Page "Richard Hofstadter" Paragraph 9

In 1948, he published The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, incisive interpretive studies of twelve major American political leaders from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

Besides critical success, the book sold nearly a million copies at university campuses, where it was used as a history textbook ; critics found it " skeptical, fresh, revisionary, occasionally ironical, without being harsh or merely destructive ".

Although, as Bruce Kuklik notes, it still " owed much to Hofstadter's leftist background ", it was ironic and paradoxical in dealing with political leaders from the Revolution to the present.

Each chapter title illustrated a paradox: Thomas Jefferson is " The Aristocrat as Democrat "; John C. Calhoun is the " Marx of the Master Class "; and Franklin Roosevelt is " The Patrician as Opportunist ".