President Eisenhower, a World War II hero, radiated strength and trust, qualities the American people found very attractive as they rebuilt their lives and established families in the 1950s. Nominated by the Republican Party in 1952, the sixty-two-year-old Eisenhower shrewdly balanced his ticket by choosing as his running mate California senator Richard M. Nixon, a man twenty-three years his junior who had risen in politics by attacking Democrats as soft on communism. On election day, Eisenhower coasted to victory, winning 55 percent of the popular vote and 83 percent of the electoral vote. Despite Eisenhower’s personal popularity, the Republicans managed to win only slim majorities in the Senate and the House. Within two years, they had lost even this slight edge in both houses, and the Democrats regained control of Congress.

With a limited electoral mandate, the president adopted what one of his speechwriters called Modern Republicanism, which tried to fit the traditional Republican Party ideals of individualism and fiscal restraint within the broad framework of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. With Democrats in control of Congress after 1954, Republicans agreed to raise Social Security benefits and to include coverage for some ten million additional workers. Congress and the president retained another New Deal mainstay, the minimum wage, and increased it from 75 cents to $1 an hour. Departing from traditional Republican criticism of big government, the Eisenhower administration added the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to the cabinet in 1953. The president justified expanding the federal government in domestic matters as part of fighting the Cold War. In 1958 Eisenhower signed into law the National Defense Education Act, which provided aid for instruction in science, math, and foreign languages and graduate fellowships and loans for college students. He portrayed the new law as a way to catch up with the Soviets, who the previous year had successfully launched the first artificial satellite, called Sputnik, into outer space.