When many people think of the Salem Witch Trials, they think of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953), a play that was written more than 250 years after the actual trials took place. The play is often given the weight of fact and truth, but though Miller did use real figures and base the events of the play on real events, it isn’t exactly a picture of verisimilitude. What led Miller to write this play, what sort of research did he conduct, and how accurate is it?
Miller lived and worked during the Cold War, an era of anti-Communist hysteria in America. The House Un-American Activities Committee held numerous hearings and trials to rout out suspected Communists, especially in Hollywood; Joseph McCarthy led a veritable reign of terror as he tried to purge the State Department of those he claimed were traitors; President Truman required loyalty oaths for government jobs; teachers, intellectuals, artists, and homosexuals tried to keep their “subversive” ideas and behavior under wraps for fear of losing jobs or being thrown in jail. Americans lived in a climate of suspicion, anxiety, and fear as they worried about the Red menace both abroad and at home.
Miller, who was already well-known for Death of a Salesman (1949), was close friends with Elia Kazan, a notable Hollywood film director, who was hauled before HUAC to testify about Communism in the industry. Miller was inspired to research the Salem Witch Trials after noting the disturbing similarities between the witch hunts of the 1690s and those of the 1950s. He wrote for the New Yorker in 1996 about how he first came to Salem: “I had read about the witchcraft trials in college, but it was not until I read a book published in 1867—a two-volume, thousand-page study by Charles W. Upham, who was then the mayor of Salem—that I knew I had to write about the period. Upham had not only written a broad and thorough investigation of what was even then an almost lost chapter of Salem’s past but opened up to me the details of personal relationships among many participants in the tragedy.” Continuing, Miller explained, “The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common experiences in the fifties: the old friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into born-again patriots; and so on. Apparently, certain processes are universal.”
In terms of the Kazin connection, Miller wrote for The Guardian, “Since I was on my way up to Salem for research on a play that I was still unsure I would write, I called at [Kazin’s] house, which was on my route. As he laid out his dilemma and his decision to comply with the HUAC (which he had already done) it was impossible not to feel his anguish, old friends that we were. But the crunch came when I felt fear, that great teacher, that cruel revealer. For it swept over me that, had I been one of his comrades, he would have spent my name as part of the guarantee of his reform. Even so, oddly enough, I was not filling up with hatred or contempt for him; his suffering was too palpable. The whole hateful procedure had brought him to this, and I believe made the writing of The Crucible all but inevitable. Even if one could grant Kazan sincerity in his new-found anti-communism, the concept of an America where such self-discoveries were pressed out of people was outrageous, and a contradiction of any concept of personal liberty.”
The play took a year to write and was first staged in 1953. In the print edition, Miller noted that it was not history: “This play is not history in the sense in which the word is used by the academic historian. Dramatic purposes have sometimes required many characters to be fused into one; the number of girls involved in the ‘crying out’ has been reduced; Abigail’s age has been raised; while there were several judges of almost equal authority, I have symbolized them all in Hathorne and Danforth. However, I believe that the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history. The fate of each character is exactly that of his historical model, and there is no one in the drama who did not play a similar — and in some cases exactly the same — role in history. As for the characters of the persons, little is known about most of them except what may be surmised from a few letters, the trial record, certain broadsides written at the time, and references to their conduct in sources of varying reliability. They may therefore be taken as creations of my own, drawn to the best of my ability in conformity with their known behavior, except as indicated in the commentary I have written for this text.” Ages and other biographical details have been changed; there is no proof that Abigail Williams knew John or Elizabeth Proctor; Proctor did not confess to being a witch; and there is no historical evidence of a dance in the woods with Tituba.
Regardless of the changes, the Crucible captures how the spirit of Salem was present in the 1950s—a spirit (no pun intended) of fear, desperation, hysteria, and persecution.
