What were the reasons for Arthur Miller to write "The Crucible"?

Answer 1

He wanted to impress Marilyn Monroe.

OK and the McCarthyism thing.

Answer 2

5. Why did Arthur Miller write the Crucible?
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Arthur Miller wrote: "I had read about the witchcraft trials in my college, but it was not until I read a book published in 1867 [?] by Charles W. Upham, who was then the mayor of Salem, that I knew I had to write about the period".
On a dismal spring day of 1952, one year before he finished writing The Crucible, he was leaving the house of producer Elia Kazan, who was about to testify before the HUAC, when Kazan's wife asked him what he planned to do. He then answered that he intended to visit Salem. She instantaneously understood the metaphor, and violently argued that such an analogy was specious, that there never were any witches but there certainly were Communists. However, he had already made up his mind, and left them.

Once in Salem, he soon realized that what happened there in the seventeenth century was happening again now. Arthur Miller wrote: "The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding ages of common experiences in the fifties".

The same terror, which paralysed Salem citizens in the spring of 1692, was paralysing the United States. Actors were replacing Salem citizens, Communists were replacing witches, and Danforth turned over his court to McCarthy and the HUAC. Blind men of equivalent stuff were again forging history. One plot made way to another. Lucifer must have joined Karl Marx, or maybe the contrary, but the aim of reactionaries of every side was for sure to melt the two shapes of evil into one reality. Lucifer first plotted against God, and "In God We Trust?" It is all the more true as Americans printed the motto on their currency to remember. Two hundred years later, Lucifer evolved in a more contemporary way, in the hope of convincing some creduluous puppets to overthrow the government of the United States: two sides of the same delirium, both harmful for the mental equilibrium of the country.

Spectral evidence was accepted during 1692's trials, and so were allegations during McCarthy's hearings. During the fifties, a question before the committee was not about "the acts of an accused but the thoughts and intentions in his alienated mind", wrote Arthur Miller.

Arthur Miller also wrote: "The old friend of a blacklisted person crossed the street to avoid being seen talking to him", the same way as Giles Corey did not dare to name other names, since his wife was now in jail because he gave her name.

"Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."

Because Arthur Miller experienced censorship in 1951, when Harry Cohn, the head of Colombia Pictures showed his script to the F.B.I. and asked him to replace the gangsters by Communists, he was in a position to grasp what was going on. The difference with many people is that he dared to write a play about these facts, in the hottest times.

Answer 3

If I'm not mistaken, (and I could very well be), it was written around the McCarthy era. When a lot of people that leaned towards a socialist attitude were being black listed. The play commented on some parallels between the Red Scare and The Salem Witch Trials.

Answer 4

McCarthism