pro-Parris faction centered around Thomas Putnam, Jr., whose daughter was one of the afflicted girls
and whose wife was one of the other accusers. Thomas Putnam believed that he had been cheated
out of his inheritance by Joseph Putnam, his half brother, who had connections to the Porters, and
who was the child of Thomas Putnam Sr.’s second marriage to a woman in Salem town. Elisabeth
and Thomas Very were related to Thomas Putnam Jr.’s stepmother, Mary Very, whom he probably
blamed for his father’s will. On the chart on p. 268 you can see some of the links between the
accused.
Boyer and Nissnbaum suggest that it would have been unremarkable, at the time, for the first three
who were denounced, including a rather bad-tempered beggar, Sarah Good, and the Parris’s West
Indian slave, Tituba, to be the target of accusations (Tituba confessed and survived.) Such marginal
individuals frequently become scapegoats for social tensions. What they believe needs explanation
was the way in which the witchcraft accusations spread, so that many respectable people were
accused and hanged, including a former minister of the village, George Burroughs. This is what takes
the Salem witchcraft episode beyond the range of the Azande-type pattern, though it never achieved
the scope of the European witchcraft trials. Boyer and Nissenbaum suggest that Parris used the
theological assumption of a hidden battle between good and evil to force villagers to take sides
between himself (whom he identified as on the side of God) and those who opposed him (whom he
identified with the Devil).
The witchcraft craze in Salem began when Parris’s daughter Betty, his relative and ward Abigail
Williams, and his slave Tituba, were found to be using magical practices to predict the fortunes,
particularly the marriages, of Betty, Abigail, Ann Putnam Jr. and a number of other girls in the
community. Because they were practicing magic, these people could all have been accused of
witchcraft themselves, or they could have been seen as wayward women and children and punished
accordingly, or simply ignored. That only Tituba was accused, while the others became accusers of
many of Parris’s enemies, proved to be very opportunistic for him. As the town minister it was Parris,
of course, who first had to make the decision to treat the strange symptoms of Betty and Abigail as
bewitchment and call in the relevant experts.
Boyer and Nissenbaum make the relevant point that although many respectable people were tried
and convicted, the leaders of the anti-Parris faction, who were among the politically and economically
strongest men in the village, were not accused, though their friends, wives and kin were. Moreover,
what finally stopped the witchcraft craze was its spread beyond Salem, so that important people in
Boston, the capital of Massachusetts Bay Colony began to be accused. Even Cotton Mather himself
was named at one point, though he was never formally charged. It should remembered that Increase
Mather, along with Judge Sewall, one of the trial judges, began to question spectral evidence. At any
rate, when the Governor’s wife was accused, the Governor called an end to the trial. Eventually,
everyone who was still in jail was released, and some compensation was paid to the survivors. Parris
was removed from his pulpit some years later, and replaced with a man whom Boyer and
Nissenbaum (elsewhere in their book) characterize as more interested in hunting and fishing than in
seeking out evidences of the Devil’s work. He also established a school and a charitable organization
in the town, to take charge of two elements of the population who had been heavily involved in the
start of the trials, as accusers and the earliest accused: young people and beggars.
The Salem witch trials represent an instance of theology being wed to politics, with tragic results. In
the play, The Crucible, Arthur Miller uses the trials to draw attention to a secular theology of fear
(substitute "Communism" for "Satan") which he believed was involved in a similar marriage in 1950s
America.
Before reading my comments on the play, you ought (if you have not done so already) to visit this
website, where the liberties which Miller has taken with the play are spelled out. Apart from the
changes which obviously are made for theatrical convenience (giving Ann Putnam, Jr. a different
name from her mother, reducing the number of locales, and therefore the number of required stage
settings), Miller’s alterations tell us something about the nature of recent "witch hunts," as compared
with those of the 17th Century.
