Dear readers—apologies for the late summer hiatus.
The best way to roll out the final chapter(s) in my survey of scapegoating, “witch hunts,” and cancelation, it seems, is to split what I intended to be the final installment into two sections.
To recap:
Part I covered the cancelation of former Portland (now NYC) journalist Nancy Rommelmann, for her reporting on #MeToo personality Asia Argento.
Part II glossed the history of Early Modern witch hunts compiled in Charles MacKay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), and added some of their historical contexts—remarkably similar to our own: new mimetic technologies (the printing press), pandemics (the Black Death), climate change (the “Little Ice Age”), and new “protest” religions (Protestantism).
The article this week will look at Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953), as interpretations of the tail end of “Witch Mania” in the New World.
The final installment will consider the primitive origins of human sacrifice and scapegoating, and how these dynamics apply to their modern corollaries in journalism and popular culture.
I concluded the last installment of “#witchhunts” by gesturing towards the merry Puritans.
Those incubators of American sensibility, who left the protestant Church of England (with a little inspiration from the printing press, and King James Bible), to seek religious freedom in the New World.
Freed from persecution by the Anglican Church, their primitive society (as Nathaniel Hawthorne describes it) soon fell to persecuting itself, in one of the last great spasms of Early Modern hysteria, culminating in the Salem witch trials of 1692.
Two of America’s canonical scapegoating texts, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953), were inspired by this period. Although Hawthorne’s is set earlier, in 1640, not in Salem but in Boston, and depicts not a theological witch hunt but a moral one: a public shaming campaign around Adultery. Represented, as most have assumed, by the red letter “A” pinned to Hawthorne’s female protagonist, Hester Prynne.
Despite their many differences—these texts were written a century apart, in entirely different circumstances, and Hawthorne’s novel is, despite appearances, a comic “romance” (his words) with a utopian feminist finale, while Miller’s play is a tragedy about a band of backstabbing Salem adolescents run amok—despite these discrepancies, the two were often lumped together as a sort of “scapegoating unit” on Puritan New England, on high school English syllabi at the turn of the last century.
At least, that’s the last time I’d read these stories, and that’s how they were presented.
But the thing they have most in common, as far as I’m now concerned, is that the plots of these historical fictions are set in motion by scandals involving older men with younger women—the same fodder for the movement that catalyzed “cancel culture” in 2017, #MeToo. Which is where we began, in the beginning of this series: with Nancy Rommelmann, opining on #MeToo personalities, and publicly suffering the consequences.
I turned to The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible for historical parallels with, and insights into, something obviously resurgent in American culture. Surprising (I wrote sometime around 2021), that these texts haven’t been meme-d into oblivion already—by the Jeremiahs of cancel-culture on the one hand, or the self-identifying Hester Prynnes of victimhood on the other. The literary and historical framework for both outlooks is scaffolded right onto the American imagination, on a pedestal of persecution and shame.
A recent American president, with little inclination for history, and less for literacy, did manage to internalize these tropes, enough to paint his own political persecution—like Clinton, like Nixon before him—as a “witch hunt.” Melvyn Bragg gestured towards this association, in a “Salem Witch Trials” episode of BBC’s In Our Time at the beginning of the Trump and #MeToo eras, but declined to explicitly link Puritan witch-hunting with twenty-first-century cancel culture—too simple, too topical, too controversial, he implied.
Thomas Chatterton-Williams, the journalist and public intellectual, was finally the first, that I know, to employ this allegory by name, calling canceled MIT scientist David Sabatini’s ordeal, “a real life The Scarlet Letter,” in August 2021.
For those who don’t recall, or care, The Scarlet Letter tells the plight of Hester Prynne, an attractive young woman married to an icy older man (Roger Chillingworth), who has a brief affair with colonial Boston’s new, Harvard-educated arrival, a Reverend named Arthur Dimmesdale.
