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Examples Of Mccarthyism In The Crucible

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“No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.” Is a quote by Edward Murrow that states one man can not harm an entire nation unless the people in that nation help him with the destruction. The whole town of Salem, in The Crucible, was put into a quarrel because multiple girls were calling everyone witches and all of the townspeople went along with their mischief. As Arthur Miller was writing The Crucible a belief known as McCarthyism was being spread about. The belief was that many Americans in the Congress had pro-communist beliefs. New historicism demonstrates how The Crucible was written due to McCarthyism.The book relates very closely to it in many ways such as that people did not support the men and women …show more content…

In The Crucible Mary Warren exclaimed, “ I cannot charge murder on Abigail… I cannot, they’ll turn on me.”( Miller 80 ).The quote demonstrates that people in Salem were terrified of testifying against the accusers solely because they did not want to be accused as well. Media would not even cover the
“communists” side of the story for the reason that they did not want to be called communists and lose viewers and money. In both situations the citizens were deathly afraid of having charges filed on them, so everyone stayed quiet. Although the people that tried helping the convicted had it difficult, the people that were actually in trouble had it a lot worse. The lives of anyone that was accused of either of the crimes was ruined. Elizabeth Proctor lost her freedom, her children, and her husband. McCarthy made an extensive list of all the people that he believed were communist and one of those people was Val Lorwin. Val worked for the State Department and as soon as the list came out and his name was on it he was fired. Although Val’s record was cleared and he was found not guilty his reputation was tainted forever. Even though the people were not guilty of the crime they were accused, the fact that they were even mentioned in the scandal made them unappealing to the public.

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