Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller was born on October 17th 1915 in New York City. An American playwright, who combined social awareness with a searching concern for his characters' inner lives, He is best known for Death of a Salesman written in 1949.

Miller was shaped by the Depression, which spelled financial ruin for his father, a small manufacturer, and demonstrated to the young Miller the insecurity of modern existence.

After graduation from high school he worked in a warehouse. With the money he earned he attended the University of Michigan, where he began to write plays. His first public success was with Focus in 1945, a novel about anti-Semitism. All My Sons written in 1947 is a drama about a manufacturer of faulty war materials that strongly reflects the influence of Ibsen, was his first important play. Death of a Salesman became one of the most famous American plays of its period. It is the tragedy of a small man destroyed by false values that are in large part the values of his society. The Crucible was written in 1953.

The Crucible

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The Crucible

The Crucible is an allegorical re-telling of the McCarthy era red scare that occurred in the United States after World War II. Based on historical accounts, the play is set during the 1692 Salem Witchcraft Trials when several young girls accuse innocent town members of witchcraft to avoid getting into trouble for entertaining ideas of witchery themselves. The husbands of some of the women involved try to convince the judges that the girls had deceived them, but find them unshakeable. Eventually even the most prominent members of the community find themselves charged, and the tension mounts as the central protagonist, John Proctor, must confess an earlier adultery in order to save his own wife from being hanged based upon charges brought by his former lover. However, because his wife lies about the adultery to save his name, the judges fail to believe his charges. Proctor is given the chance to save his own life by confessing to witchery and naming names, but chooses to die rather than betray his friends and neighbours.

McCarthyism

The late Joseph R. McCarthy, a United States Senator from Wisconsin, was in many ways the most gifted politician ever bred in the Untied States. The major phase of McCarthy's career was mercifully short. It began in 1950; three years after he had taken his seat in the Senate, where he had seemed a dim and inconsiderable figure. It ended in 1954, when the Senate passed a resolution of censure against him. That was three years before his death at the age of forty-eight.

McCarthy was a quiet and undistinguished senator until February 1950, when his public charge that 205 Communists had infiltrated the State Department created bedlam and catapulted him into headlines across the country. Upon subsequently testifying before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, he proved unable to produce the name of a single "card-carrying Communist" in any government department. Nevertheless, he gained increasing popular support for his campaign of accusations by capitalising on the fears and frustrations of a nation weary of the Korean War and appalled by Communist advances in eastern Europe and China.

McCarthy proceeded to instigate a nation-wide, militant anti-Communist "crusade"; to his supporters, he appeared as a dedicated patriot and guardian of genuine Americanism, to his detractors, as an irresponsible, self-seeking witch-hunter who was undermining the nation's traditions of civil liberties.

McCarthy was re-elected in 1952 and obtained the chairmanship of the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate and of its permanent subcommittee on investigations. For the next two years he was constantly in the spotlight, investigating various government departments and questioning innumerable witnesses about their suspected Communist affiliations. Although he failed to make a plausible case against anyone, his colourful and cleverly presented accusations drove some persons out of their jobs and brought popular condemnation to others. The persecution of innocent persons on the charge of being Communists and the forced conformity that this practice engendered in American public life came to be known as McCarthyism. Meanwhile, less flamboyant government agencies actually did identify and prosecute cases of Communist infiltration.