When Hester becomes pregnant with the Reverend’s daughter while (ahem) “Roger” is away, her adultery becomes public knowledge, a source of prurient fascination.
She’s forced to wear the scarlet letter “A,” a patch she skillfully embroiders herself, stitched to the outside of her clothes, as a mark of shame.
All the while, as a debased Hester retreats to the edge of town to raise her bedazzling daughter in isolation—only emerging to display her artistry with a sewing needle, by stitching fine garments for Boston’s elite—Hester keeps Dimmesdale’s paternity a secret. The Reverend, meanwhile, enjoys elevated status at the center of the community.
The only person who suspects Dimmesdale’s guilt is Hester’s estranged husband—an apothecary fond of herbs and potions, who returns to Boston after living amongst the Indians to find his wife with child. Chillingworth begins to ostensibly treat Dimmesdale for the nervous ailments stemming from his guilt, but actually feeds his sickness instead, using the dark arts for revenge, slowly poisoning the Reverend’s body and mind.
In the end, at the height of Boston’s “Election Day” festivities, when dour Puritans gather to perform a weak simulation of joyous celebration, on the day they elect their new leader each year—an event that draws even outcasts like Hester Prynne and her impish daughter, drunken sailors, and Native Americans to the center of town, in a carnival atmosphere where these pariahs are elevated to the status of local celebrities for one day—Arthur Dimmesdale succumbs to his conscience.
He delivers a final sermon, mounts the scaffold of shame attached to the side of the church (which Hester Prynne formerly occupied), and announces his own sin, an act a self-sacrifice before he dies.
Roger Chillingworth, deprived of his raison d’être (torturing Arthur Dimmesdale) slinks off to ignominy and oblivion, while Hester Prynne is finally free to raise her daughter in peace, without a man, and make a life for herself.
Fin.
But… The novel is addended with a weird (some say satirical), utopian vision of 19th-century women’s lib.
In Hawthorne’s “Conclusion,” the narrator echoes suffragist Margaret Fuller, sounding like her feminist Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1843), when he imagines that,
“at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it… a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness… The angel and the apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman…”
Hawthorne, meanwhile (like his wife), was lukewarm about the social movements of his day, to put it charitably—including the fight against “women’s slavery,” as the women’s rights movement was often described. He was equally ambivalent about a related movement, abolition.
In the novel proper, his storytelling is trenchant. But between the “Introductory” and “Conclusion,” his plot is bookended by odd editorializing that renders any overriding statement ironic— a cynical comedy, or something else entirely.
Though the story of Hester Prynne is set in 1640s Boston, in his introduction, Hawthorne writes amusingly, and confusingly, about himself in the present (1848)—not in Boston but in Salem, where he grew up, as the descendent of a notorious “hanging judge” in the Salem witch trials. Hawthorne would have us believe that Salem in the 1690s is not all that different than Salem in the late 1840s, or American politics in general, where people are “guillotined” for their political beliefs.
The author, we learn, lost a cushy government job at the Salem Custom-House during the presidential elections of 1848, when, in his telling, he was persecuted for being a Democrat—likening his ordeal to a political witch hunt, as so many politicians have done since.
And, in an oblique way, likening himself to his female protagonist, Hester Prynne, whose scarlet letter (a fictional conceit) he claims to have discovered in the Custom-House archives.
He even goes so far as to offer himself as a scapegoat, for the sins of his Puritan forefathers, and their fuddy-duddy descendants at the Custom-House:
“I… take shame upon myself for their sakes…”
In his hometown, the reaction to Hawthorne’s portrayal of Salem in the “Introductory” to The Scarlet Letter was so violent that, in the prologue to a later edition, he mused, you would have thought he had “burned down the Custom-House, and quenched its last ember in the blood of a certain venerable personage,” presumably, the person who fired Hawthorne.
It complicates what is otherwise a moral fable about a strong woman facing a weak, hypocritical society (above all, the society of her dull lover, Arthur Dimmesdale), that such a tight piece of literary fiction (some say feminist fiction!) is prefaced with grotesque humor and male personal grievances, and concludes with what sounds like a satire of women’s rights advocate Margaret Fuller.
Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, which debuted at the height of the Red Scare in 1953, presents an entirely different, tragic, outcome for its (male) protagonist—and it’s actually set in Salem during the witch trials.
But it carries its own ideological baggage, less conflicted than Hawthorne’s: though Miller spared audiences his unfiltered political opinions on the page, the play was immediately understood as a rebuke of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist “witch hunt,” the House UnAmerican Activities hearings.
The Crucible landed Miller in a HUAC hearing himself. Where, in a stunning case of life imitating art, like his own protagonist, Miller refused to name the names of suspected ‘witches,’ or in this case, communists.
Like The Scarlet Letter, scapegoating in The Crucible is set in motion by an act of adultery, between an older man and a younger woman.
In Salem, 1692, Abigail Williams, a seventeen-year-old under the guardianship of her venerable uncle, is seen cavorting with other teens and tweens of the village, half-naked in the woods outside town.
The girls are gathered for a ceremony, officiated by Tituba, an Afro-Caribbean slave who promises to grant the girls the men of their dreams, using sympathetic magic.
Abigail wishes to possess John Proctor, a farmer with whom she previously enjoyed an affair—until Proctor rejected her for another woman, his wife. Abigail commandeers the ceremony, then invokes the death of Elizabeth Proctor out of spite, terrifying Tituba.
In the film version, screen-written by Arthur Miller himself, Abigail Williams (Winona Ryder) snatches a sacrificial chicken from Tituba, bashes it against a rock, and smears its blood across her face, which sets the girls into a maenadic frenzy that includes nudity and, more scandalously for the Puritans, dancing.
For some reason this was excluded from the “Puritan unit,” on my high school English syllabus.
A male Salemite, witnessing this pagan ritual in the forest, reports it to the town elders, who begin an inquisition, after one of the girls turns comatose, reviving only to attempt defenestration from a second-story window.
Abigail bullies the rest of the girls into silence, but after the first scapegoat in the plot, Tituba, confesses to witchcraft (slyly, to save her own neck)—Abigail sees the advantage, and confesses as well.
This ignites a wildfire of imitative false confessions, and fake accusations—whenever anyone tells the truth, or protests their innocence. Including the accusation, by Abigail, that her romantic rival, John Proctor’s wife, is a witch.
The hero of Miller’s screenplay, Proctor (Daniel Day-Lewis) redeems his carnal sins with a woman half his age, by refuting Abigail’s accusations of witchcraft (aimed at everyone but himself), throughout The Crucible. Like Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, he confesses his adultery publicly, trying to clear his wife of Abigail’s false allegations.
At the climax, Proctor chooses the gallows over the amnesty that comes with false confession, or disingenuously accusing others. His moral failing notwithstanding, Abigail Williams’ treachery sends Proctor, his wife Elizabeth, and eighteen others to the gallows.
Now, these are works of historical fiction, and probably reveal as much about the middle-aged men who wrote them, and how they perceived American society at the time, as they do about the Salem witch trials or Puritan Boston.
However the scapegoating tendencies they represent have been ingrained in human behavior since time immemorial, and the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The fact that the main aspect of the Salem witch trials which Miller chose to fictionalize in the 1950s was a romantic entanglement between Abigail Williams and John Proctor, seems relevant.
And not for nothing, Miller studied the history of the Salem witch trials, and Hawthorne the history of Anne Hutchinson—a religious heretic exiled from Boston for challenging the patriarchs of the Puritan church—whom he directly compares to Hester Prynne, and by extension, himself, in the opening pages of The Scarlet Letter.
He added the “w” to his last name to distance himself from his great-great grandfather, “hanging judge” John Hathorne, so it’s safe to say he was also informed about the trials that took place just over a century before his birth, in Salem.
