The Crucible Allegory

Witch Trials Many people today have read Arthur Miller’s great play “The Crucible” and believe that the real witch trials were portrayed in the play but many of the facts are not particularly wrong but might be twisted. There are many proven facts that some of the story is not true to the real life events and this confuses many people because “Arthur Miller makes his characters so vivid and actually used the real names of the people that were in the trials”(Salem Witch Museum). It has been proven that Arthur changed the story on purpose to use it as an allegory for the anti-communist Red Scare to get across to the government of what they were actually doing. In the beginning of the play Arthur admits to altering the play for dramatic effect.
His main goal in writing “The Crucible” was to raise awareness that the government is pretty much doing the events that happened in the Witch Trials minus the killing as they were using tactics that weren’t in the constitutional freedoms and expecting Americans of subversive behavior. Joseph R. McCarthy began conducting his own investigation in the U.S. Senate he was accusing innocent people of having ties to communism and violating their rights by asking unfair questions to people that answering either yes or no, they couldn’t possibly prove it. Arthur smartly used this story as a symbol in saying how it’s all mass hysteria and is taking away the freedoms of everyone just because they look or act a certain way. Arthur could be seen as a spark that let the world wee what was going on with the silly trials that made no sense to accuse someone of something they did and throw them in prison without and wrong
The town of Salem suffered a case of mass hysteria that will be looked upon forever considering innocent people were murdered due to young girls trying to keep a lie going so they didn’t get caught doing something that would have landed them in trouble. We need to look upon this as an important role in our history and how things started to get almost stirred up again in the 1950s with McCarthyism spreading around. The madness was started by the Soviet Union threatening us with nuclear holocaust and the fear that there were communist spies in America so they started imprisoning innocent people who were believed to be a spy for the Soviet Union. With the help of many people along with Arthur he stopped the madness pointing out how the government was using bullying tactics and unfair advantages and were blaming innocent people who had no right to be convicted of