Analysing the Historical Content of the Crucible

In this essay, I intend to analyse the historical content of The Crucible and its relevance in today’s society. I believe that Arthur Miller’s life and his experience of McCarthyism strongly influenced the writing of The Crucible.

McCarthyism, named after Joseph McCarthy was a period of intense anti-communism, which occurred in the United States from 1948 to about 1956. During this time the government of the United States persecuted the Communist party USA, its leadership, and many others suspected of being communists. The word McCarthyism now carries the suggestion of false, hysterical accusation and large scale attacks on a minority. This anticommunist crusade stumbled in 1954, when the hearings were televised allowing the press and public to view McCarthy’s bullying tactics. He suffered a backlash in public opinion, and was then, himself investigated and McCarthy faded from the spotlight overnight.

In my opinion, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible takes two of the worst moments in American history, and uses them to demonstrate the pressure on people from society, to conform. Miller takes the Salem Witch trials and uses them to reflect on the McCarthyism period. By using religion as a sort of substitute for politics, Miller was able to see the similarities between the McCarthy era and the actions of the Puritans in Salem. Each event was just as cruel and merciless as the other, and even though the Salem Witch trials had occurred over 200 years before The Crucible was written, by using it to mirror the McCarthy era, the spirit of persecution was re-awoken. Just as McCarthy considered everything “Un-American” to be Communist, the Puritans in The Crucible thought everything un-explainable to be the work of the devil, and in both cases, the authorities demanded conformity.

In The Crucible people were put on trial and killed when they did something “un-explainable”. I think part of how Arthur Miller put this across as them being killed over whether or not it is a human right to resist conformity, for example in act three when John Proctor produced evidence that the very core of the Witch trials was a sham, he was accused of trying to overthrow the court and associating with the devil. His evidence was consequently discredited and he was executed. The only reason he “attempted to overthrow the court” seems to be because he took it upon himself to stop the madness and save the innocent people who were being accused of witchcraft.

The Crucible and McCarthyism have several similarities despite the fact that they took place at different points in time. Both The Crucible and McCarthyism involved people being wrongly accused of actions that they did not commit. Also, if someone in The Crucible confesses to being a witch in order to save their life, then their reputation is ruined and no one will ever view them the same way. In both McCarthyism and the Salem witch trials, if the person was not convicted, their image would be ruined and they would have a hard time building their image back to the way it was. Some cooperated but others, like Miller, refused to give in to questioning. Those who were revealed, falsely or legitimately, as Communists, and those who refused to incriminate their friends, saw their careers suffer, as they were blacklisted from potential jobs for many years afterward.

The society in Salem was a theocracy, a government based on religious beliefs. Therefore any sin would be seen as an offence against the public as well as against God. Sins, especially in Salem would most likely have been hidden away from public view, and this would also explain the way Miller wrote The Crucible. Everyone seemed to know, or want to know everyone else’s business. In both McCarthyism and the Salem witch trials, there was a huge amount of pressure to reveal the secret sins of friends and neighbours. People, therefore began to take advantage of this, and began using the opportunity to take out personal grudges, for example Act three, page 77, when Giles Corey confronts Thomas Putnam and points out to the court that Putnam stood to gain from everyone else’s losses. It also meant that people where highly suspicious of one another and reported everything as “witchcraft”. Similar events to Putnam’s suspicious convictions of his neighbours, again appear in McCarthyism. Many of people accused during the McCarthyism era were people with high positions of power, and plenty of people would have benefited from their loses. This shows that some people will go to any length to get what they want.

The language that Arthur Miller used when writing The Crucible is also very similar to the language used during the McCarthy era. Both refer to what they were objecting to as a disease that needed to be cured. “Witchery” threatened the purity of Salem and individuals within it. It is referred to as “a