"Salem had been established hardly forty years before. To the European world the whole province was a barbaric frontier inhabited by a sect of fanatics." --Arthur Miller, The Crucible

February 10th marks the first anniversary of the death of the greatest American playwright of the past fifty years.

Arthur Asher Miller died of heart failure at the ripe age of 89 at the summit of a career that spanned 61 years, changed the direction of American thought and letters, and brought him international acclaim.

Miller’s work—his championing of a union strike in his early play, No Villain; his humanization of the “little guy,” trammelled by a heartless system, lost in the maze of his American dream—Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman; and perhaps, most tellingly, his anachronistic rendering of the McCarthy hearings in the 17th-Century setting of The Crucible-- earned Miller the distinction of a hauling before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1956, and a Contempt of Congress citation in 1957. Despite the threat to his life’s work, security and career, Miller refused to “name names”—to reveal friends and colleagues who, like him, had been attracted to Communist and Socialist ideals during the Great Depression and the 40s.

In his last years, Miller lived to see the nation whose democracy he cherished lie its way into an illegal and preemptive war against a beaten and subdued Iraq; he saw “suspected terrorists” imprisoned without charge or trial, tortured to extract “information” and “confessions”—and the policy justified by an unelected President, a K-Street-compromised Congress and assorted Myrmidons. He did not live to see domestic surveillance justified by that same sordid group—but he had seen it all happen before: and he had written about it, searingly, in The Crucible.

To honor the principles of true freedom and integrity for which Miller stood, let us gaze back at his classic play. Any parallels with our own time and dubious cast of characters are certainly not coincidental.

Miller sets the tone of intimidation and paranoia within the first two pages of his extensive and, literarily speaking, unusual introduction: “A two-man patrol has the duty ‘to walk forth in the time of God’s worship to take notice of such as either lye about the meeting house, without attending to the word and ordinances, or that lye at home or in the fields without giving good account thereof, and to take the names of such persons, and to present them to the magistrates, whereby they may be accordingly proceeded against.’ This predilection for minding other people’s business was time-honored among the people of Salem, and it undoubtedly created many of the suspicions which were to feed the coming madness.” In the same way that we--Salem’s 21st Century descendents--feel ourselves alone and isolated against numberless hoardes stretching from the Caribbean and Andes to the Middle East, Persia, Kazakhstan and China, so the Salemnistas looked out upon an American continent that “stretched endlessly west … full of mystery … dark and threatening … for out of it Indian tribes marauded from time to time.”

Thanks to their “parochial snobbery” the Salemnistas (my term, not Miller’s!) have failed to convert the Indians. Nevertheless, this isolated, benighted colony believe that they hold “in their steady hands the candle that would light the world.”

The Salemnistas of 1692, Miller informs us, “were not quite the dedicated folk that arrived on the Mayflower … In their own time a revolution had unseated the royal government and substituted a junta …” Miller continues: “The times, to their eyes, must have been out of joint, and to the common folk must have seemed as insoluble and complicated as do ours today … The Salem tragedy,” he avers, “developed from a paradox … in whose grip we still live … Simply, it was this: for good purposes, even high purposes, the people of Salem developed a theocracy, a combine of state and religious power whose function was to keep the community together and to prevent any kind of disunity that might open it to destruction by material or ideological enemies.” Self preservation and communal unity are “good” and “high purposes,” but the antithesis of the premise lies in this: “All organization is and must be grounded on the idea of exclusion and prohibition …” And, “the time came … when the repressions of order were heavier than seemed warranted by the dangers against which the order was organized. The witch-hunt was a perverse manifestation of the panic which set in among all classes when the balance began to turn toward greater individual freedom.”

We can trace the arc of American freedom and repression since the end of the Cold War and observe Miller’s “paradox” in action. With the defeat of the Soviet adversary, the liberated American psyche embraces the chummy, New-South Clinton to lead us into the promised land of peace and prosperity. But dark forces are afoot and the “panic” sets in among all classes when the balance begins to turn toward greater individual freedom. What shall we do with all this new-found liberation from the fear of Mutual Assured Destruction? Follow our burger-chomping leader to orgiastic bliss, endanger the institutions—marriage, the family-- that have made us secure and great? Or, enforce the dark predicate: “all organization is and must be grounded on the idea of exclusion and prohibition.” Newt Gingrich, Pat Robertson—the rise of the Religious Right—play yang to Clinton’s yin. 9/11 seals the deal: Freedom—the excess of it—is the very thing we must exclude and prohibit in order to protect our essential “freedoms”!

