Collected Essays

by Arthur Miller

  Is it a political play? It is, I think, but in a particular sense. It is very often done in Latin America just before a dictatorship is about to take over—as a warning—and just after one has been overthrown, as a reminder. It was one of the first foreign works to be done after Stalin’s death, and I will wager that it will be done soon after Franco goes to his reward. As I say, it is very popular in England, where hysteria is not one of the national vices. I think it is a political play but not in terms of Left and Right. Its underlying reference is to political paranoia, whichever side makes use of that source of power.

  But paranoid politics is not easy to discuss for the reason that our fears are always based on something quite palpable and real, while theirs are illusory. I realize now that it was probably impossible to have expected an audience and critics in 1953 to feel the heat of a play which so much as implied that a state of deep fear was not entirely new in the world, let alone that the evil plotters might just be worth some dispassionate examination. On top of this, to have treated this fear as a tragic thing rather than a necessary and realistic and highly moral sort of patriotism, was more than could be borne by liberals and conservatives alike.

  We customarily think of paranoia as a craziness, a diseased delusionary state in which fears are obviously out of proportion to any conceivable stimulus. But if this were all, we should never be endangered by it. Paranoia has a power and it rises not basically from ravings about plots and hidden conspiracies, but from the grain of recognizable fact around which the fantasies are woven.

  The paranoid feels endangered by some person or group mysteriously controlling his actions despite his will. His violence is therefore always defensive, trained against oppressors who mean to kill him before he can kill them. His job is therefore to unmask and disarm, to find the seemingly innocent traces of the pervading malevolence, and he comes to recognize hostility even in the way a person folds his hands or turns his head. His only hope is power, power to neutralize the dangers around him. Naturally, since those dangers can be anywhere, his power must also be total in order to work.

  And of course it is true that to one degree or another we are, in fact, hostile to each other, and when we are accused of holding that hostility, we do indeed hate the accusation and the accuser. So that the paranoid creates the reality which proves him right. And this is why the paranoid, who in normal times might merely end in an institution, can rise to the leadership of a society which is really insecure and at a loss as to the causes of its spiritual debility. Nothing is as frightening as to not know why one is frightened. Given the “cause” we can act, and thus keep ourselves from flying apart altogether.

  Paranoid politics is seductive, too, because all politics requires that we symbolize people, until individuals cease to exist and there are only compliant supporters or the opposition. The paranoid discovers the murderous potential in the opposition, which it therefore must destroy. When, during World War II, for example, we ripped 100,000 Japanese-Americans out of their California farms and shops and confined them to Midwestern camps, we were indulging the paranoid side of our realistic fears of Japan. But was it really probable that all these men, women and children were secret agents? The grain of truth was that some, or perhaps one of them, was. Their non-“whiteness” enhanced our irrationality; we never rounded up German-Americans even though crowds of them, unlike the Japanese, had been marching around with Nazi flags in Jersey right up to the day we declared war.

  A few years after its original production, The Crucible opened again in New York, Off-Broadway, and the script was now judged by many of the same critics as an impassioned play rather than a cold tract, and it ran two years. It is true that the original production was formalized and rather ballet-like, but not by that much. It was simply that in 1958 nobody was afraid any more. Nor do I imagine that I can convince many people that this is basically what was changed and for good reason. Great fear, like great pain, is not easily recalled, it is self-healing, and the more of it we have felt the less of it we can really get ourselves to remember. And this forgetfulness is part of the tragedy.

  But no amount of paranoids walking around has very great political significance unless a partner appears who, naturally, is Interest. Hitler without the support of German big business would have merged with the legions of the mentally lost. Stalin in his last years slept in a different bed every night, employed food-tasters, and ordered the executions of people whose names he merely heard in conversation, but if the Revolution had created a healthy, ongoing society, it could not have tolerated such a chief. Had the witch-crying girls started their shenanigans in a stable community certain of itself and its future, they would have been soaked in cold water and put to bed.

  But land titles were in dispute in Salem due to edicts from Boston and London; the repressions of the Puritan code no longer seemed holy to people born after the early deprivations of the militant pioneers. A host of socially disruptive pressures were upon Salem which seemed to threaten a disorder beyond the power of the mind to analyze. The girls lifted up a cause for it all out of the morass. Americans in the late forties and fifties felt paralyzed before a power of darkness expanding its reign; we had “lost” China (which we had never “had”) and Eastern Europe. Enormous Communist parties existed in France and Italy. McCarthy solved the problem of our helplessness with a stroke—we were infiltrated by the enemy. Twenty years of conservative frustration with contemporary America was unleashed until, like the girls, McCarthy was in a position of such incredible authority that the greatest people in the land shuddered at the thought that their names might fall from his sniggering lips.

