THE POSSIBILITY

1950s ‘WITCH’ HUNTS

Largely due to the social and cultural impact of the events at Salem, the term ‘witch hunts’ has become a byword for political and social moral panics that result in a group of people being accused. In the 1950s, Senator Joseph Mccarthy famously accused multiple people of being communists, attempting to expose an infiltration of the United States government. He conducted a 36-day series of televised hearings on the matter. Without Salem’s example of a ‘witch trial’, it’s possible that misguided and dangerous actions and accusations such as this may not have been called out as easily.

1953 ARTHUR MILLER AND THE CRUCIBLE

In 1953 the celebrated American playwright, Arthur Miller, penned The Crucible, a dramatic account of the events at Salem. Miller wrote the play as a criticism of the communist ‘witch hunts’ headed by Senator Mccarthy in 1950s America. In a 1996 article for The New York Times, Miller stated that: “The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common experiences in the fifties: the old friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into bornagain patriots”. The Salem witch trials provided a historical metaphor that without, the writer would not have been able to legitimately criticise the ongoing communist scare.

July 2022 THE LEGAL IMPACT OF SALEM

Elizabeth Johnson Jr was the last of the Salem ‘witches’ to be officially pardoned. Although Johnson Jr was never executed for her ‘crime’, she was still sentenced. According to The Guardian, she was pardoned after a school class spent the year working to research how they could clear her name. The research was then sent to Senator Diana Dizoglio, who passed legislation to formally exonerate Johnson Jr. If the bloodshed in Salem had never occurred, she would not have been convicted.