What is mccarthyism the crucible

This is the backbone of fear. Just like the Americans of and of the McCarthy era, our fear governs us, forces us to ask who we are in an increasingly widening scope. We are at times ruled by the collective fear of each other and of those who may take away our rights and persecute us.

We live in fear of losing our identities. This is something which Arthur Miller wants us to be conscious of. By accusing the Army of treason, he lost respect in the population and bad opinions spread around, ruining his power streak.

This risk prevented these kinds of people from succumbing to actions that would sabotage their reputation. In addition, McCarthyism allowed these kinds of nasty people, such as McCarthy, to act upon unsightly desires. Therefore, the McCarthy trials encouraged the conflict between. Macbeth is used by Shakespeare to show the irony of the Gunpowder Plot.

The conspirators created the plot to freely practice their religion, yet planned to murder people, which, in most cases, is probably not the holiest of acts. The irony in Macbeth is that he plans to kill people in power to gain power, yet the same brings him to his demise. Macbeth is not only an entertaining work, but a historical telling of social and political issues of 17th century Protestant England.

Between and , Senator Joseph McCarthy investigated people suspected of being associated with communism. In the writing 'The Crucible,' Miller's purpose was to point out the similarities between the Salem witch hunts and. The HUAC does not arrest the man because he has committed a murder, but because he is a communist. These communists made the right decision to speak out for their freedom and against injustice.

These communists also spoke out for their freedom of different beliefs. They also believed that movies and television shows were attempting to get Americans to support communism by using propaganda. Screenwriters, musicians, actors, directors, and other entertainment professionals were subpoenaed by the HUAC because of their suspected political beliefs or associations.

When someone in Hollywood was blacklisted they were denied employment and banned from work. McCarthy was able to use this fear to his advantage. On February 9, , he claimed to possess a list of the names of people in the US State Department who were members of the American Communist Party.

The public, in the throes of a communist hysteria, demanded an investigation of these supposed agitators within the government. This persecution of alleged subversives became known colloquially as "McCarthyism. McCarthy finally lost power in soon after proposing an investigation of the military to root out communists.

President Eisenhower, who never liked McCarthy and had great respect for the military as a former commander, decided things had finally gone too far. He worked behind the scenes to discredit McCarthy. He died soon after in , four years after the opening of The Crucible. Though the modern-day witch hunt philosophy carries his namesake, Joseph McCarthy was far from the only driving force behind the investigation of suspected communists during the Cold War.

Another congressional group called the House UnAmerican Activities Committee played a similar and, some would argue, even more dramatic role at the same time.

HUAC was a congressional committee originally established in with the primary goal of investigating communist and fascist organizations that had become active during the Great Depression. Members of the committee were convinced that disloyal communists had managed to infiltrate the US government, educational system, and entertainment industry. Anyone deemed suspicious was issued a subpoena by the committee and subsequently questioned about their political activities and the activities of other potential subversives.

People who refused to answer these questions or name any names were arrested for contempt of Congress and even sent to jail. Many were subsequently denied employment opportunities in their industries because they were universally "blacklisted" or shut out by employers who feared that hiring them would be a public relations nightmare.

How did McCarthy come up with his catalog of commies? He asked everyone in Congress if he could borrow a pen. The ones who said yes were on the list. He had become fascinated with the environment of paranoia and how it affected society as a whole. When he stumbled upon the story of the Salem witch trials, he finally came up with a way to express those themes on stage. The Crucible was also a reaction his personal disappointment at the decision of his friend, director Elia Kazan, to name some former colleagues as communists in in front of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

He was suspected not incorrectly of possessing close ties to the American Communist Party. Miller did in fact write communist theater criticism and was a greater private supporter of communism than he portrayed himself to be at the time, but he never actually joined the party. When he appeared before HUAC, Miller refused to name anyone else who was involved in "subversive" political activities. Because he worked mainly in theater, he didn't have to worry as much about the effects Hollywood's unforgiving blacklist policy would have on his career.

Miller was found in contempt of Congress for refusing to betray his peers, but the ruling was overturned two years later as HUAC lost power and relevance. Much of my desperation branched out, I suppose, from a typical Depression-era trauma—the blow struck on the mind by the rise of European Fascism and the brutal anti-Semitism it had brought to power.

In any play, however trivial, there has to be a still point of moral reference against which to gauge the action. In our lives, in the late nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties, no such point existed anymore.

The anti-Communist liberals could not acknowledge the violations of those rights by congressional committees. The far right, meanwhile, was licking up all the cream. Gradually, all the old political and moral reality had melted like a Dali watch.

Nobody but a fanatic, it seemed, could really say all that he believed. President Truman was among the first to have to deal with the dilemma, and his way of resolving it—of having to trim his sails before the howling gale on the right—turned out to be momentous.

But such was the gathering power of raw belief in the great Soviet plot that Truman soon felt it necessary to institute loyalty boards of his own. This unleashed a veritable holy terror among actors, directors, and others, from Party members to those who had had the merest brush with a front organization. The Soviet plot was the hub of a great wheel of causation; the plot justified the crushing of all nuance, all the shadings that a realistic judgment of reality requires.

Even worse was the feeling that our sensitivity to this onslaught on our liberties was passing from us—indeed, from me. Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, did something that would once have been considered unthinkable: he showed my script to the F. Cohn then asked me to take the gangsters in my script, who were threatening and murdering their opponents, and simply change them to Communists. Yet I kept being drawn back to it. I had read about the witchcraft trials in college, but it was not until I read a book published in —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. I visited Salem for the first time on a dismal spring day in ; it was a sidetracked town then, with abandoned factories and vacant stores. In the gloomy courthouse there I read the transcripts of the witchcraft trials of , as taken down in a primitive shorthand by ministers who were spelling each other.

But there was one entry in Upham in which the thousands of pieces I had come across were jogged into place. It was from a report written by the Reverend Samuel Parris, who was one of the chief instigators of the witch-hunt.

Immediately Abigail cried out her fingers, her fingers, her fingers burned.