Value of $100 in 1936, adjusted to 1969

What happened to prices between 1936 and 1969

Between 1936 and 1969, the Consumer Price Index went from 13.9 to 36.7. Cumulatively, prices increased 164.0%, which works out to an average of 2.99% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1936 bought what $0.38 buys in 1969.

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: 1969

Consumer prices rose 5.5% in 1969, up from 1968’s 4.2% and the fastest pace since the Korean War era, as years of Vietnam War spending, a labor market with unemployment under 4%, and expansionary fiscal policy finally showed up fully in prices. Richard Nixon was inaugurated that January 20, pledging to curb rising prices without wage and price controls, a position he would reverse within two years. The decade’s most triumphant moment came that July 20, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon while Michael Collins orbited above, fulfilling the goal Kennedy had set in 1961 of landing a man on the lunar surface before the decade’s end. Culture and protest both reached new extremes that year: an estimated 400,000 people gathered on a dairy farm in Bethel, New York, for the Woodstock music festival that August, and a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village that June touched off days of resistance now credited with launching the modern gay rights movement. Consumer prices finished the decade 270.7% above their 1913 level, up 24.0% from where they stood in 1960. The 1960s had opened with inflation near 1% a year and closed with prices rising faster than at any point since Korea, setting up the Great Inflation that would define the 1970s. First-class postage held at 6 cents, and the minimum wage stayed at $1.60 an hour.

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