Between 1955 and 1961, the Consumer Price Index went from 26.8 to 29.9.
Cumulatively, prices increased 11.6%, which works out to an average of
1.84% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1955 bought what
$0.90 buys in 1961.
Consumer prices fell 0.4% in 1955, the first annual decline since 1949,
as a strong rebound from the 1953-54 recession delivered growth without
much price pressure; automakers and appliance makers competed hard on
price for a booming consumer market. Organized labor consolidated that
December, when the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of
Industrial Organizations merged on the 5th under President George Meany,
uniting roughly 15 million workers in the AFL-CIO after two decades as
rival federations. That same day, a different kind of organizing began in
Montgomery, Alabama: four days after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing
to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, the city’s Black community
began a boycott of its buses that would last more than a year and help
launch the civil rights movement’s mass phase. Markets got a scare that
September: news of Eisenhower’s heart attack on the 24th sent the Dow
Jones Industrial Average to its steepest one-day drop since the 1929
crash when trading resumed that Monday, before stocks recovered as the
president’s health improved. Consumer prices finished 1955 170.7% above
their 1913 level, essentially unchanged from where they
stood a year earlier. First-class postage held at 3 cents, and the
minimum wage stayed at 75 cents an hour.
The headline number is an average. Individual categories moved very differently over this
period. Here is what $100 of 1955 spending costs in 1961, by category:
Category
Avg. yearly inflation
$100 in 1955 →
All items (CPI-U)
1.84%
$112
Medical care
3.90%
$126
Transportation
2.60%
$117
Food
1.50%
$109
Apparel
1.21%
$107
Not shown because the BLS began these indexes after 1955: core (all items less food & energy) (1957–), energy (1957–), housing (1967–), recreation (1993–), education & communication (1993–).
Consumer prices rose 1.0% in 1961, down from 1960’s 1.7% as
the economy climbed out of recession, a recovery the National Bureau of
Economic Research dates to that February. Politically, the year opened
with a changing of the guard: outgoing president Dwight Eisenhower’s
farewell address on January 17 warned of a growing “military-industrial
complex,” and three days later John F. Kennedy was sworn in, urging
Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you.” The new
administration’s first major foreign-policy test came quickly and badly:
a CIA-organized force of Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs on April
17 aiming to topple Fidel Castro, and without the U.S. air support Kennedy
withheld, the invasion collapsed within three days. Cold War tensions
hardened further that August, when East German forces sealed the border
between East and West Berlin overnight, building what would become the
Berlin Wall and stopping the flow of refugees to the West. Domestically,
the wage floor moved for the first time in five years: the Fair Labor
Standards Amendments of 1961, effective that September, raised the
minimum wage to $1.15 an hour and extended coverage to roughly 3.6 million
additional workers. Consumer prices finished 1961 202.0% above their
1913 level. First-class postage held at 4 cents.
MLA: “Inflation from 1955 to 1961: $100 is worth $112 today.” InflationCalculator.com, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data, https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1955-to-1961/
APA: InflationCalculator.com. Inflation from 1955 to 1961. Based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data. Retrieved from https://inflationcalculator.com/inflation/1955-to-1961/