Value of $100 in 1925, adjusted to 1961

What happened to prices between 1925 and 1961

Between 1925 and 1961, the Consumer Price Index went from 17.5 to 29.9. Cumulatively, prices increased 70.9%, which works out to an average of 1.50% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1925 bought what $0.59 buys in 1961.

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: 1961

Consumer prices rose 1.0% in 1961, down from 1960’s 1.7% as the economy climbed out of recession, a recovery the National Bureau of Economic Research dates to that February. Politically, the year opened with a changing of the guard: outgoing president Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address on January 17 warned of a growing “military-industrial complex,” and three days later John F. Kennedy was sworn in, urging Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you.” The new administration’s first major foreign-policy test came quickly and badly: a CIA-organized force of Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs on April 17 aiming to topple Fidel Castro, and without the U.S. air support Kennedy withheld, the invasion collapsed within three days. Cold War tensions hardened further that August, when East German forces sealed the border between East and West Berlin overnight, building what would become the Berlin Wall and stopping the flow of refugees to the West. Domestically, the wage floor moved for the first time in five years: the Fair Labor Standards Amendments of 1961, effective that September, raised the minimum wage to $1.15 an hour and extended coverage to roughly 3.6 million additional workers. Consumer prices finished 1961 202.0% above their 1913 level. First-class postage held at 4 cents.

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