Value of $100 in 1926, adjusted to 1952

What happened to prices between 1926 and 1952

Between 1926 and 1952, the Consumer Price Index went from 17.7 to 26.5. Cumulatively, prices increased 49.7%, which works out to an average of 1.56% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1926 bought what $0.67 buys in 1952.

Consumer prices rose 1.1% in 1926, a third straight year of mild inflation and part of the price stability that defined the middle of the decade. Florida’s real estate boom, which had peaked the previous year on speculative buying of undeveloped land, ended abruptly that September when the Great Miami Hurricane made landfall near the city, killing hundreds and wrecking the market for land whose value had rested on continued speculation rather than anything underneath it. In Detroit, Henry Ford moved his company to a five-day, 40-hour work week without cutting pay, a break from the standard six-day schedule that other large employers would gradually adopt over the following decades; Ford argued publicly that workers with more leisure time would also become better customers for the cars his factories built. Consumer prices remained low enough by historical standards that a first-class stamp still cost just 2 cents, the same price it had held since mid-1919.

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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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