Value of $100 in 1953, adjusted to 1967

What happened to prices between 1953 and 1967

Between 1953 and 1967, the Consumer Price Index went from 26.7 to 33.4. Cumulatively, prices increased 25.1%, which works out to an average of 1.61% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1953 bought what $0.80 buys in 1967.

Consumer prices rose 0.8% in 1953, down from 1952’s 1.9% as fighting in Korea wound toward a truce and three years of wartime buying pressure finally eased. The year’s biggest shock came from Moscow: Soviet leader Joseph Stalin died March 5 after nearly three decades in power, the first change of Soviet leadership since the 1920s, opening a period of uncertainty over how his successors would deal with the West. Washington used the calmer backdrop to unwind its own wartime machinery. Authority for the price and wage controls imposed in 1951 lapsed that spring, as the Eisenhower administration, which favored free markets over controls, wound down the Office of Price Stabilization. The war itself ended, on paper, that July: negotiators signed an armistice July 27 at Panmunjom, halting the fighting roughly along the original border near the 38th parallel. No formal peace treaty ever followed, and North and South Korea remain technically at war. Consumer prices finished 1953 169.7% above their 1913 level. First-class postage held at 3 cents, and the minimum wage stayed at 75 cents an hour.

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The destination year: 1967

Consumer prices rose 3.1% in 1967, up from 1966’s 2.9% as Vietnam War spending kept climbing alongside expanding Great Society programs, a combination of rising military and domestic outlays that economists later blamed for entrenching inflation through the rest of the decade. The minimum wage rose that February 1, to $1.40 an hour, the first step of a phased increase Congress had set the year before. Urban unrest reached a peak that July, when days of rioting left 26 dead in Newark and 43 dead in Detroit, the deadliest of that summer’s roughly 160 disturbances; Johnson responded by forming the Kerner Commission to study the causes of the unrest. The Supreme Court gained its first Black justice that year too: the Senate confirmed Thurgood Marshall on August 30, and he was sworn in that October after serving as U.S. Solicitor General and, before that, as the lead attorney in Brown v. Board of Education. Consumer prices finished 1967 237.4% above their 1913 level. First-class postage held at 5 cents.

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