Salem Witch Hunt and McCarthyism - Book Report/Review Example

The Writer’s Name] [The Professor’s Name] [The Course Title] [Date] Salem Witch Hunt and McCarthyism This paper will enumerate the theme of McCarthyism as depicted in Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. Nevertheless, the theme of McCarthyism is not portrayed explicitly in the play, and Miller has been obdurate at times in his renunciation of McCarthyism as the stimulation for the work, yet, it is irrefutable that the theme of the communist witch-hunts in the early 1950s in the United States is strongly coupled with the literal witch-hunt happening in the play. The nation was in the center of a red scare in 1952, when the play was written, and Miller himself was extremely pretentious as an individual in the center of that scare, having been offered to give evidence against others and refusing to do so. Miller's play is about McCarthyism in a less restricted way than many observers have affirmed. In his introduction to his Collected Plays (1957), Arthur Miller returned to The Crucible, produced four years before, but he went back with an anguish provoked by the after-effects of McCarthyism, the witch-hunt of the 1950s, led by Senator Joe McCarthy and his lawyer-disciple, Roy Cohn. in 1954, Miller had been refused a passport by our State Department, so that he was unable to attend the opening of The Crucible in Brussels. Miller's authentic ordeal came in 1956, when he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and declined to name suspected communists, which led to a conviction of contempt of Congress in 1957. Though his conviction was reversed by the Supreme Court a year later, Miller's crisis is vividly conveyed in the 1957 introduction to his Collected Plays: It was not only the rise of "McCarthyism" that moved me, but something which seemed much more weird and mysterious. It was the fact that a political, objective, knowledgeable campaign from the far Right was capable of creating not only a terror, but a new subjective reality, a veritable mystique which was gradually assuming even a holy resonance. The wonder of it all struck me that so practical and picayune a cause, carried forward by such manifestly ridiculous men, should be capable of paralyzing thought itself, and worse, causing to billow up such persuasive clouds of "mysterious" feelings within people. It was as though the whole country had been born anew, without a memory even of certain elemental decencies which a year or two earlier no one would have imagined could be altered, let alone forgotten. Astounded, I watched men pass me by without a nod whom I had known rather well for years; and again, the astonishment was produced by my knowledge, which I could not give up, that the terror in these people was being knowingly planned and consciously engineered, and yet that all they knew was terror. That so interior and subjective an emotion could have been so manifestly created from without was a marvel to me. It underlies every word in The Crucible. It is not quite forty years since Miller composed these tense sentences, but one wonders whether they may not prove prophetic as we approach Millennium. Anti-communism is a faded banner since the demise of the Soviet Union, but witch-hunting takes many forms in the United States, and can be heard daily in the rhetoric of the Christian Coalition, the National Rifle Association, our rabid militia movements, and indeed the Gingrichian Republican party. Un-Americans are variously identified as homosexuals, Satanists, residents of New York City, or whatever, and once again an emotion "so interior and subjective" is being "created from without." The Crucible, alas, is likely to go on being as relevant a drama as it was back in 1953, when first it was staged. (Levin, 537-42) Eric Bentley, still the most intelligent and best informed of our dramatic critics, has pointed to the ways in which the genres of tragedy and of social drama tend to destroy one another in Miller's work. The Crucible, according to Bentley, rather too neatly separated the liberal sheep and the persecuting goats. Still worse, Bentley remarked that "one never knows what a Miller play is about: politics or sex." Is The Crucible a drama of adultery or of moral conscience confronting a persecuting society? How convincing is Miller's presentation of historical Salem and its obsessed self-destructiveness? The Crucible is certainly a successful stage play; revival follows revival, both here and in Great Britain. As a well-made play, The Crucible might seem to challenge comparison with George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, yet clearly it is not of Saint Joan's eminence, and in fact may owe a good deal to Shaw's drama that culminates in a public burning. (Griffin, 34) Some myths die hard. One of the most recalcitrant in recent times has been the myth of McCarthyism--the myth that America in the late 1940s and early 1950s was in the grip of a fearsome, paranoid "witch-hunt" against supposed Communists and other alleged traitors. According to this myth, the assault was fearsome because it blighted thousands of careers and lives, and it was paranoid because it was essentially groundless. Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee ranted on about Communist spies, but really, the myth of McCarthyism maintains, there were no spies to speak of, only liberals like ... well, like Alger Hiss. (Ferres, 95-101) The Crucible; no one, we think, will accuse Mr. Miller of having been overly subtle in his deployment of symbolism. But he has now for the first time cleared up any remaining doubts: "It would probably never have occurred to me to write a play about the Salem witch trials of 1692 had I not seen some astonishing correspondences with that calamity in the America of the late 40s and early 50s.... I refer to the anti-communist rage that threatened to reach hysterical proportions and sometimes did." Mr. Miller has always been a reliable source of radical-chic cliches and he does not disappoint in this new recollection. We can well believe him when he remarks that "Practically everyone I knew stood within the conventions of the political left of centre; one or two were Communist party members, some were fellow-travelers, and most had had a brush with Marxist ideas or organizations." But is it naiveté or something else when he goes on to declare that "I have never been able to believe in the reality of these people being actual or putative