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Dive into Salem's 1692 witch trials, paralleled with McCarthyism, in Arthur Miller's eye-opening play that reveals the danger of hysteria and false accusations.
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“The Crucible” By Arthur Miller
Salem, Massachusetts, 1692 Early in 1692, a small group of girls in Salem fell ill, falling victim to hallucinations and seizures.
In extremely religious Puritan New England, frightening or surprising occurrences were often attributed to the devil or his cohorts.
The unfathomable sickness spurred fears of witchcraft, and it was not long before the girls, and then many other residents of Salem, began to accuse other villagers of consorting with the devil and casting spells.
Old grudges and jealousies spilled out into the open, fueling the atmosphere of hysteria. The theocratic Massachusetts government and judicial system soon became involved.
Within a few weeks, dozens of people were in jail on charges of witchcraft. The hysteria lasted from May to September of 1692. By the time it was over, 19 people (and two dogs) had been convicted and hanged for witchcraft, one elderly man was pressed to death by stones, and 150 prisoners were awaiting trial. Five more people died in prison.
Arthur Miller More than two centuries later, Arthur Miller was born in New York City in 1915. The relative prosperity of the Miller family during his early years ended abruptly with the stock market crash of 1929. The altered status of his family and the misery wrought by the Depression had a profound impact on the development of his social consciousness.
Miller wrote The Cruciblein 1958. Although the play depicts the Salem witch trials of 1692, it was a response to the paranoid political climate that surrounded him. The 1950s saw the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, a demagogue whose paranoid hunt for Communists propelled the U.S. into a dramatic anti-Communist fervor. McCarthy conducted Senate hearings that were supposed to flush out suspected communists from government and other areas of American life, including the Arts.
The policy resulted in a whirlwind of accusations. Many cooperated through false confessions, attempting to save themselves, creating the image that the U.S. was overrun with Communists, and perpetuating the hysteria. The liberal entertainment industry, in which Miller worked, was one of the chief targets. Some called to testify cooperated, others refused. Those who refused to incriminate their friends were placed on the infamous Hollywood Blacklist. Those placed on this list were denied employment, based upon their suspected Communist sympathies.
Miller was called on to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956. Like so many of his generation, Miller, although never a member of the Communist Party, had advocated principles of equality among the classes, and social justice. At the hearings, he testified about his own experiences but refused to discuss the experiences of his colleagues and associates. He was blacklisted for his refusal to name names, but was eventually removed from the list.
Crucible • A crucible is a vessel of a very refractory material (as porcelain) used for melting a substance that requires a high degree of heat • a severe test • a place or situation in which concentrated forces interact to cause or influence change or development
Universal Connections • Miller wrote The Crucible as an allegory, a work that represents something much deeper, between the 1690 Salem witch trials and the current events that were spreading throughout the United States at the time. • The play warned that a similar “witch hunt” was happening in the United States—and this time, the accused were those who were a part of the Communist Party or who were Communist sympathizers.
A universal connection “At first I rejected the idea of a play on the subject. My own rationality was too strong, I thought, to really allow me to capture this wildly irrational outbreak. A drama cannot merely describe an emotion, it has to become that emotion. But gradually, over weeks, a living connection between myself and Salem, and between Salem and Washington, was made in my mind—for whatever else they might be, I saw that the hearings in Washington were profoundly and avowedly ritualistic. After all, in almost every case the Committee knew in advance what they wanted the witness to give them: the names of his comrades in the [Communist] Party. The FBI had long since infiltrated the Party, and informers had long ago identified the participants in various meetings.”
A universal connection “The main point of the hearings, precisely as in seventeenth-century Salem, was that the accused make public confession, damn his confederates as well as his Devil master, and guarantee his sterling new allegiance by breaking disgusting old vows—whereupon he was let loose to rejoin the society of extremely decent people. In other words, the same spiritual nugget lay folded within both procedures—an act of contrition done not in solemn privacy but out in public air.” -Arthur Miller
Comparison between the Salem Witch Trials and McCarthyism: • Suspension of rational judgment • People who challenged the authority of the court soon found themselves under suspicion of guilt • Conscience was no longer a private matter but one of state administration
The Crucible does three important things: • Illustrates the belief that history repeats itself • Through the retelling of the Salem witch trials during the Red Scare of the 50s, The Crucible helped people to understand that often in life we are unable to see our moment in history very easily unless we are aided by earlier examples, or, in other words, unless we are able to make a connection between what is going on now and what has already happened. • Shows the danger of mob mentality—the kind of thinking/action where a large number of people act on poor information or they act using emotions, rather than logic.
Themes in The Crucible • Hypocrisy • Individual vs. the community (unity and exclusion) • Authority • Greed • Justice vs. retribution and revenge • Godliness vs. worldliness • Ignorance vs. wisdom • The Puritan Myth • Order vs. Individual Freedom It is also a story about the struggle between good and evil inside the heart of one man.
Universal Appeal • “[The Crucible] is Arthur Miller’s most frequently produced play not, I think, because it addresses affairs of the state nor even because it offers us the tragic sight of a man who dies to save his conception of himself and the world, but because audiences understand all too well that the breaking of charity is no less a truth of their own lives than it is an account of historical processes… • “The Crucible reminds us how fragile is our grasp on those shared values that are the foundation of any society.” • C. Bigsby
