On December 19, 1912, prior to assuming office, Roosevelt is assassinated by Annie Oakley while personally breaking a labor strike at the Chicago Union Stockyards with the help of the Rough Riders.

Vice president-elect Charles Foster Kane takes power, and gradually leads the United States into greater levels of oppression, class division and bureaucratic incompetence and corruption – including an earlier entry into World War I in 1914 and the assassination of his rival candidate, Woodrow Wilson, during the 1916 election campaign.

The early idealism of this change is misplaced, however; upon Debs' death in 1926, power is seized by Al Capone (an obvious parallel to Joseph Stalin, just as Debs is used to mirror the achievements of Vladimir Lenin), who proceeds to rule over the USSA with a brutal, repressive fist of iron, establishing a cult of personality around himself, exiling and executing his political rivals and ruling the country more brutally and ruthlessly (and incompetently) than any of the robber barons who were previously deposed.

The stories are significant in that they feature famous fictional characters (particularly from American and British texts) interacting with real personages; President Charles Foster Kane, for example, is the main character from Orson Welles' 1941 motion picture Citizen Kane, whereas Tom Joad — hunted by real-life law enforcers Eliot Ness and Melvin Purvis in 'Tom Joad' — is the protagonist of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart appears as a British officer in Teddy Bears' Picnic (though Doctor Who is referred to as fiction in the same story), as do Nigel Molesworth and Basil Fotherington-Thomas.