hen it [the investigation] started. I used to say, you know, McCarthy is actually saying certain lines that I recall the witch-hunters saying in Salem. So I started to go back, not with the idea of writing a play, but to refresh my own mind because it was getting eerie".One day, while he was reading some documents in the Salem museum, some tourists came in and wanted to see the pins. There was no need to ask, "What pins?" During the trials in 1692, the so-called witches often "sent out their spirits" to stick pins into the flesh of the girls who were accusing them. Now, as Arthur Miller watched, "the tourists pass the books, the exhibits, and no hint of danger reaches them from the quaint relics. I have a desire to tell them the significance of those relics. It is the desire to write".The significance of those relics was, in part, that the same thing that happened in 1692 was happening all over again. "It was not only the rise of 'McCarthyism' that moved me," he writes, "but something which seemed much more weird and mysterious. It was the fact that a political, objective, knowledgeable campaign from the far Right [Communists were said to be on the far left] was capable of creating not only a terror, but a new subjective reality... and that such manifestly ridiculous men [as Senator Joe McCarthy] should be capable of paralyzing thought itself.... it was as though the whole country had been born anew, without a memory.... Astounded, I watched men pass me by without a nod whom I had known rather well for years...." And so Arthur Miller began to write The Crucible.A few years before, Arthur Miller had become famous. His second play, Death of a Salesman, had won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize and a host of other awards. By the time he was 37, in 1952, he was a respected writer of established reputation, and people were looking forward to his next play. What he had to say was bound to be important.There's a saying that a prophet is honored everywh...
