Value of $100 in 1956, adjusted to 1961

What happened to prices between 1956 and 1961

Between 1956 and 1961, the Consumer Price Index went from 27.2 to 29.9. Cumulatively, prices increased 9.9%, which works out to an average of 1.91% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1956 bought what $0.91 buys in 1961.

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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The destination year: 1961

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.

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