In 1953 in The Crucible playwright Arthur Miller seized upon the guilt that has always attached to the Salem witch hunt to make a contemporary parallel with militant anti-Communism. He implied that Salem was the source of a continuing battle between those in America who attempt to stifle free-thinking dissent and their victims among the good, common people. More than anything else the notion that dissenters represent a beleaguered class lent The Crucible its ideological thrust—one that has sustained it as a popular international repertory item for some thirty years. And yet, as Robert War-show and other critics forcefully demonstrated at the time, both Miller’s interpretation of American society and his historical analogies failed to stand up to scrutiny.

Miller’s emphasis on victimization, it was evident, could be maintained on stage only by altering the characters and motivations of his historical models (something Miller claimed scrupulously not to have done). For the truth was that the New England clergy and magistrates whom he described as having displayed “an absolute dedication to evil” acted for the most part to calm and ameliorate popular passions. The roles of the common people and the authorities, in other words, were largely the reverse of what Miller described.

In the thirty years since The Crucible, scholarly investigations have enormously complicated the picture, but each of them has served further to undermine the main popular tradition drawn on by Miller—that the Salem hysteria left an evil residue in American history. The piling