"Arthur Miller's The Crucible takes a hard look at some of the ugliest moments in American history. He uses the actual historical event of the Salem witch trials to serve as a metaphorical representation of the pressure to conform to societal norms.
The theocratic government of Salem, Massachusetts serves as an apt symbol of the pressure to conform. Religion provides an interpretation of reality for its worshippers, who live their lives according to its ideology. Those who have the ability to define reality--and make others live by that definition--become extremely powerful individuals. Exploiting religion to reinforce the primacy of one's definition of reality is an old strategy in the struggle for power.
The Salem witch trials were well over two hundred years in the past when Miller wrote The Crucible, but the self-righteous spirit of persecution that drove them was alive and well. The McCarthyites were out in full force, rooting out culprits in the Red scare. The House Un- American Activities Committee took it upon themselves to define the essence of the "American." The good American citizen was fiercely loyal to everything "American"--which, of course, was defined by the very same committee. To this committee, "anti-American" meant "Communist," and it set out to discover everyone who had anything to do with the Communist Party in the United States. Individuals could not resist the invasive questioning of the committee without staining their names with suspicion of guilt. Recovering one's good name required that the individual name other people who were Communists or had been involved in Communist activities. The hysteria of the Red Scare demanded conformity just as stringently as the theocratic government of Salem Massachusetts.
The Crucible is more than a metaphor for the pressure to conform in American culture. The language of the Salem witch trials and the investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee tend to make use of the metaphors of disease. Witchcraft threatened the moral purity of the Salem community. It threatened to taint the souls of Salem residents. It was a scourge that had to be wiped out. Souls had to be scrubbed clean in the rigorous court sessions. The Red scare described Communism in the same way. It was a scourge that threatened the very way of American life. It threatened to swallow the globe just as it had swallowed Russia. Like any other disease, the symptoms had to be diagnosed and treated. However, in order to know the disease, it was necessary to define "health." Any American citizen who failed to conform to the "healthy American" standards was already considered contaminated. The power to control the lives and speech of numerous people was a seductive power. Fortunately, the Red scare ran its course.
The kind of ideology that fueled the persecution of the witch trials and the McCarthy era is the same kind of logic that fueled the Holocaust in Germany. It the kind of logic that tries to create social unity by demanding that society be "purified" of contaminating races, ideologies, or religions. A group of people can be easily labeled as the contaminating influence and those of the righteous side can then mercilessly persecute them in the name of "cleansing." The religious undertones in the vocabulary of purification should be obvious. The language of modern science and the religious language of sin combine to create a particularly versatile, vicious language of persecution.
The Salem witch trials may seem like an obscure isolated historical event. It's easy to dismiss the trials as a relic of a vanished Puritan rigidity. Miller aimed to resurrect the events of the trials to demonstrate that the frightening human tendencies behaviors revealed by this bizarre historical event.
"(http://www.sparknotes.com/guides/crucible/)
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