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Communism And Mass Hysteria In The Crucible By Arthur Miller

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Fear and the unknown can cause people to do things that they wouldn't normally do in the right mind. Also when people want all the power they'll do what it takes to get it. A play from 1953 called, The Crucible by Arthur Miller, showed how fear affects people's thoughts. It started with a group of girls dancing in the woods. They feared getting beaten or in trouble, so they began accusing other people in the town of Salem of witchcraft. Because of that, there were 20 people killed and over 200 accused. This kind of hysteria was also seen during McCarthyism or The Red Scare. The Red Scare caused a lot of people to not trust each other and several people to lose their jobs. Arthur Miller saw the similarities between the fear of communism and …show more content…

Like in the Salem Witch Trials when over 200 people were jailed for supposedly practicing witchcraft and talking to the devil. It all started by a group of girls getting caught dancing in the woods. The girls didn’t want to get in trouble so they cried witch. The girls would appear in court and then start screaming or crying saying someone specific in the room was harming them. As it says in Aurther Miller’s play, The Crucible, “I saw Goody Jacobs with the devil!! I saw Goody Howe with the devil” and all the girls started to join in. Even though no one could physically see that person hurting the girls they still were charged. That's because of something we call spectral evidence. In May of 1693, the governor ended the witch trials for good when he pardoned all the remaining accused. With nineteen hanged and one pressed to death the Salem Witch Trials were finally …show more content…

McCarthyims and The Salem Witch Trials were very complex events in history. From being falsely accused, fear of public humiliation, and public hysteria, these two events played a big role in the history of the United States. McCarthyism was fear of communism and the witch trials were fear of witchcraft. Another major factor in these eras was guilt by association, which means that if people they were close with or were around were found guilty then they would be the next to be looked into. Both of these eras showed that the government had so much power that hysteria broke out and spread like a disease. One difference between these two is that in the witch trials people actually lost their lives and were hanged, but in the McCarthyism Era people were just blacklisted and lost their jobs and the chance to get a

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Occasion’s Effect The Salem Witch Trials and McCarthyism are very similar even though they took place such a long time from each other. If someone was accused of witchcraft in 1692 they had to confess and lose all social standing or be executed, in the 1950’s if a person was accused of being a communist they would be fired and put on trial, if they would not confess they were blacklisted until they admitted to their “crime”. Arthur Miller used the Salem Witch trials to protest McCarthyism in a somewhat discreet way that proved to be a timeless comfort to the citizens experiencing oppression from their government (“Why I Wrote The Crucible”, 911).

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The Salem Witch Trials and the McCarthy-era hearings had some events in common. In the Salem Witch Trials the town was on the hunts for witches. Nobody was safe from the accusations. This is similar to the McCarthy-era hearings. In both Situations, if one person did not like the other, they could accuse them of either witch craft or being an undercover communist.

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People were terrified of communism spreading to the United States, so when accusations started floating around everyone would believe them. McCarthy accused people of communist behavior, although many were falsely accused, no one knew better than to think they were guilty because of how scared they were of communism spreading. This resembles how certain characters were accused of witchcraft in The Crucible. The Red Scare caused nationwide hysteria just how the Salem Witch Trials caused hysteria to the people of Salem.

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McCarthyism and The Crucible caused a feeling of hysteria and paranoia in all the people that were accused and others that were not accused. Abigail Williams and McCarthy had no evidence on the people accused except rumors that were

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In times of fear and hysteria in the U.S. it is mass chaos and it only gets worse and worse. During the time of both the witch-hunt eras, whether for communist or actual witches, they prove to have many similarities between them. Both of these times were full of confusion and lying which lead to the temporary downfall of the authority at that time. Joseph McCarthy proved to be a factor in this time and add on to the chaos that was America. Arthur Miller wrote about these times in a book called The Crucible, based on the witch trial era.

