Value of $100 in 1916, adjusted to 1967

What happened to prices between 1916 and 1967

Between 1916 and 1967, the Consumer Price Index went from 10.9 to 33.4. Cumulatively, prices increased 206.4%, which works out to an average of 2.22% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1916 bought what $0.33 buys in 1967.

1916 was when World War I first showed up clearly in American price tags. Consumer prices rose 7.9% for the year, easily the sharpest increase since the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI history begins in 1913, as factories ran flat out to fill steel, munitions, and food orders from Britain and France. Railroad workers felt the squeeze from rising living costs enough to threaten a nationwide strike; Congress headed it off in September with the Adamson Act, which set an eight-hour standard workday for interstate rail employees, the first federal law of its kind covering private-sector hours. Washington was also preparing more directly for war: the National Defense Act, signed in June, expanded the Army and National Guard and funded new government-owned munitions plants, adding another source of demand to an economy already running hot. Woodrow Wilson won re-election in November largely on having kept the country out of the fighting so far, a promise that would not survive the following spring. A first-class stamp still cost 2 cents, one of the few prices that had not yet moved.

More about inflation in 1916 →

The destination year: 1967

Consumer prices rose 3.1% in 1967, up from 1966’s 2.9% as Vietnam War spending kept climbing alongside expanding Great Society programs, a combination of rising military and domestic outlays that economists later blamed for entrenching inflation through the rest of the decade. The minimum wage rose that February 1, to $1.40 an hour, the first step of a phased increase Congress had set the year before. Urban unrest reached a peak that July, when days of rioting left 26 dead in Newark and 43 dead in Detroit, the deadliest of that summer’s roughly 160 disturbances; Johnson responded by forming the Kerner Commission to study the causes of the unrest. The Supreme Court gained its first Black justice that year too: the Senate confirmed Thurgood Marshall on August 30, and he was sworn in that October after serving as U.S. Solicitor General and, before that, as the lead attorney in Brown v. Board of Education. Consumer prices finished 1967 237.4% above their 1913 level. First-class postage held at 5 cents.

More about inflation in 1967 →