The Cold War between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union was characterized by paranoia, fear, and propaganda. During the 1950s, the McCarthy hearings held by the House Un-American Activities Commission (HUAC) were also characterized by paranoia, fear, and propaganda. During the hearings, employers turned in employees, family members turned in relatives, and friends turned in friends who they suspected of harboring communist sympathies or being involved in communist activities. In actuality, few of these individuals were un-American, but the atmosphere of paranoia, fear, and propaganda caused a breakdown in community and brotherhood. Arthur Miller, a playwright with socialist sympathies, viewed the HUAC hearings as a virtual witch-hunt, inspiring him to pen his play The Crucible. In the introduction to MillerÆs (1995) play, we are told, ôMiller is concerned with the breaking of the social contract that binds a community togetheràthe breaking of charity with one anotherö (xv). It is exactly this breaking of charity with one another that was characteristic of the McCarthy hearings during the 1950s.
During the 1950s, Cold War tensions escalated until fear, paranoia, and propaganda reached a climax under the instigation and auspices of Senator Joseph McCarthy and HUAC hearings. The evangelical and politically self-serving Senator was responsible for people losing their careers, being blacklisted, and a host of other punishments for even remotely dissenting with his American ideology. In The Crucible, Miller (1995) portrays Reverend Hale in the same overzealous, Manichean manner of being able to determine good and evil as McCarthy exhibited during the HUAC hearings. As Hale tells Tituba, ôYou are GodÆs instrument put in our hands to discover the DevilÆs agents among usö (44).
John Proctor is accused of being in league with the Devil, based primarily on hearsay and the jealous accusations of Abi
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