The Crucible

In the early 1950s, America was thrust into a period of uncertainty and fear. Senator Joseph McCarthy had insinuated that the United States government was infiltrated with communists. As a result of this imprudent statement, Americans often reacted in superstitious mistrust. Everyone became suspect. In order to eradicate or at least lessen the public paranoia, Twentieth Century American author Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible as a warning of what could happen to innocent individuals in the 1950s.

It seems quite by chance that Miller visited Salem, Massachusetts in the spring 1952. Some 250 years before, Salem had been the setting of the most tragic legal miscarriage of justice in the United States history. In the article, “Why I Wrote ‘The Crucible,’” originally published in The New Yorker, Miller explained how he came to write the drama:

“The Crucible” was an act of desperation. Much of my

desperation branched out. I suppose, from a typical

Depression—era trauma—the blow struck the mind by

Rise of European Fascism and the brutal anti-Semitism it

had brought to power. But by 1950, when I began to think

of writing about the hunt for Reds in America, I was