ABSTRACT
An associated notion, that the college youth of the 1950s, were a silent generation may have somewhat more validity. The notion that conformity was a great danger was the burden of much social criticism in the 1950s. The very popularity not only of attacks on conformity but of other types of social criticism and some aspects of popular culture are hard to square with the usual picture. Liberals may not have been winning elections, but they dominated American culture and the opinion-forming media. The overwhelming majority of American intellectuals were liberals, or further to the left. The more strongly anti-Communist liberalism cantered in the American Veterans Committee, which became Americans for Democratic Action, and it developed its own magazine, The Reporter, which was influential in the 1950s. Some liberals, and the remaining democratic socialists, tended to think that the United States might have something to learn in some matters, from Labour Britain and the more developed welfare states other countries.
