When we encounter masses galvanized by a fairy tale to crush those who do not fall in line, or when we are faced with crowds who derive their power from fairy tales and go around subjugating those who are weaker than them, or when we see petty avarice for money, status, or career advancement lead to the harming of others….Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible” comes to mind.
It remains among the theater plays to have successfully captured the spirit of a particular era, simultaneously avoiding both trite and the kind of drab realism that would turn it into a documentary.
In 1953, when McCarthyism was in the ascendancy, Miller’s play emerged, reenacting the events that took place in the town of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692-3, a time rife with Puritan fanaticism. A group of girls, including a black slave from Barbados by the name of Tituba, went into the woods to dance. Samuel Parris, a merchant turned reverend, caught them engaging in what seemed an enchanted pagan ritual, as they had no clothes on. While the crowds headed towards the reverend’s house, rumors about witchcraft began spreading in the town. Although the girl who led the group, Abigail, insisted that they were only dancing, Parris, whom the townspeople despised because of his greed and lust for money, was overcome with fear of losing his religious standing and occupation. The girls’ dance in the woods allowed him to launder his reputation, as he was appointed the prosecutor tasked with pursuing and sentencing the women accused of witchcraft.
This foundational event of “The Crucible,” with its four acts, branches into several intertwined themes. There is McCarthyism, the Cold War, and the fears of communism of the time (Miller was among those interrogated towards the end of this era). Indeed, the puritanical seventeenth-century theocracy was coupled with the relentless struggle against the indigenous population (“Red Indians”), leaving the entire town of Salem tense and on guard, just as the US of the 1950s had been. This generalized unease demanded stringency and a hostile disposition.
For its part, McCarthyism used the term “un-American activities” to refer to sabotage and destructiveness, giving rise to a campaign of interrogations that went beyond current communists to encompass former communists, beyond former communists to those who might have identified with the ideology, and then to those who might become communists! This seemed to parallel what religion had been doing in Salem when it reinforced overblown fears of witchcraft that made it out to be a threat to religious orthodoxy. Thus, the dance in the forest led to over two hundred people being accused of witchcraft, with 25 of them executed, after sham trials, for being demonic beings that must be expunged from this world.
By using the trials in ‘Salem’ as a metaphor for or moral lesson about McCarthyism, Miller turned back to the religious roots that governed the establishment of this settlement and shaped its essence. The colony was seen from the start as a ‘city upon a hill,’ an implicit reference to the Gospel’s ‘Sermon on the Mount.’ The political connotation of recalling it was that the American idea is nothing but the fulfillment of the Bilibical will. This idea that McCarthyism revived entailed American exceptionalism, whereby the US is seen to have a sacred mission as a guiding light for the world.
The religious refugees from England who wanted to build a community founded on the Gospel established Salem had already been fanatical Puritans, in their behavior and morals, as well as their view of the relationship between God and believers. What they did establish was a theocratic and isolated society in which the clergy ruled in God’s name.
Religion became important once again in the 1950s. The US maintained a strong Christian identity, seeing itself as a nation of believers waging a cold war against the atheistic Soviet Union.
However, the play also tells us that when hysteria takes over, the weakest segments of society, especially women, pay the most dearly. Her gender and ethnic otherness made the Barbadian Tituba an easy target. She was the first to be accused of witchcraft. The second to be accused was Sarah Good, a homeless pauper, and she was followed by Sarah Osborne, who rarely attended church. The accusations swiftly became unbridled, while race, poverty, and especially gender remained common criteria. In fact, over three-quarters of the accused were women, while the accused men were linked, in one way or another, to those women.
The witchcraft lies were used to fortify the unequal power dynamic between genders, and trials were often designed to make it impossible for women facing male judges to prove their innocence. Thus, many of them were executed for petty reasons or no reason at all.
As for the division of labor within the nuclear family built on the authority of the male provider, which featured strongly in the play, it was a nod to the contemporary American experience of the time. During the Second World War, women entered the labor market in droves to compensate for the absence of the men needed by the army. When the war ended, they had to go back home and perform the tasks of “happy” mothers. As Betty Friedan’s famous 1963 book “The Feminine Mystique” notes, this became a theme of American feminists.
However, the world in which The Crucible takes place is one in which denouncing others is founded on a veneer of absolute purity and unwavering adherence to some form of righteousness. It is a sick and nasty place. Giles Corey, for example, was confident that the actual goal of the trials was stealing the land of the accused. Like the clergyman Samuel Paris, the large landowner Thomas Putnam was notoriously greedy. Meanwhile, fanaticism and opportunism competed to shape the behavior of Judge Thomas Danforth. Added to them were many men who tried to safeguard their standing as upright citizens by defaming others, especially women, and hurting them.
“The Crucible,” at the end of the day, is a harsh and dark piece that warns of evils that, almost immediately after leaving one place and time, reappear in a new place and time. Nonetheless, the enduring legacy of the play teaches us that only loyalty to truth and conscience can safeguard our reputation and honor. As for straight doctrines and virtues that are mainstreamed through terror, they only do the exact opposite.
