The United States had been swept into World War II, had lost its innocence, and after the war looked around for the next Hit ler, finding him in Stalin and finding Nazism in Communism. The McCarthy era was a symptom of the Cold War. The Puritans saw them selves as superior beings (while doubting it at the same time) just as Americans after World War II saw themselves as superior beings in a superior country --- challenged only by Soviet Commu nism. Evil in Puritan New England was embodied by the "witches" and evil in post-World War II America was embodied by Communists. As Miller writes of the Puritans --- "They believed, in short, that they held in their steady hands the candle that would light the world" (5) --- so could he have written of the Americans after they saved the world from Nazism, as they saw it. The edge of the wilderness was close by. The American continent stretched endlessly west, and it was full of mystery for them. It stood, dark and threatening, over their shoulders night and day, for out of it Indian tribes marauded from time to time, and Reverend Parris had parishioners who has lost relatives to these heathen (Miller 5). Stouffer, Samuel A. Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1955. It is a strange combination of true fear of the evil of the enemy (the witch or the communist) and the fear of being isolated from society which drives the people in this play and in the era of Mccarthy to join in the hysteria. The view of the Puritans toward the Devil was the same as the view of the McCarthyites toward communism. As Hale says of the relationship between good and evil: "Theology, sir, is a fortress; no crack in a fortress may be accounted small" (Miller 67). The same can be said of the view of the McCarthyites toward communism: no sign of communism in the United States---in the government, in Hollywood, anywhere --- is too small to be rooted out and destroyed. The line between Christianit |