Senator Joseph McCarthy, who gave his name to an era, led the U.S. House Un-American Activities
Committee in seeking out real and imagined Communists, who were widely believed to be infiltrating
the U.S. government, spying and spreading propaganda on behalf of the Soviet Union. Because of
this fear of propaganda, the media and entertainment industries were also subject to scrutiny. Indeed,
many people who worked in these industries, including Miller himself, did have left-wing sympathies,
but it is unlikely in the extreme that many (or any) of them were actively working for the Soviet
Union. People suspected of Communist sympathies were summoned to testify in front of the House
of Representatives Committee, and asked to name any "accomplices" who had ever been members
of the Communist party or "Communist front" organizations. The penalty for not confessing and
naming one’s associates could be anything from arrest to "blacklisting." Pressure was put on
publishers, film studios, etc. not to allow suspected "Communists" to work. If you visit this website,
you will find a list of writers who had to work under false names in order to write for the movies
during this period, along with the movies for which they have only recently been given credit. It might
be added that similar, though less extreme, pressure was brought to bear on people with left-wing
sympathies elsewhere in the "free world," including Canada. To be fair, much more deadly and
extensive purges of people suspected of anti-Communist sympathies were being conducted in the
Soviet Union, and these too can be profitably compared to witch hunts.
Arthur Miller himself, already a famous playwright, was at least partly blacklisted until he proved that
he was a "normal" American male by marrying Marilyn Monroe! This fact is symptomatic of another
aspect of McCarthy era America, one which undoubtedly influenced some of the changes Miller
made to the historical record. The 1950s were the era of Leave it To Beaver (a television show
whose passing our own Mike Harris recently mourned!). It was a time when women were being
encouraged to return to the kitchen, after being encouraged to leave it during the war years. Recently
returned soldiers scrambled to acquire an education under the G.I. Bill, which paid their tuition, and
to buy houses in the new suburbs growing up all over North America, and to get jobs in a rapidly
expanding economy to support large families, and buy unprecedented quantities of cars and
household appliances. Deviation from such "family values" made one suspect. For a time,
"homosexual" was a word that was almost synonymous with "Communist" in the United States.
Moreover, Jewish intellectuals like Miller were automatically suspect, and Miller’s history of divorces
would also have stood against him. I believe it was this emphasis on sexual conformity during the
McCarthy era that led Miller to exaggerate the sexual aspects of the Salem story, changing the ages
of some of the characters to make sexual interpretations more credible. Sexual innuendoes were
certainly not absent in Salem, but sexual politics were certainly bubbling closer to the surface during
the McCarthy era, to boil over a decade later, in the so-called "sexual revolution." Recent politics in
the U.S. teach us that sexuality is still a lodestar for political suspicion in the U.S.. To each age its
own demons!
The other theme which is very important to Miller, and concerning which he alters the record
somewhat, is the pressure on accused witches to confess. Certainly, the accused could save their
lives by confessing, just as writers, actors and civil servants in the 50s could try to save their careers
by confessing and naming others. Of course, in both cases, they paid a price, other than that exacted
by their consciences – many of their friends no longer trusted them. This was likely to be a more
acute problem in the U.S., since the people who were named by those who cooperated with the
Committee weren’t hanged and put out of the way, just fired and left to try to lead the resistance to
McCarthyism. Namers of names sometimes found themselves with no friends at all, since
anti-Communists often still failed to trust them. The issue of resisting collaboration with the witch
hunters was important enough to Miller that he altered history, and portrayed the trials as stopping
when more people refused to confess when, in fact, a significant increase in confessions probably
served to cast some doubt on the validity of individual confessions.
Taking liberties with the text is one of the characteristics of the interaction between humans and their
myths. And a charter myth is certainly what the witch hunts in Europe and Salem have become,
though they have more basis in fact than most myths. The stories of the witch hunts are charter myths
for our time, to be told by feminists, left-wing intellectuals, and lawyers for President Clinton, each
taking what he or she needs from the story, adding or subtracting as seems fit.