A context of fear
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| The Salem Girls in The Crucible (The Old Vic, London, 2014) |
Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible in the 1950s, in a climate of fear, during the Cold War,
when communist infiltration of US culture was considered a pathology, a virus
that could kill their politics and their nation.
Writers and intellectuals gravitated to communism
during the 1930s Depression, either hoping its precepts could lead to social
reform or as a way to protest America’s isolationism, specifically the nation’s
neutrality in the Spanish War. In the
50s, in a period of right-wing paranoia, they became Senator McCarthy’s
scapegoats. They were considered Un-American. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) turned its attention
to writers and actors who were
supposedly seen as a threat to the republic. Those who in the 1930s had
embraced radical politics were now to be made to pay.
In January 1952 Elia Kazan,
Miller’s friend and film director, was summoned by the Committee. Although at
first he refused to name names, he changed his mind, confessing what he had
done and said to Miller, who then left Kazan’s
house and drove directly to Salem, Massachusetts to research what would become The Crucible.
