Value of $100 in 1923, adjusted to 1953

What happened to prices between 1923 and 1953

Between 1923 and 1953, the Consumer Price Index went from 17.1 to 26.7. Cumulatively, prices increased 56.1%, which works out to an average of 1.50% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1923 bought what $0.64 buys in 1953.

Consumer prices rose 1.8% in 1923, the first increase since 1920 and a sign the postwar deflation had run its course; the economy settled into the steadier growth that defined much of the rest of the decade. The year’s biggest shock was political rather than economic: Warren Harding died August 2 in San Francisco while returning from a trip to Alaska, and Vice President Calvin Coolidge was sworn in the next day at his family’s farmhouse in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, administered the oath of office by his own father, a notary public, by lamplight. Coolidge would go on to preside over the low, stable inflation of the “Roaring Twenties.” The contrast with Germany that year was stark. The Weimar Republic’s currency collapse reached its peak in November 1923, with prices doubling every few days and a loaf of bread costing billions of marks; Germany introduced a new currency, the Rentenmark, that month to halt the spiral. U.S. consumer prices, by comparison, had moved in single digits or held flat every year since 1921, a gap that shaped how American economists would later think about what made the postwar inflation of Europe so different from the mild swings at home. First-class postage stayed at 2 cents.

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The destination year: 1953

Consumer prices rose 0.8% in 1953, down from 1952’s 1.9% as fighting in Korea wound toward a truce and three years of wartime buying pressure finally eased. The year’s biggest shock came from Moscow: Soviet leader Joseph Stalin died March 5 after nearly three decades in power, the first change of Soviet leadership since the 1920s, opening a period of uncertainty over how his successors would deal with the West. Washington used the calmer backdrop to unwind its own wartime machinery. Authority for the price and wage controls imposed in 1951 lapsed that spring, as the Eisenhower administration, which favored free markets over controls, wound down the Office of Price Stabilization. The war itself ended, on paper, that July: negotiators signed an armistice July 27 at Panmunjom, halting the fighting roughly along the original border near the 38th parallel. No formal peace treaty ever followed, and North and South Korea remain technically at war. Consumer prices finished 1953 169.7% above their 1913 level. First-class postage held at 3 cents, and the minimum wage stayed at 75 cents an hour.

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