Comparing The Crucible and Salem Witch Trials Essay

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.*

In Massachusetts during the late 1600’s, a series of prosecutions accusing people of witchcraft was a prominent event known as the Witch Trials (Salem witch trials, Wikepedia.com). As a result, many literature pieces, books, and poems were written based on the Witch Trials in Salem particularly, like Arthur Miller’s novel, The Crucible. The Crucible is well known for its incorporation of the Puritan community, making it an extensive novel, as noted by Susan Abbotson, an author who critiqued Miller’s work. Ms. Abbotson notes that much of the story is spent outside the courtroom and in the society as a whole. Consequently, her remark founded the discussion about the idea of power- hungry characters and corruption in The Crucible. In The Crucible

The Crucible by Arthur Miller is a historical play set in 1962 in the small town of Salem, Massachusetts. As you may know, you've all placed your trust in the words and actions of someone close to you. And what do they do? They betray you! It's rarely justified, and can happen to the best of us. Based on authentic records of witchcraft trials in the seventeenth-century this play explains how a small group of girls manage to create a massive panic in their town by spreading accusations of witchcraft. These rumors in turn are the causes that many citizens are hung for. This essay will show how the lies and betrayal of a few individuals eventually leads to the downfall of Salem and its society.

“Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it,” said George Santayana. If this is true, then why have we continued to repeat something like the Salem Witch Trials on more than one occasion, including the recent uproar of sexual assault accusations? Although The Crucible and modern day accusations of sexual assault differ in the ways that these assault accusations are in modern times and they are also on something that is not related to religious beliefs, they ultimately have more in common, like how evidence was and is shaky for some cases, all accusations were started by a domino effect, and reputations were ultimately ruined even if the accused were proven innocent eventually.

In Miller’s lifetime, McCarthyism was happening. The Red Scare in the 1950s made everyone in the United States afraid of what communists in the United States might do to them. This intolerance between communists and non-communists caused distrust, suspicions, and mass hysteria during the Cold War in the United States, as it did in seventeenth century Salem. A person’s reputation during McCarthyism, however, could hurt them more then

In 1962 the penalty of witchcraft was to be hung or smashed. There was a big outburst of witchcraft and spells that were going around among the people of Massachusetts in 1962. Some of the women of Salem began the witchcraft many people started to catch on and fallow them. A lot of these people were hung do to what the bible said about the wrongs of witchcraft. When these women of Salem Massachusetts started to do witchcraft and pass it on to other people they were put on trial for their actions, which at the time was, illegal. It had caught on all over England and was spreading fast. Arthur Miller made a play called the Crucible that was about the Salem witchcraft trials. Arthur miller took the historical

Many people often question what McCarthyism is and what it stands for but today there will be light shed on the subject and they can figure out how real it was. In the first place, The definition of McCarthyism is, “The practice of making accusations of disloyalty, especially of pro-Communist activity, in many instances unsupported by proof or based on slight, doubtful, or irrelevant evidence”(McCarthyism). The practices of McCarthyism were very unjust and many people were wrongfully accused of

In l993, three young children from a small town in Arkansas were found hogtied, sexually abused and murdered in cold blood; because they were different than everyone else in the town, the teenagers who were falsely accused of this crime lost eighteen years of their lives. The same thing occurred in the play written by Arthur Miller, The Crucible, the people who were different than the social norm were arrested and tried as witches. The teens from Arkansas, and the accused from The Crucible were all profiled by the public and their local justice system because they were different that their expectations of “normal”.

What do the Salem Witch Trials and the Holocaust have in common? Despite being tragic events that transpired decades apart, innocent people were murdered upon the false pretenses of a religious driven mass hysteria and madmen. The similarities in both events are astounding as both were caused by differences in personality, culture, and way of life. There are many plays and books that perfectly convey the horrors of the Holocaust, but only one play exists that tells the story of the Salem Witch Trials to the extent that they really happened. The Crucible by Arthur Miller is believed to be a realistic account of these trials. He tells of the suffering of the people and the hysteria brought upon the townsfolk through his words. Through his mind,

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the idea of communist subversion was becoming frighteningly real. These fears came to define–and, in some cases, corrode–the era’s political culture. For many Americans, the most enduring symbol of this “Red Scare” was Republican Senator Joseph P. McCarthy of Wisconsin. McCarthy spent almost five years trying in vain to expose communists and other left-wing “loyalty risks” in the U.S. government.In February 1950, appearing at the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy gave a speech that boosted him into the national spotlight. Waving a piece of paper in the air, he declared that he had a list of 205 known members of the Communist Party who were “working

The play opened with the girls doing something considered taboo in Puritan society, dancing in the woods. The girls involved in this were Abigail Williams, Betty Parris, Mary Warren, Ruth Putnam, and a few others. Tituba, Reverend Parris’s slave from Barbados was also with them. All of the girls involved were caught by Reverend Samuel Parris, the minister of Salem. When Reverend Parris catches the girls dancing in the woods, his daughter Betty Parris becomes

Continuing his claims of suspected communists, various innocent people were questioned, and some cases ended up proving nothing because of how the information received showed little evidence of the suspects being a communist. Despite some of the cases having repeated or weak information, the Senate still called for a full investigation, making suspects tell names of others who are communists. It is stated in the article, “Those who repented and named names of suspected communists were allowed to return to business as usual. Those who refused to address the committee were cited for contempt” (McCarthyism 3). People who were suspected conformed so that they would not be held for contempt. People accused others in order to avoid the punishment for contempt, fearing how the punishment would affect their life. McCarthy’s accusations also had an effect on those who were on the lower rank as well, it reads, “Uncooperative artists were blacklisted from jobs in the entertainment industry. Years passed until many had their reputations restored” (McCarthyism 3). People conformed in fear of consequences that would practically destroy their life. Being blacklisted meant being unable to find jobs and having a ruined reputation, so civilians conformed to the law to keep their jobs and not have their lives destroyed. Conformity is achieved by fear of consequences throughout McCarthyism,

This drama called ‘The Crucible’ written by Arthur Miller talks about a town called Salem that has an outbreak. Not just your regular flu outbreak, but an outbreak in witches. The town is having trials in their court all the time to find out if these witches are placing curses on the town, and the town is trying to get rid of all the witches. The main characters include Abigail, John Proctor, Elizabeth, Reverend Parris, Tituba, and Betty Parris. The author's purpose of this play was to inform the readers of the ‘Salem Witch Trials.’

One of the many works written and driven by Puritan influence, The Crucible by Arthur Miller has continued to influence life and thinkings. Its story tracing the 1692 Salem Witch Trials has been widely read, received and understood, along with influencing the reader and their ideals. The play has manifested into more than words on a page and has become of the greatest influences, even sixty years after its publication. Though its story has not changed and is merely a retelling of the original itself, its themes have greatly impacted its universal and enduring state.