November 26, 1989

Again They Drink From the Cup of

Suspicion
By ARTHUR MILLER

he Crucible,'' written in 1953 by Arthur Miller, is produced constantly all

over the world. On Thursday the play, which links the Salem witch trials of
the 1690's to McCarthyism in the 1950's, will open at the Long Wharf
Theater in New Haven, where Arvin Brown will direct a cast that includes John
Braden, Charles Cioffi, Frank Converse and Virginia Downing. In March the
Roundabout Theater in New York will also stage a production, directed by
Gerald Freedman. In this essay the playwright discusses the origin and nature of
his work.

I did not write ''The Crucible'' simply to propagandize against McCarthyism,

although if justification were needed that would have been enough. There was
something else involved. I'll try to explain.

A writer friend was recently telling me about a Moscow theater producer who is
interested in putting on a play about the Vietnam War. Why Vietnam? It turns
out that what he would really like to illuminate is the Russian defeat in
Afghanistan, but with feelings about Afghanistan still running so high he felt he
needed a metaphor that would go to the dilemmas underlying such a war rather
than attempting an outright confrontation with the thickets of feeling surrounding
Afghanistan itself.

That approach reminded me of my decision to write about the 1692 Salem witch
trials rather than trying to take on Joseph McCarthy and his cohorts directly. In
the early 50's McCarthyism, so-called, began as a conservative Republican
cavalry charge that in the name of anti-Communism helped scatter the left-liberal
coalitions of Democrats and union people who had held together the only
recently faded New Deal. But this was no ordinary political campaign. This time
the enemy was not merely ''The Democrat Party,'' as McCarthy sneeringly
renamed it, but the hidden foreign plot which, naively but often knowingly, it
shielded. Thus a certain sublime gloss - national security - was varnished over a
very traditional grab for domestic political power.
With amazing speed McCarthy was convincing a lot of not unintelligent people
that the incredible was really true, and that, say, General of the Army George
Catlett Marshal was a Communist sympathizer, or that Senator Millard E.
Tydings of Maryland was a buddy of Earl Browder, head of the American
Communist Party. (A photo of both of them standing happily together would
only much later be proved to have been a fake manufactured by Roy Cohn,
McCarthy's right-hand bandido.) For a time it began to seem that Senator Joe was
heading straight for the White House, the more so when the sheer incredibility of
his claims appeared to be part proof that they were real; if the Communists were
indeed hidden everywhere, it followed that they would certainly be found where
common sense indicated they could not conceivably be.

The case being circular, it was finally all but unarguable. Worse yet, you could
not rely on the too-trusting police, the naively legalistic courts or even the slow-
moving F.B.I. to root out the conspiracy. As for the press, it was all but sold to
Moscow, secretly, of course. Who then was absolutely reliable? McCarthy,
naturally, and those who had his blessing.

This was colorful and fascinating stuff for the stage, but a play takes a year to
write and months to see through production, and I could not imagine spending so
much time on what seemed to me so obvious a tale. But as the anti-Communist
crusade settled in, and showed signs of becoming the permanent derangement of
the American psyche, a kind of mystery began to emerge from its melodramas
and comedies. We were all behaving differently than we used to; we had drunk
from the cup of suspicion of one another; people inevitably were afraid of too
close an association with someone who might one day fall afoul of some
committee. Even certain words vibrated perilously, words like organize, social,
militant, movement, capitalism - it didn't do to be on too familiar terms with such
language. We had entered a mysterious pall from which there seemed no exit.

Returning around that time to my alma mater, the University of Michigan, to do a

story for Holiday magazine, I discovered that students were avoiding living in the
co-op rooming houses because the very idea of a nonprofit organization was
suspiciously pro-left. The F.B.I. was paying students at Michigan to report
secretly on teachers' political remarks, and teachers to report on students.

Why was there so little real opposition to this madness? Of course there was the
fear of reprisals, of losing jobs or perhaps only bad publicity, but there was also
guilt, and this seemed to me the main crippler, the internalized cop.

No doubt instinctually, McCarthy and Roy Cohn were handing around full plates
of guilt which were promptly licked clean by people who in one way or another
had brushed the sleeve of the Communist movement in the 30's - some by joining
the party or supporting one of its front organizations, a left-wing union or
professional guild, or in whatever manner had at some point in their lives turned
to the left. Of course such people were used to being guilty - why else would they
have bothered to worry about the poor, the blacks, the lynch victims, the Spanish
Republicans and so on when real Americans were only remotely aware of such
inequities around them?

It was a charm, a kind of spell. McCarthy could call the Roosevelt New Deal ''20
years of treason'' with hardly a rejoinder from the vast multitude of Americans
for whom New Deal measures, hardly more than a decade before, had meant the
difference between living on the street or in their own homes, between hunger
and real starvation. It was a sort of benighted miracle that just about anything that
flew out of his mouth, no matter how outrageously and obviously idiotic, could
be made to land in an audience and stir people's terrors of being taken over by
Communists, their very religion in danger.

