Value of $100 in 1935, adjusted to 1960

What happened to prices between 1935 and 1960

Between 1935 and 1960, the Consumer Price Index went from 13.7 to 29.6. Cumulatively, prices increased 116.1%, which works out to an average of 3.13% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1935 bought what $0.46 buys in 1960.

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.

More about inflation in 1935 →

The destination year: 1960

Consumer prices rose 1.7% in 1960, up from 1959’s 0.7% even as the economy slipped into recession that April, a downturn that would prove the shortest since World War II. The year’s defining political moment came that November, when John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard Nixon in one of the closest presidential elections in U.S. history, decided by roughly two-tenths of a percentage point in the popular vote. Television played a new role in the race: the first-ever televised presidential debate that September, watched by an estimated 70 million people, was widely seen as favoring the telegenic Kennedy. Civil rights protest took a new form that February, when four Black freshmen at North Carolina A&T State University sat down at a whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro and refused to leave; the sit-in tactic spread to dozens of Southern cities within weeks. Cold War tensions flared that May, when a Soviet missile downed an American U-2 spy plane deep inside Soviet airspace. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was captured alive, embarrassing the Eisenhower administration and collapsing a Paris summit called to ease relations with Moscow. Consumer prices finished 1960 199.0% above their 1913 level. First-class postage held at 4 cents, and the minimum wage stayed at $1.00 an hour.

More about inflation in 1960 →