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Description: The Crucible is a film version of Arthur Miller's play about Puritan society, the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, and, metaphorically, the Red Scare during the period 1947 - 1956. Miller wrote the screenplay for the movie, giving the film more credibility than most adaptations of classic plays.
Rationale for Using the Movie: The play is a classic of the American stage. Students of both American Literature and U.S. History will better understand how a frightened society can ignore fundamental beliefs in justice as well as its own basic principles of the primacy of law. The film makes Miller's concepts applicable in terms of metaphor to situations that society faces today. Moreover, the film addresses individual responsibility in terms of honesty, integrity and forgiveness.
Objectives/Student Outcomes: Opportunities for research enable students to look deeper into the underlying causes of historical events and through discussion and writing assignments students will be able to sharpen skills associated with analysis and persuasion.
Background: The Witchcraft Trials of 1692 and the Red Scare of 1947 - 1956
Witchcraft hysterias occurred in both Catholic and Protestant areas of Europe from about 1480 through the end of the 1600s. Scholars estimate that from 1500 to 1660, some 50,000 to 80,000 suspected witches, 80% of them women, were executed. Persecutions continued into the 1700s. In Europe, witchcraft persecutions often led to more devastating effects than the hysteria in Salem. In some cities hundreds were executed as witches. In a few Swiss villages, after the waves of anti-witch hysteria, there were scarcely any women left.
The Salem Witchcraft trials of 1692 led to the imprisonment of more than 100 people and the execution of 20. Four died in prison. Men were executed as well as women. The accusations were made by a group of young women demonstrating symptoms of hysteria. They accused various people in the village of appearing to them as specters that would pinch, suffocate or stab them. Often the only way those accused could avoid being hanged was to confess guilt and to give the names of other alleged witches.
Connections to the Crucible Movie and the written screenplay
Arthur Miller, the man who wrote "The Crucible" commented on the connection between the Salem witch trials and the Red Scare. Describing the time he spent going over original documents from the time of the trials. He said,
. . . [G]radually, over the weeks a living connection between myself and Salem, and between Salem and Washington, was made in my mind & for whatever else they might be, I saw that the hearings in Washington were profoundly and even avowedly ritualistic. After all, in almost every case the [House Un-American Activities] Committee knew in advance what they wanted the witness to give them: the names of his comrades in the [Communist] Party. The FBI had long since infiltrated the [Communist] Party, and informers had long ago identified the participants in various meetings. The main point of the hearings, precisely as in Seventeenth Century Salem, was that the accused make public confession, damn his confederates as well as his Devil master, and guarantee his sterling new allegiance by breaking disgusting old vows -- whereupon he was let loose to rejoin the society of extremely decent people. In other words, the same spiritual nugget lay folded within both procedures -- an act of contrition done not in solemn privacy but out in the public air. The Salem prosecution was actually on more solid legal ground since the defendant, if guilty of familiarity with the Unclean One, had broken a law against the practice of witchcraft, a civil as well as a religious offense; whereas the offender against HUAC could not be accused of any such violation but only of a spiritual crime, subservience to a political enemy's desires and ideology. He was summoned before the Committee to be called a bad name, but one that could destroy his career. . . . Timebends, A Life by Arthur Miller, page 331.
Several years after he wrote "The Crucible," Arthur Miller himself was called to testify before the HUAC. He refused to answer the Committee's questions about the names of persons who had been present at meetings of writers that he had attended in the 1930s. As a result, he was charged with criminal contempt of congress, tried and then convicted. The conviction was later thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court.
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