An avid reader of Rabelais, Hawthorne was also familiar with the rituals of carnival, which are all over The Scarlet Letter, and as far as anthropologists are concerned, closely mirror the mechanics of scapegoating. (More on that next time).
It’s worth mentioning that versions of these two texts—the film version of The Crucible screen-written by Arthur Miller (1996), and an (abysmal) adaptation of The Scarlet Letter directed by Demi Moore (1995), were released on the cusp of the first great “media circus” of the early Internet Age to involve an older man with a younger woman: the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal—when the media became infatuated with another mark of shame, on Monica Lewinsky’s dress. Had they wished, president and intern could have viewed either film in the White House Family Theater, at the height of their affair.
The impeachment campaign against Clinton, of course, was painted by his supporters as a media witch hunt, and the scapegoating of Monica Lewinsky—in what was commonly referred to as simply the “Lewinsky Scandal”—has subsequently been compared to the plight of Hester Prynne.
The next great invocation of American witch hunting—as noted by BBC host Melvin Bragg in the “Salem Witch Trials” podcast released at the beginning of the “cancel culture” era—was the scapegoating of Muslims after 9-11.
One of the reasons the journalist and academic I mentioned earlier, Thomas Chatterton-Williams, referred to David Sabatini’s cancelation as a “real life The Scarlet Letter,” I suspect, is that it took place at MIT—in Cambridge, just outside of Boston.
To me the circumstances of that case—a 50-year-old cancer researcher involved with a 29-year-old research assistant (who became jealous of another woman, then lodged false allegations of sexual harassment on social media, in what subsequent investigations have revealed to be a consensual relationship)—more closely mirror the machinations of Abigail Williams in a “real life The Crucible." Although, the naïveté of a “genius” MIT professor, sparking-up a midlife rebound relationship with a grad student, at the height of the #MeToo movement, does have dimwitted shades of Arthur Dimmesdale.
Along with MIT, Cambridge is also home to Harvard, whence the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale is sent to minister the people of Boston, and ruin Hester Prynne’s reputation.
Harvard is also the school the expert on demonology in The Crucible, the Reverend John Hale, is dispatched from to investigate witchcraft in Salem.
The historical John Hale was indeed educated at Harvard, at Cambridge’s “church in the wilderness,” founded to train the Puritan clergy of New England. He wrote a book about his experiences in Salem, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft (1697), detailing how he went from ardently supporting the trials, to critiquing them (once his wife was among the accused).
A Modest Enquiry may be a critique of American witch hunting, but it serves up the same kind of theological hokum that fueled the tragedy in the first place, to explain what ‘actually’ happened in Salem: demons impersonating the accused.
In the accounts of Early Modern witchcraft I covered last time, I mentioned that another book, the Malleus Malificarum, fueled the “Witch Mania” in Europe. The Malleus was also the product of one of the finest think factories, in Europe. It was co-written by a Dean, and a professor of theology at the University of Cologne.
It’s a fool’s errand to make direct equivalencies between 15th-century theology and postmodern thought, but it’s worth keeping in mind that representatives from some of our highest institutions—Catholic, Puritan, or secular—are capable of errors in judgement, when they’re caught up in collective responses to historical events, especially those that involve scapegoating.
In December of 2023, the presidents of Harvard and MIT (and Penn) were called to testify about their alleged failure to address a form of scapegoating, or campus antisemitism.
In what was predictably decried as a “witch hunt” of college administrators on one side of the political spectrum, media supporters on both sides of a debate about two historically-scapegoated student groups, Jewish and Muslim, weighed-in, and two college presidents resigned.
For historical perspective, though modern universities have been described as incubators for esoteric ideologies, which some have compared to new, protest-ant forms of “religion”—somewhat like the whacky folk beliefs about demonology that infused Christianity through the Malleus Malificarum—when the original author of the Malleus presented his ideas before the Faculty of Cologne, he was condemned.
