Graphic: Jezebel, Photos: Getty, AP
“How may I live without my name?” John Proctor asks in the climactic scene from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. The play, which centers the 1692 Salem witch trial narrative on Proctor, is more concerned with how accusations will affect his name rather than the fact that they might end his life.
“I have given you my soul; leave me my name!” he cries. In the play, Proctor has been accused of witchcraft when his real crime was having sex with a teenager, one he doesn’t see as so bad that it should sully his reputation.
The idea of wrongfully accused men as victims of 21st-century witch hunts got a poster boy in Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh
Long understood as an allegory for the blacklisting that happened in Hollywood during the Red Scare, The Crucible is also a pretty accurate playbook for the ways that powerful men defend themselves when their bad behavior is made public. John Proctor stands accused by a scheming girl and is wrongfully punished for an imaginary crime by a corrupt system. Miller is the reason the words “witch hunt” and “McCarthyism” are now synonymous: In the early 1950s, when the Red Scare had Americans terrified their neighbors were secret communists on the Kremlin’s payroll, Joseph McCarthy made a career out of exacerbating those fears for attention and political gain. But The Crucible uses the Salem witch trials as an allegory for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which did not directly involve McCarthy. While McCarthy focused on political enemies, HUAC went after Hollywood, demanding writers, directors, producers, and actors either confess, repent, and name names or face permanent blacklisting, losing their livelihoods in the process. Over time, the witch hunts of The Crucible have come to encompass all the communist hunting of the era, most notably, the scores of hearings conducted by McCarthy.
But Republicans have long avoided the allegory, remaining insistent that the hearings, in which McCarthy questioned hundreds of “witnesses” to root out communists at the government level, served some purpose beyond advancing McCarty’s career. Official documents from the U.S. Senate admit McCarthy’s “browbeating tactics destroyed careers of people who were not involved in the infiltration of our government.” Yet defenders on the right insist McCarthy himself was the real victim of a witch hunt, equating the mean things people have said about him since his death with the actual economic punishments and permanent stigma faced by those he persecuted.
Ann Coulter, who wrote Treason, a book lionizing McCarthy as a misunderstood hero, summed up a longstanding party line: “ [McCarthy] was exposing the Democratic party for collaborating with a regime as evil as the Nazis,” she said in a 2003 C-Span interview to promote the book. “It was devastating to the Democratic party,” she said. “So they had to fight back. They had to make his name mud.”
Her championing of McCarthy is just as focused on his reputation as John Proctor’s monologue. Coulter is hardly alone in her defense. In 2002, The Washington Post sympathetically covered an exhibition in McCarthy’s hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin called “Joseph McCarthy: An American Tragedy,” describing the ruinous hearings as simply “zealous.” A similarly sympathetic look at McCarthy in 2005 published by the Chicago Tribune described him as a “popular hometown boy of humble origins,” keening at the fact that he didn’t not live long enough for a “second chance.” But even right after McCarthy’s death from cirrhosis of the liver in 1957, a reporter eulogized the senator by comparing him to Christ, according to The Washington Post:
One local Republican newspaperman even compared McCarthy to Jesus, condemning the ‘thousand Pontius Pilates’ who crucified McCarthy ‘because of his efforts to expose the communist conspiracy designed to destroy the United States.’
As powerful men increasingly begin to face accusations rather than make them, the meaning of the witch hunts has shifted. Republican leaders are now willing to sacrifice McCarthy’s good name in defense of their own. During Robert Mueller’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, Donald Trump, a longtime friend of McCarthy’s henchman Roy Cohn, invoked that old twofer of Salem and McCarthyism to defend himself, tweeting that the proceedings were a “rigged witch hunt” in which Mueller “and his gang” made “Joseph McCarthy look like a baby.” Another tweet read “Study Joseph McCarthy.”
This new concern over “McCarthyism” frames unpleasant truths as having equal weight to undeserved punishment.
Just as MeToo unearthed thousands of stories many didn’t want to hear, Republicans latched onto to Trump’s ramblings about McCarthyism, at last decrying witch hunts as unfair now that they are on the opposite end of the accusations. This new concern over “McCarthyism” frames unpleasant truths as having equal weight to undeserved punishment. The male-centric witch trials in The Crucible provide a perfect metaphor for those looking to write off women’s experiences as hysteria. A 2015 RealClearPolitics piece about the conversation around sexual assault on college campuses describes McCarthyism as a failed response to communism “grounded in real danger” while dismissing “‘rape culture’ in 21st century America” as “no more real than the devil in the 17th century colonies.”
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