The Crucible

Arthur Miller wrote the play The Crucible in response to the red scare of the 1950’s, in which he was was condemned for disrespect & disapproval of the United States Congress for being unsuccessful in naming numerous individuals who had attended meetings with him. In a bid to not only secure his career as a journalist & play writer and also to alert the American people against the government misinformation & propaganda that were headed their way. The characters in the play are faced with the same tragedies & sentences that befell people during the McCarthyism trials; he uses the ‘Salem Witch Trials’ as a metaphor to draw national attention towards the doings and executioners of the McCarthyism propaganda. Arthur Miller uses allegory in his play, The Crucible, to show the similarities between the Salem witch trials and the Red Scare. During the McCarthy era, freedom was a very important aspect in life; during the Salem witch trials, religion was a very important aspect of life. In both of these events, people are frightened. The Red Scare led to many people fearing others, thinking everyone was a Communist. In the Salem witch trials, witchcraft is threatening the village. Miller also wanted to show the similarity between both corrupt courts in these two events. In the Salem witch trials, all substantial evidence is through out of the window, and everything that supports witchcraft is valid. Much is the same with the Red Scare court system.
The obvious connections between the Salem Witch Trials and the McCarthy era are illustrated throughout The Crucible, and one could argue Miller wrote the play to help Americans realize the wrong in accusing others without evidence. During both the witch trials and the chaos in the 1950s, innocent people were blacklisted, trivial actions became suspicious, and humans allowed their fear to run their actions.
In both cases, respectable people were unjustly accused, and blacklisted, permanently ruining their reputations. Accusations came from fear of being accused, as well as the fear of being in harm. Many people who were highly respected were accused of unreasonable crimes, and due to the hysteria at the time, they were not questioned. For example, in the 1950s Senator Joseph McCarthy created a list of potential individuals he feared were communist, such as Walt Disney, Ronald Regan and Arthur Miller. McCarthy created this list based off of his own fears of communism, and unsubstantial evidence, and accused many highly respected people of an unrealistic crime. McCarthy accused people of communism who did not support the communist party in any way, and “resulted in their prominent careers being destroyed” and loss of their family and friends “all based on untrue rumors which were spread about them”