traitors any more than I could be, yet others like them were being fired from teaching or jobs in government or large corporations." Mr. Miller is especially incredulous that any of his fellow artists could have engaged in traitorous activities: "The unwelcome truth denied by the right was that the Hollywood writers accused of subversion were not a menace to the country, or even bearers of meaningful change. They wrote not propaganda but entertainment, some of it of a mildly liberal cast, but most of it mindless, or when it was political, as with Preston Sturges or Frank Capra, entirely and exuberantly un-Marxist." The scope of The Crucible is wide; a general illustration of a witch-hunt and an explanation of how and why they break out. To limit it to one particular twentieth-century witch-hunt is to wear blinkers. Miller's comment is for yesterday as well as for the day after tomorrow, and not merely the here-and-now of American politics. It is surely a kind of vanity to corner-off a section of a large work, identify with it, and claim that as the subject of the whole. It cannot be overlooked that The Crucible is applicable to any situation that allows the accuser to be always holy, as it also is to any conflict between the individual and authority. Timeless as An Enemy of the People, it symbolizes all forms of heresy-hunting, religious and political. (Douglas, 145-51) Miller himself covers the whole field by discussing contemporary diabolism alongside Hale's belief in the Devil. He writes of the necessity of the Devil: "A weapon designed and used time and time again in every age to whip men into a surrender to a particular church or church-state." He traces the Devil's progress, from Lucifer of the Spanish Inquisition to current politics. "A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence. Once such an equation is effectively made, society becomes a congeries of plots and counterplots, and the main role of government changes from that of the arbiter to that of the scourge of God." The events of the 1950s disturbed Miller, as he would later describe in his introduction to his Collected Plays, which was published in 1957: It was not only the rise of "McCarthyism" that moved me, but something which seemed much more weird and mysterious. It was the fact that a political, objective, knowledgeable campaign from the far Right was capable of creating not only a terror, but a new subjective reality. ... The wonder of it all struck me that so practical and picayune a cause, carried forward by such manifestly ridiculous men, should be capable of paralyzing thought itself, and worse, causing to billow up such persuasive clouds of "mysterious" feelings within people. ... With this in mind, Miller turned to the Salem witch trials, events he had similarly thought were nearly incomprehensible. He did extensive research on these trials using, among other things, various public records in Salem. Miller realized this was the right venue for his new play when he discovered one piece of information, namely that Abigail, the leader of the hysterical girls who appeared in court, had accused Elizabeth Proctor of being a witch but had not accused Elizabeth's husband, John. Miller changed historical events here slightly when he wrote his play, in that he rose Abigail's age and lowered John Proctor's to make an affair between them believable. He created the affair as Abigail's prime motivator for accusing Elizabeth. Even though there was no historical record of it, Miller felt it appropriate based on information he read. Some critics have called the affair forced; others have seen it as a device that works. Other such reasons also have been known to prompt the people in Salem at the time to accuse fellow citizens of witchcraft. For example, victims of societal prejudice were accused first--a black slave from a far-away land and another woman who was poverty-stricken and pregnant but unmarried. Similarly, prior to the trials, men were frequently creating reasons for suing landowners out of jealously because of their better animals and/or land. Once the witch trials began, Thomas Putnam, it was said, told his daughter who to accuse in court, knowing that he would be able to purchase the convicted man's property while he was serving his sentence in prison. Another reason for an accusation was explained to Miller after The Crucible was produced. In a letter from a descendent of John Proctor, it was cited that Proctor was an amateur inventor of items that others found suspicious because of their ingenuity. (Ditsky, 65-72) Some critics have accused Miller of inaccuracies in his portrayal of the Salem circumstances, and numerous essays have been written--both pro and con--on this topic. In the printed play, Miller includes a note just prior to its beginning explaining that his goal was not to recreate an exact history, and he enumerates the changes he has made and why. Over time, The Crucible has become Miller's most frequently produced play. Some critics see this as proof that the play is not just about the witch trials or McCarthyism but is universal. This, in fact, was Miller's goal, as he described it: "I wished for a way to write a play that would be sharp, that would lift out of the morass of subjectivism the squirming, single, defined process which would show that the sin of public terror is that it divests man of conscience, of himself." Miller has written extensively on theater, and in a piece for the New York Times after The Crucible was completed but before it was produced, he voiced a similar viewpoint to the one above, although in a different context. In the piece, he writes about the state of theater but makes no mention of The Crucible. He compares a negative force at work in the movie industry to one similar but less influential in theater, namely a practical, financial force to keep movies within certain boundaries and therefore similar and no longer risky. Works Cited Ditsky, John. "Stone, Fire, and Light: Approaches to The Crucible," North Dakota Quarterly 46:2 ( 2000): 65-72. Douglas, James W. "Miller's The Crucible: Which Witch is Which?" Renascence 15 ( 2003): 145-51. Ferres, John H. Twentieth-Century Interpretations of "The Crucible." Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2002. 95-101 Griffin, John and Alice. "Arthur Miller Discusses The Crucible," Theatre Arts 37 ( October 1999): 34. Levin, David. "Salem Witchcraft in Recent Fiction and Drama," New England Quarterly ( December 2001): 537-42. Read More