Thomas Danforth And Mccarthyism In Arthur Miller's The Crucible

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The play, “The Crucible”, by Arthur Miller starts off with an unconscious girl named Betty Parris, and her distraught father. The situation that led to this outcome started a whole pandemonium which was known as The Salem Witch Trials. A few centuries later, a similar issue called McCarthyism would come up, and yet again, destroy people’s lives. In the Salem trials, however, innocent people were killed, and there was one main man to directly blame for those lost lives: (Judge) Thomas Danforth. While Danforth seemed very pretentious in Arthur Miller’s adaptation of the trials, the script and characters were embellished. However, there is undoubtedly some truth behind Danforth; Miller did not just pull his ideas from the clouds. The story is based on a real-life experience, with actual colonists from 17th century America. “The Crucible” is just a slightly altered rendition of the real thing. McCarthyism is also able to be related to Danforth and the trials due to the fact that it was the same idea. Celebrities were falsely accused of being Communists by Senator McCarthy, and they were blacklisted and fired from their jobs. Thomas Danforth, in reality, was one of the many characters who was …show more content…
Judge Danforth is able to be compared to Senator McCarthy because they both falsely accused people who they thought, or who they were told, were guilty of no relevant reason. Many people suffered from these accusations and were ostracized for them. History has repeated itself, and what was once an issue in the 17th century, became an issue in the 20th

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