Arthur Miller's Play Vs Mccarthyism

The horrors of history are passed on from generation to generation in hopes that they will never occur again. People look back on these times and are appalled at how horrendous the times were; yet, in the 1950s, history repeated itself. During this time, Joseph McCarthy, a United States senator from Wisconsin, began accusing people of being communists or communist sympathizers, which is parallel to the Salem witch trials in the late 1690s when innocent people were accused of practicing witchcraft. One of the people McCarthy accused was author and playwright Arthur Miller. To express his outrage at McCarthy’s actions, miller wrote The Crucible, intentionally drawing similarities between the McCarthy hearings and the Salem witch trials.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, communism was a major threat to the United States. Joseph McCarthy, a senator at the time, attempted to capitalize on this by accusing over two hundred men and women of sneaking communism into the United States government or for supporting the cause.* Among these two hundred men and women were several authors, including Arthur Miller. In explaining his reasoning for writing The Crucible, Miller said, ". . . my basic need was to respond to a phenomenon which, with only small exaggeration, one could say was paralyzing a whole generation and in an amazingly short time was drying up the habits of trust and toleration in public discourse."* After visiting Salem and researching the events of the Salem Witch Trials, Miller realized how the havoc of these events corresponded to the events in the 1940s and 1950s.*

Communism. Witchcraft. These two highly controversial topics are either feared or adored by people. There are numerous similarities and differences between both, yet one thing is prominent: they both incite hysteria. The Crucible by Arthur Miller is an allegorical play mirroring 1950’s America during the Red Scare. “McCarthyism” is the act of accusing someone of an act of treason without substantial evidence. It relies on the uncertainty and the fear of the unknown among people, which in turn, incites hysteria. Joseph McCarthy accused many people of being communists without much evidence or reason. The accusations in The Crucible also are proposed without evidence and cause much hysteria among the town. Since The Crucible was written as an

“A trial without witnesses, when it involves a criminal accusation, a criminal matter, is not a true trial.” - Bill McCollum. ‘The Crucible’ was a play written by Arthur Miller in 1953. It portrayed the obvious similarities between McCarthyism and The Salem Witch Trials. McCarthyism was a campaign against potential communists in the 1950’s led by Joseph McCarthy. The accused were blacklisted from their jobs even though the majority were innocent. The witch trials that took place in Salem, Massachusetts was the accusation and prosecution for witchcraft that took place between 1692 and 1693. The Salem witch Trials resulted in the execution of 20 people. There are many similarities between McCarthyism and ‘The Crucible’ including completely false accusations, a refusal to lie and confess to these accusations, and there is a clear lack of evidence in both the play and the trials.

Authors used their literary work to get a point across to the public in the story The Crucible; Arthur Miller used events and characters to show the similarities to McCarthyism which was prevalent in the 1950s. McCarthyism was associated with the period in the United Sates also known as the Second Red Scare. McCarthyism is very similar in the way that Joe McCarthy accused Americans of being communist and in The Crucible people were being accused of being witches. It is known that Arthur Miller wrote this story as a reaction to a tragic time in our history.

The Crucible, written by Arthur Miller, was not only a captivating play, but also a platform to fight against the iniquitous force of McCarthyism during the 1950s. Set in Salem, a town in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, the play dramatized the witch trials that brought widespread paranoia during 1692 to 1693. So to no one’s surprise, The Crucible and McCarthyism were juxtaposed. Since Arthur Miller wanted to criticize the acts of Senator Joseph McCarthy, he chose to express specific themes that appeared in both the play’s Puritan setting and in the United States. One of the major themes Arthur Miller wanted to convey through his work is the distrust of nature. In the remainder of this essay, I will be discussing the relationship of this theme to the play’s

While The Crucible is set during the Witch Trials, the entire play is essentially an allegorical symbol for the intolerance of McCarthyism. Several parallels

Arthur Miller's The Crucible, depicts the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 but is analogous to the McCarthy trials of the 1950s. In both situations, widespread hysteria occurs, stemming from existing fears of the people of that particular era. The Salem witchhunt trials parallel the McCarthy era in three major aspects: unfounded accusations, hostile interrogation of numerous innocent people and the ruination and death of various people's lives.

The Crucible is a dramatic and fictional play that was written by American author Arthur Miller during the time period of McCarthyism in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Due to the fear of internal communist subversion that reached a nearly historical pitch; The U.S. Government investigated and also falsely accused many of its federal employees such as author Arthur Miller. Miller has written the Crucible as allegory of McCarthyism to declare his dissatisfaction of the government. He believed justice should still be existed in the court system even though it was influenced by trends such as anti-communism and religion.

Arthur Miller, a famous playwright and a great American figure in the theaters. John Procter, one of his most famous actors in The Crucible. John played a hidden role in the Crucible, which was mainly describing Arthur’s point of view in about the McCarthyism. How are they alike? How does Arthur relate himself in his play to Proctor, mostly through his marriages, beliefs, and basically they had more common things in between.

Arthur Miller saw people's paranoia. He noticed this from the things he heard come from the mouth of senator Mccarthy such as. ‘’Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.’’ Words like this coming from someone so high really shook people. A product of McCarthy’s work was the horrible view of the accused and how their families cut off all ties with them. After seeing stories like this Arthur felt compelled to speak out against the scare. On the topic he said things like this “It would probably never have occurred to me to write a play about the Salem witch trials of 1692 had I not seen

There have been many events in history that shape the time we live in. The Crucible by Arthur Miller is an allegory for the Red Scare in McCarthy Era because of fear, accusations, anger within the people.

McCarthyism started when Joseph McCarthy, who was the U.S. Senator at the time, started making unsupported accusations of communists. He started by just accusing people he didn’t necessarily like. The same thing happened in The Crucible, Abigail Williams and her friends would accuse people they didn’t like of being witches. During the McCarthyism time period, Miller was one of the accused and became blacklisted. After he was blacklisted no one would hire

McCarthyism is well-known and embraced by Arthur Miller. His 1953 play on the Salem witch trials act as an allegory to Joseph McCarthy’s scandal, comparing them to a “witch hunt”, thus an allusion to the Salem tragedies. Miller uses his characters in a strict way to develop his allegory of the Puritan intolerance. Strongly implanted by Miller, his theme of intolerance demonstrates what thoughts spring to life and what he is trying to put forth. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Miller uses his characters of Deputy Governor Danforth, Abigail Williams, and Marry Warren to construct his overall theme of intolerance and thus does so substantially, proving his theory that a witch hunt provides nothing in which good comes out of it.

Miller wrote the play to compare what was happening in the 1950’s at that time with what had occurred in the Salem witch hunts. Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’ was written so that people at the time could relate what had happened in Salem with the McCarthyism happening at that time. The McCarthyism era was when the Un-American Activities Committee was at power and punished civilians who were accused as communists. The events that happened at