McCarthyism. A similar account in history to the Salem Witch trials was an era in the United States called McCarthyism.

McCarthy targeted many people, mostly the democrats such a Harry Truman and his colleagues who were portrayed as being soft on communism. McCarthy’s campaign was proving to be very strong. The peak of McCarthy’s influential strength was revealed when his crusade against communism helped his fellow republican, Dwight Eisenhower win the presidential election in 1952. Many politicians realised that McCarthy had great persuasive abilities towards the American citizens and so were unwilling to criticise him at any extent. A comment revealed that McCarthy was feared by other politicians. It stated, “Attacking him as this state is regarded as a certain method of committing suicide”. This is comparable to the fact that in 1692, attacking the church was a one way ticket to being punished and most probably given a death sentence. One exception to the scared politicians was the Assistant Secretary of State, William Benton who was opposed to this era of McCarthyism. The response that McCarthy and his supporters gave was to claim that Benton had protected known communists. This was one major reason to why Bento was defeated in the 1952 elections.

The next targets were what McCarthy believed were Anti-American books in libraries. The books that were removed from the library shelves were either written by communists, people who agreed with communism, former communists and people who strongly disagreed with anti-communists. This was followed by an objective stating that the military had to be investigated to see if there had been a communist infiltration or some kind of leak of tactical information. McCarthy had made attempts to damage the reputation of the Secretary of the Army, Robert Stevens, but failed successively. Dwight Eisenhower, the president was furious at McCarthy and decided that this anti-communist hysteria had to come to an end. McCarthy’s tactics and methods were publicised and vice-president, Richard Nixon had made a speech criticising McCarthy. It was a short time until McCarthy was expelled from his position as Chairman of the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate. He had lost his power and the media lost interest in his claims of communist conspiracy. The era of McCarthyism was over.

Arthur Miller, the author of ‘The Crucible’ was somewhat inspired by the decade of McCarthyism. He researched into anti-communist hysteria and also the Salem Witch Trials, where he had found that the two events were very similar. He decided to create a play under the category of a parody to show the madness that occurred due to the issue of witches in 1692. This excitement or hysteria was shown as a real event that happened in the past, but at the same time as a comically ridiculous event that was the cause for many deaths of many innocent people.