?
About 90%
About 90% of the index's value was gone: it sank from 381 in September 1929 to 41 in July 1932, its lowest close of the 20th century.
Q 07Which British politician, later a wartime prime minister, lost heavily in the 1929 Wall Street crash?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill then set off on a lecture tour of North America, hoping to win back what the crash had cost him.
Q 08Which show-business newspaper ran a famous 1929 headline joking that Wall Street had laid an egg?
Variety
Variety, founded in New York in 1905 by Sime Silverman to cover theater and vaudeville, printed the headline on October 30, 1929, while the market was still reeling.
Q 09Which New York skyscraper, begun months after the 1929 crash, had so few tenants it was mocked as empty?
Empire State Building
Empire State Building construction started in March 1930 and took just over 13 months, but the slump left it so unlet that New Yorkers called it the Empty State Building.
Q 10Which stock speculator, father of a future president, was named first head of the US market watchdog in 1934?
Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.
Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. had profited by betting on falling prices after the 1929 crash, then spent a year policing the kind of trading he knew from the inside.
Q 11Which stock exchange vice president, later jailed for embezzlement, placed the bankers' showy bids on October 24, 1929?
Richard Whitney
Richard Whitney was hailed as the White Knight of Wall Street for the stunt, but in 1938 he went to Sing Sing prison for stealing from, among others, the New York Yacht Club.
Q 12On October 24, 1929, the bankers' pool tried to calm the panic with a showy bid for shares of which company?
U.S. Steel
U.S. Steel drew a bid of $205 a share, above the going price, and the gesture worked for a day: the Dow closed only about 2% down.
Q 13Which federal agency was created in 1934 to police the stock market and stamp out the abuses of the 1920s?
Q 21Which famous banker caused an outcry at 1933 Senate hearings by admitting he had paid no income tax for two years?
J. P. Morgan Jr.
J. P. Morgan Jr. admitted that he and many of his partners had paid no income tax in 1931 and 1932. The revelations built public support for new banking and securities laws.
Q 22The Senate inquiry into the causes of the 1929 crash is remembered by the name of which chief counsel?
Ferdinand Pecora
Ferdinand Pecora, a Sicilian-born New York prosecutor, was the fourth chief counsel and was hired only to write the final report. He asked for more hearings and made headlines instead.
Q 23Charles E. Mitchell, who pledged $25 million to halt a March 1929 market slide, was president of which New York lender?
Securities and Exchange Commission
The Securities and Exchange Commission took over enforcement of the 1933 truth-in-securities law from the Federal Trade Commission, which had policed share sales for a year.
Q 14Which agency, created in 1933 after thousands of American banks failed, still protects savers if their bank collapses?
FDIC
The FDIC was born in the Banking Act of 1933 after nearly 10,000 banks failed in four years, and it boasts that no depositor has lost a penny of insured money since.
Q 15Which 1933 law, named after its two sponsors, forced American banks to split everyday banking from stock dealing?
Glass–Steagall Act
The Glass–Steagall Act walled off commercial banks, which take deposits and make loans, from investment banks that underwrite and sell securities. The wall came down in 1999.
Q 16Which 1930 law raised American import duties so high that over a thousand economists begged for a veto?
Smoot–Hawley Tariff
The Smoot–Hawley Tariff became law in June 1930 despite a petition from 1,028 economists, and trading partners hit back with duties of their own as world trade plummeted.
Q 17Which Yale economist declared, days before the 1929 crash, that stock prices had reached a permanently high plateau?
Irving Fisher
Irving Fisher, perhaps the first celebrity economist, lost much of his wealth and reputation in the crash, and for months kept assuring investors that recovery was near.
Q 18Which forecaster's September 1929 warning that a crash was coming set off a market dip the press named after him?
Roger Babson
Roger Babson told a business conference on September 5, 1929, that a crash was coming, and the slide that followed was dubbed the Babson Break. He also founded Babson College.
Q 19Which speculator, nicknamed the Boy Plunger, made about $100 million betting against the market in the 1929 crash?
Jesse Livermore
Jesse Livermore hid his bets by spreading them across more than 100 brokers, and when the public blamed him for the crash he got death threats and hired an armed bodyguard.
Q 20Which economist wrote The Great Crash, 1929, a bestselling 1955 history of the stock market collapse?
John Kenneth Galbraith
John Kenneth Galbraith wrote it during a break from another book and called it the only one he remembered as a joy, not a labor. It blamed the crash on rampant speculation.
National City Bank
National City Bank, a forerunner of Citibank, was run by a man the press called Sunshine Charley for his relentless selling of securities. A Senate exposé later forced him to resign.
Q 24Which private New York lender failed after a December 1930 panic at its Bronx branch?
Bank of United States
The Bank of United States had no link to the government, and rivals had warned that its name would mislead immigrants. Its fall is said to have started the collapse of American banking.
Q 25In March 1933, Washington shut every American bank for four days while Congress passed emergency laws, under what name?
A banking holiday
A banking holiday had already spread from state to state, with Michigan shutting its banks for eight days in February 1933 as savers rushed to pull out their deposits.
Q 26Britain abandoned which monetary system in 1931, and so recovered from the slump sooner than countries that kept it?
The gold standard
The gold standard tied a currency to bullion, which limited how much money central banks could create to fight the slump. France and Belgium clung to it and recovered later.
Q 27A frenzied mid-1920s land boom in which US state, ended by a 1926 hurricane, set the mood for the stock market bubble?
Florida
Florida drew property speculators from all over the nation between 1924 and 1926, until a hurricane that struck Miami finished off the boom.
Q 28Which Wall Street firm sponsored the Shenandoah and Blue Ridge investment trusts that collapsed in the 1929 crash?
Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs's trusts took in ordinary people's savings but were built on borrowed money, which multiplied the losses once prices turned.
Q 29Which General Motors founder joined a failed bid to prop up share prices on October 29, 1929, and later went bankrupt?
William C. Durant
William C. Durant bought stock alongside members of the Rockefeller family to show confidence in the market, but prices kept falling. By 1936 he was bankrupt.
Q 30At the depth of the slump in 1933, roughly what share of American workers had no job?
About 1 in 4
About 1 in 4 workers were unemployed by 1933, when roughly a third of farmers had lost their land and 9,000 of the country's 25,000 banks had gone under.