Similarities Between Mccarthyism And The Crucible
McCarthyism and The Crucible
Arthur Miller`s The Crucible is a timeless classic of witchcraft that is rooted in accusations and political motives. The crucible is set during the Salem witch trails and it centers on a young girl, Abigail Williams, and her quest to meet all of her selfish desires. A group of girls, led by Abigail accuse town people of witchcraft to cover up the fact that they were dancing in the forest. She eventually blames Elizabeth Proctor for witchcraft, so she will have Elizabeth`s husband, John for herself. Trials are conducted and many non-guilty people are convicted and killed. Miller`s drama was inspired by his own involvement in the House Un-American Committee trials during the McCarthy period. Arthur Millers The Crucible is strongly influenced by the events connected to McCarthyism during the 1950`s. In the 1950’s, American citizens faced the threat of looming nuclear annihilation that was posed by the Soviet Union and it’s …show more content…
satellite nations. America took many steps to curb the spread of the common enemy: communism. These steps included an arms race, cryptology, and national efforts by the civilian population. One of the national efforts was the creation of Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings into the depth of the American Communist Party. From this the House Un-American Committee (HUAC) was formed and led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. In the 1950`s, the HUAC questioned people that were suspected of being communists. The committee interviewed individuals about their activities and also asked them for names of others suspected communists (“Background”
Crucible). The committee pressured people to testify before them and name communists and communist sympathizers. Insisting on the right to silence as in the First Amendment, or on the right to not incriminate oneself as in the Fifth Amendment was suddenly seen as an act of treason (“Arthur” Interrogating). Those who refused to comply were found in contempt of congress and even sent to jail. They could also be blacklisted –unofficially shunned by employers- effectively ruining their careers. In 1950, HUAC began investigation Hollywood and its related communists of writers, actors, and directors (Jimmerson, 17). Enoch Brater wrote
“The progressive theatre community in New York became and early target for McCarthy and his henchmen.
Liberal, urbane, and left-leaning, many of them members of the original Group Theatre with Immigrant and often Eastern European Jewish roots (like McCarthy himself), the entertainment industry on both coasts provided some of the prime material HUAC needed to present its case before a provincial, puritantiantical and conservative America. Several members of the Group Theatre had indeed been members of the communist party in the 1930`s and all identified with the fight against poverty, inequality and fascism. McCarthy knew how well with the Cold War his truth could be manipulated” (Brater). Arthur Miller had an interesting history with HUAC witch ultimately sparked his creation of The Crucible. Miller had joined the Federal Theatre Project, which was founded in 1935 and designed to put actors and writers back to work during the depression. Rumors began to circulate that this organization was full of
communists
(Jimmerson 13). In 1952, Miller`s friend and director, Elia Kazan testified before HUAC and named Miller as a socialist sympathizer. Miller`s previous plays All My Sons and Death of a Salesman painted a less than flattering picture of capitalism, and led the HUAC to believe that the playwright had communist connections of some kind (Jimmerson 17). In 1953, Arthur Miller went on to write The Crucible, which largely reflects the trials during this time. Miller told Christopher Bigsby “it was really a tremendous outburst of primitive human terror” and that “The Crucible displayed his disgust with Red-baiting, his contempt for those who named names, and above all, is clear-sightedness concerning the show trail nature of the entire enterprise” (Brater). Miller wrote in the 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 political, objective, and 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 case, 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’” (“Background” Crucible).
Rather than situate the play in the contentious political climate of the McCarhyite present, Miller made the firm decision to look to the past. “Gradually over weeks, a living connection between myself and Salem, and between Salem and Washington were
profoundly and even avowedly ritualistic” (Brater). Miller wrote, “There was a fundamental absurdity in the Salem witch-hunt, of course, since witches didn’t exist, but this only helped relate it more to what we were going through” (Miller 96). Miller saw how both the HUAC hearings and the witch trials had a definite structure behind them, designed to make people publically confess. In both cases, the “judges” knew in advance all the information for which they asked (Abbotson). In both The Crucible and the McCarthy trials, the questioned people were expected to admit to being a witch or being a communist, and if they denied it then they were automatically guilty. “Salem`s seventeenth century victims refused to recant their confederacy with the forces of darkness; that was their crime and undoing. What their judges required, as in the HUAC interrogations, was a ‘public confession’ after which they could be ‘let lose to rejoin the society of extremely decent people” (Brater). During both historical periods, society created a problem to which over ran their lives and became part of their day-to-day lives. “I don’t think i can adequately communicate the sheer density of the atmosphere of the time,” Miller observed, “for the outrageous had became the accepted norm” (Brater). Also both instances of judgment were set forth due to the fact that Americans would judge themselves. Steven R. Centola wrote:
“John and Elizabeth Proctor, like many other Puritans, perhaps like many other Americans, assumed a priori that they were sinful and thus worthless. Therefor they misread and misjudged their lives` experiences. They judged themselves guilty and were willing to accept the verdict of guilty by others. Most frightening for the nation, this self-destructive attitude of guilt had become institutionalized in
the American theocracy, and when it was given power, these qualities which defined the victim became the instruments which supported and strengthened the oppression” (Centola 33).
