Brian Gardener looks at the background to Arthur Miller's 'The Crucible'. The Crucible' was first produced in 1953. At the time the United states was in the grip of powerful anti-communist bysteria. This period is often summed up by the phrase "McCarthyism' but appearing centre-stage only in 1950, the senator for Winsconsin, Joseph McCarthy, was something of a Latecomer to the drama.
By the end of the war, the US was in the throes of an unprecedented economic boom. However with cleven million servicemen due to return, if the country was to avoid another serious depression foreign markets had to open up to Us trade and investment After suffering some twenty million casualties, the Soviet Union was in no state to go to war Yet in order to justify its profitdoic mutary expansion, Ine Us very much needed a new enemy.
The years following the war saw the U.S. experience the greatest number of strikes in its history. For American canitalists the en emy was not only without but within.
So began the Cold War both at home and abroad.
Truman and the Democratic Party's adoption of anti-communism was in many ways a of their Republican opponents. In 1946 the Republicans had been out of power for fourteen years. With few other weapons in their ar. the Democrat administration was soft on communism.
In 1947, the Republican dominated Congress passed the Taft. Hartley act which outlawed strikes by government employces, banned the closed shop and required union leaders to swear they were not communists.
Truman established a federal loyalty programme and the AttorWITH A NEW screen treatArt imitating Me: a scene from the original production of The Crucible in 1953 ney General was authorised to tions. Two thousand were sacked as a result. Evidence against an employce could amount merely to the existence of texts on Marxism on their bookshelves!
The administration established a "Zeal for Democracy' in schools. The teaching of anti-communism occame an important part of the curriculum.
For the members of Congress's House Un-american Activities Committee (HUAC), the communist conspiracy pervaded every arca of American life. Many prostrated themselves before it, confessing to their former sins and The actions of the committee gave free rein to others to carry out purges, Companies carried out their own investigations of employecs and trade unions rid their organisations of suspected communists before the HUAC could Many lost their livelihoods. Some suffered the worse fates of imprisonment and death.
In 1948, the committee's new boy, Richard Nixon, grilled the former State Department official, " Alger Hiss after it was alleged that he led a secret communist cell inside the Roosevelt administration of the 1930s. Hiss denied the charges but was later sentenced to five years in prison having been convicted of perjury on oath before the committee.
In 1949, when the Soviet Union exploded an atomic bomb, the prevailing view was that they could not possibly have developed such a capability without having been passed secret information. In 1951, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were convicted of giving away atomic secrets and were finally executed in June, 1953.
The hysteria reached its zenith in February, 1950 when the previ. ously obscure senator, Joe McCarthy made a speech claiming that 205 State Department employces were communists. Never able to substantiate the charge, McCarthy changed his story several times Addicted to his own publicity, McCarthy slung mud at any convenient target. If it didn't stick he quickly moved on to something eise.
He was Witchfinder General to ate Republicans who balked at getting their hands too dirty. His downfall came in 1954 when he maac tac mistake or maycsugaung the army.
The military establishment counter-attacked with an accusatial treatment for a recently drafted member off his staff. In the relevised hearings he appeared both arrogant and deranged. Later that year the senate censured him for "conduct... unbecoming a ate".
In 1947, before the onset of McCarthy the HUAC had investigated the motion picture industry. The Hollywood Ten refused to be interrogated on the grounds that such questions from a governmental body violated the first amendment of the constitution.
Every one of them was jailed for contempt of Congress and the studio bosses ensured that most of them were never to work in the film industry again.
In the fifties Hollywood increasingly infected anticommunise propaganda into its outpur. When as a young screenwriter Arthur Miller was pressured to turn the gangster villains into Brooklyn waterfront, he withdrew the script. The following day the producer sent him a wire saying. "It's interesting how the minute we try to make tae scrupt pro-American, you pull out."
"Timebends', Miller's autobiography, describes his evolving feelings on the paraliels between the events in Salem in 1692 and the contemporary political situation.
He says: "At first I rejected the idea of a play on the subict -. but gradually over weeks, a living connection between myself and Salem, and berween Salem and myself was made in my mind... the bearings in Washington were profoundly and even avowedly ritua!istic...The main point was that the damn his confederates as well as his Devil master, and guarantec his sterling new allegiance by breaking disgusting old vows • jom tae society of extremicsy ac cent people."
Miller himself always doubted his own political conviction. Even as a young man who toyed with the idea of joining the Lincoln Brigade and fighting on the republican side in the Spanish civil war, he rejected the communist orthodoxy of the time, secing himself as first and foremost a writer.
As perhaps the greatest American dramatist of the century, one of his enduring achievements has ocen in plays suca as Localn or a Salesman' and 'All My Sons' to expose the tragedy of the many people who buy into the American capitalist dream.
Some three years after the first production of 'The Crucible', Miller was himself summoned to testily belore the committee. By that time, after the demise of McCarthy, anti-communism was not the political force which it once had been.
Perhaps recognising this and needing all the publicity they could get, the members of the committee seemed to attach more importance to being photographed with milers taea wilk, martyn Monroc, than they did to interrogating the playwright himself.
Pausine for a moment to cxamine the frame, it is tempting to ties and into the fifties the House Un-American Activities Committee had been trving to evolve its own script of the time and could never decide whether the treatment should be comedy or farce, in tae closing moments there is a return to farce but whatever the style the effect is the same. The vast majority of the dissenters had been destroyed.