Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered: Salem's Witches Haunt New England History

Abstract

missionary impulse from the City on a Hill; the democratic legacy of the town meeting; the founding of Harvard and the creation of a rich educational tradition-these are the towering monuments from Puritan America that should stand out on the historical landscape. And they do-as do many other lesser but important symbols: Thanksgiving, village greens, stone walls, and old taverns. But swirling about all of these icons are the murky mists of Salem witchcraft. Quite simply, the American public is bedeviled by the Salem trials because, try as they might, most people cannot really comprehend how decent, educated, pious, law-abiding New England villagers could hang their own neighbors for virtually no discernible crime. witches of Salem will not go away; ask any historian who speaks and writes about Puritanism. Salem's witches haunt public lectures on colonial New England, survey courses in American history, and any discussion of the Puritan origins of American identity. They are the ghosts in our historical attic. These ghosts were brought out of the attic and put on the stage in 1953 when Arthur Miller discovered the roots of McCarthyism in Salem. His play, Crucible, joined Nathaniel Hawthorne's, Scarlet Letter, as one of the two most important sources for communicating an understanding of Puritanism to the public. Hawthorne was explicit about his own inability to escape spectral images from New England's past. The figure of my first ancestor ... still haunts me, he wrote in The Custom House essay which prefaced Scarlet Letter. As their representative, he continued, I take shame upon my self for their sakes and pray that any curse ... may be now and henceforth removed. Salem's witches are famous even in Europe. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a screenplay for Crucible (1958) that wrapped a Cold War European context around it. And Crucible lives on in recent American film. Miller adapted his own play into a popular, critically acclaimed movie in 1996. Professional historians also display an extraordinary interest in the