Despising one-man rule, nearly all of them slave owners, men of wealth and property gathered to create the U.S. They looked to ancient Greece, and to an Indian Confederation for models and designed a government in which “some” men ruled.

Selecting a president would be accomplished by electors in each state. Two men from each state would form a Senate. Propertied men could vote for a House of Representatives. With approval by senators, men of substance would serve on a Supreme Court for life.

If this sounds like an exclusive men’s club, it was. The full measure of its lack of democratic substance is that it measured ethnically different people stolen from Africa as three-fifths of a person.

Though hallowed, our Constitution was a poor beginning. Some amendments made it better. Others made it worse. Praise the First, guaranteeing freedom of speech. The Second, inserted to allow militias to defend against slave rebellion, has been misread by the Supreme Court. In the process of killing off most First Americans, settlers became gun lovers. In 180 school shootings in the past 10 years, 356 children died. The court makes killing children easier.

Amendment Thirteen outlawed slavery. Fifteen allowed all men to vote. Eighteen was a mistake; banning alcohol is like banning food. With Nineteen, women forced for themselves the vote. One founder’s privileged institution, the Electoral College, needs shutting down in favor of direct elections.

The end of slavery did little to alter the cotton business, either for growers or manufacturers. Growers used impoverished Blacks to produce, and mill owners still exploited women and children to produce cloth.

The U.S. evolved as a capitalist experiment in which mine owners provided ore, steel mills created tracks, and railroaders were granted swaths of land to build towns. White northern Europeans were urged to emigrate as labor. Men of wealth ruled. Strikes were brutally broken. Protesters like Joe Hill were framed and executed.

Starving the working class, the greatest of all depressions brought Franklin Roosevelt to power. During five ensuing decades, the people, even those of color, experienced improvement. When I heard presidential candidate Senator Robert Taft speak in 1952, I measured how much my family’s party of Lincoln had changed. Theodore Roosevelt said Republicans became the party of big business, those men who had run the country before FDR.

Churchill joined Truman to create the Cold War. Truman financed France to begin the Vietnam disaster.

Eisenhower warned against emergent corporate, intelligence, and military control of the country after World War II. The CIA, Mafia, and Hoover’s FBI teamed to assassinate JFK and five other men who opposed that sinister power. Corporate media hides them, but stunning truths about assassinations of the 1960s are there for any who want to know them. The public record, guarded by corporate media, is a lie.

Republican and big business efforts to end progressive politics began with Reagan’s election. An actor, in full sense of the word, his first act was destroying the air traffic controller’s union.

What began after Reagan was a design by corporate wealth for resumption of complete and uncontested power. On the surface we had the John Birch Society and the Tea Party, but in the background, a deliberate effort to gain control of state and local government across the country. Appearing were organizations like the Heritage Foundation, lobbying for re-creating that old America the Founders designed; the Federalist Society that selects right-wing candidates for the courts; and immense funding sources like Koch Industries and the wealthy.

From 1991 on, Sinclair Broadcast Group began spewing distorted daily news and outright lies on, now 294 TV stations across the country. Christian megachurches were part of the right-wing tide. Election rules were politicized, gun possession protected, and women’s rights trashed. In funding of elections, corporations now counted as people.

The Tea Party Movement of 2009 was inspired by opposition to the now popular Affordable Care Act, along with racist resentment that a person of color like Barack Obama could have been allowed to become president. Their movement’s goal was creation of an extreme right-wing party.

As we’ve seen, a wealthy class candidate seeking billions in donations on a promise of lowering corporate taxes, lowering government spending on health care and Social Security, forcing rule-makers out of government, punishing immigrants and those who oppose him — who would remain president to protect these interests for the rest of his life — has the support of those who would take the country back to the all-white Christian, racist 1950s with his extreme, fascist MAGA party.

Charlemont resident Carl Doerner is an author and historian, currently editing his newest work, “Breaking the Silence: Revisioning the American Narrative.”