Between 1947 and 1952, the Consumer Price Index went from 22.3 to 26.5.
Cumulatively, prices increased 18.8%, which works out to an average of
3.51% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1947 bought what
$0.84 buys in 1952.
Consumer prices rose 14.4% in 1947, up from 1946’s 8.3% and
the fastest annual increase since 1920, as the last of the wartime price
controls disappeared and a year of strikes, wage catch-up, and lingering
shortages hit consumers all at once. Congress answered the previous year’s
strike wave that June, overriding President Truman’s veto to pass the
Taft-Hartley Act, which banned secondary boycotts and the closed shop and
let states adopt “right-to-work” laws curbing union power. American
attention was also turning outward. In a June 5 speech at Harvard,
Secretary of State George Marshall outlined a U.S.-funded plan to rebuild
Western Europe’s economies, an effort that would become known as the
Marshall Plan once Congress funded it the following year. The government
reorganized itself for the confrontation with the Soviet Union that plan was
partly designed to prevent: the National Security Act, signed July 26,
created the Department of Defense, the Air Force as a separate service, the
Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Council. Consumer
prices stood 125.3% above their 1913 level and 30.4% above
1929’s pre-Depression peak, up from just 1.2% above it four
years earlier. First-class postage held at 3 cents, and the minimum wage
stayed at 40 cents an hour.
The headline number is an average. Individual categories moved very differently over this
period. Here is what $100 of 1947 spending costs in 1952, by category:
Category
Avg. yearly inflation
$100 in 1947 →
All items (CPI-U)
3.51%
$119
Transportation
6.80%
$139
Medical care
4.35%
$124
Food
3.56%
$119
Apparel
1.74%
$109
Not shown because the BLS began these indexes after 1947: core (all items less food & energy) (1957–), energy (1957–), housing (1967–), recreation (1993–), education & communication (1993–).
Consumer prices rose 1.9% in 1952, down sharply from 1951’s
7.9% as the price and wage controls imposed the year before held the cost
of living in check even with the Korean War still underway. Labor strife
tested those controls that spring: to head off a strike that could have
disrupted war production, President Truman ordered the government to
seize the steel industry that April, over the objections of steel
companies fighting the price the Office of Price Stabilization had set for
their product. The Supreme Court ruled the seizure unconstitutional in
Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer that June, a landmark limit on
presidential power, and steelworkers then struck for 53 days before a
settlement. Politics delivered the year’s biggest change that November:
Dwight Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson, promising to “go to Korea” to
end the war and returning Republicans to the White House for the first
time since 1933. The Cold War’s technological edge sharpened that same
month, when the United States tested the first hydrogen bomb at Enewetak
Atoll on November 1, a device hundreds of times more powerful than the
atomic bombs used against Japan in 1945. Consumer prices finished 1952
167.7% above their 1913 level. First-class postage held at
3 cents, and the minimum wage stayed at 75 cents an hour.
MLA: “Inflation from 1947 to 1952: $100 is worth $119 today.” InflationCalculator.com, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data, https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1947-to-1952/
APA: InflationCalculator.com. Inflation from 1947 to 1952. Based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data. Retrieved from https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1947-to-1952/