I had known the Salem story since college, over a decade earlier, but what kept
assaulting my brain now was not the hunt for witches itself; it was the paralysis
that had led to more than 20 public hangings of very respectable farmers by their
neighbors. There was something ''wonderful'' in this spectacle, a kind of perverse,
malign poetry that had simply swamped the imaginations of these people. I
thought I saw something like it around me in the early 50's.

The truth is that the more I worked at this dilemma the less it had to do with
Communists and McCarthy and the more it concerned something very
fundamental in the human animal: the fear of the unknown, and particularly the
dread of social isolation.

Political movements are always trying to position themselves as shields against

the unknown - vote for me and you're safe. The difference during witch hunts is
that you are being made safe from a malign, debauched, evil, irreligious, wife-
swapping, deceitful, immoral, stinking conspiracy stemming from the very
bowels of hell. In Wisconsin in the early 50's, a reporter went door to door asking
residents if they agreed with certain propositions, 10 in number, and discovered
that very few people did, and that most thought the first 10 amendments to the
United States Constitution, unnamed of course in the inquiry, were Communistic.
To propose that we should be free to express any idea at all was frightening to a
lot of people.

The Colonial government in the 1690's saw itself as protecting Christianity

(while unknowingly propagating a thrilling counter-religion of Satan worship) by
seizing on the ravings of a klatch of repressed pubescent girls who, fearing
punishment for their implicitly sexual revolt, began convincing themselves that
they had been perverted by Satan. There were economic and social pressures at
work, but the nub of it all as it appeared to the locals at the moment was that the
arch-fiend had been sneaked into the spotless town by an alien who, even better,
was black, the Barbadian slave of the Lord's very own man, the church minister
himself. Authority quickly converted the poor girls back to the true religion and
made them celebrities for their agonizing bravery in pointing out likely adherents
of the Devil.

But were there not really Communists, whereas there never were any witches? Of
course. And there are also paranoids who are really being followed. There was a
very real military face-off in the 50's between America and the Soviet Union, and
we had only recently ''lost'' China, but were these grounds for blacklisting actors
and writers in Hollywood, or destroying professionals in many other fields, and
for turning the country into a whispering gallery? What research showed me, and
what I hoped the play would show the country and the world, was the continuity
through time of human delusion, and the only safeguard, fragile though it may
be, against it - namely, the law and the courageous few whose sacrifice
illuminates delusion.

In the 35 years since the play was written it has become my most produced work
by far. I doubt a week has gone by when it has not been on some stage
somewhere in the world. It seems to be produced, especially in Latin America,
when a dictatorship is in the offing, or when one has just been overthrown.

There is so often a telltale social sidelight connected to its production. Years ago
in South Africa, black Tituba had to be played by a white woman in blackface,
but the director, Barney Simon, terrified though he was of attack, wanted the
white audience to contemplate the story. Last year I happened to meet Nien
Cheng, the 70-year-old author of ''Life and Death in Shanghai,'' an account of her
six-year imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution. Tears formed in her eyes
when she shook my hand, tears as it surprisingly turned out, of gratitude.

Released from prison, she had spent months recuperating when a director friend,
Huang Tsolin, invited her to see his production of ''The Crucible'' in a Shanghai
theater. She said she was astounded: ''I could not believe the play was not written
by a Chinese because the questions of the court were exactly the same ones the
Cultural Revolutionaries had put to me!''

I saw the play in Tbilisi, Soviet Georgia, where John Proctor wore 17th-century
Turkish pantaloons and a gorgeous wide moustache and was chased through a
forest by a crowd waving scimitars. At Olivier's fabulous 1965 National Theater
production, with Colin Blakely and Joyce Redman, I overheard a young woman
in front of me whispering to her escort, ''Didn't this have something to do with
that American Senator -what was his name?'' I have to admit that it felt
marvellous that McCarthy was what's-his-name while ''The Crucible'' was ''The
Crucible'' still.

Simone Signoret and Yves Montand did a stirring French film, a version of their
Paris stage performance, with a screenplay by Jean-Paul Sartre in which the New
England farmers were, inexplicably, Roman Catholic. The Long Wharf Theater
in New Haven is about to open it under Arvin Brown's direction - it was Long
Wharf's first production 25 years ago - and the Roundabout Theater will be doing
it later this season. An HBO film of it is to be made this winter for both television
and theatrical distributon. In Glasgow recently, two productions were running at
the same time, one by a young Soviet company. The Schiller Theater in Berlin
will have it on in a few months.

I have wondered if one of the reasons the play continues like this is its symbolic
unleashing of the specter of order's fragility. When certainties evaporate with
each dawn, the unknowable is always around the corner. We know how much
depends on mere trust and good faith and a certain respect for the human person,
and how easily breached these are. And we know as well how close to the edge
we live and how weak we really are and how quickly swept by fear the mass of
us can become when our panic button is pushed. It is also, I suppose, that the
play reaffirms the ultimate power of courage and clarity of mind whose ultimate
fruit is liberty.