Value of $100 in 1925, adjusted to 1952

What happened to prices between 1925 and 1952

Between 1925 and 1952, the Consumer Price Index went from 17.5 to 26.5. Cumulatively, prices increased 51.4%, which works out to an average of 1.55% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1925 bought what $0.66 buys in 1952.

Consumer prices rose 2.3% in 1925, the CPI’s largest single-year increase since the deflationary swings of the early 1920s, though still mild next to the double-digit inflation of the World War I years. The country’s cultural fault lines were on full display that summer in Dayton, Tennessee, where high school teacher John Scopes was tried July 10-21 for violating a state law against teaching evolution, a case that drew national press coverage and pitted prosecutor William Jennings Bryan against defense attorney Clarence Darrow. Real estate speculation, meanwhile, peaked in Florida, where buyers flipped undeveloped land in the Miami area on thin down payments, driving prices far above what the land itself could support; the bubble would collapse the following year. Detroit reshuffled that June too: Walter Chrysler reorganized the struggling Maxwell Motor Company into Chrysler Corporation, the start of what would become one of the American auto industry’s “Big Three.” First-class postage held at 2 cents for the sixth straight year.

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The destination year: 1952

Consumer prices rose 1.9% in 1952, down sharply from 1951’s 7.9% as the price and wage controls imposed the year before held the cost of living in check even with the Korean War still underway. Labor strife tested those controls that spring: to head off a strike that could have disrupted war production, President Truman ordered the government to seize the steel industry that April, over the objections of steel companies fighting the price the Office of Price Stabilization had set for their product. The Supreme Court ruled the seizure unconstitutional in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer that June, a landmark limit on presidential power, and steelworkers then struck for 53 days before a settlement. Politics delivered the year’s biggest change that November: Dwight Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson, promising to “go to Korea” to end the war and returning Republicans to the White House for the first time since 1933. The Cold War’s technological edge sharpened that same month, when the United States tested the first hydrogen bomb at Enewetak Atoll on November 1, a device hundreds of times more powerful than the atomic bombs used against Japan in 1945. Consumer prices finished 1952 167.7% 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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