J. Edgar Hoover was the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1924 until his death in 1972. After World War II, the FBI. expanded its mission to investigate individuals thought to be subversive. Hoover testifies before the House Unamerican Activities Committee in 1947 in a hearing to expose Communist infiltration into American life.
Following the fall of China to the Communists and the Soviet explosion of an atomic device ending the American nuclear monopoly, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy alleges in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia on February 9, 1950 that communists had infiltrated the State Department. Eventually, McCarthy would lose support even within the Republican Party and the Senate censured him in 1954.
In 1947, following a rash of postwar strikes and unfavorable media portrayals of union leaders, the Republican Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act outlawing the closed shop and giving the president power to order a cooling-off period in the case of any strike that endangered health or national security. Although President Truman vetoed the bill, Congress overrode his veto. Long unpopular with organized labor, the Taft-Hartley Act was never repealed.
For large capital-intensive businesses such as the automotive industry, it is essential to avoid work stoppages. In the late 1940s, General Motors signed an agreement with the United Auto Workers linking future wage increases to productivity. This agreement gave GM the labor peace it desired and the union the high wages and job security it sought .
In 1950 University of Chicago professor David Riesman, together with other sociologists, published The Lonely Crowd in which they examine the transformation of American society from an inner-directed society focused on achievement to an outer-directed society bent on conformity and its impact upon the new class of corporate managers.
As the American economy became increasingly oriented towards consumption, new forms of culture intended to have a broad appeal emerged. In this 1953 article, social critic Dwight Macdonald discusses the new "mass culture."
President Eisenhower gave a farewell speech to the nation on January 17, 1961. Because he was a career military officer, his warning about the growth of a military-industrial complex and its possible effect upon democracy and civil liberties at home caught many contemporary observers by surprise.