Is The Crucible about McCarthyism?

A play set in 1692

The Crucible opened at the Martin Beck Theatre on Broadway on January 22, 1953. Arthur Miller set it in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, when accusations of witchcraft in one village grew into trials in which more than 200 people were accused and twenty were executed. The play never mentions Congress, communism or Senator McCarthy. Audiences in 1953 saw the parallel anyway, and the play won the Tony Award for best play that year.

Miller, Kazan and the committee

Miller made the trip to Salem’s court records in 1952. In his memoir Timebends (1987) he recalls what came just before it. He stopped at the Connecticut home of his friend Elia Kazan, who had directed his plays All My Sons and Death of a Salesman. Kazan told him he had decided to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee and name people he had known in the Communist Party. Miller drove on to Salem. Kazan’s testimony belongs to the story of the Hollywood blacklist.

The committee came to Miller too, in time. In 1954 the State Department refused him a passport to attend the play’s premiere in Brussels. In June 1956 he testified before the House committee, spoke about his own past, and refused to name the people he had seen at meetings of Communist writers years earlier. He was convicted of contempt of Congress in 1957, and an appeals court overturned the conviction in 1958.

The parallel: confess and name

Salem gave Miller a mechanism more than a costume. In 1692 an accused person could survive by confessing and naming others; those who held to their innocence went to the gallows. In the 1950s a witness could clear his name and work again by appearing before a committee and naming others. In both, a name spoken by someone else could be enough to ruin a life.

Miller’s hero, the farmer John Proctor, at last agrees to confess, then refuses to let his signed paper be posted on the church door, because it would brand him and shame those who died silent. Asked why he will not hand it over, he answers that it is his name, and he cannot have another. He chooses the gallows over the signature.

Where the comparison breaks

Critics pointed to a flaw from the start. There were no witches in Salem; the accused were innocent of something impossible. In 1950s America there were real Communists, and some of them had spied for Moscow, as the Venona cables later confirmed. Read that way, the play is truest about method: what happens when an accusation is treated as proof, and when the way to safety runs through other people’s names. Both points hold at once.

How “witch hunt” became a political word

In politics, a witch hunt is a hunt for enemies on hearsay, where the accusation does the work of proof. The phrase was already in use before the play. On June 1, 1950, in her Declaration of Conscience, Senator Margaret Chase Smith told the Senate she wanted neither a cover-up from the Democrats nor “a Republican smear or witch hunt.” Miller gave the phrase a story everyone could picture. Since then it has served accused people of every party, whether the charges against them were true or not.