Paranoia is deeply entwined with the human psyche, and parallels can be seen across generations. This is made extremely clear with Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, written in 1953, which parallels the communist-hunting era, so characterized by Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy and his incessant search for communists, against the backdrop of the Salem Witch trials. There are indeed many parallels which can be made.
In both the anti-communist atmosphere of the Cold War and the paranoia of ultra-religious Salem in 1692, there was an element of “the enemy is among us”. It was, to an extent, taken for granted that the individual societies had been infiltrated, and that anyone among them could be the enemy. In both situations, this fear of the “ever present” enemy led to paranoia and many false accusations, with the innocent often being punished. Since by human nature we are programmed to “categorize”, us vs. them, the effect was that even those under mere suspicion were treated inhumanely, as they could in fact be “the other”.
Another parallel in both cases is that the “enemy” looked like them. In the Salem Witch trials, anyone could have become infected by the spirit of the devil. In their peaceful early New England society, they were a mostly homogenous group, and indeed, some of the accused were even related directly to the preacher. This led to people airing old grievances with neighbors under the guise of outing them for witchcraft (to what extent they actually believed their accusations can be debated). In Cold War era United States, the same was certainly true. Albeit a multicultural nation, at the time and at the present, in the 1950s, there were few in positions of power who were not Caucasian, and ethnic groups were unlikely to interact with one another. At the same time, the Soviet Union had a large pool of Caucasian populace to draw upon to infiltrate the United States. The belief, one generally considered true, was that a properly trained KGB agent could live amongst Americans for years without being detected as a sleeper agent (if properly trained linguistically to have no accent, etc.). There was also a strong belief, not entirely baseless, that the Soviets had a large pool of home-grown talent to draw on. Socialist and Bolshevik movements were not unknown to the United States; indeed, Milwaukee, for example, had many Socialist party mayors throughout the 20th Century, and Socialism was particularly in vogue in the early 1900s. There was a precedent for believing that the enemy was among us. The German Revolution in 1918 had also cast a shadow over this; at the end of World War I, after the German government themselves had sent Lenin on a sealed train to St. Petersburg, thinking his Bolshevik Revolution was nothing more than a disturbance, the Kaiser was overthrown by a number of different forces, people (like Rosa Luxemburg or Karl Liebknecht) thinking of bringing Bolshevism to the German people. This notion would play heavily into the “Stab in the Back” theory popular in both Germany and the United States in the interwar period, and would contribute to the idea in the United States that enemies could be anywhere.
Another point in which they paralleled was that a fair trial was by no means ensured. Certainly, since witchcraft does not pragmatically exist, the people put on trial and executed at Salem were not given due process. Mere accusations were all it took to be hung or stoned, in lieu of any actual evidence. In the period of anti-communist hysteria in the United States in the 1950s, this was similarly true. The Hollywood Blacklist, for example, was a list of entertainers, directors, and producers who were “blacklisted” from employment for suspected communist leanings, despite the fact that no real proof was required to put them on this list. This is but one example of the many ways McCarthyism brought about hardship to the people it targeted; the people on this list had no opportunity to defend themselves against any charges, they were simply singled out and then denied work, careers, and livelihoods on the sole basis of the fact that some people believed they might have leftist leanings.
Both were also used as an opportunity to take out rivals. In Salem, if one had an ongoing dispute with a neighbor, a great way to seek revenge was to accuse them of witchcraft. Likewise, in the McCarthy era, the method was used directly to target what he perceived as political enemies, such as teachers, unions, and certain influential people in the entertainment industry.
Intriguingly, both might have occurred due to a drastic change in the conditions of the time. While Salem, and much of Massachusetts Colony up to that point, had been founded as a religious community, things were changing rapidly from within. Massive general colonization of Boston and the general introduction of indentured servants in the colony was changing the demographic from being a mainly pastoral and religious one to a much more generally inviting area centered around a large, urban metropolis. Religion thus was losing ground (Salem was less than a day’s journey from Boston). Surely, some of the inhabitants felt threatened by the conditions in the colony in general, which were changing quite quickly. In the United States in the 1950s, as well, things were changing quickly, though less on a local level (although if you consider the advances made in transportation and globalization since the 1690s, still very much on a comparable level). The United States had gone within only a few short months from being an ally of the Soviet Union to being its number one enemy in 1945-1946. By the time the 1950s rolled around, the Korean War was in full swing, backed on the opposing side by the Soviet Union. The Soviets had blockaded Berlin in 1948 to attempt to force the Allied powers out. Mainland China had become the then-Soviet backed People’s Republic of China. The Soviet Union also had the atom bomb, years before experts had predicted it could happen. The general feeling at the time was that things were changing rapidly, too rapidly, and in many tangible ways, against the United States’ favor. In this, we can see a parallel to Salem, where they were under similar pressures. This led to large-scale paranoia in both cases.
The Alger Hiss trial and the trial of the Rosenbergs for espionage did not calm fears in McCarthy-era United States. These events seemed to vindicate the paranoia that was already widespread. In a similar manner, the Salem Witch Trials, widely publicized in the area for their time and widely attended, did little to abet fears. Once people were convicted (however wrongly) of witchcraft, the layman then began to believe that there was indeed some substance to the idea that people were being possessed by the devil, and began looking for signs of witchcraft in things they otherwise would have seen as mundane. As unfortunate as it is, suspicion is also something hard-wired into the human brain, and once a person is trained to believe they should be looking for suspicious activity, they will find it, even when it is not actually there or the explanation is innocuous.
It is notable that, in our post-9/11 world, we also see many parallels to both of these incidents. People frequently express sentiments of feeling uneasy seated, or even on the same airplane as, people of islamic origin. The issue of police profiling has also come up heavily lately, with groups such as Islamic Americans and African Americans claiming to be (and statistically are) targeted for random searches more than the general populace (for example, at airport security checkpoints). We must take care to ensure that this trend does not cross the line into the outright witch hunt that both of these events celebrated.
Arthur Miller was vastly ahead of his time when he wrote The Crucible. Indeed, it is likely he that propagated the idea that the McCarthy era proceedings were in general just as baseless as those of the Salem Witch Trials. His astute recognition of that fact is certainly something history should be grateful for, and his play is a gift not only to literature, but to culture as well. Thanks to Miller, students the world over are given the opportunity to assess the parallels of the Salem Witch Trials and McCarthyism on a direct basis, and shown immediately what the similarities are on a personal level. It is notable that Miller himself would, after publication, be summoned before the House Un-American Activities committee and convicted of “Contempt of Congress” for not naming people who had attended various meetings with him. Indeed, his early persecution by the committee (in 1952) directly inspired the play. He was convicted of Contempt of Congress in 1956, for beliefs he no longer held, and interestingly would later go on to briefly marry Marilyn Monroe. Surely, though, his greatest contribution to society was in not only recognizing the injustices of McCarthyism, but also in recognizing the parallels to prior witch hunts, in particular, the Salem Witch Trials, and bringing them to the public in the concrete form of a well thought-out play. Society owes Miller a great debt, and we can only hope that we remember the lesson he taught us in The Crucible: that any one of us could be accused at any time for something we did not do, and while justice may help, it is the prevailing notions of the time that will ultimately influence the judgement that is made.
References:
Morgan, Edmund S. “Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and the Salem Witch Trials: A Historian’s
View.” Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Arthur Miller. Bloom, Harold. New York, New York: Infobase Publishing. 2007.
Cerjak, Judith A. “Beware the Loss of Conscience: The Crucible as a Warning for Today”.
The English Journal. Vol. 26, No. 5, Sept. 1987.
