Because of the fear of witches, people tried to protect themselves by sending anyone slightly untrustworthy to jail or to Gallows Hill. Centuries later Senator Joseph McCarthy, like Abigail Williams spread fear. Unlike Abigail, McCarthy spread fear about communism during the Second Red Scare. McCarthy started by creating
The unwarranted accusations that Joseph McCarthy and the citizens of Salem made are what fueled the widespread hysteria in both situations. According to Miller “It seemed that the hysteria in Salem had a certain inner procedure, or several, which were duplicating once again and that perhaps by revealing the nature of that procedure some light could be thrown on what we were doing ourselves. "(Miller) He made this statement in comparison to the present day witch hunts; which were at the time of the McCarthy trials. The people of Salem accused others of witchcraft to protect their own lives. In both eras, they struck fear in citizens due to the "guilty until you confess" attitude which were in favor of the court.
A History of Persecution For millennium humans have been afraid of the unknown and what they do not understand. This fear has led to violence and the perpetration of unspeakable actions in the name of eradicating that fear. During the 1940’s and 50’s the United States was suffering under the fear of communist sabotage and were turning to McCarthyism to root out the traitors. Playwright Arthur Miller saw the unfairness and mad persecutions that were sweeping the nation and satired it all in his play The Crucible which is a retelling of the Salem Witch Trials that took place in Massachusetts in 1692. Miller used the play to represent injustices that were going on at the time such as accusations that had no substantial evidence, an unfair assumption that the accused was guilty until proven innocent, and the tendency of Senator McCarthy to retaliate against any criticism against him an accusation of being a communist sympathizer.
Two passages highlight tremendous fault in judgment pertaining to witch hunting, both of which I will explain and reflect upon throughout this essay. During the first act, upon Mr. Hale’s entry, Miller exposes the connections between communism vs. capitalism and good vs. evil. As Mr. Hale holds that “the devil is a wily one” (Miller, 35) and must be stopped, there were many in both the United States and communist Russia who condemned the opposite party of espionage in an effort to undermine what they believed to be “good” in the battle of “good” vs. “evil”. Russia, for example, during the years of Stalin’s reign, held military tribunals for those accused of conspiring with the capitalists. The average duration of these trials was three minutes (class notes, POL 334) and, most always, the tribunal
By comparing the periods of the Salem Witch trials in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and the era of McCarthyism in the film Good Night and Good Luck, I can say that these two periods were essentially the same, only the name of the threat was different. Also I can draw some parallels between the relationship between the Estonians and the Russians during nowadays. First similarity is the spreading of paranoia and terror among the society. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, people were afraid, that their fellow members of the society were witches. Terror and panic rose in the Salem community as the paranoia and terror about the communists did in the era of McCarthyism during the late 1940s to the late 1950s.
Occurring in late sixteen hundreds, the Salem witch trials was a manhunt derived from greed and vengeance. During the 1940s and the 1950, a wave of paranoia and anti-communist sentiments consumed the nation. Headed my Senator Joseph McCarthy, the House of Un-American Committee arrested and questioned citizens about their past or resent connections to the communist party. In play The Crucible, the Salem witch trials serve as the foundation for Arthur Miller’s allegorical tale about the era of McCarthyism. At a first glance, many assume a direct connection does not exist between the play and the dark event in history, but analyzed closely, the Crucible parallels the events of the Red Scare.
McCarthyism in the 1950’s was the practice of broadcasting allegations of political treachery or rebellion with inadequate regard to evidence. The events that took place in the 1950’s concerning McCarthyism are what inspired Miller to write his play on the Salem witch trials of 1692. The fear of repeating the horrors of the past pushed him to try and open the eyes of those who seemed to be following a dangerous path. The Crucible and McCarthyism both contain instances of false accusation, wrongly gained power, and mass hysteria. Similarly to the Salem witch trials, McCarthyism started in a time of great fear, but instead of fearing witches that made pacts with the Devil, the people of the 1950’s feared communism.
In The Crucible, people accused each other of witch craft without proper evidence because they were afraid of being called witches. For instance, when Reverend Hale accused Tituba of dealing with witch craft, she immediately confessed that the devil has spoken to her and she accused Goody Osburn and Goody Good of being witches. In the same way in 1950 Senator McCarthy made claims about certain people being communists or communist sympathisers because he feared that America was becoming a communist country. These sort of unsubstantiated claims are another reason why The Crucible relates to our contemporary society. For example, the Federal Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi made a request to ban the burqa because he thought that it was being used as a disguise by criminals, this allegation was later rejected due to a lack of evidence.
Parris and Procter did not agree on how people would be accused of something. Procter says to Parris “But who tells us Rebecca Nurse murdered seven babies by sending out her spirit on them? It is the children only, and this one will swear she lied to you”. (III.116-132) Procter knew the girls were lying because Abigail had told him so. The fear of it being true made the people crazy.
Act I mostly describes the main characters in the play. The act takes place in Reverend Parris' home. Reverend Parris discovered his daughter dancing naked in the woods with other girls and his negro slave, later he called in the Reverend Hale to investigate his doubts and thinking’s of the witchcraft. In this act what really talks about is the superstition of Parris, also it could be said that it talked about the viciousness of Abigail, and what I thought was the most important one, was the secret of Proctor with Abigail. During Act II it shows that Proctor wants to defend himself from the truth.