Arthur Miller was one of America’s greatest playwrights, which means he’s a racist. That is the inevitable conclusion if one thinks that the entire history of the United States, along with its government, institutions, and dominant culture are irredeemably racist. ‘Tis a pity that’s where we’ve come to considering that the United States has been involved in a decade’s long, one might say, centuries long endeavor to end the racist notion that rights and opportunities should be allocated by race, but nevertheless, racism hangs over our heads, like an apparition.
Miller is well known for his seminal play Death of a Salesman which is regularly performed and resides in a lot of top 10 lists of American plays. But he also wrote The Crucible which is a ripped from the very old headlines tale about young girls who can determine who in their small village is a witch. These witchy apparitions hang in the air, and only the girls can see them, but the politicians and authorities take these girls seriously and began to execute the accused for heresy.
The actual event from The Crucible are known to history as the Salem Witch Trials, but they were odd trials by contemporary standards. The trial was really a forced march before the truthsayers who, if they “saw” the apparitions, would began to writhe and scream and yell “I see Goody Osbourne cavorting with the devil!” which was enough to get Goody, a woman everyone had known since birth, killed. In the end, between 1692 and 1693, over 200 were accused, 150 people were arrested, and 25 were executed for witchcraft. Those girls stuck with “their truth” and 25 strangers were hung by the neck until dead.
Why would Arthur Miller take up this sad and sordid tale? Well, playwrights are big on symbolic representations of larger concepts and so it is widely believed that The Crucible is an allegorical play about McCarthyism. McCarthyism is the catch-all phrase that describes another period in US history where many thousands of people were accused of being communists or communist agents.
Some of these people were communists and had been in touch with actual communists from communist countries but most were more like ‘communist-curious’ or ‘communist-lite’, perhaps ‘communist-adjacent.’ They were not more communist than the average Bernie Sanders voter but to the HUAC, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, headed by US Senator Joseph McCarthy, accusation was good enough and he demanded of known communists identify unknown communists. They were to name names. Lists of the accused were circulated and anyone on it was subject to certain unemployment or worse. This “red scare” went on through the 1940s and in to the 1950s. A series of Supreme Court orders brought this period to an end, but not before catching Arthur Miller up in its net.
So, The Crucible is about the communist panic but it tells the tale using the Salem Witch Trials. The story is built around a central sympathetic character, John Proctor, who we discover early on, has had an affair with a much younger girl. Proctor is married and the girl has been dismissed from the home he shares with this wife, but Proctor’s wife Elizabeth knows what happened. It seems that she has not completely forgiven John Proctor, and they have a stony peace in their simple home. It hardly mattes because John Proctor works hard in the fields most of the time anyway.
The one who is really not over it, however, is the girl, Abigail Williams, and when she and a bunch of other girls get in trouble for trying to use magic to woo the town men, they begin to see these visions and apparitions that tell them who is a witch. That this is a horrible ruse is not noticed by the political and religious authorities who have the power of life and death.
Inevitably, Elizabeth Proctor finds herself accused, and finally, John Proctor himself is hauled in. By the time the authorities figure out they’ve been played by a bunch of insidiously dishonest girls, they’ve already sentenced scores of people to death, and so they devise a way out: they will get John Proctor to admit he’s the ringleader, punish him, and quietly move on.
But this means they have to get Proctor to play along, and so he, as with any good drama, finds himself with a terrible choice; he can sign away his name, and the truth, and live, or he can live in the truth, which is that he is not a sorcerer, but a good man who made mistakes, and die.
Spoiler alert; he dies.
I do not believe that the US is a racist nation, but we are a nation highly prone to manias which sweep through the population and create untold misery. The search for racists among us, to the more abstract search for racism, is a perennial mania that hangs on relatively rare events but thrives on as if it is a demon hanging on our every national step. Special people are supposed to be able to ‘see’ it buried in the hearts of white Americans, but also deep in the institutions. Any outcome that does not fall equally on the white population as the black population is considered to be caused by the hidden but always present racism. It explains so much, and yet, like an evil spirit, is oddly capricious. It seems to be far less interested in Asians, or even the most hated of minorities, the Jews.
Nevertheless, people who have done nothing but live in peace all their lives now stand accused of being racist, and even saying that racism is not a thing, or at least, not an all powerful thing, are now considered, de facto, racist. Denial equals guilt. Silence equals approval. If you speak ill of the idea of pervasive racism, you are racist, but if you don’t speak, that means you are racist too. Like John Proctor, we have no good choices; we can confess to it, or be punished. Many have already, and I fear many more, will be punished to death as this mania sweeps up everything in its path.
Our unforgiveable racism is said to be based in the fact that slavery was allowed in the British colonies and in the first 90 years or so of the United States. That we fought the most deadly war in US history to end slavery means nothing, of course.
In a sad and ironic twist, the Salem Witch Trials are linked to the current racism mania via a slave girl named Tituba. She was an immigrant from Barbados and the property of the family of Abigail Williams. The young girls were fascinated by Tituba, and she made potions for them so they could attract the man who they wanted. The deeply repressed sexuality of these white girls found expression in Tituba’s ways, and this was deeply forbidden. When these activities became known, the white girls and Tibuba were in trouble, and it was Tituba who broke first; she is the one that said they were all just victims of witchcraft, and therefore, not responsible for their actions. According to Tibuba, they had seen witches, and they see them all over town. Perhaps she knew that as a slave and immigrant, she would die first, and she clearly understood the religious impulses of her white masters and she played them masterfully. Having seen this, the white girls followed suit.
By the time her story, collaborated and proliferated by the white girls, was discounted, 25 innocent people had been killed, and a fresh chapter in American mania was written. We aren’t a racist nation but we are an emotional and troubled land, and this mania will result in an unknown number of dead, and a fresh realization that in the end, we are so often a powerful, interesting, spectacular and irascible nation populated by complete and utter fools.
TomRoushOnline 