Cashing in on the despair, the ever-smiling Democratic Party presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt rode into the presidency promising a "New Deal" ... although the specifics of the matter were never very clear during the presidential campaign.  In fact, they would soon reveal themselves to be even more "Socialist" than what the Democrats had so recently accused Hoover of attempting to put in place.  In any case, a very discouraged American electorate turned out in huge numbers to support this most optimistic candidate – for there was little else at the time to be optimistic about.   The First 100 days.  A vast number of Roosevelt's programs were easily put through a Democratic-Party-controlled Congress … putting thousands of unemployed young men to work building national parks; Roosevelt and his "Brain Trust" of presidential advisors had dams and river plants built in order to generate both flood control and vast amounts of electrical energy for rural America; he put the American banking system under the protection of a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the stock market under the regulation of a Securities Exchange Commission. But that was just the beginning.  He would in 1934 move on to create a home mortgage insurance commission (the Federal Housing Administration); and in 1935 set up America's Social Security Trust Fund … to prompt Americans to set aside part of their earnings in order to have a pension fund to draw from during the years of their retirement. And then he went on to finance multitudes of various civil building projects, from swimming pools, to amphitheaters, to railroad improvements, to municipal parks, to municipal public office buildings, to roads, airports, etc., etc.  … to put unemployed Americans to work.  And of course all this ran up the public debt to unprecedented heights. Confrontation with the U.S. Supreme Court The U.S. Supreme Court looked suspiciously at these projects, claiming that they had no constitutional warrant, and shot one down after another … only to have Roosevelt come up with yet another program.  Furious at this opposition, he threatened to simply reshape the membership of the Court … shocking even members of his own party at this rather unconstitutional step.  However, some changes in the makeup and viewpoint of the Court membership soon changed its position vis-a-vis his projects.  Roosevelt, however, had lost a lot of political standing during his war with the Court ... a political war which did not go over too well with a lot of Americans.  A deep shift in the American sense of order The Depression seemed to be a concrete support of the idea that the realm of social ideas and ideals that the country had been living under – virtually since its founding in the early 1600s – were "false gods" who clearly had failed.  It was indeed time to go at life in very new, very "progressive" ways.  Certainly that was the idea that justified Roosevelt's use of extensive federal powers to rebuild American society, almost from the ground up.  But the thinking did not just stop at political "progress" ... but under the guidance of self-appointed social prophets – with their grand social theories – the Depression promoted a deep spirit of progressivism in the realm of new social ideals ... and even in the realm of religion.  For American intellectuals, this was exactly what they had spent years preparing for ... the opportunity to put their beautiful social ideals into action. The Humanist Manifesto (1933).  This intellectualist spirit of the times is best represented in the Humanist Manifesto, signed by 34 prominent individuals and published in America's mainstream media on May 1st, 1933.  The signatories included some 9 professors of religion, theology, philosophy, etc. at Harvard, Chicago (3), Cornell, Michigan, Illinois, Pittsburgh, Smith, and Columbia (2 ... one of them being the very well-known John Dewey) – plus 9 Unitarian pastors, plus 4 editors of prestigious journals, and a number of heads of various Liberal societies.  In short, a group very representative of the highest realm of American social intellectualism. Basically from the Humanist Manifesto's point of view, capitalism had failed ... and so also had traditional Christianity.  It was time for a deep revision in the social, moral and spiritual character of modern society. Interestingly, the signers of the document start off by identifying themselves as "Religious humanists" ... believing that the universe was "self-existing and not created."  It also affirms that "modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values."  It also states that "there will be no uniquely religious emotions and attitudes of the kind hitherto associated with belief in the supernatural."  And it affirms that "a socialized and cooperative economic order must be established to the end that the equitable distribution of means of life be possible." And so it concludes "So stand the theses of religious humanism." This was not Middle America speaking.  This was American Intellectualism speaking.  And this amazing document made very clear the key features of Humanism ... and its ideals that serve as the underpinning worldview that has long directed "lofty" Intellectuals ... the same ideals that informed Rousseau, Jefferson, Marx, Wilson, and many others of this same intellectual nature.