The Enemy Within Page 22

  Salemwitchcraft as period piece

  But redemption would come in due course, as the Puritans gained a new set of revisionist interpreters. Among professional historians the leader (at least in chronological sequence) was Samuel Eliot Morison, whose pathbreaking work, The Puritan Pronaos: Studies in the Intellectual Life of New England, in the Seventeenth Century, appeared in 1936. Morison strove, above all else, to take the Puritans on their own terms, without superimposing modern (and “progressive”) standards of value. Seen in that light, their achievements, intellectual and otherwise, were distinctly impressive. And also in that light, witchcraft beliefs—even witch trials—did not appear incongruous; to the contrary, they were “typical of the seventeenth-century situation.” The Salem trials, moreover, were the product of an especially “troubled period” in New England history, when “the people were uneasy with rebellions, changes of government, and Indian attacks.” The “afflicted children” had acted an insincere part, while their elders “kept a cowardly silence.” Such moments of “mass madness” had occurred also in other times and places. Indeed, Salem recalled, for Morison, “a recent miscarriage of justice . . . in the same commonwealth [Massachusetts],” the Sacco-Vanzetti trials of the 1920s; this parallel “compels us to be charitable” to the perpetrators. All things considered, the 1692 “outbreak” was no more than “a small incident in the history of a great superstition.” And, when it was done, New England was “left . . . much as it had been before.” In short: unfortunate, yes; regrettable, yes; but not very significant overall.

  Morison’s colleague on the faculty at Harvard, Perry Miller, took a more complex and nuanced position. Miller would eventually become the most important of all contributors to Puritan studies; in ways unimagined by his predecessors, he plumbed the depths of a collective “New England mind.” The witch trials, however, left him in a somewhat divided frame. At certain points he seemed impatient with the popular interest they inevitably aroused—a product, he thought, of rank sensationalism. In that connection he could say, with a faint air of contempt: “The intellectual history of New England can be written as if no such thing ever happened. It had no effect on the ecclesiastical or political situation, it does not figure in the institutional or ideological development.” Like Morison, Miller hoped to wish the matter away by denying its importance. The elaborately developed Puritan theology, on which he lavished his own extraordinary powers of analysis, counted for so much more.

  Yet in other parts of his oeuvre, a different, and less dismissive, assessment appeared. He sensed in some of his clergymen subjects—Hale, for one; Cotton Mather, for another—a virtual crisis of faith in response to the witch trials. Hale, of course, had come to acknowledge “error,” and Mather had approached the same point without quite getting there. Both had been led, in Hale’s words, to “a more strict scanning of the principles . . . [they] had imbibed.” Once such a process began, Miller wondered, where would it stop? He concluded as follows: “The onus of error lay heavy upon the land; the realization of it slowly but irresistibly ate into the New England conscience.” The passing years brought “an unassuageable grief that the covenanted community should have committed an irreparable evil. Out of sorrow and chagrin, out of dread, was born a new love for the land which had been desecrated, but somehow also consecrated, by the blood of innocents.” For Miller, the witch-hunt had finally been transmuted into a strange kind of romantic myth.

  Salemwitchcraft and the vulnerability of children

  A slender article, little noticed at the time of its publication in 1943, deserves at least brief mention here, if only because it anticipated later developments. Entitled “Pediatric Aspects of the Salem Witchcraft Tragedy,” it appeared in a scientific journal; its author, Ernest Caulfield, was a medical doctor. Caulfield’s chief aim was to counter the still-prevalent emphasis on “fraud” in explaining the witch-hunt; his approach reflected his professional specialty in pediatrics. A foremost point about the accusers, he believed, was simply their position as children subject to the extreme pressures created by a “gruesome theology” of sin and death. Key Puritan doctrines such as predestination “involved a complex mental process that no child could experience, much less enjoy.” As a result, young New Englanders were obliged to live in a state of “constant, gnawing fear.” Some, for whom the demands were too great, plunged into “the worst sort of mental distress.” And the bizarre antics seen at Salem were “only the outward manifestation of their feeble attempts to escape from their insecure, cruel, depressive . . . village world.”

  Salemwitchcraft as hysteria

  The cumulative effect of witchcraft-related writing through the first half of the 20th century was almost to remove the topic from public view. The progressive historians had buried it, along with everything else in Puritanism, as being unworthy of serious consideration. The opinions of revisionists like Morison and Miller were at best ambivalent; moreover, embedded as they were in a scholarly literature, they could not command wide attention. Hence it fell to a non-scholar, Marion L. Starkey, to bring Salem back out where general readers might again take its measure. Her book, The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry Into the Salem Witch Trials, was published in 1949, and quickly gained a large audience.