Both McCarthy and Abigail Williams knew that when they lighted the fire of accusing people of these crimes that people would go along and that it would blow up significantly. Both The Crucible and the McCarthy trails have a common theme: hysteria and paranoia. The Crucible most significantly captures the climate of fear and the abuse of civil liberties set in motion by John McCarthy and other right-wing opportunists in the United States congress. Arthur Miller wrote:
“But it is impossible to convey properly the fears that marked that period. Nobody was shot to be sure, although some were going to jail, where at least one, William Remington, was murdered by an inmate hoping to shorten his sentence by having killed a communist. Rather than physical fear, it was the sense of impotence which seemed to deepen with each week, of bing unable to speak accurately of the very recent past when being left-wing in America and for that matter in Europe, was to be alive to the dilemmas of the day” (“Arthur” Interrogating).
Whichever way you turned during both periods, you faced the fear of being judged and labeled as guilty, and there also was a fear of coming into contact with the so-called “enemy” itself. “Paranoia breeds paranoia, of course, but below paranoia there lies a bristling, unwelcome truth, a truth so repugnant as to produce fantasies of persecution in order to conceal the truth” (Miller 96).
Arthur Millers The Crucible is strongly influenced by the events connected to McCarthyism during the 1950`s. Arthur Miller`s connection with the HUAC trials brought him to write The Crucible, which has strong ties to McCarthyism. Both periods were a time of un-right judgment, which resulted in the loss of many personal and physical lives. Nineteen lives were taken during the Salem witch trials and by 1954, HUAC had removed 212 Hollywood workers from all levels of production, putting an end to their careers (“Arthur” Interrogating). Both instances also bred hysteria and paranoia which only made things worse.
Works Cited
Abbotson, Susan C. W. “The Crucible.” Critical Companion of Arthur Miller: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work, Critical Companion. New York: Facts on File INC., 2007. Bloom`s Literary Reference Online. Web. 3 May 2013.
Arthur Miller. “The Crucible in History: The Massey Lecture, Harvard University.”
Arthur Miller: The Crucible in History and Other Essays. 2005. 33-55. Bloom`s Modern Critical Interpretations: Arthur Miller`s The Crucible. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: InfoBase Publishing, 2008. 96. Print.
“Background to The Crucible.” The Crucible. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 2010. Bloom`s Literary Reference Online. Web. 3 May 2013.
Brater, Enoch. “The Crucible`s Historical Parallels.” Arthur Miller: A Playwright`s Life and Works. New York: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2005. The Crucible, New Edition, Bloom`s Guides. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 2010. Bloom`s Literary Reference Online. Web. 3 May 2013.
Centola, Steven R. Modern Drama 28. (1985): 535-552. Rpt. In “History and other Spectres in Arthur Miller`s The Crucible.” Bloom`s Modern Critical Interpretations: Arthur Miller`s The Crucible. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: InfoBase Publishing, 2008. 26-33. Print.
Colton, Alyssa. “Literary Contests in Plays: Arthur Miller`s The Crucible.” Literary Context in Plays; Arthur Miller`s The Crucible. 2006. Literary Reference Center. Web. 3 May 2013.
“Interrogating The Crucible: Revisiting the Biographical, Historical, and Political Sources of Arthur Miller`s Play.” Staging a Cultural Paradigm: The Political and Personal in America Drama. P.I.E, 2002. 79-100. Rpt. In Bloom`s Modern Critical Interpretations: Arthur Miller`s The Crucible. New York: InfoBase Publishing, 2008. 103-158, Print.
Jimerson, M. N. The Crucible, Understanding Great Literature. Farmington Hills: Lucent Books, 2003. Print.
