Blog Post #8 - 1690s Salem vs. 1950s US: The Crucible & McCarthyism

As I examined this week’s transcripts, depositions, and documents in The Salem Witch Hunt, something that caught my eye – in the last section, which focused on John and Elizabeth Proctor – was the connection to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Senator McCarthy’s 1950s witch hunt. I found this connection interesting and helpful in contextualizing the relationships, motives, and tragedies of the trials of 1692. As The Salem Witch Hunt shares, for example, the purpose of McCarthy’s witch hunt was “to root out alleged Communists threatening the security and moral fiber of the nation” and “Miller’s play is a gripping piece of theater and a powerful commentary on the deadly impact of fear, suspicion, and malice.” It was also interesting to investigate the broad and specific Merriam-Webster definitions of “crucible” –

“Crucible looks like it should be closely related to the Latin combining form cruc- (‘cross’); however, unlike crucial, it isn’t. It was forged instead from the Medieval Latin crucibulum, a noun for an earthen pot used to melt metals, and in English, it first referred to a vessel made of a very heat-resistant material (such as porcelain) used for melting a substance that requires a high degree of heat. It’s possible that the resemblance between cruc- and crucible encouraged people to start using crucible to mean ‘a severe trial,’ as that sense is synonymous with one meaning of cross, but the idea of simmering in a literal crucible also sounds plenty severe. The newest sense of crucible (‘a situation in which great changes take place,’ as in ‘forged in the crucible of war’) recalls the fire and heat required to transform some solids into liquids.”

Keeping this definition of “crucible” in mind – a definition that makes me think of a rising and stifling fever, a pressure cooker situation of mounting anxiety and paranoia and othering – I looked closer at McCarthy’s 1950s witchhunt and Arthur Miller’s 1956 The Crucible. Interestingly, Miller drew inspiration from the McCarthy trials and the Salem Witch Trials that they mirrored in many unfortunate ways. For example, his protagonist, John Proctor, says: "We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!" For context, amid the Cold War (1945-1991) between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, deep fears of Communism gripped the American people – causing many to believe that Communist spies, the “reds,” were lying in wait among our citizens ready to subvert and harm us. As explained by Tara Miller – 

The first Red Scare created the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1938. HUAC was formed to find and uncover suspected communists in the United States in a process known as red-baiting. The first Red Scare focused on discovering subversive communists in the government, yet the second Red Scare focused on the entertainment industry… While formed to find covert communists, it was more commonly used to silence people and organizations that they, the powers that be, disagreed with. During the second red scare, Senator Joseph McCarthy gave a speech claiming to have two hundred and five names written on a piece of paper that were members of the communist party.

Finally, something else that I found interesting was how Miller’s writing reflected his encounters with McCarthy and HUAC. His first encounter was when he refused to sign an anti-communist declaration with the film release of Death of a Salesman – which decidedly marked him as a potential red spy. With this in mind, it was interesting to read about how Miller chose to lay out the protagonist and antagonist groups in The Crucible: “Miller represented the Hollywood elite with the people of Salem, The Communists were represented as witches, and McCarthy was represented by Abigail and those making the unfounded accusations.”

https://owlcation.com/humanities/The-Crucible-McCarthyism-and-a-Historical-View-of-Witch-Hunts