This combined compendium summarizes Avis Everhard’s extended manuscript—edited and introduced by Anthony Meredith—which gives an intimate, partisan account of the revolutionary years roughly framed by 1912–1932 and of the rise and consolidation of the Iron Heel (the Oligarchy). Meredith’s foreword stresses the manuscript’s value as a vivid personal record rather than an impartial history: Avis’s proximity to events and her devotion to Ernest Everhard both enliven and color her testimony.

Principal figures and milieu
Avis Everhard narrates as diarist, widow, and covert agent; Ernest Everhard appears as the movement’s intellectual organizer whose rhetoric—“the fact” and the concept “Iron Heel”—frames the struggle. Secondary figures populate the narrative: Hartman (a comrade and companion in flight), Knowlton (condemned traitor executed by comrades), Garthwaite (secret‑service signaler), Biedenbach (inventor of an “expedite” explosive), Jackson (a maimed millworker whose case radicalizes Avis), Bishop Morehouse, assorted professors, journalists, trust‑figures (Wickson, Pertonwaithe), Mercenaries, and the anonymous “people of the abyss.”

Narrative arc and the Second Revolt (Chapters XXI–XXV)
The manuscript traces early encounters (Avis meets Ernest in 1912), the growing socialist movement, and the Oligarchy’s systematic countermeasures—legal manipulation, co‑optation, mercenary force, and secret‑service networks. The Second Revolt, centered on Chicago, is rendered in harrowing, documentary detail. Knowlton’s execution in Milwaukee and Chicago’s ruined streets introduce a city under uncanny hush, punctured by detonations, falling captive war‑balloons, and destroyed utilities. Avis and Hartman penetrate the labour ghetto, witness skyscraper firefights, window‑bombings and machine‑gun salvos, and see civilians killed clutching proclamations.

Chapter XXIII (“The People of the Abyss”) records the eruption of a degenerate, vengeful proletarian mass and Avis’s psychological shift from panic to clinical stoicism amid bayonettings, house‑to‑house slaughter, and the mercenaries’ ruthless clearing. Garthwaite rescues her from a crushing mob; Biedenbach’s improvised balloon attacks (using “expedite”) destroy a fortress at terrible human cost. Chapter XXIV (“Nightmare”) follows a fragmented, hallucinatory escape and reunion with Ernest, who helps extract the narrator from Chicago’s ruins; the automobile flight past stockyards and Pullman makes vivid the scale of devastation and the oligarchy’s protected enclaves. Chapter XXV (“The Terrorists”) sketches the political aftermath: relentless reprisals, mass executions, refugees and outlaws hunted, and unaffiliated terrorist cells that both retaliate and obstruct organized recovery. The manuscript breaks off abruptly; editorial notes emphasize international scope, Everhard’s central role, and documentary lacunae.

Themes, value and limits
Major themes are a structural critique of capitalism’s reactionary oligarchy, institutional betrayal by universities, churches and press, the fraught ethics of clandestine resistance, and psychological realism under strain. Avis’s account is indispensable for its humane detail and moral texture, but must be read with caution for partisan bias, hero‑worship of Ernest, and occasional prophetic generalization; triangulation with other documents is necessary for fuller historical reconstruction.