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The Crucible vs. McCarthyism The Crucible by Arthur Miller was made in reference to McCarthyism, or paranoia of the presence of Communism in the United States in the 1940’s and 1950’s. During this time many citizens were accused of being Communist and were punished, even though they were innocent. The purpose of The Crucible was to depict how McCarthyism was just as unfounded and nonsensical as the witch trials that occurred centuries prior. Miller had made numerous connections between the hunt for communists and the witch hunts in Salem in 1692 (“Salem Witch Trials”). This is a description of how they overlapped and how Miller showed this correlation in his story. McCarthyism started by Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin senator in the late 1940s and early 1950s. During this time, President Truman had ordered background checks on all citizens associated with the government in hope of finding and prosecuting Communists. McCarthy used this to his advantage in order to be taken seriously as senator and began to accuse people of being Communist spies. He gave a speech accusing 205 individuals of being a spy for the Soviet Union for gaining secrets about the atomic bomb. This launched a full-blown investigation in …show more content…
More specifically, the time they were set in. The Crucible was set in a time of puritanism and fear of witchcraft, while McCarthyism or “the Red Scare” took place just after the Cold War, which was a time when the fear of Communism was at its heights.The fear in both was fueled by select individuals making accusations against prominent figures. In The Crucible it was Abigail Williams making the primary accusations against well-known women in the community. This is paralleled by McCarthy accusing popular actors and artists in Hollywood. In both situations, it created a sense of insecurity among the population. They believed if those individuals could be guilty, than anyone could be (“McCarthyism, Red
As once stated by Joseph R. McCarthy “I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five people that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department” (Joseph). The red scare occurred in the 1950’s when United States senator Joseph McCarthy lied when accusing people for being communists. McCarthyism is the practice of making false accusation for the purpose of ruining the lives of innocent people. In the play, The Crucible by Arthur Miller, which takes place in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 when the townspeople were accusing and being accused of witchcraft. Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible as a reference to the red scare because in 1692 and 1950’s, both societies were being watched closely, were restricted of certain opportunities, and in both there were false accusations. In The Crucible, Salem’s downfall was caused by theocracy because the church plays an enormous role in
Joseph McCarthy was a Republican senator who did as much as he could to whip up anti-communism in the 1950s. In the time of his term, he didn’t attach his name to anything significant until February 9, 1950. On that day, he gave a political speech claiming that he had a list of 205 Communists in the State Department. Although nobody saw the list of names and it wasn’t clarified by anybody else, the speech made national news. Furthermore, this relates to The Crucible because Abigail, like McCarthy, made multiple false witch accusations on women in Salem. Arthur Miller’s historical play, The Crucible, portrays the historical events of the Salem witch trials through a number of memorable characters and a background based off of McCarthyism. While
Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible as a protest paper to the brutality of the Red Scare .The Red Scare was the inoperable fear of Communism within the United States. This scare was caused as a result of the Cold War in the 1950’s. During the Cold War the US was scared of an attack of the Soviets, and the Soviets were equally as scared of an attack upon them by us. Joseph McCarthy, a Senator from Wisconsin, saw this fear as an opportunity to rise to power. McCarthy had many supporters that were primarily Republicans, Catholics, Conservative Protestants, and Blue-collar workers. McCarthy ruthlessly utilized scare tactics to get people to believe and follow him blindly into his accusations as to innocent citizens supporting Communism and either having them jailed or killed by providing phony evidence. Arthur Miller was not intimidated by this he wrote the Crucible as “an act of desperation” (Miller). This desperation was to counteract the lack of speaking out about personal beliefs during the Red Scare for the fear of breaking the law. In The Crucible, Miller wrote about a character named John Proctor who is very similar to Miller himself. Both the author and the character had to overturn the same personal paralyzing guilt, not speaking out soon enough. Nonetheless, their eventual overcoming of this guilt leads them to becoming the most forthright voice against the madness around them.
What is McCarthyism? It is the public onslaught of an individual or an individual’s character by means of baseless and uncorroborated charges, basically the repudiation of a person’s reputation. Joe McCarthy was the Wisconsin senator that evoked this era of fear and paranoia by inflaming the current fear of world domination by the Communist party that enveloped the Nation. He did this by announcing that he had discovered “57 cases of individuals who would appear to be either card carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy.” (McCarthy, 1950, p. 2), later the amount of implicated individuals rose to 205. These accusations launched McCarthy into the national spotlight where he then began his smear campaign against many well-known Americans, which was commonly referred to as “witch-hunts”. Because of McCarthy’s actions, up to 12, people lots their jobs hundreds were incarcerated. He then turned his sights to book banning because he claimed there were 30,000 books written by all shades of Communists. After his lists were made public all were removed from the Overseas Library Program. But he was not finished yet, he then assailed members of the entertainment business. He had writers and actors brought to trial. Many of these people were blacklisted and worse, all without a single shred of evidence. When people spoke out against McCarthy they were thrown onto the communist train, until enough people came forward to rebuke McCarthy’s unprecedented tactics. At this point he fell from political power into dishonor on December 2, 1954. This ended the McCarthy era, but not the atmosphere of paranoia that lingers in the nation today.
