Value of $100 in 1946, adjusted to 1960

What happened to prices between 1946 and 1960

Between 1946 and 1960, the Consumer Price Index went from 19.5 to 29.6. Cumulatively, prices increased 51.8%, which works out to an average of 3.03% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1946 bought what $0.66 buys in 1960.

Consumer prices rose 8.3% in 1946, up sharply from 1945’s 2.3% and the sharpest increase since 1942, as wartime price controls finally came apart. Congress let the Office of Price Administration’s authority lapse at the end of June, reinstated a weaker version soon after, then wound the whole system down through the rest of the year, releasing years of pent-up demand into the price level almost at once. Meat was the clearest casualty of the fight over decontrol: farmers withheld livestock rather than sell at capped prices, producing severe shortages that spring and summer until ceilings on meat were lifted that October, after which supplies reappeared almost overnight. Labor cashed in its own wartime restraint the same year. An estimated 4.6 million workers walked out at some point in 1946, hitting steel, coal, automakers, and the railroads in the largest strike wave in U.S. history, as unions pushed for wage gains to offset cost-of-living increases controls could no longer contain. Amid the turmoil, Congress made a less visible but lasting change to economic policy: the Employment Act of 1946, signed that February, committed the federal government to promoting maximum employment and created the Council of Economic Advisers. Consumer prices stood 97.0% above their 1913 level, nearly double where the index had started 33 years earlier. First-class postage held at 3 cents, and the minimum wage stayed at 40 cents an hour.

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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.

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