The American political tradition and the men who made it

The founding fathers, an age of realism

Thomas Jefferson, the aristocrat as democrat

Andrew Jackson and the rise of liberal capitalism

John C. Calhoun, the Marx of the master class

Abraham Lincoln and the self-made myth

Wendell Phillips, the patrician as agitator

The spoilsmen, an age of cynicism

William Jennings Bryan, the democrat as revivalist

Theodore Roosevelt, the conservative as progressive

Woodrow Wilson, the conservative as liberal

Herbert Hoover and the crisis of American individualism

Franklin D. Roosevelt, the partician as opportunist.