Dead Hand of the Dead: Anderson and Hickerson’s Gods of the Lightning

Abstract

In many ways, the turbulent history of anarchy in the United States reached a climax with the case of Sacco and Vanzetti. In turn, the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti seemed to confirm and validate the pessimistic strain of the social protest plays under study. Maxwell Anderson and Harold Hickerson set out to capture the outraged sentiments of the time with what John Gassner called “the strongest drama of social protest produced in the 1920s” (Gassner “Introduction: Gods of the Lightning ” 530). It is perhaps in this play that the anger and the fatalism that the age seemed to consistently evoke came together to make as close as the period comes to a definitive statement on Broadway—a statement that encompasses and acknowledges the growing resentment against the Great War, as well as the anger and gallows humor that accompanied the activism and anarchy of the I .W.W. The deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti, by extension, also reinforced the ultimate grimness and fatalism accompanying the rage.