Witchhunt Narrative and the Intellectual Climate of America

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This study focuses on the way religious and political intolerance in the United States led to the phenomenon of the witch hunt, in which a small number of individuals are blamed for a series of misfortunes and disasters which befall a community. The ceremony of punishing evil originated in Europe in the Middle Age but was transformed in the New World where both Puritanism and the harsh natural environment molded the intellectual climate of the continent's early settlers. The famous witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in the Colonial Period represent a typical example of the peculiarly American version of the phenomenon. Throughout American history the hunt for evil "witches" reemerged periodically. One important such reemergence was the red purge in the twentieth century that culminated in McCarthyism in the 1950s. This purge showed how strongly the rhetoric of exclusion appealed to the popular imagination in its identification of certain people as witches who represented a social and political threat to the nation. The aim of this study is to explore the underlying common intellectual assumptions and dilemmas that marked both the Salem witchcraft trials and the red purge in the 1950s, with special emphasis on the narrative structure in which the witch hunt was depicted. Justified, and criticized. By looking at political and religious documents, novels, and criticisms about the Salem witchcraft trials and the red purge in the 1950s, we attempt to capture the central paradox of American psyche, torn between humane liberalism and intolerant pursuit of its own image of justice.