Arthur Miller wrote the Crucible during a time of great fear as the cold war had been kicked off several years earlier. It was a time of panic and the people of the country were willing to extend that fear towards anything that seemed wrong even without any evidence so long as a person of great authority backed it. The McCarthyism period resembled the Salem Witch Trials and allowed Miller to mirror his writing in a way that showed the people their errors.
McCarthyism began because a person of authority saw a weakness in the striving masses and took advantage. Miller saw this as the problem it was and set out to inform the masses through the use of his book, The Crucible. He knew that slandering the