| 1945 | Franklin D. Roosevelt dies. Harry S. Truman becomes president. |
| U.S. atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. | |
| End of World War II. | |
| 1948 | Harry S. Truman elected U.S. president. |
| 1949 | The Soviet Union successfully tests an atomic bomb. |
| 1950 | The Korean War begins. |
| Senator Joseph McCarthy charges that the U.S. State Department is riddled with spies and Communist subversives. | |
| 1952 | General Dwight D. Eisenhower is elected U.S. president. |
| 1953 | Comic book sales reach 70 million to 100 million monthly. |
| Ethyl and Julius Rosenberg are executed for spying. | |
| First issue of Playboy magazine published. | |
| Truce declared, effectively ending the Korean War. | |
| 1954 | Dr. Fredric Wertham publishes Seduction of the Innocent. |
| Senate Juvenile Delinquency Hearings begin. | |
| Stringent Comic Industry Code adopted. | |
| Televised hearings of McCarthy investigation of the U.S. Army. | |
| Censure of Senator McCarthy voted by the U.S. Senate. | |
| Supreme Court issues Brown v. Board of Education decision. | |
| 1955 | Widespread popularity of the controversial new music and dance called rock and roll. |
In the early 1950s, a heated discussion erupted in the United States regarding the assertion that crime comic books were responsible for a postwar wave of juvenile delinquency. Parents, church and civic groups, media pundits and opinion makers, members of Congress, law enforcement officials, criminologists, and experts in child psychology and sociology all weighed in on the national debate about the possible damaging effects of reading comics that glorified crime or depicted horror. In response, local and state governments considered, and even legislated, severe restrictions as to who could buy or sell comic books, where, and which kind. This national debate culminated in televised hearings before the Senate Committee on Crime and Juvenile Delinquency, chaired by several important senators, including Senators Robert Hendrickson of New Jersey and later Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. The senators and their staff brought together most of the major voices in this debate and solicited a wide variety of opinions.
The most dramatic moments in the investigation came with the testimony of two leading spokesmen: Dr. Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist, and William Gaines, publisher of Tales from the Crypt and other horror and crime comics. Wertham had done much to turn public opinion against the comics industry and denounced comics as a direct cause of the rising tide of youth crime. Gaines, on the other hand, defended his publication, and even its goriest presentations, as harmless, good fun.
Although the direct link between reading material and crime was not established to the committee’s satisfaction, its final report was highly critical of crime and horror comics and their glorification of criminals, overt sexuality, and threatening and frightening situations presented to young readers. If the conclusions of the committee were inconclusive, however, the effect of this national spotlight on the comics industry was profound. To head off national regulation and censorship, the comics industry, made up of the principal publishers, adopted a code of standards that effectively ended the appearance of crime and horror comics, resulting in serious economic losses for the industry.