Arthur Miller\'s Refusal to Testify

Arthur Miller's Refusal To Testify

Being John Proctor in the Real World: Arthur Miller's Refusal to Testify for or against Communism

Everyday, significant events in people's lives have ways of projecting and morphing itself into art. Individuals express their thoughts and feelings about an issue or event in their lives through works of art, be these works in visual, oral, or written form. Literature has always been considered as the most descriptive and detailed medium of human expression. Whether in prose or poetry forms, the individual provides one or more facets of an issue, his/her interpretation of life personified through words and narratives.

Indeed, this had been Arthur Miller's motive when he created the play, "The Crucible" in the mid-20th century. "The Crucible" was Miller's response to the undertaking he experienced when he refused to testify against Communism during the Cold War, a period wherein the American government was struggling with its fight against Communism. The Cold War in itself was a questionable agenda for the McCarthy administration, since it was only a war motivated by the U.S.'s fear that Communism would succeed in Asia and will spread throughout other nations and territories as well. The success of Communism meant the failure of capitalism, which the U.S. subscribes to, mainly because Capitalism embodied everything Communism stood against.

Thus, Miller's refusal to testify against Communism as a 'threat to U.S. security' was interpreted by the paranoid American government as a manifestation of his support for it. Whether Miller supported and believed in Communism or not was beside the question, for the silent persecution that he experienced after his refusal was an even greater punishment he received. He was labeled for a belief that he did not openly admitted subsisting to; he was labeled based on the fact that he refused to testify against an ideology.

It is not surprising, then, that the primary message of "The Crucible" resonated his thoughts and feelings about the McCarthy administration's containment policy against Communism. The arguments he presented in the play showed how Miller viewed the government's offensive action against Communism not only futile, but reflection of how American society was slowly developing into: "...for good purposes, even high purposes, the people of Salem developed a theocracy, a combination of state and religious power whose function was...to prevent any kind of disunity that might open it to destruction by...ideological enemies."