The Cruicable

The Crucible

We ask ourselves why did Arthur Miller write The Crucible. Why did he draw the connection between the Salem witch-hunt of 1692 and McCarthyism, which swept America in the 1950s?

Arthur Miller wrote: "I had read about the witchcraft trials in my college, but it was not until I read a book published in 1867 by Charles W. Upham, who was then the mayor of Salem, that I knew I had to write about the period".

On a gloomy spring day of 1952, one year before he finished writing The Crucible, he was leaving the house of producer Elia Kazan, who was about to testify before the HUAC, when Kazan's wife asked him what he planned to do. He then answered that he intended to visit Salem. She instantaneously understood the metaphor, and violently argued that such an analogy was specious, that there never were any witches but there certainly were Communists. However, he had already made up his mind, and left them.

Once in Salem, he soon realized that what happened there in the seventeenth century was happening again now. Arthur Miller wrote: "The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding ages of common experiences in the fifties". The same terror, which paralyzed Salem citizens in the spring of 1692, was paralyzing the United States. Actors were replacing Salem citizens, Communists were replacing witches, and Danforth turned over his court to McCarthy and the HUAC. Blind men of equivalent stuff were again forging history. One plot made way to another. Lucifer must have joined Karl Marx, or maybe the opposite, but the aim of reactionaries of every side was for sure to melt the two shapes of evil into one reality. Lucifer first plotted against God, and "In God We Trust?" It’s as true as Americans printed the motto on their currency to remember. Two hundred years later, Lucifer evolved in a more contemporary way, in the hope of convincing some credulous puppets to overthrow the government of the United States: two sides of the same restlessness, both harmful for the mental stability of the country. Ghostly evidence