the HUAC ruptured their friendship. Kazan appeared be-
fore HUAC in the spring of 1952, after which Miller re-
fused to speak to Kazan, considering him an informer.
Kazan was conspicuously not invited to direct The Cru-
cible for its Broadway debut in 1953.
Significance
The Crucible remains widely read in the early
twenty-first century, and is considered one of Miller’s
most powerful works. The play is especially riveting be-
cause of the intense personal relationships among its cen-
tral characters. It was an 1867 study by Charles W.
Upham (Salem’s then-mayor) that moved Miller to cre-
ate a drama exploring such emotions as hysteria, anguish,
remorse and courage. Other historical accounts of what
had happened during the Salem witch hunts might be rich
in facts and analysis, but Miller’s fictional account of the
lives at stake brought home to a contemporary public
what it must have been like then—as well as the terror
felt by the targets of the Communist witch hunts.
Miller’s writing has often been celebrated for his un-
flinching examinations of human character in moments
of both moral weakness and moral strength. Miller’s es-
say of reflections on his work is a valuable contribution
to the study of the political in art. Miller reiterates his
affinity for the John Proctor character, who would rather
die than give false testimony. Miller was willing to tes-
tify before the HUAC about his own leftist activities, but
would not name others involved. The playwriting of The
Crucible was also an artistic processing of the personal
as well as political. Miller hints at his own marital infi-
delities and subsequent regret that are again paralleled in
John Proctor.
More than five decades after its composition, The
Crucible remains as powerful as when the specter of Mc-
Carthyism colored its every analysis. The play’s artistic
impact lies in its complex development of characters and
the sheer drama of Miller’s brilliant storytelling. Miller’s
fascination with legal language—he followed Senate
hearings very closely—also inspired the style of the di-
alogue in The Crucible. Although contemporary audi-
ences may experience Miller’s play as period drama, he
is ever astute in bringing to the audience’s awareness that
at any time, somewhere in the world, there are ongoing
witch hunts of some kind. In the instance of The Cru-
cible, the artistic is inherently political, but at its root is
an unshakeable social concern.
Primary Source
“Why I Wrote
The Crucible.
” [excerpt]
SYNOPSIS: Arthur Miller wrote
The Crucible
in 1952
largely in response to McCarthyism.
The Crucible
is
set in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Rumors of
witchcraft throughout the town lead to accusations,
roundups, and forced confessions. Eventually the in-
nocent were sent to the gallows. Miller compared
the hysteria of the Salem witch hunts centuries ear-
lier to the outing of alleged Communists during his
own lifetime. Miller’s essay “Why I Wrote
The Cru-
cible
” was written on the occasion of the play’s first
Hollywood adaptation, a little more than forty years
after
The Crucible
and ironically, Miller’s blacklist-
ing by Hollywood.
As I watched “The Crucible” taking shape as a
movie over much of the past year, the sheer depth
of time that it represents for me kept returning to
my mind. As those powerful actors blossomed on
the screen, and the children and the horses, the
crowds and the wagons, I thought again about how
I came to cook all this up nearly fifty years ago, in
an America nobody I know seems to remember
clearly. In a way, there is a biting irony in this film’s
having been made by a Hollywood studio, something
unimaginable in the fifties. . . .
“The Crucible” was an act of desperation. Much
of my desperation branched out, I suppose, from a
typical Depression-era trauma—the blow struck on
the mind by the rise of European Fascism and the
brutal anti-Semitism it had brought to power. But by
1950, when I began to think of writing about the
hunt for Reds in America, I was motivated in some
great part by the paralysis that had set in among
many liberals who, despite their discomfort with the
inquisitors’ violations of civil rights, were fearful, and
with good reason, of being identified as covert Com-
munists if they should protest too strongly.
Nobody but a fanatic, it seemed, could really say
all that he believed.
. . . The Red hunt, led by the House Committee
on Un-American Activities and by McCarthy, was be-
coming the dominating fixation of the American psy-
che. It reached Hollywood when the studios, after
first resisting, agreed to submit artists’ names to
the House Committee for “clearing” before employ-
ing them. This unleashed a veritable holy terror
among actors, directors, and others, from Party
members to those who had had the merest brush
with a front organization.
. . . Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures,
did something that would once have been consid-
ered unthinkable: he showed my script to the F.B.I.
Cohn then asked me to take the gangsters in my
script, who were threatening and murdering their
“Why I Wrote
The Crucible
”
36
I
The Arts
American Decades Primary Sources, 1950–1959
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