On the other hand, Heinrich Kramer, who called for illegal procedures inconsistent with church doctrine, was never removed from the University of Cologne. He actually enjoyed a degree of prestige, and because of the printing press, his ideas had a marked effect on the prosecution of witchcraft in Europe. If the accounts in Popular Delusions are any indication, they were widely embraced and imitated by the youth of Germany—even by those who wanted to be perceived as witches, or wizards.
Political ideology aside, it’s hard not see that campus culture is often enmeshed with cancel culture. Whatever their failures in judgement, college administrators in 2023 were caught between a rock and a hard place: between student protest groups who often use cancelation as a cudgel, and congressional representatives described as doing the same, or conducting a “witch hunt.”
But the congressional witch hunt, from McCarthy to Clinton (and in his own words, Trump), is nothing new. Social media scapegoating is a fresher, but familiar, animal.
For my money, the text that gives me chills when I compare it to online cancelation is not The Scarlet Letter but The Crucible. Because it gets to the crux of the phenomenon, imitation.
The process of Abigail turning the other children of Salem against alleged witches is eerily reminiscent of modern-day mimesis and meme-ification: a frenzy of false shrieking and fast copying.
In one of the creepier scenes in the 1996 film, when the accusers claim one poor girl is possessed by witchcraft—the only girl of the entire lot who speaks the truth—the victim understandably protests her innocence. As a strategic response, her accusers intuitively mimic her every word, as a choir, in hysterical unison, parroting the victim’s innocence back at her, and thus mocking it.
The mob’s mimicry is supposed to prove that they, like the supposed witch-girl, are receiving these words from spirits in the air. They pretend to echo what the devil is making her say, not what the victim is actually saying in her own defense. In this way, the accusers drown out the victim’s sincere claims of innocence by, ironically, repeating them in a louder, madder voice—a diabolical mockery.
It’s like a sadistic parlor game, or a jongleur’s tricks, “mimic witchcraft,” as Hawthorne calls such carnival mischief in The Scarlet Letter. It’s haunting to see such an innocent childish game, the elementary human tendency to imitate, applied to the most nefarious ends, with consequences the girls never consider: the victim (in this case, their peer) will hang, unless she too joins their choir of lies. Through the simplest act of mimicking the innocent, mocking the words proclaiming the truth, the gang of tweenage accusers steals the voice right out of her throat, usurping her very soul. This, it strikes the viewer, is true evil: the ability to twist truth into falsehood, innocence into guilt— through disingenuous, ‘magical’ repetition.
Aside from “mimic witchcraft,” the most unsettling aspect of online public shaming foretold in both The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible is the loss of privacy, exposure to the mob.
Hawthorne’s words about Hester’s ignominy in seventeenth-century Massachusetts apply equally to anyone trying to hide from the relentless gaze of social media in the twentieth-first century:
There can be no outrage, methinks, against our common nature,—whatever be the delinquencies of the individual,—no outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame.
Or, if we prefer John Proctor’s chilling words about transparency, sin and exposure, from The Crucible: “It is a providence, and no great change; we are what we always were, but naked now… Aye, naked! And the wind, God’s icy wind, will blow!”
For the first time, human nature, along with everyone’s foibles and mistakes, is archived and searchable, permanently on display, should anyone care to dig these out of the Custom-House records.
Human nature hasn’t changed all that much, but our ability to search for dirt, imitate en masse, and victimize has.
In the words of one critic, comparing scapegoating in Miller and Hawthorne: “the quest… is to root out evil as it has been made manifest in witchcraft,” or whatever the sin of the day may be.
“But the search for evil only serves to beget evil with a type of horrifying geometrical progression. The search is… a seeking for truth. But the real truth is clouded over by the apparent truth, and… accusations hold the day.”
In the words of Arthur Miller, and John Proctor:
I’ll tell you what’s walking Salem—vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys to the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!
That, I think, comes closer than Hawthorne to describing the worst excesses of scapegoating in the Internet Age.