Abstract

SINCE its appearance during the height of the McCarthy era, Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953) has been read as a scathing commentary on postwar American political culture. Indeed, the author himself was far from subtle in suggesting the way in which the Salem witchcraft trials provided a historical metaphor for a contemporary crisis: In the countries of the Communist ideology, all resistance of any import is linked to the totally malign capitalist succubi, and in America any man who is not reactionary in his views is open to the charge of alliance with Red hell. The ease with which Puritan witch-hunting was appropriated for ideological purposes during the 1950s was not, of course, restricted to literary texts. One notable historian, Marion Starkey, referred to the delusion of 1692 as an allegory of our times. Granted the sophistication that historical distance provides, we now rather easily recognize how postwar political anxieties impinged on the historical record of seventeenth-century New England.' Such impositions were not characteristic of the 1950s alone, however. They are also readily discovered in the early American republic.

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