Arthur Miller, an American writer during the 1950’s, compose one of his well known publish plays, The Crucible, as an allegory for the clear purpose of criticizing America’s society with the McCarthy anti-communist trials revolving during the era. The Crucible consisted of the background of 1600’s Salem witch trials but what Miller wanted to capture was the idea of the trials in American society being unjustifiable and destroyed lives of innocents in many occurrences. Within the composer of Arthur Miller’s, "Are You Now Or Were You Ever?,” the purpose is to justify his reason for shaming American society for the anti-communist trials by arguing that the blame was paranoia driving an individual to hysteria, often leading to bringing out the worse from within. Miller demonstrates a series of rhetorical strategies throughout the article in order to help convince an audience of his argument of paranoia leads up to distrust and chaos around a community.
Miller begins the article with a series of specific verbs in order to layout a logical and convincing reasoning of why he was driven to expose the idea of paranoia being the one to commence the misshapen in society with all the trails. He describes on how “paralyzed a whole generation” was due to Communist paranoia during the era of John McCarthy (Miller 1). With the use of the verb “paralyzed”, Miller creates a negative connotation that the audience can interpret to a sorrow feeling. People were not living happy lives during the