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Why I Wrote The Crucible An Artist’s Answer to Politics by Arthur Miller Published in The New Yorker, October 21, 1996 Joseph McCarthy Arthur Miller As I watched The Crucible taking shape as a movie over much of the past year… I thought again about how I came to cook all this up nearly fifty years ago, in an America almost nobody I know seems to remember clearly. In a way, there is a biting irony in this film’s having been made by a Hollywood studio, something unimaginable in the fifties… I remember those years—they formed The Crucible’s skeleton— but I have lost the dead weight of the fear I had then. Fear doesn’t travel well; just as it can warp judgment, its absence can diminish memory’s truth. What terrifies one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next… Likewise, films of Senator Joseph McCarthy are rather unsettling—if you remember the fear he once spread. Buzzing his truculent sidewalk brawler’s snarl through the hairs in his nose, squinting through his cat’s eyes and sneering like a villain, he comes across now as nearly comical, a self-aware performer keeping a straight face as he does his juicy threat-shtick. McCarthy’s power to stir fears of creeping Communism was not entirely based on illusion, of course; the paranoid, real or pretended, always secretes its pearl around a grain of fact… the expanding Soviet Union… China in 1949… Italian and German Fascism… [It’s a slippery slope…] There was magic all around; the politics of alien conspiracy soon dominated political discourse and bid fair to wipe out any other issue… The Crucible was an act of desperation…by 1950 I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals who, despite their discomfort with the inquisitor’s violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists if they should protest too strongly… Gradually, all the old political and moral reality had melted like a Dali watch. N