Narrative
Arthur Miller's The Crucible and McCarthyism
The transition to the discussion of American literature will reflect how art imitates life in an effort to understand and deal with the problems and fears people face in stressful times of war and civil unrest. This will be the emphasis for the study of The Crucible. While this play is widely taught as a caveat to students about judging others, the implications that Miller was presenting are often lost on high school students. After delving beyond the surface story of the Salem witch hunts, drawing the parallel to McCarthyism is a difficult transition for many students. Through the introduction of a possible, present-day threat to the students' own civil liberties, they may be better able to make a connection.
Why did Arthur Miller feel compelled to write this play? What were his personal connections to the injustices being done by the House Un-American Activities Committee? And why choose the Salem witch trials as his parallel? Looking back at the theocracy governing Salem, perhaps Miller saw a parallel between that rule and the government in the Cold War era. The Salem goal was "to keep the community together, and to prevent any kind of disunity that might open it to destruction by material or ideological enemies" (McDougell Littell, 2002, p. 168). E. Miller Budick points out in his essay, "History and Other Spectres in The Crucible" that in the introduction to his Collected Plays, Miller asserts that he was attracted to the story of the Salem witch trials before McCarthyism. What he was really interested in was authoritarian systems and how they operated:
It was not only the rise of "McCarthyism" that moved me, but something which seemed much more weird and mysterious. It was the fact that a political, objective, knowledgeable campaign from the far Right was capable of creating not only a terror, but a new subjective reality, a veritable mystique which was gradually assuming even a holy resonance. . . . It was as though the whole country had been born anew, without a memory even of certain elemental decencies which a year or two earlier no one would have imagined could be altered, let alone forgotten.4
The theocracy of Salem was absolute in its power. Later, the House Un-American Activities Committee became a power almost as strong. The fervor was contagious; many wanted to jump on the bandwagon while others were terrified into complying. In the McCarthy hearings as well as in the Salem witch trials, once one person opened up, others followed. What Miller highlighted was the inability of people to judge one another. While a government must make attempts to try people for crimes fairly, the task is monumental and the system an imperfect one.
Joe McCarthy didn't see it that way. He took on the arduous task of single-handedly weeding the Communists out of America. When he was finally censured by the Senate it was apparent what a brute and bully he had become. This is summed up quite succinctly by British writer Iris Murdoch: ". . . politicians aren't concerned with justice being done, they're concerned with justice seeming to be done as a result of their keen-eyed vigilance" (Murdoch, 1978, p. 34).
Imagine being a member of a small community with virtually no contact with the world outside the two dozen or so farms making up that community. Now think about the kind of people who inhabited the Salem, Massachusetts community in 1692. These Puritans were bound by strict rules governing their daily lives and their beliefs. Life in Salem in the 1690s would offer little variety. You would rarely meet anyone new, your chores would change only with the seasons, and the company you kept would be strictly controlled by church law, family interventions, and the limited leisure time available. What would young people do for amusement? In the play, Tituba became the novelty for the young girls because of her knowledge from her native Barbados. She spoke and sang in a language unknown to the others and mixed a cauldron of soup containing chicken blood. The girls danced around this in secret, as dancing was prohibited in Salem.
All these little things started out as tiny guilty pleasures, but soon, fear and guilt overtook the girls and what had started out as sport due to boredom, grew as the accusations became deadly. Think about the power of suggestion. If someone tells you she is casting a spell on you and you are a suggestible personality, you might allow yourself subconsciously to believe it. The beginning of group hysteria is easy to see at the end of Act I of The Crucible. Once Tituba confesses publicly to Reverend Parris, Betty and Abigail start naming names, too. This natural occurrence in the play is the first of many parallels to the naming of names in the McCarthy hearings.
In the commentary in the McDougell Littell text, a suggestion is made that the reader is led to see the Devil as a necessary part of a respectable view of cosmology (McDougell Littell, 2002, p. 182). It balances out good to acknowledge evil. In the Puritan society so concerned with beating the natural tendencies of evil out of a person, the manifestation must become very real. Voltaire said that if there were no God, it would be necessary to invent Him. If this is true, then man must surely invent the Devil, too. This is the only convenient place to place blame. Psychologists would call this transference, the act of transferring the responsibility of blame from oneself to another person or object.
So the question may come down to whether or not the accused were guilty of witchcraft or the accusers were just intent on blaming them or maybe the events surrounding the Salem witch trials were just due to the rye crop and the fungal infestation, Ergotism. In her book Poisons of the Past, Mary Kilbourne Matossian traces the spread of this disease from Eastern Europe and documents the climatic conditions that made it a likely source for the "fits" experienced by the people in Salem in 1692. Due to a failed wheat crop, rye became a staple grain. Rye that is infested with ergot appears with small buds or spurs growing among the grain on each stalk. Many of the symptoms of its consumption correspond to those reported by the citizens of Salem. These included hallucinations, and feelings of being pricked or pinched. The basic ergot alkaloid is lysergic acid hydroxyethylamide, or LSD (Matossian, 1989, pp. 115-122). This possibility could explain some of the behaviors of the era, but could not have been responsible for everything. For that, group hysteria must occur. In a small community with one outsider, represented in The Crucible by Tituba, the slave from Barbados, it was easy to assign, or transfer the blame. In the same vein, blaming the Communists for everything was en vogue in The Cold War era.