Arthur Miller`s The Crucible is a timeless classic of witchcraft that is rooted in accusations and political motives. The crucible is set during the Salem witch trails and it centers on a young girl, Abigail Williams, and her quest to meet all of her selfish desires. A group of girls, led by Abigail accuse town people of witchcraft to cover up the fact that they were dancing in the forest. She eventually blames Elizabeth Proctor for witchcraft, so she will have Elizabeth`s husband, John for herself. Trials are conducted and many non-guilty people are convicted and killed. Miller`s drama was inspired by his own involvement in the House Un-American Committee trials during the McCarthy period. Arthur Millers The Crucible is strongly influenced by the events connected to McCarthyism during the 1950`s. In the 1950’s, American citizens faced the threat of looming nuclear annihilation that was posed by the Soviet Union and it’s …show more content…
satellite nations. America took many steps to curb the spread of the common enemy: communism. These steps included an arms race, cryptology, and national efforts by the civilian population. One of the national efforts was the creation of Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings into the depth of the American Communist Party. From this the House Un-American Committee (HUAC) was formed and led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. In the 1950`s, the HUAC questioned people that were suspected of being communists. The committee interviewed individuals about their activities and also asked them for names of others suspected communists (“Background”
Crucible). The committee pressured people to testify before them and name communists and communist sympathizers. Insisting on the right to silence as in the First Amendment, or on the right to not incriminate oneself as in the Fifth Amendment was suddenly seen as an act of treason (“Arthur” Interrogating). Those who refused to comply were found in contempt of congress and even sent to jail. They could also be blacklisted –unofficially shunned by employers- effectively ruining their careers. In 1950, HUAC began investigation Hollywood and its related communists of writers, actors, and directors (Jimmerson, 17). Enoch Brater wrote
“The progressive theatre community in New York became and early target for McCarthy and his henchmen.
Liberal, urbane, and left-leaning, many of them members of the original Group Theatre with Immigrant and often Eastern European Jewish roots (like McCarthy himself), the entertainment industry on both coasts provided some of the prime material HUAC needed to present its case before a provincial, puritantiantical and conservative America. Several members of the Group Theatre had indeed been members of the communist party in the 1930`s and all identified with the fight against poverty, inequality and fascism. McCarthy knew how well with the Cold War his truth could be manipulated” (Brater). Arthur Miller had an interesting history with HUAC witch ultimately sparked his creation of The Crucible. Miller had joined the Federal Theatre Project, which was founded in 1935 and designed to put actors and writers back to work during the depression. Rumors began to circulate that this organization was full of
communists
(Jimmerson 13). In 1952, Miller`s friend and director, Elia Kazan testified before HUAC and named Miller as a socialist sympathizer. Miller`s previous plays All My Sons and Death of a Salesman painted a less than flattering picture of capitalism, and led the HUAC to believe that the playwright had communist connections of some kind (Jimmerson 17). In 1953, Arthur Miller went on to write The Crucible, which largely reflects the trials during this time. Miller told Christopher Bigsby “it was really a tremendous outburst of primitive human terror” and that “The Crucible displayed his disgust with Red-baiting, his contempt for those who named names, and above all, is clear-sightedness concerning the show trail nature of the entire enterprise” (Brater). Miller wrote in the 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 political, objective, and 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 case, 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’” (“Background” Crucible).
Rather than situate the play in the contentious political climate of the McCarhyite present, Miller made the firm decision to look to the past. “Gradually over weeks, a living connection between myself and Salem, and between Salem and Washington were
profoundly and even avowedly ritualistic” (Brater). Miller wrote, “There was a fundamental absurdity in the Salem witch-hunt, of course, since witches didn’t exist, but this only helped relate it more to what we were going through” (Miller 96). Miller saw how both the HUAC hearings and the witch trials had a definite structure behind them, designed to make people publically confess. In both cases, the “judges” knew in advance all the information for which they asked (Abbotson). In both The Crucible and the McCarthy trials, the questioned people were expected to admit to being a witch or being a communist, and if they denied it then they were automatically guilty. “Salem`s seventeenth century victims refused to recant their confederacy with the forces of darkness; that was their crime and undoing. What their judges required, as in the HUAC interrogations, was a ‘public confession’ after which they could be ‘let lose to rejoin the society of extremely decent people” (Brater). During both historical periods, society created a problem to which over ran their lives and became part of their day-to-day lives. “I don’t think i can adequately communicate the sheer density of the atmosphere of the time,” Miller observed, “for the outrageous had became the accepted norm” (Brater). Also both instances of judgment were set forth due to the fact that Americans would judge themselves. Steven R. Centola wrote:
“John and Elizabeth Proctor, like many other Puritans, perhaps like many other Americans, assumed a priori that they were sinful and thus worthless. Therefor they misread and misjudged their lives` experiences. They judged themselves guilty and were willing to accept the verdict of guilty by others. Most frightening for the nation, this self-destructive attitude of guilt had become institutionalized in
the American theocracy, and when it was given power, these qualities which defined the victim became the instruments which supported and strengthened the oppression” (Centola 33).
