Correlation Between McCarthyism and The Crucible Essay

The Crucible is said to be significantly related with McCarthyism during the early 1900s in America. Arthur Miller, the author of the play The Crucible was inspired to write about the late 1600s witch-hunting incident because of a massive hysteria that aroused McCarthyism to emerge in the 1900s.

Joseph McCarthy was an American politician that became the Republican Senator from the state of Wisconsin played a major role in McCarthyism. In order to achieve the office, during his campaign, McCarthy announced false claims against La Follette who was the preceding Senator of McCarthy. During his office as a Senator, McCarthy claimed that there were numerous communist subversives and Soviet (Russian) spies in the federal government and elsewhere in the nation.

McCarthyism is a political movement inspired by Joseph McCarthy himself to accuse many people of being communist subversives or Soviet spies without concrete evidences. Determined to root out the communist parties in America, McCarthy started to track down numerous people that he thought to be communists or belonged to the American Communist Party. The reason why McCarthy started to track communists is because he thought that communism was an ominous threat to the nation.

McCarthyism closely resembles the witch-hunting era of the 1600s portrayed by Arthur Miller through his piece of literature, The Crucible. Around the 1950s when McCarthyism seemed to be slowly emerging from the darkness to the minds of the people, a concept of a blacklist was also surfacing amongst the government parties themselves. A blacklist is basically a long list of names of people who are accused of being part of a communist party in America. Due to being blacklisted, people lost their jobs, economic values, and many other privileges that they previously had before being blacklisted. Similarly, The Crucible has shown its readers how being accused of witchcraft can lead to devastating consequences such as death.

McCarthyism in America had many significant impacts on the whole nation including the film industry Hollywood. An anti-communist organization known as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) played a significant role in filtrating communism in Hollywood. During the Great Depression, many directors, actors and actresses, and other people affiliated with the film industry financially supported the Communist Party. When HUAC started to take action, many writers, actors, and actresses were accused of being supportive of the Communist Party in America. Many celebrities and directors fled the nation as the HUAC started to filter out communists in the nation. As opposition to McCarthyism, people associated with Hollywood formed a committee known as the CFA. Their main objective was to dismiss the idea of communism is a black sin from the nation, but they failed to achieve their goals.

Arthur Miller was inspired to write about the witch hunting era due to the rising conflicts McCarthyism has caused. When Miller visited Salem in person and realized the gravity of the witch hunting era, he found some correlations between McCarthyism and the Salem witch trials. In order to express his opinions on the preposterous accusations caused by McCarthyism, Arthur Miller seem to have wrote the novel, The Crucible.

Works Cited

Arthur Miller and McCarthyism. Mansfield Independent School District : K-12

Public Education in North Texas. 5 May 2009

Miller, Arthur. An artists answer to Politics . WHY I WROTE THE

CRUCIBLE. 30 Apr. 2009 .