A very famous man once said, “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.” (Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933). This is certainly true when it comes to Arthur Miller’s, The Crucible. Arthur Miller lived through the Red Scare, also known as McCarthyism. After living through this era and being one of the accused communists Miller wrote the book titled The Crucible in 1952. This book told the story of the Salem witch trials with some modifications to make it more relevant to the current situation. The book ultimately became an allegory devoted solely to McCarthyism. In The Crucible it uses situations such as the actual trials; direct comparisons of the characters in the book to those that participated in the McCarthy trials and, the atmosphere of the two events were almost identical.
The Crucible by Arthur Miller The Crucible is a fictional retelling of events in American history surrounding the Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century, yet is as much a product of the time in which Arthur Miller wrote it, the early 1950s, as it is description of Puritan society. At that particular time in the 1950s, when Arthur Miller wrote the play the American Senator McCarthy who chaired the ‘House Un-American Activities Committee’ was very conscious of communism and feared its influence in America. It stopped authors’ writings being published in fear of them being socialist sympathisers. Miller was fascinated by the Salem Witch Trials and that human beings were capable of such madness. In the 1950s the audience would have seen the play as a parallel between the McCarthy trials and the Salem Trials.
The Crucible is paralleled directly to the Salem Witch Trials and indirectly to the McCarthy hearings of the 1950’s. The story of The Crucible takes place against the background of the Salem Witch, trials but the themes lie much deeper. The main themes expressed in The Crucible relate to the events that occurred at both the Salem Witch Trials and during the McCarthy era. At the Salem Witch Trials, one hundred fifty people were accused of practicing witchcraft and nineteen of those were convicted and executed. The evidence against these people was hardly substantial. At the McCarthy hearings, thousands of people were “blacklisted.” Anyone who tried to oppose the accusations was also viewed as a Communist. No one was convicted due to the more advanced legal system; still, that did not erase the fear that was instilled by the allegations.
There is a strong connection between McCarthyism and the Salem With Trials, which are what The Crucible is based on. Arthur Miller immediately recognized this link, and displayed a great example of an abuse of power, and people going to great measures to get what they want (Brater). The desire for power, unsubstantiated accusations, and the detrimental effects of these accusations are the ways in which The Crucible is connected to McCarthyism. Power and selfishness can destroy the lives of those that possess it, and the lives of people around them. Humans are easily influenced by what others do and say, which is why people can gain power so easily. It is the choice of the powerful to use their power in the correct way. When power is misused, paranoia and chaos, as well as many other negative effects result.
McCarthy was elected senate after becoming a lawyer in his sate of Wisconsin. During the first few years of his term nothing major really happened until 1950. In a speech to the Women’s club of wheeling in West Virginia he stated that he had a list in his hand of about 205 known members of the communist party working for the United States department. President Harry Truman had signed an executive order that said that all communists or fascists could not obtain a United States government job. The FBI played a big role in the investigation of this list McCarthy contained. McCarthy’s friend j. Edgar Hoover, which was a violent ant-communist in the federal government, could not wait to expose the people McCarthy accused of being communists. McCarthy’s list created a nationwide scar among the people of the United States. Everything McCarthy said was a lie and he had no evidence to show that the people he accused were really communist but, because of the start of the Korean War and the arrest of two American soldiers accused of spying on the Soviet Union American citizen...
In 1950s, Joseph McCarthy started to accuse hundreds of people for believing in communism so that he can strike fear in people hearts and can remain in power, just
McCarthy told people, that he “cannot take the time to name all the man in the state department who have been named as members of the communist party and members of a spy ring, I have in my hand a list of 205”(McCarthyism). McCarthy as the U.S. senator made unsubstantiated claims that more members of the communist party had infiltrated the united states government and he had no proof the
Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is a play that was first performed in 1953 in the United States of America in the midst of the persecution of alleged communists during the era of McCarthyism. Although the play explicitly addresses the Salem which hunt, many find that the play is an analogy to McCarthyism due to the striking similarities in which the people behaved. Miller highlight the different groups of characters in order to reveal overlying ideas of the play such as: Self preservation, power, and hypocrisy.
In The Crucible, the mass hysteria surrounding the witch trials caused paranoia amongst the people of Salem. Miller uses the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 as a symbol and allegory of the fear surrounding the spread of communism during the 1950s in America. The community’s sense of justice was blinded by the mass hysteria and for some, a desire for vengeance and personal gain. The Putnams
In The Crucible, Miller patently compares the communist witch hunt with the famously discredited Salem witch hunt, parodies the agitators of the Red Scare, and perhaps most provocatively, implies that the American people and government are complicit in its horrors.... ... middle of paper ... ... Do to their defiant stance against H.U.A.C.
Events have played out in history that made people realize the inhumane acts of people and the Salem witch trials and the McCarthy era were two of them. The Salem witch trials in 1692 were almost 260 years before the McCarthy “witch hunts” in the 1950s yet there are similarities between them. The Crucible, written by Arthur Miller in 1953, is about the Salem witch trials and is an allegory to the practicing of McCarthyism during the Second Red Scare in the United States, which Miller was a victim of. Although there may be differences between “The Crucible” and McCarthyism, ultimately the anger, lack of evidence, and the people were alike in both events.