A last look at Miller’s cogent introduction; writing about the Salemfolk: “… one can only pity them all, just as we shall be pitied someday. It is still impossible for man to organize his social life without repressions, and the balance has yet to be struck between order and freedom.” And, lest we forget the ever-pragmatic, grasping side of the human simian: “The witch-hunt was not, however, a mere repression. It was also … a long overdue opportunity for everyone so inclined to express publicly his guilt and sins, under the cover of accusations against the victims.” As we lust after the resources of the Middle East, Latin America and Africa now, so was it neighbor against neighbor then: “Land-lust which had been expressed before by constant bickering over boundaries and deeds could now be elevated to the arena of morality; one could cry witch against one’s neighbor and feel perfectly justified in the bargain. Old scores could be settled on a plane of heavenly combat between Lucifer and the Lord; suspicions and the envy of the miserqable toward the happy could and did burst out in the general revenge.”

The play begins with an incident of domestic spying! The Reverend Samuel Parris has discovered his daughter Betty, his niece Abigail and some other girls and young women of the village dancing “like heathen in the forest.” Even more mortifying, perhaps, he believes he saw “someone naked running through the trees!” Ten-year-old Betty lies comatose in her bed; 17-year-old Abigail, “a stikingly beautiful girl, an orphan, with an endless capacity for dissembling,” called to give account of herself before the supine Betty and her guilt-racked father, immediately deflects attention to Goody Proctor, her former employer: “They want slaves, not such as I … I will not black my face for any of them!” Gradually we shall learn that Abigail has had a brief affair with Goody’s husband, John. The note of sexual repression and frustration is struck early. When the Reverend wonders about Abigail’s failure to find work in the seven months since she left the service of the Proctors, she replies, “Do you begrudge my bed, uncle?” She means, of course, her room and board, but the double entendre hovers.

Enter Mrs. Ann Putnam, “a twisted soul of forty-five, a death-ridden woman, haunted by dreams.” Ann Putnam has lost several babies to childbirth and has convinced herself that the devil and those who do his work have cursed her. Reverend Parris defers to her. Ann Putnam, like Donald Rumsfeld, is overly concerned about “metrics.” As soon as she observes the supine ten-year-old, she asks, “How high did she fly, how high?”

Other girls and young women enter the sick room; when the adults leave, they reveal the conspiracy of silence and obfuscation. “What’ll we do?” Mary Warren cries. “The village is out! I just come from the farm; the whole country’s talkin’ witchcraft! They’ll be callin’ us witches … Witchery’s a hangin’ error, a hangin’ like they done in Boston two year ago!”

To still the growing fear and dissension in the ranks, Abigail shakes the not-quite-so-comatose Betty, who has, of course, heard all. When Abigail threatens her, Betty reveals the genesis of all the “witchery,” telling Abigail: “You drank a charm to kill John Proctor’s wife! You drank a charm to kill Goody Proctor.” Abigail “smashes her across the face.”

Soon, John Proctor himself arrives looking for the fluttery Marry Warren, a.w.o.l. again from her tasks as Abigail’s replacement, assisting Goody Proctor. The one heroic figure, Proctor “is a man in his prime” who is “not easily led…. In Proctor’s presence a fool felt his foolishness instantly.” I have scratched my head to think of a comparable figure in our contemporary political scene, but I regret to report I cannot name one. Mary Warren complains that she has “only come to see the great doings in the world,” and Proctor responds: “I’ll show you a great doin’ on your arse one of these days. Now get you home; my wife is waiting’ with your work!”

When Mary and the others have left, Abigail and Proctor have a moment alone. “I look for John Proctor that took me from my sleep and put knowledge in my heart!” Abigail confesses. “I never knew what pretense Salem was, I never knew the lying lessons I was taught.” Clearly, Abigail, as much sinning as sinned against, is still carrying the torch. But Proctor rebuffs her; he has returned to the strait and narrow, determined to be faithful to his wife.

When the Reverend Parris returns, the truce between him and Proctor explodes. The Reverend is sore because Proctor does not attend his church. “I have trouble enough without I come five mile to hear him preach only hellfire and damnation,” Proctor tells another character. To which Parris presently responds: “There is either obedience or the church will burn like Hell is burning!” To which Proctor rebuts: “Can you speak one minute without we land in Hell again? I am sick of Hell.” And Parris parries: “It is not for you to say what is good for you to hear!” And Proctor presently responds: “I like not the smell of this ‘authority.’”

