A-Z 2021 M - The Crucible (Arthur Miller, 1953)

If there's one thing that my country is really, really good at, it's attacking itself.  All you have to do to see evidence of that is look at the news; we're always divided, often with at least one side quoting Bible verses as justification for their hatred of the other side.  I've actually seen Leviticus quoted as a pro-face-mask argument in recent days, which, on one hand, good on whoever found that for locating something that speaks the right language, but on the other hand...  Ugh.  I'm not going to get into the theory and practice of using historical religious documents as a guiding principle in the modern world, that's just not what I'm here for, and it would probably just turn into a crazed rant anyways.

What I am here for, right now, is Cold War/Red Scare commentary disguised as a play about the Salem witch trials.

So, because it's absolutely not existing in a vacuum, the first place to start any discussion of The Crucible has to be with the political background to its writing, specifically the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and its intersection with the entertainment industry.  If someone pointed a finger at you and said 'Communist!', you got dragged into Congress where you had to answer whether you were a Communist, and if you knew anyone else who might have been a Communist, and if you say no, they're not going to believe you, and if you say yes, you'd better have names to give, and if you plead your First or Fifth Amendment rights, well, that's just proof that you're a Communist, because nobody has anything to fear if they're innocent, right?

So basically, anyone who got pulled in was either guilty or had to point fingers.  Refusal wasn't an option.

Arthur Miller, The Crucible's author, saw all this happening, saw his friend Elia Kazan actually pointing fingers in 1952, and then went to research in Salem, Massachusetts, because, well...  we've seen this kind of kangaroo court situation before, in this country.  And the result is a Tony-award-winning play that ended up perfectly describing how he was going to end up acting when he got dragged in front of the HUAC himself in 1956.

The play itself does a little bit of playing fast-and-loose with history, but the general form of the narrative follows what actually happened.  Some of the girls of Salem Village get caught doing stuff they shouldn't be, decide to blame it on witchcraft, and when they suddenly have everyone's ears and become celebrities of a sort, which isn't helped by everyone being willing to go with their argument and go into a state of paranoia.  With the courts deciding that since supernatural evidence by definition lacks a physical presence, the situation ended up that the only way out was to lie and say you were guilty of witchcraft, repent before the Lord, and name names.

There's a lot to unpack in the real events, particularly in the political underpinnings; I'm far from an expert, but I can point at the podcast Remarkable Providences as a source of good background information (in particular, the political and economic motives are only glossed over in The Crucible).  Miller provides several short essays in the midst of Act One, in order to give some historical background for the characters, though he does leave out where his inaccuracies lie.  It would be difficult to argue that he wasn't aware of what he was doing, but given that he was making a statement about the nature of guilt in the middle of an uncontrolled moral panic, his messaging through the lead character, John Proctor, requires a bit of that.  In particular, the personal conflict in the play revolves around a past illicit dalliance between him and Abigail Williams, the primary instigator of the witch panic, and ringleader of the group of girls pointing fingers at everyone around them.

In real life, this almost certainly never happened, given that Proctor was in his 60s and Abigail a pre-teen, but in the play, these ages are changed to mid-30s and 18 respectively.  The main reason Proctor gets involved in the proceedings is that Abigail points a finger at his wife, in what is all but directly stated to be an attempt to render Proctor a widower so that she can marry him, but his attempt to talk some sense into the court instead results in him being declared a witch, himself.  In true kangaroo court style, he's essentially declared guilty without anything even remotely resembling a fair trial, and the play ends with his execution after perjuring himself in an attempt to get some real justice for the innocent, an act which he very forcibly recants after it becomes clear that no such justice is present.

In the end of the play, we're told that Abigail stole her uncle's fortune and hopped on a ship; the epilogue suggests that she was later seen as a prostitute in New York, a somewhat poetic ending based on the play's version of her.  It's unclear where Miller got this from, however; Abigail Williams doesn't seem to exist in the historical record after (or, indeed, before) the witchcraft scare in Salem.

So, what are we to take from this?  That paranoia is bad when it results in a bit of face-spiting?  That using scripture and religion to determine what is or isn't a sign of guilt results in the innocent being punished?  That trusting the accuser with no actual evidence is a really, really stupid idea?

That people are really, really good at putting their brains into coast and just going along with whatever the loud voices shouting in their ears tell them?

In 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy (admittedly, not part of HUAC, but very much of the same political moment) made the ill-advised move to turn his anti-Communist attentions toward the US Army.  The resulting proceedings were very much public, and led to his popularity and approval spiraling downward, and eventually a formal censure by the Senate, effectively ending his political career.

In the script he wrote for the 1996 film version of the play, Miller added a scene, just before the final day, where Abigail is directly confronted by Reverend Hale, one of Proctor's allies, who has come to realize how he's been used over the length of the story, and exactly what his expertise in finding apparent witchcraft and devilry has been used for.  In response, Abigail declares Hale's wife to be a witch, an act which results in her being largely discredited due to having accused a preacher's wife, considered beyond reproach, of being a witch.  While this doesn't get those previously accused off the hook, it's the point where she decides to make her escape, ahead of any repercussions landing on her head.

One has to wonder what the tipping point in our culture's current moment of paranoid self-harm and self-destruction is going to be.