ARTHUR MILLER: THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES In Salem, Massachusetts, a dozen teen-age girls and a black slave woman are caught dancing in the woods around a bubbling cauldron. Today, you wouldn't even use the word "caught." You might think these girls were strange, but you'd hardly call the cops on them. But it's 1692, and Salem isn't just an ordinary small town; it's a religious community of the strictest kind. The people and their laws are as harsh as the Massachusetts winter. When two of the girls pass out from fright and can't be revived, the others find themselves in serious trouble. Women who dance with the Devil are witches; and witches, when they are caught, are hanged. To get themselves out of their predicament, the girls try to spread the blame around. But the blame-spreading gets out of hand, and before long the whole town is in a panic, everyone accusing everyone else of witchcraft. Nineteen people will be hanged before the madness is stopped.Well, you say, people were superstitious then. Nothing like that could happen today. Maybe so, but in the early 1950s, at the time The Crucible was written, a similar kind of hunt was taking place, not for witches, but for Communists. Today it bears the harmless-sounding name of the McCarthy Hearings on Un-American Activities, but for the people who got caught up in it--some of them our parents and grandparents--this "witch-hunt" was anything but harmless. in fact, to the playwright Arthur Miller, the McCarthy Hearings bore an alarming resemblance to the trials in Salem in 1692. The Crucible was his way of trying to keep history from repeating itself.One of the most popular TV shows in 1953 was "I Led Three Lives." It always began the same way: A man's face appears on the screen. His expression is taut with anxiety. The narrator says something like, "This is the fantastically true story of Herbert A. Philbrick, who for nine frightening years did lead three lives--average citizen, member o...
