It is hard to believe that someone could be killed for being a witch but that is exactly what happened in the 1690s. In Salem, Massachusetts, many people were killed after being accused of witchcraft. In the 1950s, a similar situation occurred when the government questioned many people to determine if they were involved with communism. The Crucible play draws an analogy between the horrors of the Salem witch trials to the horrors of McCarthyism. Arthur Miller's experience led him to write the Crucible which drew on the events of the time. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is a play which criticizes the injustice suffered by the people accused of witchcraft in Salem in the 1690s as an analogy to the people accused of communism in the United States …show more content…
As community members charged one another with misdeeds involving witch craft, the situation escalated from a small charge into a form of hysteria, (Salem witch trials). Members of the Salem community were accusing one another of being witches to take the blame off themselves. More and more people were accused of being witches as the hysteria spread. " A scorching wind of fanatic madness blew on the little Puritan village, spreading fiction –through death, that is –dozens of innocent souls," (Raymond Rouleau among the Witches). Many people were believed to be witches even though they denied it because of faulty claims against them. Ultimately, nineteen people were put to death because of allegations against them. "It means: do not be misled by the play's historical theme into forgetting the main point, which is that 'witch trials' are always with us, and especially today,"(The Liberal Conscience in the Crucible). The ugliness of human nature can be seen strongly in the Salem Witch Trials. It does not take much to wrongly accuse people of wrongdoings. There will always be people who wrongfully accuse others because of their fears or to benefit