Value of $100 in 1919, adjusted to 1960

What happened to prices between 1919 and 1960

Between 1919 and 1960, the Consumer Price Index went from 17.3 to 29.6. Cumulatively, prices increased 71.1%, which works out to an average of 1.32% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1919 bought what $0.58 buys in 1960.

The fighting in Europe ended in November 1918, but American prices kept climbing through 1919 almost as fast as they had during the war itself, rising 14.6% for the year. Wartime price and production controls were being dismantled, millions of soldiers were returning to the civilian labor market, and demand that had been held back for years ran into supply that had not caught up, a combination that kept the cost of living rising even with the guns silent. Workers, whose pay had fallen behind three straight years of double-digit inflation, pushed back: a general strike shut down Seattle in February, Boston’s police force walked out in September, and a nationwide steel strike that same month drew in roughly 350,000 workers and ran into the following January. One price did fall that year: first-class postage reverted to 2 cents on July 1, ending the wartime 3-cent rate that had funded part of the war effort since late 1917. By year’s end, prices had risen close to 75% since the CPI’s 1913 starting point, compressing more than a decade of typical peacetime inflation into six years of war and its aftermath.

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The destination year: 1960

Consumer prices rose 1.7% in 1960, up from 1959’s 0.7% even as the economy slipped into recession that April, a downturn that would prove the shortest since World War II. The year’s defining political moment came that November, when John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard Nixon in one of the closest presidential elections in U.S. history, decided by roughly two-tenths of a percentage point in the popular vote. Television played a new role in the race: the first-ever televised presidential debate that September, watched by an estimated 70 million people, was widely seen as favoring the telegenic Kennedy. Civil rights protest took a new form that February, when four Black freshmen at North Carolina A&T State University sat down at a whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro and refused to leave; the sit-in tactic spread to dozens of Southern cities within weeks. Cold War tensions flared that May, when a Soviet missile downed an American U-2 spy plane deep inside Soviet airspace. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was captured alive, embarrassing the Eisenhower administration and collapsing a Paris summit called to ease relations with Moscow. Consumer prices finished 1960 199.0% above their 1913 level. First-class postage held at 4 cents, and the minimum wage stayed at $1.00 an hour.

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