  Starkey was a writer of considerable imaginative gifts, and she tried especially to develop the dramatic possibilities inherent in the story. Her focus throughout was the “circle” of afflicted girls. In this, she reinstated the emphasis of the 18th- and 19th-century writers on Salem, and her question was also theirs: How to explain the “fits” and similar “actings” that had proved so crucial to the entire affair? Her answer, however, was diametrically opposed. Where many others had seen “fraud and imposture,” Starkey (like Caulfield a few years before) diagnosed involuntary, not to say unconscious, motives at work; her circle was composed of true hysterics. The modern in her “modern enquiry” was a quick shot of Freudianism, flavored with a dollop of developmental psychology. The special “adolescent” status of the afflicted accusers seemed to Starkey a key element. They were at the mercy of biological and hormonal change, familial stress, and community neglect (this last because teenage girls were so little acknowledged in pre-modern culture); at one point she referred to them as “a pack of bobbysoxers on the loose.” They sought excitement, notoriety, adventure—and their fits did, in addition, convey a certain protest—but all without any form of planful intent.

  Salemwitchcraft as political repression

  Starkey’s work was also shaped, at least implicitly, by the political environment of the post-World War Two era—the aftermath of violent struggle against Nazism, and the beginnings of the Cold War. Soon this environment would inspire another treatment that was both similar and different. Its form would be that of the theater, its creator the playwright Arthur Miller. The play itself, an immediate sensation when first performed in 1952, was entitled The Crucible. Miller’s version of the witch trials was a superbly crafted parody of the Red Scare—the government investigations of Communism—in the late 1940s and early ’50s. Indeed it joined, to an astonishing degree, the history of those two widely separated periods.

  Miller had begun his preparations for the play with a careful reading of Upham (all 1,000 pages); he had also spent a week at the old courthouse in Salem itself, wading through the trial records. He altered certain of the original facts in order to suit the needs of the stage—elevating John Proctor, for example, to a central role, and adding a love interest. But the play as a whole remained remarkably faithful to the spirit and emotions of actual events; even the speech patterns rang true. (There is no better way to “hear” the people of 17th-century New England than to attend a performance of The Crucible.)

  The play took no position on the motives of the afflicted girls; they might, or might not, have been bona fide hysterics. But it strongly suggested that much of the community, judges, clergy, and ordinary citizens alike, had succumbed to a particularly malignant form of group hysteria�
�and then, in the name of conformity, had carried out a ruthless program of social and political repression. Rampant suspicion, spiraling panic, a thirst for vengeance: thus the ingredients of witch-hunting, in the 1690s and again in the 1950s. As Miller would put it many years afterward, his aim was to spotlight “the primeval structure of human sacrifice to the forces of fanaticism and paranoia that goes on repeating itself forever as though imbedded in the brain of social man.” The important word here is “forever”; the stakes were now raised to a level approaching universality.

  Taken as a whole, The Crucible has done more to shape popular perceptions of Salem witchcraft than any other single writing; for many in the present day, it is the only real source. It has, at the same time, greatly enhanced the metaphorical power of the term witch-hunting. And it continues to remind us that, behind the term, there does indeed lurk something spanning many otherwise disparate historical and cultural circumstances.

  Salemwitchcraft and shifting cultural boundaries

  In 1966, Kai T. Erikson published an important work of historical sociology, Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance, in which the witch trials played a conspicuous part. Erikson’s main theme was social and cultural “boundary-setting.” He decided to take 17th-century Massachusetts as a “laboratory” for investigating the way communities, during periods of crisis, seek to redefine themselves and redraw their cultural boundaries; Salem would serve as a test case. His conclusion, after careful examination of the pertinent records, was that Massachusetts in 1692 had indeed reached a crucial turning point. Its imperial charter was in doubt, its cultural fulcrum was shifting from the spiritual to the secular, outbursts of “angry dissension” were on the rise, and so forth. Ministers, for their part, had developed a distinctive sermon type appropriate to such difficult times, the so-called jeremiad, with lament over moral shortcoming as its dominant motif; this, in turn, served only to heighten the general mood of anxiety.

  The cumulative result was a loss of the special “sense of mission” that had inspired the colony’s founding. The “yardstick” against which “the original settlers . . . measured their achievements” was gone, and, in the convulsive process of witch-hunting, their descendants wrestled with a host of unsettling consequences. Ironically, the subsequent collapse (and discrediting) of the trials enabled the community to reorient itself and mark out new boundaries—and thus to birth a new identity, built around the prototype of “the practical, self-reliant Yankee.” Whatever the value of this conclusion for sociological theory, it did jibe with some leading facts of early New England history: the undeniable, seemingly intractable, stresses—political, social, and psychological—the region had faced during the years and decades preceding the trials.

  Salemwitchcraft as actual practice

  Chadwick Hansen was the next important entrant in this increasingly crowded field; his book Witchcraft at Salem (1969) was designed to offer “a fresh and objective review of the entire matter.” Hansen began by adopting the position of Starkey, that the afflicted were nothing more (or less) than hysterics. “Their behavior,” he stated flatly, “was not fraudulent, but pathological. . . . They were mentally ill.” Moreover, he extended this diagnosis to include many confessors as well; thus the whole amounted to “an outbreak of epidemic hysteria.”

