Value of $100 in 1948, adjusted to 1956

What happened to prices between 1948 and 1956

Between 1948 and 1956, the Consumer Price Index went from 24.1 to 27.2. Cumulatively, prices increased 12.9%, which works out to an average of 1.52% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1948 bought what $0.89 buys in 1956.

Consumer prices rose 8.1% in 1948, down slightly from 1947’s 14.4% but still the second straight year of sharp postwar inflation now that wartime price controls were fully gone. Congress moved to stabilize a different economy that April, passing the Economic Cooperation Act to fund the plan Secretary of State George Marshall had proposed the year before: more than $13 billion over four years to rebuild Western Europe and counter Soviet influence. The Cold War turned tense closer to the plan’s target that June, when Soviet forces cut off road and rail access to the Western-controlled sectors of Berlin. American and British aircraft responded almost immediately with an airlift of food, fuel, and supplies that would keep the city running for nearly a year. Domestic politics produced its own upset that November: nearly every poll and pundit had predicted a Republican win, but Harry Truman defeated New York Governor Thomas Dewey, handing the Chicago Tribune its famously wrong “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline. Consumer prices finished the year 143.4% above their 1913 level and 40.9% above 1929’s pre-Depression peak. First-class postage held at 3 cents, and the minimum wage stayed at 40 cents an hour.

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The destination year: 1956

Consumer prices rose 1.5% in 1956, a return to mild inflation after they had fallen 0.4% in 1955, the only annual decline of the decade. The two years sat in the calmest stretch of the postwar index, a lull between the Korean War price surge earlier in the 1950s and the acceleration that would return in the 1970s. Congress had already raised the wage floor into that calm: the Fair Labor Standards Amendments of 1955, signed the previous August, took effect March 1 and lifted the federal minimum wage from 75 cents to $1 an hour, the first increase since 1950. Eisenhower signed a longer-lasting commitment on June 29, the Federal-Aid Highway Act, funding 41,000 miles of controlled-access highway at 90% federal cost to build the Interstate System, the largest public-works program the country had undertaken. He won a second term that November, carrying 41 states and about 57% of the popular vote in a rematch against Adlai Stevenson. Abroad, the Suez Crisis broke the calm on the supply side: Egypt nationalized the canal on July 26, and after Israel invaded the Sinai on October 29 with British and French forces following, the canal’s closure and damaged pipelines squeezed oil shipments to Western Europe for months. Consumer prices stood 174.7% above their 1913 level by 1956, up 94% since 1940 alone, even after a decade that had barely moved the index. First-class postage held at 3 cents, unchanged since 1932.

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