Value of $100 in 1935, adjusted to 1959

What happened to prices between 1935 and 1959

Between 1935 and 1959, the Consumer Price Index went from 13.7 to 29.1. Cumulatively, prices increased 112.4%, which works out to an average of 3.19% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1935 bought what $0.47 buys in 1959.

Consumer prices rose 2.2% in 1935, a second straight annual increase after 1934’s turnaround, though the CPI still sat well below its 1929 peak and the recovery remained uneven and incomplete. The year’s biggest legislative achievements aimed at making that unevenness less punishing. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act on August 14, creating federal old-age pensions and unemployment insurance funded by a new payroll tax, the first federal safety net of its kind in U.S. history. That spring, the Works Progress Administration had already begun putting millions of unemployed Americans to work on public construction, arts, and infrastructure projects, becoming the largest jobs program of the New Deal. Congress added labor protections to the mix that July with the National Labor Relations Act, guaranteeing most private-sector workers the right to organize and bargain collectively. The human cost of the Dust Bowl was still mounting on the Plains: the storm known as Black Sunday hit on April 14, one of the worst of the decade, and continued drought kept driving farm families off land that could no longer support them. Consumer prices ended the year 38.4% above their 1913 level. First-class postage held at 3 cents.

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The destination year: 1959

Consumer prices rose 0.7% in 1959, down sharply from 1958’s 2.8% as the economy recovered briskly from the year before’s recession, with output and employment both rebounding through the year. The map of the country changed that year for the first time since 1912: Alaska joined the union January 3, and Hawaii followed August 21, completing the 50-state United States. Ninety miles from Florida, Cuba changed hands that January, when Fidel Castro’s guerrilla forces overthrew President Fulgencio Batista, who fled the country on the 1st; Castro entered Havana on the 8th, beginning a Communist government that would define Cold War tensions in the hemisphere for decades. Labor and management fought their longest battle of the postwar era that summer: the United Steelworkers walked out July 15 in a dispute over work rules, the longest strike in the industry’s history, before a federal court granted the Eisenhower administration a Taft-Hartley back-to-work order that November. Consumer prices finished the decade 193.9% above their 1913 level, up 20.7% from where they stood in 1950. First-class postage held at 4 cents, and the minimum wage stayed at $1.00 an hour.

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