Both McCarthy and Abigail Williams knew that when they lighted the fire of accusing people of these crimes that people would go along and that it would blow up significantly. Both The Crucible and the McCarthy trails have a common theme: hysteria and paranoia. The Crucible most significantly captures the climate of fear and the abuse of civil liberties set in motion by John McCarthy and other right-wing opportunists in the United States congress. Arthur Miller wrote:
“But it is impossible to convey properly the fears that marked that period. Nobody was shot to be sure, although some were going to jail, where at least one, William Remington, was murdered by an inmate hoping to shorten his sentence by having killed a communist. Rather than physical fear, it was the sense of impotence which seemed to deepen with each week, of bing unable to speak accurately of the very recent past when being left-wing in America and for that matter in Europe, was to be alive to the dilemmas of the day” (“Arthur” Interrogating).
Whichever way you turned during both periods, you faced the fear of being judged and labeled as guilty, and there also was a fear of coming into contact with the so-called “enemy” itself. “Paranoia breeds paranoia, of course, but below paranoia there lies a bristling, unwelcome truth, a truth so repugnant as to produce fantasies of persecution in order to conceal the truth” (Miller 96).
Arthur Millers The Crucible is strongly influenced by the events connected to McCarthyism during the 1950`s. Arthur Miller`s connection with the HUAC trials brought him to write The Crucible, which has strong ties to McCarthyism. Both periods were a time of un-right judgment, which resulted in the loss of many personal and physical lives. Nineteen lives were taken during the Salem witch trials and by 1954, HUAC had removed 212 Hollywood workers from all levels of production, putting an end to their careers (“Arthur” Interrogating). Both instances also bred hysteria and paranoia which only made things worse.
Works Cited
Abbotson, Susan C. W. “The Crucible.” Critical Companion of Arthur Miller: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work, Critical Companion. New York: Facts on File INC., 2007. Bloom`s Literary Reference Online. Web. 3 May 2013.
Arthur Miller. “The Crucible in History: The Massey Lecture, Harvard University.”
Arthur Miller: The Crucible in History and Other Essays. 2005. 33-55. Bloom`s Modern Critical Interpretations: Arthur Miller`s The Crucible. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: InfoBase Publishing, 2008. 96. Print.
“Background to The Crucible.” The Crucible. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 2010. Bloom`s Literary Reference Online. Web. 3 May 2013.
Brater, Enoch. “The Crucible`s Historical Parallels.” Arthur Miller: A Playwright`s Life and Works. New York: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2005. The Crucible, New Edition, Bloom`s Guides. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 2010. Bloom`s Literary Reference Online. Web. 3 May 2013.
Centola, Steven R. Modern Drama 28. (1985): 535-552. Rpt. In “History and other Spectres in Arthur Miller`s The Crucible.” Bloom`s Modern Critical Interpretations: Arthur Miller`s The Crucible. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: InfoBase Publishing, 2008. 26-33. Print.
Colton, Alyssa. “Literary Contests in Plays: Arthur Miller`s The Crucible.” Literary Context in Plays; Arthur Miller`s The Crucible. 2006. Literary Reference Center. Web. 3 May 2013.
“Interrogating The Crucible: Revisiting the Biographical, Historical, and Political Sources of Arthur Miller`s Play.” Staging a Cultural Paradigm: The Political and Personal in America Drama. P.I.E, 2002. 79-100. Rpt. In Bloom`s Modern Critical Interpretations: Arthur Miller`s The Crucible. New York: InfoBase Publishing, 2008. 103-158, Print.
Jimerson, M. N. The Crucible, Understanding Great Literature. Farmington Hills: Lucent Books, 2003. Print.