  The fantasy of the fifties has rich documentation, but the Rosenberg case, because it ended in death, provides one insight which may throw some light on paranoid fear. In the final speech of the presiding judge is the statement that the defendants committed one of the gravest crimes in all history in giving the atom-bomb secret to Russia. Yet, no expert competent to make such a judgment had been called, and even more instructive—the defense attorney was so eager to prove his adherence to the reigning fear that he moved to impound the diagram of the bomb lens allegedly transmitted by the Rosenbergs, so that nobody in the future could steal it again—or, by the way, examine its validity. Recently, however, it was examined by a group of physicists who had actually worked on the lens, and their verdict was that it was scientifically a farce. I am reasonably sure that the passion of the judge’s speech was real, and certainly he was not crazy. He was, however, afraid.

  Can it all happen again? I believe it can. Will it?

  The opposite of paranoid politics is Law and good faith. An example, the best I know, is the American Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, which de-symbolize the individual and consider him as the sum of his acts rather than his hidden thoughts and propensities for plotting evil.

  And there are signs that somehow, someway, people in responsible positions have learned at least part of the lesson. Despite our being in a war, despite the immense opposition to it, the draft-card burning and demonstrations, the President and the leadership of the country as a whole have not rallied the unwashed to go hunting for people whose bad thoughts are cheating us of victory.

  But what will happen if the American becomes more desperately frustrated, if this war goes on for years, if a sense of national powerlessness prepares the ground for cries of “Betrayal!”—the old paranoid cry to which the highly moral mad respond by seeing where others are blind?

  Laws, as we know, are made of bendable stuff; panic systematized around a grain of fact waits forever in the human brain. The tragic reply, John Proctor’s, is unfortunately no defense against this kind of social dissolution, but spoken in good time it is perhaps our only safety: “A fire, a fire is burning. I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face. And it is my face, and yours, Danforth. For them that quail to bring men out of ignorance as I have quailed, and as you do now when you know in all your
black hearts that this be fraud—God damns our kind especially. . . .” A foisted analogy? Only if we are certain that the slide into darkness is far, far behind us. As things stand, Proctor’s passion has its own life intact and will until Power is guaranteed against the temptations of the irrational. The surgeons say they work to make their job unnecessary. The Crucible was written in that spirit—that the coiled thing in the public heart might die of light. A reasonable thought, but an unreasonable hope which against all reason never disappears.

  The Crucible in History

  1999

  It would probably never have occurred to me to write a play about the Salem witch trials of 1692 had I not seen some astonishing correspondences with that calamity in the America of the late Forties and early Fifties. There were other enticements for me in the Salem period, however; most especially the chance it offered to write in what was for me a practically new language, one that would require new muscles.

  I was never a scholar or an historian, of course; my basic need was somehow to respond to a phenomenon which, with only small exaggeration, one could say was paralyzing a whole generation and in an amazingly short time was drying up the habits of trust and toleration in public discourse. I refer, of course, to the anticommunist rage that threatened to reach hysterical proportions and sometimes did. I can’t remember anyone calling it an ideological war, but I think now that that is what it amounted to. Looking back at the period, I suppose we very rapidly passed over anything like a discussion or debate and into something quite different, a hunt not alone for subversive people but ideas and even a suspect language. The object, a shock at the time, was to destroy the least credibility of any and all ideas associated with socialism and communism, whose proponents had to be either knowing or unwitting agents of Soviet subversion. An ideological war is like guerrilla war, since the enemy is first of all an idea whose proponents are not in uniform but are disguised as ordinary citizens, a situation that can scare a lot of people to death.

  I am not really equipped to deliver a history of Cold War America, which like any other period is packed with passionately held illusions and ideas distorted on all sides by fear. Suffice to say it was a time of great, no doubt unprecedented fear, but fear, like love, is mostly incommunicable once it has passed. So I shall try to limit myself, as far as possible, to speak of events as they struck me personally, for those are what finally created The Crucible.

  One knew that congressional investigations of subversion had been going on since the Thirties. The Dies committee, beginning with Nazi subversion in America, ended up with a neverending and often silly investigation of communists. But the country in the Thirties was not under external threat, and nobody seemed to take seriously any menace from an American Communist Party that could hardly elect a dogcatcher. From my perspective, what changed everything was the victory of the Chinese communists in 1949. Inevitably, the Chinese Reds were seen as all but an arm of the expansionist post–World War II Soviet machine, and a look at the map would indeed show that an enormous new part of the planet had turned red.

  “Who Lost China!” almost instantly became the Republican mantra. Who were the traitors inside the Democratic administrations, going back to Roosevelt, that had sold out our favorite Chinese, Chiang Kai-shek? This, I think, was the first notable injection of the idea of treason and foreign agents into domestic political discourse. To me the simplicity of it all was breathtaking. There had to be left-wing traitors in government, otherwise how could the Chinese—who, as everyone knew, loved Americans more than anybody—have turned against the pro-American Chiang Kai-shek in favor of a Soviet agent like Mao Tse-tung?

