Value of $100 in 1936, adjusted to 1955

What happened to prices between 1936 and 1955

Between 1936 and 1955, the Consumer Price Index went from 13.9 to 26.8. Cumulatively, prices increased 92.8%, which works out to an average of 3.52% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1936 bought what $0.52 buys in 1955.

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.

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The destination year: 1955

Consumer prices fell 0.4% in 1955, the first annual decline since 1949, as a strong rebound from the 1953-54 recession delivered growth without much price pressure; automakers and appliance makers competed hard on price for a booming consumer market. Organized labor consolidated that December, when the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations merged on the 5th under President George Meany, uniting roughly 15 million workers in the AFL-CIO after two decades as rival federations. That same day, a different kind of organizing began in Montgomery, Alabama: four days after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, the city’s Black community began a boycott of its buses that would last more than a year and help launch the civil rights movement’s mass phase. Markets got a scare that September: news of Eisenhower’s heart attack on the 24th sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average to its steepest one-day drop since the 1929 crash when trading resumed that Monday, before stocks recovered as the president’s health improved. Consumer prices finished 1955 170.7% above their 1913 level, essentially unchanged from where they stood a year earlier. First-class postage held at 3 cents, and the minimum wage stayed at 75 cents an hour.

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