It is an argumentative analysis of wealth and class in the United States, and how they are leveraged for purposes of political and economic power, specifically by what the author contends is a "plutocratic circle" composed of a tightly interlinked group of 60 families.

Though praised by some contemporary and modern reviewers, and once cited in a speech by Harold L. Ickes, it has also been criticized by others and was the subject of a 1938 libel suit by DuPont over factual inaccuracies contained in the text.

Beard said that Hearst would face "oblivion in death", caused an immediate stir and was described by Foreign Affairs as "an annihilating study of the newspaper magnate" worthy of "wide attention".

[3] Published in 1937 by Vanguard Press, it joined several previous works by American authors and commentators which purportedly identified a cartel of families or individuals that controlled most of the wealth in the United States, part of what has been described as "a generational moral reaction against the perceived depredations of the monied class".

According to Lundberg, this situation is unique to the United States as the plutocracies of Europe had largely disintegrated due to World War I:[2][10] In Germany and Austria-Hungary the dominant elite of wealth – landowners, bankers, and industrialists – were virtually pauperized overnight.

[13] Writing in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Michael Scheler declared America's 60 Families was comparable to Karl Marx's Capital and described it as "unquestionably the best contribution to the socialist critique of capitalist economy".

[15] Writing in the Saturday Review of Literature, Oswald Garrison Villard criticized America's 60 Families, describing it as "bitter muckracking", lamenting that it merely revisited old themes, and ultimately dismissing it with the caution that as "a guidebook to American folly and scandal it has a place.

[16] Several years later, Nazi politician Robert Ley, head of the German Labor Front, published a pamphlet in Germany titled Roosevelt Betrays America!

[17] United States Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes obliquely referred to the book in a December 1937 speech in which he declared that "the 60 families" had engineered the Great Depression.

In it, Jackson declared that American young people had to start their careers at "the bottom of an impossibly long ladder of a few great corporations dominated by America’s 60 families".

[32] In The American Scholar, Asher Lans penned a more positive review of The Rich and the Super-Rich, saying that while it was "too long, at points factually erroneous, and often prone to oversimplification", these faults were minor and the volume represented an "immensely important and provocative popularization of insufficiently noticed tendencies in the political economy".