May 9, 2006
The Crucible vs. Today Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:00 PM EST I agree with Joshua Zeitz that Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is a great play and the Salem witch trials are one of the those episodes in American history with enduring fascination. The New York Public Library has no fewer than 61 titles on the subject and many, many more on related subjects. Some of the fascination, I suppose, comes from the Lizzie Borden effect, in that we just don’t have quite enough information to definitively solve the mystery of what really happened. But I think he goes way too far in comparing the Salem witch trials with current events. Even accepting the reality of witches, as many, perhaps most, of the people of seventeenth-century Massachusetts did, they posed a threat in no way comparable to modern day terrorists. Witches threatened the souls of the unwary. Terrorists killed three thousand of my fellow New Yorkers on September 11, 2001. Hundreds of innocent people in Bali, Madrid, London, and elsewhere have died at their hands since. No one doubts that terrorists, given the opportunity, would kill tens of thousands more without a twitch of conscience. Witches were putative threats and all of the accused vehemently denied the charges, even as they mounted the gallows. Terrorists are real threats, and Zacarias Moussaoui gloried in his guilt at his trial. Mr. Zeitz writes, “Even as historians continue to sift through the grains of evidence, The Crucible still has a great deal to offer. In a time when foreign nationals and U.S. citizens are rotting in American prisons unable to learn the charges against them, consult with counsel, or receive a fair trial (or any trial at all) . . .” What American citizens are rotting in jail uncharged and without counsel? José Padilla was held as an enemy combatant and the Supreme Court has ruled that American citizens can be so held (ex parte Quirin, 1942). His case received a great deal of attention, both judicial and journalistic, with many able lawyers working pro bono on his behalf. He has now been charged with various crimes. Who else? As for the foreign nationals being held, they, too, are enemy combatants. None of them are entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention, which regulates the handling of prisoners of war and binds sovereign states that are signatories to it. Al Qaeda is neither a sovereign state nor a signatory. Legally the captors of these men could have just put a gun to the backs of their heads and pulled the trigger. I think the problem here is that the left still thinks of the War on Terror not as a war but as a criminal matter. And that those involved should be treated as criminals, with all the protections the law provides to those charged with a crime. But 9/11 was not a criminal act; it was an act of war, plain and simple. And in wartime, alas, a balance must be struck between military necessity and constitutional protections. As Justice Robert Jackson warned (in dissent in Terminiello v. Chicago, 1944), we must not “convert the Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.” I might point out that far worse has been done in the name of military necessity than anything the Bush Administration has done. In 1942 FDR threw tens of thousands of native-born American citizens into concentration camps for no reason other than their ancestry. Further, Mr. Zeitz writes, “In explaining his opposition to the Salem trials, Increase Mather, the great seventeenth-century Puritan minister, put it this way: ‘It were better that ten suspected witches should escape, than that one innocent person be condemned.’ Substitute ‘terrorist’ for ‘witch,’ and one suspects that, today, Mather might just receive an unwelcomed knock on his door.” Really? First, of course, witches in seventeenth-century New England were less of a clear and present threat than twenty-first-century terrorists (see above). Second, I may have missed it, but which intellectuals have had “an unwelcomed knock on his door” in the middle of the night? The editors of The Nation have been left to sleep soundly. So have countless bloggers of the Daily Kos stripe. Dennis Kucinich and Maxine Waters attend Congress unmolested. Street demonstrations by those opposed to the war have been unrestricted. Indeed, is there in the United States today a single person not diagnosed with paranoia who has feared his statements of opinion might bring the FBI?
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