  All I knew about China in 1949 was what I had read by Edgar Snow and Jack Belden and Teddy White and other American reporters. What it amounted to was that the Nationalist regime was feudal and thoroughly corrupt and that the Reds were basically a miserably exploited peasantry that at long last had risen up and thrown their exploiters into the sea. I thought it was a great idea. In any event, the idea of our “losing” China seemed the equivalent of a flea losing an elephant. Nevertheless, there was a growing uproar in and out of Congress. One read that the China Lobby, a wealthy support group backing Chiang Kai-shek’s hopes to return to Beijing from Taiwan, was reportedly paying a lot of the bills and that Senator McCarthy was one of their most effective champions. The partisan political manipulation of a real issue was so patent that President Truman could dismiss the Republican scare as a “red herring.” But it is an indication of its impact on the public mind that he soon had to retreat and institute a loyalty board of his own to investigate the allegiance of government employees.

  To call the ensuing atmosphere paranoid is not to say that there was nothing real in the American–Soviet standoff. To be sure, I am far more willing than I was then, due to some experiences of my own with both sides, to credit both the American and Soviet leadership with enough ignorance of each other to have ignited a third world war. But there was something of the inauthentic, the spurious, and the invented in the conflict, if only because of the swiftness with which all values were being forced in a matter of months to literally reverse themselves. I recall some examples.

  Death of a Salesman opened in February of 1949 and was hailed by nearly every newspaper and magazine; parenthetically, I should add that two exceptions come to mind, one Marxist, the other ex-Marxist. The Marxist was the Daily Worker, which found the play defeatist and lacking militant protest; the ex-Marxist, Mary McCarthy, who seemed outraged by the idea of elevating it to the status of tragedy and just hated it in general, particularly, I thought, because it was so popular. Real tragedy would have to close in two weeks. Anyway, several movie studios wanted it, and it was finally Columbia Pictures that bought it and engaged a great star, Fredric March, to play Willy.

  In something like two years or less, as I recall, with the picture finished, I was asked by a terrified Columbia to sign an anticommunist declaration in order to ward off picket lines which apparently the American Legion was threatening to throw across the entrances of theaters showing the film. In the numerous phone calls that followed, the air of terror was heavy. It was the first intimation of what would soon follow. I declined to make any such statement, which, frankly, I found demeaning; what right had any organization to demand anyone’s pledge of loyalty? I was sure the whole thing would soon go away, it was just too outrageous.

  But instead of disappearing, the studio, it now developed, had actually made another film, a short which was to be shown with Salesman. This was called The Life of a Salesman and consisted of several lectures by City College School of Business professors. What they boiled down to was that selling was basically a joy, one of the most gratifying and useful of professions, and that Willy was simply a nut. Never in show business history has a studio spent so much good money to prove that its feature film was pointless. I threatened to sue (on what basis I had no idea), but of course the short could not be shown lest it bore the audience blind. But in less than two years Death of a Salesman had gone from a masterpiece to a pariah that was basically fraudulent.

  In 1948, ’49, ’50, ’51, I had the sensation of being trapped inside a perverse work of art, one of those Escher constructs in which it is impossible to know whether a stairway is going up or down. Practically everyone I knew, all survivors of the Great Depression of course as well as World War II, was somewhere within the conventions of the political left of center; one or two were Communist Party members, some were sort of fellow travelers, as I suppose I was, and most had had one or another brush with Marxist ideas or organizations. I have never been able to believe in the reality of these people being actual or putative traitors any more than I could be, yet others like them were being fired from teaching or other jobs in government or large corporations. The unreality of it all never left me. We were living in an art form, a metaphor that had no long history but, incredibly enough, suddenly gripped the country. So I suppose that in one sense The Cruc
ible was an attempt to make life real again, palpable and structured—a work of art created in order to interpret an anterior work of art that was called reality but was not.

  Again—it was the very swiftness of the change that lent it this unreality. Only three or four years earlier an American movie audience, on seeing a newsreel of—let’s say—a Russian solider or even Stalin saluting the Red Army, would have applauded, for that army had taken the brunt of the Nazi onslaught, as most people were aware. Now they would have looked on with fear or at least bewilderment, for the Russians had become the enemy of mankind, a menace to all that was good. It was the Germans who, with amazing rapidity, were turning good. Could this be real? And how to mentally deal with, for example, American authorities removing from German schoolbooks all mention of the Hitler decade?

  In the unions, communists and their allies, who had been known as intrepid organizers, were now to be shorn of union membership and turned out as seditious, in effect. Harry Bridges, for example, the idol of West Coast longshoremen, whom he had all but single-handedly organized, would be subjected to court trial after court trail to drive him out of the country and back to his native Australia as an unadmitted communist. Academics, some of them prominent in their fields, were especially targeted, many forced to retire or simply fired for disloyalty; some of them communists, some fellow travelers, and inevitably, a certain number who were simply unaffiliated liberals who refused to sign one of the dozens of anticommunist pledges being required by college administrations.