McCarthyism and The Crucible
... a good example of a modern day ‘witchhunt’. McCarthy led the Senate Committee on Internal Security which, like the Salem judges, forced people to confess, and then name the associates. Once Miller had discovered this, he decided to travel to Salem in 1952 and see for himself what the small isolated town looked like. Once in Salem, he soon realised that what happened there in the seventeenth century was happening again now. He wrote: “The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding ages of common experiences in the fifties”. The link between the two situations is outstanding: both sought to hunt out ‘witches’ going against the dominant values of the time; both created hysteria among the public covering the course of justice and forcing people to follow through lies; both involved individuals speaking out against others in order to prove their lack of guilt. Miller recognised this direct link and was able to write a play that would explore ‘the mystery of the handling over of conscience’, which he viewed as ‘the central and informing fact of the time’. Both the Salem Witchhunt and the Red Scare were triggered by fear. They both happened because of timing and outside events. In both cases, the “inquisitions” followed serious war. In the Witchhunt, it was the time before the reason and science when the Puritans were defending their way of like and establishing the New World. In the Red Scare, it was the time when the U.S. was assuming its role as a world power; communism was different and considered a threat to democracy. In the 1692 trials, supernatural evidence was accepted, and so were allegations during McCarthy’s hearings. During the fifties, a question before the committee was not about the acts of an accused, but the thoughts and intentions in his unfamiliar mind. Arthur Miller wrote: “The old friend of a blacklisted person crossed the street to avoid been seen talking to him”. In this case, it’s the same way, as Giles Corey did not dare to name other names, since his wife w...