Puritans, The Crucible, and The McCarthy Trials

The first Puritans came to America in 1620 and by 1640, New England held as many as twenty thousand Puritans.

The term puritan is a broad term, referring to a number of Protestant groups.

The Puritans sought to “purify” the Anglican Church.

They felt that Christian worship and church organization should be simplified in order to more closely resemble models from the Bible.

Many Puritans were persecuted in Europe. They came to America seeking religious freedom and a chance to build a new society patterned after God’s word.

The Puritans

In 1534, King Henry VIII formed the Anglican Church (or the Church of England) when he formally split from the Catholic Church (so that he could divorce his wife).

Anglicans are commonly referred to as Episcopalians in the United States.

Presbyterians, Methodists, and Lutherans are all considered to be “Protestant” religions because all were born out of protests to Catholic and Anglican practices.

These three denominations share a belief in a literalistic interpretation of the Bible and insist on plain, spare churches without statues, candles, or elaborate vestments.

Protestant Denominations

A City Upon a HillFor we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world…

-- John Winthrop

John Winthrop was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the founder of the city of Boston.

Puritans believed that Adam and Eve’s sin had damned most people for all eternity.

They also believed that Jesus Christ had been sent to earth to save particular people.

It was difficult to know if an individual was one of the saved (the elect), or one of the damned (the unregenerate).

As a result, Puritans tried to live their lives in an exemplary manner, thinking that if you acted like “The Elect” should act, that would mean that you were one.

Puritan Beliefs: Sinners All?

Puritans believed that a covenant, or a contract, existed between God and humanity.

This idea of a contract between God and man also determined how the Puritans set up government in their communities, paving the way for American constitutional government.

Education was highly important to the Puritans, so people could read and understand the Bible and follow religious debates.

Harvard College was founded in 1636 to train Puritan Ministers.

Puritan Government and Education

The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings before local magistrates followed by county court trials to prosecute people accused of witchcraft in Essex, Suffolk and Middlesex counties of colonial Massachusetts, between February 1692 and May 1693.

The Salem Witch Trials

•Over 150 people were arrested and imprisoned, with even more accused but not formally pursued by the authorities. •Because of Puritan traditions, the accuser was never questioned; the accused must automatically be guilty of some wrongdoing and was expected to confess.•The two courts convicted twenty-nine people of the capital felony of witchcraft. Nineteen of the accused, fourteen women and five men, were hanged.•One man (Giles Corey) who refused to enter a plea was crushed to death under heavy stones in an attempt to force him to do so.

Developed after the Second World WarThe Red Scare was characterized by the fear that

communist thinking would disrupt the capitalist social order of America

The Red Scare did not distinguish among communist, socialist, or Social Democrat — because all were "foreign" (European) "ideologies", thus, "un-American”

In 1949, anti–communist fear was aggravated by the Chinese Communists winning the Chinese Civil War

American media reported that some communist nations had spies in the U.S. and now could produce atomic bombs.

The Red Scare 1947-1957

There were those who decided to reap political gain from the fears of the American public, and the most notorious of these is Joseph McCarthy. Joe McCarthy was a Republican Senator who announced that he had lists of suspected communists. The list had names of many kinds of people, and they ranged from TV personalities to businessmen.

He was often in the news, telling the American people that they were being overrun with communists, and that they must rid themselves of all the communists before America could be great again.

In 1954, all of America watched avidly as the Senate held hearings for some of the people on the lists. The hearings were televised nationwide.

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) blacklisted many people. Blacklisting means putting people on a list of suspected communists. It meant that their professional reputation was destroyed, and that no one would hire them for fear of being thought a communist.

The McCarthy Trials

Arthur Miller•October 1915- February 2005

•An American playwright and essayist

•Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, a period during which he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and was married to Marilyn Monroe.

•Arthur Miller was a member of the Communist party in 1950’s America. His name was given to HUAC and he was tried and convicted as a communist. His conviction was later overturned.

Allegory: a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.

In The Crucible, Miller likened the situation with the House Un-American Activities Committee to the witch hunt in Salem.

The Crucible

In creating a work for the stage Miller made no attempt to represent the real, historical personalities of his characters: he developed them to meet the needs of the play.

He fused certain characters into one: for example the judges "Hathorne" and "Danforth" are representative of several judges in the case, and the number of young girls involved was similarly reduced.

Most of the historical roles, however, are accurately represented and the judicial sentences pronounced on the characters are as given to the real-life counterparts.[

Miller gave all his characters the same colloquialisms, such as "Goody" for good wife, and drew on the rhythms and speech patterns of the King James Bible to achieve the effect of historical perspective he wanted.

He knew that to have a successful allegory, the reader would have to feel as though they were reading a true tale of the Salem Witch Trials, not a political commentary of the McCarthy Trials.

The Crucible vs. The McCarthy Trials