Value of $100 in 1915, adjusted to 1926

What happened to prices between 1915 and 1926

Between 1915 and 1926, the Consumer Price Index went from 10.1 to 17.7. Cumulatively, prices increased 75.2%, which works out to an average of 5.23% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1915 bought what $0.57 buys in 1926.

Consumer prices rose 1.0% in 1915, the second straight year of near-flat inflation before the wartime price surges of 1916 through 1918. The year’s defining event had nothing to do with prices directly: a German submarine sank the British liner Lusitania off the Irish coast on May 7, killing 128 Americans and hardening U.S. opinion against Germany two years before the country entered the war. Economically, 1915 was a turning point of a different kind. A recession that had dragged on since 1913 began lifting as Britain and France placed growing orders for steel, munitions, and other war materiel with American manufacturers, and U.S. exports to the Allied powers climbed sharply through the year. That demand would keep building through 1916, eventually pulling prices up with it. On the regulatory side, the Federal Trade Commission opened for business in March, taking on enforcement of the Clayton Antitrust Act that Congress had passed the previous fall. A first-class stamp still cost 2 cents, unchanged since 1885 and still two years from its first wartime increase.

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The destination year: 1926

Consumer prices rose 1.1% in 1926, a third straight year of mild inflation and part of the price stability that defined the middle of the decade. Florida’s real estate boom, which had peaked the previous year on speculative buying of undeveloped land, ended abruptly that September when the Great Miami Hurricane made landfall near the city, killing hundreds and wrecking the market for land whose value had rested on continued speculation rather than anything underneath it. In Detroit, Henry Ford moved his company to a five-day, 40-hour work week without cutting pay, a break from the standard six-day schedule that other large employers would gradually adopt over the following decades; Ford argued publicly that workers with more leisure time would also become better customers for the cars his factories built. Consumer prices remained low enough by historical standards that a first-class stamp still cost just 2 cents, the same price it had held since mid-1919.

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