“It would probably never have occurred to me to write a play about the Salem witch trials of 1692 had I not seen some astonishing correspondences with that calamity in the late forties and early fifties,” noted Arthur Miller in his essay The Crucible in History. He, of course, was speaking of the relationship between his play and the second Red Scare. He used The Crucible to show the effects of hysteria on a community, and that the time, the size of the community, and the specific fear do not matter. In both of the scenarios Miller wrote, about fear caused people to act desperately, victims were accused with little to no evidence, and these accusations could cost them their lives. People fear things that are different. This is especially true when their lives or ways of life are threatened. During the Red Scare, people were afraid for the security of the United States. - insert sentence from website here- In the Salem witch trials, the citizens of Salem were afraid for the health and safety of themselves, their families, and their children. Worse than the general …show more content…
Any person could assume someone was a communist/witch. There was no possibility for logical evidence. They were fighting people’s private thoughts or agreements people made with the devil. What way is there to prove these accusations false? For such empty accusations, the stakes were colossal. In Salem, if a person was found guilty of being a witch, they were hung. During the Red Scare, those accused of being communists essentially lost their lives because they lost their jobs and their friends. That is, if they didn’t throw others under the bus. In each event, if a person was accused, but they turned around and accused four more people, they would not lose their lives. It became a vicious cycle of empty accusations followed by more and more accusations. Until finally, society realized that they were all being