The Theme of McCarthyism in Arthur Miller's Play The Crucible

. . Guardedness, suspicion, aloof circumspection--- . . . what boast [these traits] e'er had to do with the creative act? . . . Out of the hectoring of columnists, the compulsions of patriotic gangs, the suspicions of the salutary and the corrupt alike, art never will and never has prepare soil (Miller 160).

The point Miller is making is that his extend should not be seen as a political treatise arguing against McCarthyism and aught more. He is finally arguing for the freedom of expression of the individual, regular when that expression appears to defy social standards and understanding.

Miller writes that "It was not save the rise of 'McCarthyism' that moved me, but something which seemed much more supernatural and mysterious. It was the fact that a political, objective, knowl buntable campaign from the far Right was equal to(p) of creating not only a terror, but a impertinently subjective reality, a veritable mystique which was gradually assuming plane a holy resonance" (Miller 161-162).

The Crucible, then, is most McCarthyism in the equivalent means that Moby Dick is about whaling. Miller is writing about an external force which deliberately terrorizes a nation of ostensibly thinking individuals and does so in such a way that they do not even see the design nookie the terror. Miller writes "That so interior and subjective an emotion could have been so manifestly created from without was a marvel to me. It underlies every intelligence activity in The Crucible" (Miller 1

The get together States had been swept into World War II, had lost its innocence, and after the warfare looked around for the next Hitler, decision him in Stalin and finding Nazism in Communism. The McCarthy era was a symptom of the coolness War. The Puritans saw themselves as supreme beings (while doubting it at the alike(p) time) just as Americans after World War II saw themselves as superior beings in a superior country --- challenged only by Soviet Communism. Evil in Puritan New England was embodied by the "witches" and evil in post-World War II America was embodied by Communists.

As Miller writes of the Puritans --- "They believed, in short, that they held in their steady hands the cadmium that would light the world" (5) --- so could he have scripted of the Americans after they saved the world from Nazism, as they saw it.

The edge of the wilderness was close by. The American continent stretched endlessly west, and it was intact of mystery for them. It stood, dark and threatening, over their shoulders night and day, for out of it Indian tribes marauded from time to time, and Reverend Parris had parishioners who has lost relatives to these heathen (Miller 5).

Stouffer, Samuel A. Communism, Conformity and civilian Liberties Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1955.

It is a strange combination of original idolise of the evil of the enemy (the witch or the communist) and the fear of being isolated from society which drives the people in this play and in the era of Mccarthy to join in the hysteria.

The suck in of the Puritans toward the colossus was the same as the view of the McCarthyites toward communism. As Hale says of the kind between good and evil: "Theology, sir, is a fortress; no crack in a fortress may be accounted small" (Miller 67). The same can be said of the view of the McCarthyites toward communism: no sign of communism in the coupled States---in the government, in Hollywood, anywhere --- is too small to be grow out and destroyed. The line between Christ
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