How does one explain away the hysteria during the McCarthy Era? Was there something in the water? Was Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (from Dr. Strangelove) right about our "precious bodily fluids" being poisoned through some plot involving fluoridation? In contrast to the society at the time of the Salem trials, the 1950s found this country enjoying a return to solid family life following WWII. In the documentary, Rosie the Riveter5, five women who were in the workforce during World War II recall their experiences. "Rosie the Riveter" was a popular poster featuring a white American female with her hair tied up and sleeves rolled up to show her capable biceps. This indicated the willingness of the American women to step in and temporarily take over for the boys who were away at war. Following the end of the war, women were encouraged to get back into their nurturing roles as homemakers as the men went to college on the GI Bill or reassumed their jobs (Rosie the Riveter, 1980). Everything should have been fine but everything wasn't fine. Senator Joe McCarthy felt compelled to ferret out the subversive element in American society that he was sure would cause the end of democracy. Many law-abiding citizens' careers and lives were destroyed by political zealotry in his endeavor to keep America safe for democracy. The fear of an invasion still loomed; or perhaps he was just ambitious. Regardless, there was enough fear and suspicion to sway many people. How did he get away with it? Did he have that charisma that sucked others into his realm, making them believe in his cause simply because of his enthusiasm? If that was the case, then who was doing the bewitching?
Senator Joe McCarthy began his life as the fifth of what was to be a family with nine children, born in Wisconsin to farmers of Irish descent. An unattractive child with short arms and a barrel chest, he was protected by his mother who told him to "be somebody" (Rovere, 1959, p. 80). Nothing in his upbringing suggested that he would rise to the power he achieved. His five years of fame began only three years after he became a senator and ended three years before his death at age forty-eight.
At the beginning of his term he was unremarkable. Then, on February 10, 1950 he made a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia in which he stated that he and the Secretary of State had a list of several known Communists in the State Department. That did it. Overnight, it seems, Joe McCarthy became an eponym. The political cartoonist Herbert Block (Herblock) coined the term "McCarthyism."6 To this day, the term is not a compliment, intimating that if something resembles McCarthyism it is extreme and unproven.
Fear soon overtook good judgment. McCarthy had boasted of knowledge and that gave him an aura of power. This blatant act was just the beginning of his desecration of American civil liberties. The Truman administration was completely cowed by him and The Washington Post voiced its hope that the Eisenhower era would stem the power McCarthy wielded, but it was not so. He flaunted his confidence and even was likened to Hitler (Rovere, 1959, p.18). While he was not anti-Semitic, he nevertheless wanted to "cleanse" away the Communist element. Rovere further recounts personal stories of some of the officials in Washington at the time actually blanching at the sound of McCarthy's name (Rovere, 1959, p.16). Just possessing the ability to instill that much fear in an entire administration is reminiscent of Hitler's reported charisma. The known difference is that McCarthy had no far reaching plans for what to do once he had rid the country of the Reds.
Rovere's book was published in 1959. In 1968, Roy Cohn published his book, McCarthy. In his description of how he met the senator, Cohn refers to Rovere as "a kind of one-man bureau of misinformation on the subject. . ." (Cohn, 1968, p. 45).
The transcript of Edward R. Murrow's interview with McCarthy from his television show See it Now reveals McCarthy's questioning tactics and Murrow's preparedness for the interview. Murrow pointedly corrects McCarthy with accurate documentation. For instance, when McCarthy states that only the left wing press criticized him, Murrow brings out a chart with quotes from eight major U.S. papers.
Another example was McCarthy's questioning of Reed Harris about the content of a book he had written in 1932—more than two decades earlier, and further criticized the man for allowing himself to be represented by an attorney provided by the American Civil Liberties Union. The point McCarthy was making was that the ACLU was listed as a front for the Communist Party. Murrow's point was that Harris' case was important to McCarthy only as a vehicle for pointing out the ACLU's alleged alliance with the Communist party. One month later McCarthy said that Murrow was "the leader and the cleverest of the jackal pack which is always found at the throat of anyone who dares to expose Communist traitors."7
What about today? What do we believe here and now? Do we feel safe, and why or why not? How can we really tell? We are now facing an uncertainty unlike any seen on this continent since the Revolutionary War. Since 9/11 everything in America has changed, and for the first time since then, we Americans live with the uneasy knowledge that terrorists could strike again—anywhere—not overseas, but here—right here where we live. How safe do we feel that the government is protecting us? And how far are we willing to go to be safe, i.e. what civil liberties are we willing to compromise in order to maintain our safety and the safety of our way of life?
These are difficult questions. To bring these questions to a place in a teenager's reality it is vital to come up with an issue that is near and dear to a teenager's heart. This would be his/her music. With this in mind, the original narrative exercise will put forth several questions for the students to consider, forcing them to choose between obeying the law or breaking it and to examine what they believe and how strongly they believe it (see Appendix E).
A culminating project for the unit will be a speculative narrative. This is a problem-solving exercise for the students that will ask them to consider how they would react to a suspension of some of their civil liberties (see Appendix F). For example, how would they react if recorded music were suddenly outlawed because of some belief that subversive messages were encoded that posed a threat to the government? No CDs, no I-Pods, only live music without amplification. Students will be forced to decide how they will react to this encroachment on their lives. Will they find a way to circumvent this government edict (or outright break the law) or will they obey it? Will any of them mount a legal campaign to overturn it?
My hope is that the students will discover for themselves the role that human nature plays in all of these events and in all events in which people are involved. Through examining two examples from the past, they will come to realize that regardless of the laws of men or nature, civil liberties must be constantly fought for in an effort to maintain the balance between democracy, First Amendment Rights, and national security—a formidable, but not impossible task.
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