He wrote twenty books, covering the politics of the New Deal, biographies of major politicians, issues in planning, and memoirs of his experiences.

In his youth, he gained an appreciation for workers' rights and liberal politics from the works of Upton Sinclair, James Bryce, Edward Bellamy,[1] Frederick Winslow Taylor,[2] and Charles Richard van Hise.

At university, he was influenced by the teaching of Scott Nearing and Simon Patten, as well as the writings of John Dewey in philosophy.

He advocated agricultural planning (led by industry) to stop the rural poverty that had become prevalent due to a crop surplus after the First World War.

Some of the RA's activities dealt with land conservation and rural aid, but the construction of new suburban satellite cities was the most prominent.

In her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the author Jane Jacobs critically quotes Tugwell on the program: "My idea is to go just outside centers of population, pick up cheap land, build a whole community and entice people into it.

"[10] She believed that he underestimated the strengths of complex urban communities and caused too much social displacement in "tearing down" neighborhoods that might have been renovated.

[11] The RA completed three "Greenbelt" towns before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found the program unconstitutional in Franklin Township v. Tugwell.

He was appointed as a vice president at the American Molasses Co. At this time, he divorced his first wife and married Grace Falke, his former assistant.

New York's reformist mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, created the commission as part of a city charter reform aimed at reducing corruption and inefficiency.

Robert Moses killed Tugwell's proposed fifty-year master plan with a fiery public denouncement of its open-space protections.

In one case, he vetoed a bill approved by both chambers of the Puerto Rico Legislature, and supported by 59 of 77[a] municipalities, establishing a state medical school in the city of Ponce, calling it "regionalism.

Tugwell pled for party unity under a platform that The New York Times summed up as "endorsing Red foreign policy".

Tugwell's autobiographies include The Light of Other Days (1962), To the Lesser Heights of Morningside (1982), The Stricken Land (1947), A Chronicle of Jeopardy (1955), The Brains Trust (1968), Off Course (1971), and Roosevelt's Revolution: The First Year, a Personal Perspective (1977).