How Were You Ever By Arthur Miller Interpret The Crucible

In Author Arthur Miller’s Are You Now Or Were You Ever, Arthur Miller begins by explaining the inspiration and the background in creating The Crucible. The Salem witch trials and the Red Scare faced many comparisons as to what they really means and what it resulted in. Not only did it lead a country to a fear of individuals, but to deaths that were not justified but just executed on the thought of paranoia. Miller's purpose is to describe the era of confusion and how paranoid a nation can be with just a simple lie told by high congressmen. Throughout the passage, Miller utilized a abhorring tone by describing the Red Scare and the Salem witch trials as a failure to the justice system ultimately regarding the Devil as the failure in the government.

To begin with, the author creates a violent imagery with describing what inmates would do to confessed communists on hopes to get a shorter sentence by “helping the nation”, “William Remington, was murdered by an inmate hoping to shorten his sentence by having killed a communist”(Miller 11). This murder was no ordinary murder, it was not an act of deliberate evil but rather of fear and paranoia that the nation was going through in the 1900’s. With the use of violent imagery, Miller tried to explicitly reveal the on-going

killings that could have been stopped if a lie was not spread around.
The author then continues on to explain the crisis that Arthur Miller was going through during the 1900’s.

Many believed Arthur Miller to be a accessed communist and everybody wanted him to pay the price a communist would, which would be of course death. The situation got so bad that Miller had to bring in his wife at the time, Marilyn Monroe, to the court so that she can seduce the court (Miller 15). The irony of it is to reveal the real “Devil” as described in salem, is not really the devil but the government itself. With the government just believing a set of accusations with no proof to be shown, where is the evidence? The justice? nothing was done to those accused other than to be set to

execution.
Arthur Miller concludes by analyzing and describing what life was really like in a campus. Going to college, students hope for a fun time and to achieve great knowledge in whatever their desired profession was. Well in the 1900’s, Arthur Miller met with university officials and they described what the normal procedures were on a day to day basis in order to capture or to arrest any committed communists. As described by Arthur Miller, the FBI had been talking with professors to keep an eye on students to express left-wing part opinions, communism, and to immediately report them to their office and bring the students upon interrogation (Miller 17).
In Conclusion, Arthur Miller concludes that both in Salem and in the United States, the world has been filled with both greed and jealousy. The World in his eyes is that the world has become obsessed with their fear of communism and witches that the nation began to fall apart little by little falling in a deep state of fear. If you were accused or even announced as a communist or a witch, you would face severe punishment. Arthur Miller expands in this concept when talking about he was publicly attacked in the New York World Telegram (Miller 35). It stated that Miller was a disloyal lefty which meant he was a problem against the democracy in the states. They tried to publicly humiliate him in order to bring an end to his film about juvenile delinquency where he wrote about gang violence. In the end, the court was threatening to bring an end to production, just by one false claim. You can see the analogy of this as how simple and devastating the justice system worked in bringing “justice” to the case. Just as seen in the 1600’s in salem, history repeated itself over and over again just by the bitter hatred a group of individuals had on another group which led to many false deaths that could have been prevented.