Value of $100 in 1934, adjusted to 1943

What happened to prices between 1934 and 1943

Between 1934 and 1943, the Consumer Price Index went from 13.4 to 17.3. Cumulatively, prices increased 29.1%, which works out to an average of 2.88% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1934 bought what $0.77 buys in 1943.

Consumer prices rose 3.1% in 1934, the first annual increase since 1926; every year from 1927 through 1933 had been flat or falling, so the turn marked a real break after eight years without a single gain. Currency policy did some of the work. The Gold Reserve Act, signed January 30, formally devalued the dollar by raising the official price of gold from $20.67 to $35 an ounce, part of the administration’s deliberate effort to reflate prices after four straight years of deflation. Financial regulation tightened at the same time: the Securities Exchange Act of June 6 created the Securities and Exchange Commission to police stock exchanges and enforce disclosure rules, a direct response to the speculation blamed for the 1929 crash. The recovery was fragile and unevenly felt, especially on the Great Plains, where drought had turned overplowed farmland to dust. Over May 9-11, high winds lifted an estimated 350 million tons of topsoil into the air, darkening skies as far away as Washington and New York and giving city readers who had never seen a wheat field a first glimpse of the disaster building in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Consumer prices stood 35.4% above their 1913 level, still well below the 1929 peak but rising for the first time since the Depression began. First-class postage held at 3 cents.

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The destination year: 1943

Consumer prices rose 6.1% in 1943, a slower pace than 1942’s surge but still well above anything the country had seen before the war. The slowdown owed largely to the “Hold the Line” order, issued that April, which froze most wages, prices, and rents at their current levels after the previous year’s jump showed how far demand had outrun the existing controls. Rationing grew more sophisticated alongside the freeze: starting in February, a points system split scarce goods into red points for meat, butter, and other fats and blue points for canned and processed foods, letting households budget across categories instead of simply going without once a flat quota ran dry. The government also changed how it collected the taxes paying for all of it. The Current Tax Payment Act, signed June 9, required employers to withhold federal income tax directly from paychecks for the first time, smoothing the flow of wartime revenue and creating the pay-as-you-go system still used today. Consumer prices stood 74.7% above their 1913 level and 33.1% above 1933’s Depression-era low. First-class postage held at 3 cents, and the minimum wage stayed at 30 cents an hour.

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