Salem’s Reign of Terror

The desire to understand why people hunt witches runs much deeper. Schiff reminds us that it was the Holocaust that sent historian Marion Starkey into the Salem archives. Aided by court records previously scattered throughout the North Shore of Massachusetts and assembled during the Works Progress Administration into three giant volumes, she published The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry Into the Salem Witch Trials in 1949. It offered up the first psychological portrait of the event and its characters, in particular the development of childish fantasies into teenage hysteria. It was this volume that Miller picked up to begin his research, the perfect entrance for a storyteller. 

In 1952, around the time Miller’s friend, director Elia Kazan, outed eight of their creative colleagues as Communists to the House Un-American Activities Committee, the disgruntled playwright traveled to the Salem library. Playing loose with Starkey’s book and the few recorded documents—altering ages, creating character composites, adding a romantic backstory—he emerged with a masterful four-act allegory for the “witch hunt.” Miller had an important goal for his play, which he wrote down in his notebook: “It must be tragic.” But instead, he was swept away by the bureaucracy of evil. The New York Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson, in his opening night review of The Crucible, wrote that Miller “has permitted himself to be concerned more with the technique of the witch hunt than with its humanity,” and declared it, as a drama, still in the shadow of Death of a Salesman. Note that it’s The Crucible, however, that remains Miller’s most frequently produced work. (The next Broadway revival is scheduled for spring 2016.)

As for Miller’s famous quote, it was Starkey who said it first, in her preface to The Devil in Massachusetts: “I have tried to uncover the classic dramatic form of the story itself, for here is a real ‘Greek tragedy,’ with a beginning, a middle, and an end.” (Unlike Miller, however, she tried her best in the book to let the characters speak for themselves and not “blur their portraits with the sentimentality and flares of moral indignation.”) The narrative of Salem itself is a story “pockmarked by seventeenth-century deletions and studded with nineteenth-century inventions,” Schiff writes. Her history is a corrective to Miller and Starkey, who have carved a narrative out of ambiguous events. Schiff is unsentimental and undramatic, she resists a beginning, middle, and end. According to her, the end of Salem is nowhere in sight.

Why then would a Pulitzer Prize-winning twenty-first century biographer yoke herself anew to the Salem witch trials unless she comes bearing news? In The Witches, Schiff is an industrious schoolmarm; unlike Miller, the news she bears has little to do with tragedy, and even less to do with conclusions. She has produced a nearly 500-page history that feels uncannily like a (slightly overstuffed) biography, in which even the most theatrical plot points are treated as plain, hard facts to be marshaled and accounted for in a rigorous chronology. 

This was no small feat, given how few documents there are for a historian to work with: Not a single session of the witchcraft court survives. The only extant source materials are depositions, indictments, confessions, petitions, and two death warrants—crusted over with three centuries’ worth of interpretation and speculation, which began with Cotton Mather’s unabashedly subjective The Wonders of the Invisible World. Penned while witches still flew outside his window and published in 1693, today it has become a guide for the medieval cast of the Puritan mind, which believed as devoutly in devils, witches, and their familiars as it did in God himself. In the eighteenth century, there came a long, guilty silence, during which everybody did their best to never again think or talk about those feeble-minded colonials and their unseemly credulity. Then, in 1831, Charles W. Upham, Harvard classmate of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the seventh mayor of Salem, tore off the muzzle and delivered his “Lectures on Witchcraft,” republished in 1867 as the first definitive history of the trials. This incurable unknowability—“the irresistible locked-room mystery of the matter,” Schiff writes—largely accounts, she argues, for Salem’s enduring appeal. “If we knew more about Salem, we might attend to it less, a conundrum that touches on something of what propelled the witch panic in the first place.” 

As she did with her 2010 biography Cleopatra, Schiff honors her subject’s gaping documentary absences by fleshing out the actual world in which the witch panic took root and thrived, showing the full range of factors that influenced its participants—young and old, rich and poor, male and female—with gratifying vividness. Puritan settlers were “ardent, anxious, unbashful, incurably logical” religious fanatics who “breathed, dreamed, disciplined, bartered, and hallucinated in biblical texts and imagery.” (The average churchgoer heard 15,000 hours of sermons in his lifetime.) As such, they were “not quite Americans, as homogeneous a culture as has ever existed on this continent.” Dressed in stiff cottons and scratchy wools in muted earth tones, they lived in “dim, smoky, firelit homes” that were “perched on the uncomfortable edge of an unpredictable wilderness,” howling with “the devilish savage, the swarthy terrorist.” The air was so silent—“the slap of a beaver’s tail against the water could be heard a half a mile off”—that everyday sounds were distorted into auditory illusions. Even their dark wasn’t ours: “The sky over New England was crow black, pitch-black, Bible black.” Resources were dismayingly scarce. During the winter of 1692, the Massachusetts Bay was awaiting a new charter, so it didn’t even have a governor.