02/05/2020
Timely Political Commentary ....
Arthur Miller’s “Why I Wrote ‘The Crucible’ ”
The New Yorker
February 5, 2020
The playwright Arthur Miller once referred to theater as “the art of the present tense.” Miller published more than thirty plays, in the course of nearly seven decades, including “A View from the Bridge” and “Death of a Salesman,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1949. Between 1995 and 2002, he contributed six pieces to The New Yorker.
His work is notable for its ability to confront large cultural themes in the most intimate, crystalline prose. In 1996, Miller published an essay in the magazine about the creation of his iconic drama “The Crucible,” and the period, during the nineteen-fifties, when Senator Joseph McCarthy helped generate a national firestorm by making widespread (and unsubstantiated) allegations of subversive activity against members of the U.S. government. McCarthy, Miller writes, appears almost comical in hindsight—“a self-aware performer keeping a straight face as he does his juicy threat-shtick.”
Yet the senator from Wisconsin, employing an almost daily barrage of mudslinging and threats, was able to cow a legislative body comprised of accomplished, seasoned statesmen and women in less than a year. McCarthy’s threats and accusations had such a grip on the nation that otherwise sensible politicians and ordinary citizens were too unnerved to push back.
“In those years, our thought processes were becoming so magical, so paranoid, that to imagine writing a play about this environment was like trying to pick one’s teeth with a ball of wool: I lacked the tools to illuminate miasma. Yet I kept being drawn back to it,” Miller writes. During his research, Miller discovered a historical parallel for the McCarthy scare, in the Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century.
In the course of those trials, fear and paranoia spread like a fever, infecting the townspeople and unleashing a kind of mass frenzy. It was in this rich setting that Miller found a fitting backdrop for his parable about political persecution and demagoguery.
The fever infecting Washington during his own time appeared all-consuming; no one wanted to speak out or stand up to McCarthy and his allies for fear that the senator’s ire would soon focus on him. During periods of political delirium, demagogues and other authoritarians can appear to be giants who hold unparalleled sway; yet in hindsight, Miller notes, even giants begin to look small.
Miller’s great talent was his ability to see past the limitations of his own era, and to create a compelling work of art that vividly demonstrates what can occur when a political fever eventually breaks. —Erin Overbey, archive editor
