1692 At first only three women were charged. Over the rest of that spring and summer, as the confusion and hysteria grew and the examinations were moved to the meeting house, 55 men and women would ‘confess’ to witchcraft. Over 150 would be imprisoned, nineteen hanged, and Giles Corey, aged 81, pressed to death under a platform loaded with stones.
The panic was fed by underlying anxiety about whether the colony’s royal charter would be renewed, combined with fear that the devil was actively and secretly undermining the pious community. The effects of his work were plain to see: a number of adolescent girls were falling about convulsed into grotesque postures, complaining of invisible bites and pinches on their arms and legs.
Who had done the devil’s work? As always in witch scares, suspicion fell on older women, many widowed or single, marginal to the town. One by one they were accused. Since they bore no marks of their wickedness, the court had no way of determining their guilt apart from forcing confessions through leading questions:
Sarah Goode what evil Spirit have you familiarity with?
None …
Why do you hurt these children?
I doe not hurt them. I scorn it.
Who doe you imploy then to do it?
I imploy no body.
What creature do you imploy then?
And so on. No wonder Arthur Miller was so fascinated with the Salem trials. His play The Crucible (1953) kept the language and characters of the original, but the audience knew it was really about the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), another ‘court’ that could subpoena witnesses, deny them the right to cross-examine others testifying against them, try to brow-beat them into admitting to invisible abuses, then charge them with contempt if they refused to confess.
On 18 August 1955, HUAC questioned the folk-singer Pete Seeger on his performances for alleged communist-front cultural organisations:
MR TAVENNER: […] I have before me a photostatic copy of the June 20, 1947, issue of the Daily Worker, [in which] … appears this advertisement: ‘Tonight—Bronx, hear Peter Seeger and his guitar, at Allerton Section housewarming.’ May I ask you whether or not the Allerton Section was a section of the Communist Party? …
MR SEEGER: I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this …1
Because he refused to plead the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, which allows witnesses to refuse to testify if their testimony would incriminate them, Pete Seeger’s failure to answer landed him in jail for a year for contempt of Congress.