Early in the year 1692, in
the small Massachusetts village of Salem, a collection of girls
fell ill, falling victim to hallucinations and seizures. In extremely
religious Puritan New England, frightening or surprising occurrences
were often attributed to the devil or his cohorts. The unfathomable
sickness spurred fears of witchcraft, and it was not long before the
girls, and then many other residents of Salem, began to accuse other
villagers of consorting with devils and casting spells. Old grudges
and jealousies spilled out into the open, fueling the atmosphere
of hysteria. The Massachusetts government and judicial system, heavily
influenced by religion, rolled into action. Within a few weeks,
dozens of people were in jail on charges of witchcraft. By the time
the fever had run its course, in late August 1692,
nineteen people (and two dogs) had been convicted and hanged for
witchcraft.
More than two centuries later, Arthur Miller was born
in New York City on October 17, 1915. His
career as a playwright began while he was a student at the University
of Michigan. Several of his early works won prizes, and during his
senior year, the Federal Theatre Project in Detroit performed one
of his works. He produced his first great success, All My
Sons, in 1947. Two years later,
in 1949, Miller wrote Death of a
Salesman, which won the Pulitzer Prize and transformed
Miller into a national sensation. Many critics described Death
of a Salesman as the first great American tragedy, and
Miller gained an associated eminence as a man who understood the
deep essence of the United States.
Drawing on research on the witch trials he had conducted
while an undergraduate, Miller composed The Crucible in
the early 1950s. Miller
wrote the play during the brief ascendancy of Senator Joseph McCarthy,
a demagogue whose vitriolic anti-Communism proved the spark needed
to propel the United States into a dramatic and fractious anti-Communist
fervor during these first tense years of the Cold War with the Soviet
Union. Led by McCarthy, special congressional committees conducted
highly controversial investigations intended to root out Communist
sympathizers in the United States. As with the alleged witches of
Salem, suspected Communists were encouraged to confess and to identify
other Red sympathizers as means of escaping punishment. The policy
resulted in a whirlwind of accusations. As people began to realize
that they might be condemned as Communists regardless of their innocence,
many “cooperated,” attempting to save themselves through false confessions,
creating the image that the United States was overrun with Communists
and perpetuating the hysteria. The liberal entertainment industry,
in which Miller worked, was one of the chief targets of these “witch
hunts,” as their opponents termed them. Some cooperated; 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.
At the time of its first performance, in January of 1953,
critics and cast alike perceived The Crucible as
a direct attack on McCarthyism (the policy of sniffing out Communists).
Its comparatively short run, compared with those of Miller’s other
works, was blamed on anti-Communist fervor. When Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg were accused of spying for the Soviets and executed, the
cast and audience of Miller’s play observed a moment of silence.
Still, there are difficulties with interpreting The Crucible as
a strict allegorical treatment of 1950s
McCarthyism. For one thing, there were, as far as one can tell,
no actual witches or devil-worshipers in Salem. However, there were
certainly Communists in 1950s America, and many
of those who were lionized as victims of McCarthyism at the time,
such as the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss (a former State Department
official), were later found to have been in the pay of the Soviet Union.
Miller’s Communist friends, then, were often less innocent than
the victims of the Salem witch trials, like the stalwart Rebecca Nurse
or the tragic John Proctor.
If Miller took unknowing liberties with the facts of his
own era, he also played fast and loose with the historical record.
The general outline of events in The Crucible corresponds
to what happened in Salem of 1692, but Miller’s
characters are often composites. Furthermore, his central plot device—the
affair between Abigail Williams and John Proctor—has no grounding
in fact (Proctor was over sixty at the time of the trials, while
Abigail was only eleven). Thus, Miller’s decision to set sexual
jealousy at the root of the hysteria constitutes a dramatic contrivance.
In an odd way, then, The Crucible is
best read outside its historical context—not as a perfect allegory
for anti-Communism, or as a faithful account of the Salem trials,
but as a powerful and timeless depiction of how intolerance and
hysteria can intersect and tear a community apart. In John Proctor,
Miller gives the reader a marvelous tragic hero for any time—a flawed
figure who finds his moral center just as everything is falling
to pieces around him.