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McCarthyism McCarthyism is a terrible way of thinking, creates a negative environment, and is relatable to the Salem Witch Trials. To begin, McCarthyism is making assumptions without credible evidence. McCarthy demonstrates this when he gave a speech at the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia: “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 and shaping policy” in the State Department.” (History.com) Next, McCarthy created an environment that everyone was scared to have his or her own opinions in. Everyone just conformed to what McCarthy said: “President Truman vetoed the Act (McCarran Internal Security Act)-he said it “would make a mockery

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People were so full of fear that they would do anything to eliminate their anxiety. The McCarthy hearings of the 1950s reenacted the hysteria of the Salem witch trials of 1692 by spreading mass fear of prosecution, creating false accusations, and blacklisting people. The Salem witch trials were considered to be America 's most notorious episode of witchcraft hysteria. Many innocent people were killed as a result of false accusations, and many other women were put through trials to determine if they were witches.

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It was a campaign in which innocent people were accused of communism, that occurred over 200 years after the Salem Witch Trials. McCarthyism could have been prevented had people learned about the harmful effects of the Salem Witch Trials. Many similarities are shared between McCarthyism and the Salem Witch Trials that occurred in The Crucible. During McCarthyism, people feared the intrusion of Communism. Similarly, people in the Salem Witch Trials feared the Devil.

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From Salem to McCarthy: How Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" highlights the dangerous consequences of fear and political hysteria. McCarthyism and the Salem witch trials are two significant events in American history, separated by over 200 years. However, they share many similarities in terms of their impact on American society and culture. Both events involved accusations of wrongdoing without sufficient evidence, leading to the persecution of innocent people. In the Salem witch trials, people were accused of practicing witchcraft, while in McCarthyism, people were accused of being communists.

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In history there have been many major events that have shaped the times we live in. Two of the major events of our time are the "witchunts" of the Salem Witch Trials and McCarthyism. The Crucible is a 1953 play by American playwright Arthur Miller. It is a drama and fictional story of the Salem Witch Trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692-1693. Miller wrote the play as a parable for McCarthyism, when the United States government ostracized people for being communists.

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1014 Words | 5 Pages

McCarthyism and Arthur Miller's “The Crucible” share many similar qualities regarding the actions of society when aroused with a certain fear. It was distinctly seen first in the 1600s during the Salem Witch Trials, which is portrayed through the play, “The Crucible”. It happened when talk of witchcraft scattered the town of Salem, making everyone hysterical and constantly accusing people of being witches without proof. Behavior similar to this came back in the mid 1900s when society was accusing people of being communist during a time of fearing Hitler. The claims of supposed communists were involved in the idea of McCarthyism.

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The spread of mass hysteria is due to the irrational fears ingrained in the minds of the Puritans, which were formed primarily because of Tituba and Mary Warren’s lies. Tituba’s false confession led to the initial belief that Salem was indeed suffering at the hands of witchcraft, and Mary Warren’s sudden breaking off from the Devil and claim that John Proctor was forcing her to work with the Devil further proved that there were people in Salem betraying God. This may seem reasonable, but there was a lack of evidence and proper investigation that took place, which led people to jump to conclusions as a way of getting the matter under control. The Crucible can be connected to the McCarthyism of the 50s, where American Senator Joseph McCarthy accused many government workers (without proof) of being part of the Communist Party, which led them to be put on a blacklist. McCarthy’s accusations caught the attention of Americans since many were afraid of the government being overthrown by communists, and this only worsened the mass hysteria at

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In the play, The Crucible, by Arthur Miller the argument that individuals must stand in opposition to collective injustice is immensely apparent. The idea of the Salem Witch Trials reflects what was going on for the so called Communists in the Red Scare. It illustrates the power of mass fear in a society. Undoubtedly, there are many similarities between the Red Scare and the Salem Witch Trials. To fully understand the comparison between the Red Scare and the Salem Witch Trials, we must analyze the ideas of McCarthyism.

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​Fear drives action. The main reason people continue to progress and change are due to the fear of the unknown. Humans have and will continue to fear the unknown since the beginning of the world. In the town of Salem circa 1692, fear ran a rampage and cased dozens of innocent people to be accused of witchcraft and hanged. In Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, this mass hysteria led to the death of many innocent citizens.

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Mass hysteria officially breaks out when Abigail Williams began accusing innocent people of summoning the devil and anyone who acted strangely or out of the ordinary were accused of witchcraft. Because of Abigail's accusations whoever denied that they

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