Miller’s play was a response to Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts
A high school English teacher, Pat Osowski of Ripon High School (Wisconsin), wrote me last week asking whether I had ever written about The Crucible as he had just had a great experience teaching the work. I’ll share his story in a moment but, as it happens, I had indeed been contemplating a post on Arthur Miller’s 1953 play. That’s because Texas Senator Ted Cruz has announced that he is running for president and one story that has emerged is his acting in the play while at Harvard Law School
The story, as recounted by The Boston Globe, is fairly funny. The actors apparently had a successful opening night and, in a celebratory party, Cruz drank so much grain alcohol that he staggered through the performance on the following day–so much so that fellow cast members had to improvise lines to cover for him.
I’m not really interested in Cruz’s acting history, however. Rather, what draws me is the fact that Cruz has been compared to Joseph McCarthy—most notably by Christopher Matthew of MSNBC—and the play was Arthur Miller’s response to McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts. Matthews points to Cruz’s use of innuendo and guilt by association, especially when he argued, in Chuck Hagel’s nomination hearings for Secretary of Defense, that we didn’t know for certain that Hagel hadn’t received money from North Korea. I therefore wanted to know who Cruz played.
If I were doing the casting, Cruz would play the cunning Putnam, who strategically uses charges of witchcraft to possess himself of other people’s land. It’s not unlike the way that Cruz conjures up political hysteria, even persuading his fellow Republicans to shut down the government, in order to get people to send him checks.
But no, Cruz played Reverend Samuel Parris, head of the community, father of one of the afflicted girls, and owner of Tituba, who comes to be seen as a witch. The Globe had fun with how Parris’s paranoia sounds a lot like Cruz’s:
As the lights rose, Ted Cruz held center stage, dressed in black and kneeling at a bedside. The first-year student at Harvard Law School delivered his lines with the emotions of a man gripped by anger, fear, and worry for his reputation.
“Do you understand that I have many enemies?” he thundered. “There is a faction that is sworn to drive me from my pulpit. Do you understand that?”
Here’s Miller describing the historical Parris in his stage notes. Does it sound familiar?
He believed he was being persecuted wherever he went, despite his best efforts to win people and God to his side. In meeting, he felt insulted if someone rose to shut the door without first asking his permission.
Parris, however, seems less secure than Cruz, who always exhibits supreme confidence. That’s why Putnam, who is contemptuous of Parris, seems a better fit. Then again, if Cruz were ever to ascend to a position of Parris-like power, he might be guilty of the same tyrannical behavior and reveal the same insecurities. I could imagine him as a Nixon-like president.
Hopefully Cruz playing Parris was not predictive of his eventual rise to supreme executive authority.
Back to my correspondent, who turned the famous controversy about “the color of the dress” to good use in his high school English class on The Crucible. Here’s his account, slightly edited for conciseness:
We had been watching The Crucible in a unit on conformity and the 1950s that we thematically connected with our U.S. History class. That was the weekend “the dress” blew up the Internet and people were fighting over what color they saw. So Monday morning I put a picture of the dress up on the school’s projector screen and stood in the hall as I usually do to greet students. I heard the discussions. Those that couldn’t decide were informed by other students. Arguments started about the actual color.
When class began I poked the hornet’s nest a bit more, and one girl declared that those who saw gold and white just needed to shut up. Then I asked how people were treated by those that felt they were wrong. We laughed about some of the reactions and talked about how stupid it was that people were making a big deal about a dress.
Then I asked them what would happen if the issue had been religion rather than a color. When this line of inquiry didn’t pan out, I asked the girl that had her friend tell her to shut up what might happen if people thought that seeing gold and white indicated devil possession and that the consequence was death. In the ensuing discussion, we agreed that one can’t easily conclude that either the girls or the town are stupid.
Few things are more important than teaching our young people to inhabit other perspectives. If they learn to do so, they will be less likely to fall for those who “know” the truth and assert that nuance is for squishes. Like, say, Ted Cruz.
Added note: After reading this post, Pat sent me the following note:
It would have been more ironically wonderful if he had played Judge Danforth, but Parris is a pretty good fit, too. Parris is power hungry but really, really paranoid and most people just don’t like him. One of my favorite lines in the play is Act I, Scene 4. Mrs. Putnam is mad at Rebecca Nurse saying that perhaps things just happen for other reasons than witchcraft, and Mrs. Putnam says that “there are wheels within wheels in this village and fires within fires.” Though she is trying to say that witchcraft is everywhere, we almost immediately hear Proctor and Parris arguing about Parris’ job security and how much he’s paid. It becomes clear that the wheels within wheels is going to be about power politics and money. It’s so subtly obvious like Miller is so good at writing. Proctor doesn’t have his children baptized because he didn’t want Parris laying his hands on them. I think there are a lot of comparisons to what Cruz has become.