Between 1936 and 1943, the Consumer Price Index went from 13.9 to 17.3.
Cumulatively, prices increased 24.5%, which works out to an average of
3.18% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1936 bought what
$0.80 buys in 1943.
Consumer prices rose 1.5% in 1936, a third straight annual increase and part
of a slow, steady climb back from the 1933 trough, though
prices and the broader economy still had not fully recovered to their
pre-Depression levels. Voters delivered their verdict on that recovery in
November, reelecting Franklin D. Roosevelt over Republican Alf Landon in one
of the most lopsided elections in U.S. history: Roosevelt carried 46 of 48
states and won the Electoral College 523 to 8, a broad public endorsement of
the New Deal. Public works kept advancing that year, too. Hoover Dam, one of
the era’s signature projects, had been dedicated in September 1935, but its
first generators did not begin sending electricity over transmission lines
to Los Angeles until October 1936, a milestone that showed how long even a
celebrated project took to reach full operation. Consumer prices ended the
year 40.4% above their 1913 level, still 18.7% below the
1929 peak, a gap that would keep narrowing until a sharp new recession
interrupted the recovery the following year. First-class postage held at 3
cents.
The headline number is an average. Individual categories moved very differently over this
period. Here is what $100 of 1936 spending costs in 1943, by category:
Category
Avg. yearly inflation
$100 in 1936 →
All items (CPI-U)
3.18%
$124
Food
4.46%
$136
Apparel
4.09%
$132
Transportation
1.53%
$111
Medical care
1.35%
$110
Not shown because the BLS began these indexes after 1936: core (all items less food & energy) (1957–), energy (1957–), housing (1967–), recreation (1993–), education & communication (1993–).
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.
MLA: “Inflation from 1936 to 1943: $100 is worth $124 today.” InflationCalculator.com, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data, https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1936-to-1943/
APA: InflationCalculator.com. Inflation from 1936 to 1943. Based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data. Retrieved from https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1936-to-1943/