American contentiousness, our adversarial posturing, is not a recent trait. Giles Corey, eighty three, “knotted with muscle, canny, inquisitive,” has watched the debate between Proctor and Parris. “Wherefore is everybody suing everybody else?” he complains. “I have been six time in court this year.” But Corey’s attmpted witticim falls flat. Parris has an ally present in the character of Anne Putnam’s husband. Putnam’s own argument with Proctor is secular: they both lay claim to the same tract of land.

At this point, there’s another extraordinary interpolation by Miller. In fact, among the hundreds of plays I’ve read, this one is quite remarkable in that it is meant to be read as much as it is meant to be seen. Only Shaw, so far as I know, can rival Miller in this intercalating talent. It’s the introduction of another major character, one Reverend Hale, which elicits Miller’s musings: “We conceive the Devil as a necessary part of a respectable view of cosmology,” Miller declares. “Ours is a divided empire in which certain ideas and emotions and actions are of God, and their opposites are of Lucifer.” Further: “When we see the steady and methodical inculcation into humanity of the idea of man’s worthlessness—until redeemed—the necessity of the Devil may become evident as a weapon, a weapon designed and used time and time again in every age to whip men into a surrender to a particular church or church-state.” Writing today, Miller might have called that weapon one of mass destruction.

Writing in the paranoiac 50s, Miller’s thoughts in this broad aside sound a clarion tocsin in 2006: “In America any man who is not reactionary in his views is open to the charge of alliance with the Red hell. Political opposition, thereby, is given an inhumane overlay which then justifies the abrogation of all normally applied customs of civilized intercourse. A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence. Once such an equation is effectively made, society becomes a congerie of plots and counterplots, and the main role of government changes from that of the arbiter to that of the scourge of God.”

Miller’s play is too good for the cursory treatment I’ve rendered here. Like all great works of art, it both captures the spirit of its age and transcends it, shooting tendrils into all-time, at once caressing and impastoing the canvas with a universal human portrait. John Proctor, Giles Corey and eighteen others were hanged and crushed to death because of the hysterical false witnessing of girls and young women, fearful of acknowledging their own sensuality, coerced by a moribund authority to find the Devil in their actions, to cast the Incubus out so he might gnaw the heads of the innocent. Proctor, at least in the play, finds redemption: he will not sully his good name by naming others in the supposed diabolical conspiracy: “I have three children—how may I teach them to walk like men in the world, and I sold my friends?” More full of life, vigor and integrity than any other character, Proctor cannot bring himself to name those who have already been accused—and some of whom have already been hanged. Pressed to lend his weight to the inquisitional proceedings, he cries out: “It is my name! … I cannot have another … How may I live without my name?”

We have moved far since The Crucible—but we have not advanced. In this age of “extraordinary renditions” when we fly suspected terrorists to be beaten in Egypt or boiled alive in Uzbekistan, we have not advanced, but we have sunken into a slough of despond from which we may never emerge. When Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz can nuance the kinds of torture that are “acceptable”; when our President and Attorney General assure our Congressional leaders that domestic surveillance is within the purview of a War President, even when war has not been declared—we may rest assured we have not advanced. When New York Times reporters like Judith Miller gossip tall tales about weapons of mass destruction and improbable links between secular states and radical religious groups—when we cannot trust our messengers—then surely we are not advancing, but are moving backwards: back past the Englightenment, past our own revolutionary ideals of liberty and fair dealing.

Among other things, The Crucible is a study in the way we delude ourselves, how our fears pervert our best intentions. The President of International PEN for four years, Miller had an especially prescient warning for those whose stock-in-trade is the written and spoken word, whose responsibility is to knowledge, truth and wisdom. Towards the end, Proctor cries out: “A fire, a fire is burning! … For them that quail to bring men out of ignorance, as I have quailed, and as you quail now when you know in all your black hearts that this be fraud—God damns our kind especially, and we will burn, we will burn together!”

Gary Steven Corseri’s plays have been performed on Atlanta-PBS and elsewhere. His articles, fiction and poetry have appeared at CounterPunch, CommonDreams, The New York Times, Village Voice, Redbook and DissidentVoice. His books include "Holy Grail, Holy Grail; A Fine Excess and Manifestations." He has taught in public schools, prisons and universities. Email to: corseri@verizon.net.

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