[Home]
Arthur Miller

The Witch-hunt
In the early 1950s, a nationwide hunt for Communists took place in America, bearing the harmless-sounding name of “The McCarthy Hearings”. These hearings, however, were anything but harmless, especially so to Arthur Miller himself. The following is an excerpt of a biography of Arthur Miller’s life:
 

“Arthur Miller had just turned 14 when His family's savings were wiped out by the stock market crash of October, 1929. Almost literally overnight, the lives of many of his friends changed from reasonable comfort to poverty. Over the next 12 years--the time of the Great Depression, as it is called--Arthur Miller came to know and work with people who had joined the Communist Party. These people weren't spies, they simply were desperate, and they saw Communism as a way out of a desperate situation. And although Communism worried a few people in the 1930s, most were too busy with their own problems to give it much thought. Besides, Soviet Russia was not yet an enemy of the United States. In fact, Russian and American soldiers later fought side by side against the Germans at the end of World War II. It wasn't until after the war, when--as so often happens--the victor's turned against each other, that Communism began to be considered a very serious threat. By the late 1940s when the Congressional hearings first began, there were quite a few people who had flirted with Communism at some time or other, although most had renounced it long before. But even if you had no Communism in your own past, you could easily be in the same position as Arthur Miller--you knew someone who did. That was more than enough to get you in trouble with Senator McCarthy and similar investigators.”

 

Fortunately for him, Miller was summoned to appear before the Un-American Activities Committee only in 1956, when it had become clear that very few people were completely free of any connection with Communism, and the movement had lost much of its support, existent only because of the fear it had inspired in those who would speak against it. For him, he had seen the dangers of fascism and dictatorship the McCarthy hearings had posed, the same dangers of Communism, and protested against it in a petition, which was the chief reason why he had been summoned to appear before the Committee. He then began to note a remarkable resemblance between the McCarthy hearings and the witch-hunts which had occurred in America many years ago and had written “The Crucible”, using historical parallels from the McCarthy hearings in “The Crucible”, as we will examine in the next chapter. [Top]