Notes on "The Crucible"
Arthur Miller, the man who wrote "The Crucible" commented on the
connection between the Salem witch trials and the Red Scare.
Describing the time he spent going over original documents from the
time of the trials. He said,
. . . [G]radually, over the 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 even avowedly
ritualistic. After all, in almost every case the [House UnAmerican Activities] 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
[Communist] Party, and informers had long ago identified the
participants in various meetings. 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 the public
air. The Salem prosecution was actually on more solid legal
ground since the defendant, if guilty of familiarity with the
Unclean One, had broken a law against the practice of witchcraft,
a civil as well as a religious offense; whereas the offender
against HUAC could not be accused of any such violation but
only of a spiritual crime, subservience to a political enemy's
desires and ideology. He was summoned before the Committee
to be called a bad name, but one that could destroy his career. .
. . Timebends, A Life by Arthur Miller, page 331.
Several years after he wrote "The Crucible," Arthur Miller himself was
called to testify before the HUAC. He refused to answer the
Committee's questions about the names of persons who had been
present at meetings of writers that he had attended in the 1930s. As a
result, he was charged with criminal contempt of congress, tried and
then convicted. The conviction was later thrown out by the U.S.
Supreme Court.
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Question 1: Why would one of the country's most celebrated
playwrights risk going to jail for refusing to give names that the
HUAC already had in its files?
It has been argued that there were no real witches while there actually
were real communists, some of whom were subservient to the Soviet
Union, a real threat. Miller responds that during the time of the Salem
trials, the best minds in America and in Europe believed in the
existence of witches. He notes that on three occasions, the Bible warns
against witches. Historians, both secular and religious, confirm that
witches have existed and continue to exist, though not in the
stereotypical image used to raise hysterical fear in centuries past; they
never rode broomsticks nor did they have green skin, although they
may have used frogs in some of their traditional remedies. Both
witches and communists were feared, both reviled. Both were seen as
a serious threat to the dominant paradigm and as such had to be
eliminated, especially when there was economic or political gain to be
had in the process. Miller comments on the offense of the accused in
both situations:
The House Un-American Activities Committee [had] been in
existence since 1938, but the tinder of guilt was not so available
when the New Deal and Roosevelt were openly espousing a
policy of vast social engineering often reminiscent of socialist
methods. But as in Salem, a point arrived, in the late forties,
when the rules of social intercourse quite suddenly changed, or
were changed, and attitudes that had merely been anticapitalist-antiestablishment were now made unholy, morally
repulsive, and if not actually treasonous then implicitly so.
America had always been a religious country. Timebends, A
Life by Arthur Miller, pages 341 & 342.
The House Un-American Activities Committee was abolished in 1975.
The religious fervor Miller mentions can be seen in the term "godless
communists" that was commonly used in the period following World
War II and in the sudden inclusion of the words "under God" in the
Pledge of Allegiance.
Question 2: How does religion play a role in the anti-terrorist
campaign being waged around the globe today?
The universality of the "The Crucible" is demonstrated by the fact that
people in countries other than the U.S. can use the play/film as a
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window through which to view their own efforts to gain the personal
freedom. Miller, in his autobiography, describes the following incident:
In Shanghai in 1980, ["The Crucible"] served as a metaphor for
life under Mao and the Cultural Revolution, decades when
accusation and enforced guilt ruled China and all but destroyed
the last signs of intelligent life. The writer Nien Cheng, who had
spent six and a half years in solitary confinement and whose
daughter was murdered by the Red Guards, could not believe
that a non-Chinese had written the play. "Some of the
interrogations," she said, "were precisely the same ones used on
us in the Cultural Revolution." It was chilling to realize what had
never occurred to me until she mentioned it -- that the tyranny
of teenagers was almost identical in both instances. Timebends,
A Life by Arthur Miller, page 348.
"The tyranny of teenagers," is the focus of action in the "The Crucible"
but not in the American experience during the Red Scare. No youthful
exuberance can explain the excess of the McCarthy and HUAC
hearings, or the two hundred years of persecution suffered by witches
prior to the events in Salem. Miller's play brought forth the universal
truth of religious and political intolerance and as such it is important in
the world-wide battle for rights clearly spelled out in the First
Amendment of the United States Constitution.
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