In 1948 he published "The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It", interpretive studies of 12 major American political leaders from the 18th to the 20th centuries. The book was a critical success and 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." 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." Hofstadter's style was so powerful and engrossing that professors kept assigning the book long after scholars had revised or rejected its main points.