The Socio-Political Crucible of Arthur Miller's Play: - Semester 4, WBSU

The socio-political
Crucible of
Arthur Miller’s play
-Semester 4, WBSU
The Crucible draws a parallel between the Salem witch
hunts of 1692 and the Communist hunt by Senator
Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, explores the following
themes:
1. effects of fear/ threat on a community,
2. conflict between individual conscience and authority,
3. concept of post-Truth in modern age,
4. possibility of tragedy in modern times,
5. processes of control,
6. role of artist.
Other texts on the McCarthy era
• Eric Bentley, Thirty Years of Treason

• Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time
• Lately Thomas, When Even Angels
Wept: The Senator Joseph McCarthy
affair--a story without a hero
• Robert Goldston, The American
Nightmare: Senator Joseph R.
McCarthy and the Politics of Hate
FROM “Why I Wrote The Crucible: An artist’s answer to politics”,
The New Yorker, 1996
“ McCarthy’s power to stir fears of creeping Communism was not

entirely based on illusion, of course; the paranoid, real or pretended,
always secretes its pearl around a grain of fact. From being our
wartime ally, the Soviet Union rapidly became an expanding empire.
In 1949, Mao Zedong took power in China. Western Europe also
seemed ready to become Red—especially Italy, where the Communist
Party was the largest outside Russia, and was growing. Capitalism, in
the opinion of many, myself included, had nothing more to say, its nal
poisoned bloom having been Italian and German Fascism. McCarthy—
brash and ill- mannered but to many authentic and true—boiled it
all down to what anyone could understand: we had “lost China” and
would soon lose Europe as well, because the State Department—
staffed, of course, under Democratic Presidents—was full of
treasonous pro-Soviet intellectuals. It was as simple as that.
The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off
corresponding images of common experiences in the fifties: the old
friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen
talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into born-
again patriots; and so on. Apparently, certain processes are universal.
When Gentiles in Hitler’s Germany, for example, saw their Jewish
neighbors being trucked off, or farmers in Soviet Ukraine saw the
Kulaks vanishing before their eyes, the common reaction, even
among those unsympathetic to Nazism
or Communism, was quite naturally to turn away in fear of being
identified with the condemned. As I learned from non-Jewish
refugees, however, there was often a despairing pity mixed with
“Well, they must have done something.” Few of us can easily
surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The
thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many
innocent people is intolerable And so the evidence has to be internally
denied.
It was from a report written by the Reverend Samuel Parris, who was one
of the chief instigators of the witch-hunt. “During the examination of Elizabeth
Procter, Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam”—the two were “afflicted” teen-age
accusers, and Abigail was Parris’s niece—“both made offer to strike at said
Procter; but when Abigail’s hand came near, it opened, whereas it was made up
into a fist before, and came down exceeding lightly as it drew near to said
Procter, and at length, with open and extended fingers, touched Procter’s hood
very lightly. Immediately Abigail cried out her fingers, her fingers, her fingers
burned. . . .” In this remarkably observed gesture of a troubled young girl, I
believed, a play became possible. Elizabeth Proctor had been the
orphaned Abigail’s mistress, and they had lived together in the same small
house until Elizabeth red the girl. By this time, I was sure, John Proctor had
bedded Abigail, who had to be dismissed most likely to appease Elizabeth.
There was bad blood between the two women now. That Abigail started, in
effect, to condemn Elizabeth to death with her touch, then stopped her hand,
then went through with it, was quite suddenly the human center of all this
turmoil.
At a certain point, the high court of the province
made the fatal decision to admit, for the first time, the use of “spectral
evidence” as proof of guilt. Spectral evidence, so aptly named, meant that
if I swore that you had sent out your “familiar spirit” to choke, tickle, or
poison me or my cattle, or to control my thoughts and actions, I could get
you hanged unless you confessed to having had contact with the Devil.
After all, only the Devil could lend such powers of invisible transport to
confederates, in his everlasting plot to bring down Christianity.
Naturally, the best proof of the sincerity of your confession was your
naming others whom you had seen in the Devil’s company—an invitation
to private vengeance, but made official by the seal of the theocratic state.
It was as though the court had grown tired of thinking and had invited in
the instincts: spectral evidence—that poisoned cloud of paranoid fantasy
—made a kind of lunatic sense to them, as it did in plot ridden
1952, when so often the question was not the acts of an accused …
It seems to me entirely appropriate that on the day the
play opened, a newspaper headline read
“ ALL THIRTEEN RED GUILTY ”—a story about
American Communists who faced
prison for “conspiring to teach and advocate the duty
and necessity of forcible overthrow of government.”
The subcommittee first investigated allegations of Communist
influence in the Voice of America, at that time administered by the
State Department's United States Information Agency. Many VOA
personnel were questioned in front of television cameras and a
packed press gallery, with McCarthy lacing his questions with hostile
innuendo and false accusations. A few VOA employees alleged
Communist influence on the content of broadcasts, but none of the
charges were substantiated. Morale at VOA was badly damaged, and
one of its engineers committed suicide during McCarthy's
investigation. …
The subcommittee then turned to the overseas library program of the
International Information Agency. Cohn toured Europe examining the
card catalogs of the State Department libraries looking for works by
