Over-Exaggerations on McCarthyism in The Crucible by Arthur Miller

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“I visited Salem for the first time on a dismal spring day in 1952….” (Miller 1095) that’s what started it all. Arthur Miller was motivated to write The Crucible due to the trauma done to the liberals during the McCarthyism trials. The question is, was he a little too motivated to write it? Could his thirst for vengeance for those accused fuel him to over-exaggerate what happened in order to prove a point? Arthur Miller overused his artistic license because Joseph McCarthy was accusing important people of being communists, he wasn’t exactly like Danforth, and some of the accused in the McCarthyism trials were actual communists. To begin with, Joseph McCarthy wasn’t accusing unimportant people of being communists. In fact, “McCarthy claimed that he had a list of 205 people in the State Department that were known to be members of the American Communist Party.” (Spartacus Educational) Arthur Miller himself was put on a blacklist of the House of Un-American Activity Committee for not giving up names. That begs the argument that Miller had a personal vendetta against McCarthy and would ha...

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