The Crucible
by Arthur Miller
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Book Summary Information
Author: Arthur MillerIntroduction: Christopher Bigsby
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-03-25
ISBN: 0142437336
Number of pages: 143
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780142437339
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Crucible
Book Review: An extraordinary play -- about McCathy"s witchhunt
Summary: 5 Stars
My wife and I first read this play about 35 years ago and we saw it performed (separately)in lackluster productions.
In May, 2006 we saw in London "The Crucible" as performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company. It lived up to exceptional reviews, including the first ever six star maximum awarded by TimeOut's theater section.
Some plays read better than they ever perform. Others perform better than they read. Others are equal. This is a play that reads and performs well, but a theater production is extremely demanding, if for other reason the number of actors required. The RSC had the requisite numbers and quality.
Miller was quite open about the play's symbolizing of the McCarthy era of smears, innuendos and attacks that ruined the lives of many innocent people. Miller made it clear that his play was fiction that was loosely based on the Salem witch trials.
The play is also about human character -- how revenge, jealousy and other motivations sometimes bring out the worst. In the 50s, few played much attention to the allusions to the Puritans, who had no tolerance for other Christians, much less other faiths. For them, as the play says, you are either with us or you are against us. A familiar refrain. Well performed or well read, the play is thought provoking. But your mind must be open to at least consider putting yourself honestly into Miller's shoes and his era.
There is a reviewer who condemns this play even while admitting he has never read it or seen it performed. He is only concerned with imposing his point of view. What he contends is that McCarthy was more right than wrong and that there was no witchhunt because there were communists -- and some in government. It's a popular theme among McCarthyism deniers
Condemning a book or play you know nothing about is akin to book burning -- or witch hunting.
Witch Hunt is defined as "an attempt to find and punish people whose opinions are unpopular and who are said to be a danger to society" My Webster defines "the searching out and deliberate harassment of those (as political opponents) with unpopular views." Miller got that right and the revisionists of facts get it wrong. From the earliest days, witch hunting has never really been about witches, but those who held those unpopular views or lived differently.
You could get to be a "fellow traveler" by speaking to the wrong people. Most American communists had quit the party in disillusionment well before McCarthy came along. McCarthy in his "Crucible" style kangaroo court went after people anyone who could give him a headline. He gave no due process or fairness. It was about confessions and naming names in a Soviet-style show trial. Which is strange for a man who and other right wingers in Congress who succeeded in overturning the conviction of the SS troops responsible for the Malmedy Massacre. It was all in character.
McCarthy won his first local election by smearing a respectedl jurist. And then, exaggerating his own war experience, he smeared Sen. La Folette as a draft dodger even though LaFollette was 46 when Pearl Harbor was attacked. McCarthy requested a DSC he almost certainly did not deserve (similar to LBJ's Silver Star). And he claimed to have flown missions (in varying numbers) when he was actually a desk bound intelligence cipher. And then he saw opportunity as a demagogue on the communist threat identified by George Kennan in the "Long Telegram."
In February, 1950 he waved a list of people who he said were communists who in the State Department. A review is no place to recount basic history of who our WWII allies were -- or that Churchill, a devout anti-communists needed the Soviet Union against Hitler as did we. There were real problems. In 1946, the State Department itself prepared the list of security risks McCarthy eventually waved around. Most of them were dismissed as security risks, not as Communists, but for other reasons, i.e. sexual preference, alcoholism, bankruptcy, etc. McCarthy got the names from a Senate report done years before. Some had been guilty of having a contrary view on China, citing the corruption and weakness of Chiang Kai-Shek. McCarthy's, who attacked gays, could not have passed the security standards due to his own sexual preferences and alcoholism.
McCarthy leveled the charge of helping the communist agenda against General Eisenhower, President Truman, FDR, General George Marshall, Secretary of State Dean Acheson and many other great men who were staunch anti-communists. In fairness to McCarthy, he did some of his worst smears while drunk or close to it. He would drink with reporters, then feed them their stories. Anyone looking at the old film can see that he was frequently intoxicated -- and his performance on the Murrow See It Now, was not only smear but out of control. Easy to see in Good Night and Good Luck. No one could damage McCarthy in the end as he did himself.
Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican conservative, strongly condemned McCarthy in her Declaration of Conscience speech in June of 1950. Others joined her, but most were afraid. Eisenhower, who had despised McCarthy for years, did not respond until McCarthy went after the Army. McCarthy targeted political opponents, e.g. Sen. Millard Tydings was tarred by McCarthy's committee with a faked photograph of him with a Communist. He smeared a Connecticut Senator who questioned his actions. Even J.Edgar Hoover had to wash his hands of him. So the smears continued until 1954 when the Senate finally censured McCarthy for conduct unbecoming his office.
McCarthy did no good and damaged the U.S. counter espionage program. It was in any event Richard Nixon who pushed the Alger Hiss case -- before the election when McCarthy discovered Çommunism was his ticket. Other major cases involving communists, for good or ill, were accomplished before McCarthy came along.
The climate of fear and division McCarthy engendered was perhaps Stalin's greatest victory. The McCarthy hearings called those who would make a good show confession-- or provide a list of names already given. Artist and writers and bureaucrats who had done nothing feared for their jobs for youthful indiscretions, or knowing a wrong someone -- or for nothing at all. McCarthy not only stifled dissent, he cast a pall over American intellectual life more in line with Stalin than the US.
Carl Foreman, who co-wrote the script for "High Noon" and co-proiduced it, is an example of those forced into exile (to Britain). As it happens, High Noon, once wildly condemned by the right, is one of the most requested film for presidential viewing. Reagan loved it. So did Lech Walesa, who cites use of its imagery, i.e. the movie poster of Gary Cooper, in Poland's first almost-free elections. Why? As Walesa said in the Wall Street Journal: "Cowboys fight for justice, fight against evil, and fight for freedom, both physical and spiritual." Some conservatives now rave over its depiction of duty and courage.
So too, is The Crucible about core American beliefs of nothing going along with the crowd, joining the lynch mob. The unpopularity or even complete wrongness of some views does not make it correct to punish people for having those beliefs. If you want to criticize it, first you have to see the play and understand it.
Summary of The Crucible
Based on historical people and real events, Arthur Miller's play uses the destructive power of socially sanctioned violence unleashed by the rumors of witchcraft as a powerful parable about McCarthyism.Classics Books
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