Value of $100 in 1955, adjusted to 1969

What happened to prices between 1955 and 1969

Between 1955 and 1969, the Consumer Price Index went from 26.8 to 36.7. Cumulatively, prices increased 36.9%, which works out to an average of 2.27% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1955 bought what $0.73 buys in 1969.

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.

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The destination year: 1969

Consumer prices rose 5.5% in 1969, up from 1968’s 4.2% and the fastest pace since the Korean War era, as years of Vietnam War spending, a labor market with unemployment under 4%, and expansionary fiscal policy finally showed up fully in prices. Richard Nixon was inaugurated that January 20, pledging to curb rising prices without wage and price controls, a position he would reverse within two years. The decade’s most triumphant moment came that July 20, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon while Michael Collins orbited above, fulfilling the goal Kennedy had set in 1961 of landing a man on the lunar surface before the decade’s end. Culture and protest both reached new extremes that year: an estimated 400,000 people gathered on a dairy farm in Bethel, New York, for the Woodstock music festival that August, and a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village that June touched off days of resistance now credited with launching the modern gay rights movement. Consumer prices finished the decade 270.7% above their 1913 level, up 24.0% from where they stood in 1960. The 1960s had opened with inflation near 1% a year and closed with prices rising faster than at any point since Korea, setting up the Great Inflation that would define the 1970s. First-class postage held at 6 cents, and the minimum wage stayed at $1.60 an hour.

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