authors he deemed inappropriate. McCarthy then recited the list of
supposedly pro-communist authors before his subcommittee and the
press. The State Department bowed to McCarthy and ordered its
overseas librarians to remove from their shelves "material by any
controversial persons, Communists, fellow travelers, etc." Some
libraries went as far as burning the newly forbidden books. Shortly
after this, in one of his public criticisms of McCarthy, President
Eisenhower urged Americans: "Don't join the book burners. ... Don't
be afraid to go in your library and read every book."
“It's okay –
We're hunting
Communist"
October 31,
1947.
The
Washington
Post
Thurber and Nugent's comedy about academic freedom and anti-Red
philistinism on a university campus: a remake of The 1942 The Male Animal:
There can be little doubt that in the heyday of McCarthyism and the firings of
college teachers suspected of being Communists or fellow travellers, the
interchange between Tommy Turner, the English instructor, and Ed Keller, a
member of the board of trustees at Midwestern University, was a tense
moment in the theatre:
Ed: I'm just telling Turner here we've had enough of this Red business among
the students and the faculty. Don't want any more.
Tommy: This isn't Red, Mr. Keller.
Ed: Maybe not, but it looks bad. We don't want anything Red-or even Pink -
taught here.
Tommy: But who's to decide what is Red or what is Pink?
Ed: We are! Somebody's got to decide what's fit to teach. If we don't who
would.
Damon: I thought the faculty had-
Ed: No sir. You fellows are too wishy-washy. We saw that in the Chapman
case. Americanism is what we want taught here.
- The Male Animal, 1942, 1952
Murrow said of McCarthy:
No one familiar with the history of this country can deny that congressional committees are useful. It is necessary to
investigate before legislating, but the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one, and the junior
Senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. His primary achievement has been in confusing the public
mind, as between the internal and the external threats of Communism. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.
We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process
of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in
our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men—not from men who feared to
write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.
This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can
deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a
republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We
proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we
cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given
considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create this situation of fear; he
merely exploited it—and rather successfully. Cassius was right: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in
ourselves.”
"Transcript – See it Now: A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy". CBS-TV. March 9, 1954. Retrieved March
9, 2008. Berkely Media Resources Center.
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/libraries/media-resources-center
writers, academicians, comedians, journalists
In 1951, Ray Bradbury published The Fireman, an allegory on suppression of ideas. This served as the basis
for Fahrenheit 451 published in 1953. Bradbury said that he wrote Fahrenheit 451 because of his concerns at the
time (during the McCarthy era) about the threat of book burning in the United States.
In 1953, the popular daily comic strip Pogo introduced the character Simple J. Malarkey, a pugnacious and
conniving wildcat with an unmistakable physical resemblance to McCarthy. After a worried Rhode
Island newspaper editor protested to the syndicate that provided the strip, creator Walt Kelly began depicting the
Malarkey character with a bag over his head, concealing his features. The explanation was that Malarkey was
hiding from a Rhode Island Red hen, a clear reference to the controversy over the Malarkey character.
In 1953, playwright Arthur Miller published The Crucible, suggesting the Salem Witch Trials were analogous to
McCarthyism.
As his fame grew, McCarthy increasingly became the target of ridicule and parody. He was impersonated by
nightclub and radio impressionists and was satirized in Mad magazine, on The Red Skelton Show, and elsewhere.
Several comedy songs lampooning the senator were released in 1954, including "Point of Order" by Stan
Freberg and Daws Butler, "Senator McCarthy Blues" by Hal Block, and unionist folk singer Joe Glazer's "Joe
McCarthy's Band", sung to the tune of "McNamara's Band". Also in 1954, the radio comedy team Bob and
Ray parodied McCarthy with the character "Commissioner Carstairs" in their soap opera spoof "Mary
Backstayge, Noble Wife". That same year, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio network broadcast a
satire, The Investigator, whose title character was a clear imitation of McCarthy. A recording of the show
became popular in the United States, and was reportedly played by President Eisenhower at cabinet meetings.
The 1953 novel Mr. Costello, Hero by Theodore Sturgeon was described by noted journalist and author Paul
Williams as "the all-time great story about Senator Joseph McCarthy, who he was and how he did what he did."
"You read books, eh?"
During the postwar anti-communist campaign hundreds of
elementary and high school teachers were investigated
and lost their jobs, sometimes as a result of being named
by proliferating "anti-subversive" groups and individuals.
Some individuals compiled and circulated their own
blacklists, which were accepted by frightened employers
and casting directors who feared being blacklisted
themselves if they sought facts and fair play. The motives
of some self-serving or vindictive accusers were summed
up by Herb Block in a phrase: "If you can't crush the
commies, you can nail a neighbor."

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The socio-political

• Eric Bentley, Thirty Years of Treason

“ McCarthy’s power to stir fears of creeping Communism was not

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