Value of $100 in 1960, adjusted to 1969

What happened to prices between 1960 and 1969

Between 1960 and 1969, the Consumer Price Index went from 29.6 to 36.7. Cumulatively, prices increased 24.0%, which works out to an average of 2.42% per year. Put differently, a dollar in 1960 bought what $0.81 buys in 1969.

Consumer prices rose 1.7% in 1960, up from 1959’s 0.7% even as the economy slipped into recession that April, a downturn that would prove the shortest since World War II. The year’s defining political moment came that November, when John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard Nixon in one of the closest presidential elections in U.S. history, decided by roughly two-tenths of a percentage point in the popular vote. Television played a new role in the race: the first-ever televised presidential debate that September, watched by an estimated 70 million people, was widely seen as favoring the telegenic Kennedy. Civil rights protest took a new form that February, when four Black freshmen at North Carolina A&T State University sat down at a whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro and refused to leave; the sit-in tactic spread to dozens of Southern cities within weeks. Cold War tensions flared that May, when a Soviet missile downed an American U-2 spy plane deep inside Soviet airspace. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was captured alive, embarrassing the Eisenhower administration and collapsing a Paris summit called to ease relations with Moscow. Consumer prices finished 1960 199.0% above their 1913 level. First-class postage held at 4 cents, and the minimum wage stayed at $1.00 an hour.

More about inflation in 1960 →

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.

More about inflation in 1969 →