The McCarthy and the Salem Witch Hunts
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“The McCarthy Era of the 1950s and the Salem Witch Trials of the 1600s were major events in American history that destroyed the lives and careers of many innocent victims. These tragic events were similar in that they demonstrated how hard times lead to societys need to find a scapegoat. They also show the shame and regret that take place after the bloodbaths occur. The parallels between these two events, which took place almost 300 years apart, are remarkable.”
“However, the Salem Witchcraft Trials use of human frailty in court helped courts move forward in eliminating its use. Courts now need factual or circumstantial evidence to convict a person of any crime and the accused is promised a fair trial. Nowadays, the accused is given an unbiased judge and jury making it a fair trial (Linder). A fair trial was something colonialists thought they were giving. Human frailty to a colonialist from the 1640s would have been overwhelming and unbelievable. Colonialists believed that the common procedure of witchcraft was justifiable and never abused. The evidence from the Salem trials found nowadays shows that not only were the procedures often abused and accusations baseless, but that the way in which they treated the accused was inhumane.”The Crucible is a fictional retelling of events in American history surrounding the Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century, yet is as much a product of the time in which Arthur Miller wrote it, the early 1950s, as it is description of Puritan society. The Salem witch trials took place from June through September of 1692, during which time nineteen men and women were hanged at Gallows Hill near Salem, while another man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death for refusing to submit to a trial on witchcraft charges. Hundreds of other persons faced accusations of witchcraft and dozens more languished in jail without trials. As the play describes, the witchcraft trials began because of the illness of Betty Parris, the daughter of the Salem minister, Reverend Samuel Parris, a former merchant in Barbados. Before Betty Parris fell ill, Cotton Mather had published
“Memorable Providences,” describing the suspected witchcraft of an Irish washerwoman in Boston, and Betty Parris hysteria mirrored those of the suspected Irish witch. Other girls, including Ruth Putnam and Mercy Lewis also exhibited similar symptoms. However, actual events diverge from the narrative of the play. The Parris slave, Tituba (who was likely a South American Arawak Indian and not African), immediately came under suspicion. As a form of counter-magic, Tituba was ordered to bake a rye cake with the urine of the afflicted victim and to feed the cake to a dog. This added to suspicions of witchcraft by Tituba, and led to the slave becoming one of the first women accused, along with Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn. Although most of the women first accused of witchcraft were considered disreputable, several reputable members of the community were soon executed, including Rebecca Nurse (featured in the play), the most controversial execution, George Burroughs, the former minister in Salem. One of the most flamboyant of the women executed was Bridget Bishop, a woman who had been married several times and was known as the mistress of two Salem taverns and had a reputation for dressing more artistically than the women of the village.Sir William Phips, the Governor of Massachusetts, created a new court to oversee the witchcraft cases. The Chief Justice of this court was William Stoughton, an avid witch-hunter who allowed many deviations from normal courtroom procedure including the admission of spectral evidence (testimony by afflicted persons that they had been visited by a suspects specter) and private conversations between accusers and judges.
By the early autumn of 1692, the cries of witchcraft began to ebb and doubts began to develop concerning the validity of the charges. The educated elite of the colony began efforts to end the witch-hunting hysteria that had enveloped Salem. Increase Mather, the father of Cotton, published “Cases