Their "socialism" tended to the typically non-Marxist indigenous American tradition exemplified by Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Laurence Gronlund, Eugene Debs, Frederic C. Howe, Thorstein Veblen, Robert La Follette, Sr.
In 1934 Bingham & Rodman published a selection of essays representing the magazine's wide-ranging response to the depths of the first trough of the Great Depression in America, Challenge To The New Deal (New York, Falcon Press, 1935), an important witness to the era's progressive political thought outside the metropolitan partisan establishment.
The magazine attracted a broad range of contributors, typically independents, diversely progressive, including Thomas Ryum Amlie, Roger N. Baldwin, Charles A.
Gerald Nye, Floyd Olson, Milo Reno, James Rorty, Bertrand Russell, Howard Scott, Upton Sinclair, Jerry Voorhis, Mary Heaton Vorse, Charles W. Yost, Stephen Spender, Robert F. Wagner, Burton Wheeler, and Edmund Wilson.
In his book The Politics of Upheaval, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. stated that during the early New Deal years of the Great Depression, Common Sense became "the most lively and interesting forum of radical discussion in the country.