  But the truly new piece in Hansen’s “review” was his idea that “witchcraft actually did exist and was widely practiced in seventeenth-century New England.” From his own reading of the courtroom records he had concluded that several of the accused were “in all probability” guilty as charged. On this point he referred especially to evidence for the use of “image magic”; as an example, he cited the testimony given at the trial of Bridget Bishop about “poppets” found in her basement. From here he took a further step, arguing that witchcraft “worked” as intended by its practitioners, but “through psychogenic rather than occult means.” It was extreme fear in the victims that brought on their “symptoms,” energized their fits, and produced other disabling conditions up to and including death. Here Hansen invoked an important group of studies by medical anthropologists, on certain present-day West Indian communities, where severe, occasionally fatal, illness appears to have no identifiable cause apart from a dread of attack by magical means (voodoo).

  Hansen’s work seems, in retrospect, a transitional moment in the overall sequence of these histories. To some extent, it followed established patterns. Like most of its predecessors, it took the witch trials essentially as a set piece, without much connection to any wider historical forces; it also retained the old concern with the possibility of fraud (on which, however, it gave an emphatically negative verdict). But its careful research base, and, in particular, its interdisciplinary thrust—reaching out toward clinical psychology and anthropology—pointed in a new direction.

  In fact, the study of Salem witchcraft was about to undergo a dramatic transformation in both quantitative and qualitative terms. The sheer volume of work on the subject would soon leap upward, as professional historians reclaimed it for their own. At the same time, the center of interest shifted to matters of context: how to situate witch-hunting in relation to other elements of time and place. This does not mean that previous questions were abandoned altogether: What happened at Salem? would always, perhaps inevitably, remain a lively point of concern. But there arose a second set of questions, parallel yet different, as to what witchcraft history might reveal about pre-modern life in a variety of related dimensions. In a sense, this history was no longer simply an end in itself; it was also a means to other ends. There was, too, a further implication here—that changing scholarly trends and fashions, as much as events in the world at large, would henceforth shape the approach taken by leading contributors.

  Salemwitchcraft and the coming of capitalism

  The most powerful such trend, during the 1970s, was the so-called new social history, a broad-gauge revisionary movement centered on the systematic (even scientific) analysis of the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. This provided the frame for the next major contribution to Salem studies, a brilliantly innovative work by a pair of young scholars, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, published in 1974 as Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Both title and subtitle announced a difference. The Salem community, not the witch-hunt as such, would be the chief focus. And questions of social organization, not blow-by-blow details of the trial proceedings, would set the main lines of investigation. In fact, Salem Possessed relegated the trials almost to a prefatory role—summarized in its opening chapter and mentioned thereafter only tangentially.

  The authors began by following up on a lead from Upham’s work of more than a century before. Through careful analysis of land deeds and other local records, Upham had succeeded in creating a detailed map of Salem at the time of the trials, with every household carefully plotted in. He had then noted an interesting geographical pattern, which Boyer and Nissenbaum were able to confirm and to interpret. Salem was divided between its original nucleus, abutting the shoreline and known as “the Town,” and another section, a few miles back to the west and north, called simply “the Village.” The Town was strongly oriented to the sea and trade, while the Village was made up predominantly of small-scale farmsteads. This difference had widened steadily through several decades. By the end of the century, the Town represented (for its time) a “capitalist” way of life, with a cadre of busy merchants at the top of its steeply graded social and economic pyramid.

  The witchcraft accusations began, it is clear, among residents of the Village. Moreover, Upham’s map showed that virtually all the key accusers lived in the most interior part of the Village, while the accused came largely from households in the section bordering the Town. Boyer and Nissenbaum used this discovery as a stepping-off point for developing detailed “profiles” of two sharply antagonized factions in Village life. (The theme of “factionalism” had also appeared in Upham, but Salem Possessed would take it much further.) The grou
p based in the interior consisted of old-style farmers of below-average means and highly traditional values. In direct contrast, its opponents displayed an “entrepreneurial” bent; they included tradesmen, innkeepers, and farmers who were at least partially oriented to the market (as befitted their location close to the Town). Boyer and Nissenbaum summed up the difference as follows: “From the evidence . . . the [interior] faction emerges as by far the more vulnerable of the two: less wealthy, . . . owning less land, quite literally hedged in by more flourishing . . . neighbors, and less able to benefit from developments centered in Salem Town.”

  The struggle between them went back nearly 20 years before 1692. Its most visible aspect was a succession of controversies involving the Village ministers: first, Reverend James Bayley (hired in 1672, fired in 1679); followed by Reverend George Burroughs (1680- 83); and then Reverend Deodat Lawson (1684-87). The level of feeling, in each case, was remarkably high; as one Villager described the situation in 1679, “Brother is against brother, and neighbors [are] against neighbors, all quarreling and smiting one another.” A final, crucial phase began with the arrival in 1688 of Reverend Samuel Parris, around whom the old “contentions” immediately flared anew. The traditionalists were, by and large, Parris’s loyal supporters, their more entrepreneurial counterparts his persistent detractors. The points of conflict were political rather than ecclesiastical, especially the desire—again, among the traditionalists—to separate the life of the Village as much as possible from the capitalist ethos of the Town.