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"Miller Convicted in Contempt Case"

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June 1, 1957

Miller Convicted in Contempt Case
By JOSEPH A. LOFTUS
ASHINGTON, May 31 - Arthur Miller, the playwright, was found guilty today of contempt of Congress.
He had refused to answer two questions at a hearing before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Although he testified frankly about his own relationships with persons of Communist bent or membership, he said that his conscience had forbidden him to tell about others.

Both of the questions that he refused to answer dealt with other persons who had attended meetings with him.

Overruling the defense on what the court considered the main point in the case, Judge Charles F. McLaughlin said that both questions had been pertinent to the committee's inquiry. Therefore, he convicted Mr. Miller on both counts.

Judge McLaughlin tried Mr. Miller recently in United States District Court without a jury. He filed the opinion with the clerk of the court today.

Sentence will be pronounced later. The maximum sentence for contempt of Congress is a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. Judges seldom impose the maximum in these cases and no one has been imprisoned recently for refusing to talk about others when he has been frank about himself.

The 42-year-old playwright, whose wife is Marilyn Monroe, the motion picture actress, testified before the committee on June 21, 1956. He said that he had attended five or six meetings of Communist party writers.

Referring to a 1947 meeting, the committee asked him:

1. "Can you tell us who were there when you walked into the room?"

2. "Was Arnaud D'Usseau chairman of the meeting of the Communist party writers which took place in 1947 at which you were in attendance?"

The Government contended that both questions had been pertinent to the subject of the fraudulent procurement and misuse of American passports by persons in the service of the Communist conspiracy. This was the announced subject of the hearing at which Mr. Miller testified.

Judge McLaughlin ruled that the committee had met the requirement of having valid legislative purpose for its hearing. The Government had shown, he said, that American passports were being misused by persons connected with the Communist conspiracy.

"Since the Congress has power to legislate concerning passports," he said, "it is evident that Congress had the right to investigate the subject of passports."

The court said that Communist sympathizers had used passports unlawfully, that Miller had held a passport in 1947, that he had been denied one in 1954, and that he had had an application pending for one at the time of the Congressional hearing.

Mr. D'Usseau, said the opinion, had been a witness before the same committee in 1952 and had refused to answer all questions about Communist party membership or activity.

Judge McLaughlin ruled:

"In the circumstances, an inquiry directed to defendant as to the identity of the Communist party writers with whom he foregathered for discussions of the works of Communist writers would seem to be one logically calculated to produce information which could be of assistance to the committee in connection with its investigation of communistic passport activities in relation to the aforementioned matter of legislative concern."

Discussing Mr. Miller's motive for refusing to answer, the court said:

"However commendable may be regarded the motive of the defendant in refusing to disclose the identity or the official position of another with whom he was in association, lest said disclosure might bring trouble on him, that motive and that refusal have been removed from this court's consideration."

In support of this, the court cited an opinion of the Circuit Court of Appeals, District of Columbia, in a similar contempt case, Watkins v. United States. The Watkins case now is before the Supreme Court.

At his apartment, 444 East Fifty-seventh Street, Mr. Miller declined yesterday to comment on his conviction.

Mr. and Mrs. Miller left the apartment late yesterday for an undisclosed destination.

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June 1, 1957 Miller Convicted in Contempt CaseBy JOSEPH A. LOFTUS ASHINGTON, May 31 - Arthur Miller, the playwright, was found guilty today of contempt of Congress.He had refused to answer two questions at a hearing before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

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The 1692 Salem Witch Museum | History, Education, Self-Guided Tours

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The Salem Witch Museum is a museum in Salem, MA about the Witch Trials of 1692. The museum is based on the actual documents of the trials. Plan a visit to check out the scenes, and listen to the accurate narration from the history of the Salem Witch Hunt. Enjoy the guided tours in one of the most hi…

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An artist's answer to politics.

As I watched "The Crucible" taking shape as a movie over much of the past year, the sheer depth of time that it represents for me kept returning to mind. As those powerful actors blossomed on the screen, and the children and the horses, the crowds and the wagons, I thought again about how I came to cook all this up nearly fifty years ago, in an America almost nobody I know seems to remember clearly. In a way, there is a biting irony in this film's having been made by a Hollywood studio, something unimaginable in the fifties. But there they are-Daniel Day-Lewis (John Proctor) scything his sea-bordered field, Joan Allen (Elizabeth) lying pregnant in the frigid jail, Winona Ryder (Abigail) stealing her minister-uncle's money, majestic Paul Scofield (Judge Danforth) and his righteous empathy with the Devil-possessed children, and all of them looking as inevitable as rain.

I remember those years-they formed "The Crucible" 's skeleton-but I have lost the dead weight of the fear I had then. Fear doesn't travel well; just as it can warp judgment, its absence can diminish memory's truth. What terrifies one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next. I remember how in 1964, only twenty years after the war, Harold Clurman, the director of "Incident at Vichy," showed the cast a film of a Hitler speech, hoping to give them a sense of the Nazi period in which my play took place. They watched as Hitler, facing a vast stadium full of adoring people, went up on his toes in ecstasy, hands clasped under his chin, a sublimely self-gratified grin on his face, his body swivelling rather cutely, and they giggled at his overacting.

Likewise, films of Senator Joseph McCarthy are rather unsettling-if you remember the fear he once spread. Buzzing his truculent sidewalk brawler's snarl through the hairs in his nose, squinting through his cat's eyes and sneering like a villain, he comes across now as nearly comical, a self-aware performer keeping a straight face as he does his juicy threat-shtick.

McCarthy's power to stir fears of creeping Communism was not entirely based on illusion, of course; the paranoid, real or pretended, always secretes its pearl around a grain of fact. From being our wartime ally, the Soviet Union rapidly became an expanding empire. In 1949, Mao Zedong took power in China. Western Europe also seemed ready to become Red-especially Italy, where the Communist Party was the largest outside Russia, and was growing. Capitalism, in the opinion of many, myself included, had nothing more to say, its final poisoned bloom having been Italian and German Fascism. McCarthy-brash and ill-mannered but to many authentic and true-boiled it all down to what anyone could understand: we had "lost China" and would soon lose Europe as well, because the State Department-staffed, of course, under Democratic Presidents-was full of treasonous pro-Soviet intellectuals. It was as simple as that.

If our losing China seemed the equivalent of a flea's losing an elephant, it was still a phrase-and a conviction-that one did not dare to question; to do so was to risk drawing suspicion on oneself. Indeed, the State Department proceeded to hound and fire the officers who knew China, its language, and its opaque culture-a move that suggested the practitioners of sympathetic magic who wring the neck of a doll in order to make a distant enemy's head drop off. There was magic all around; the politics of alien conspiracy soon dominated political discourse and bid fair to wipe out any other issue. How could one deal with such enormities in a play?

"The Crucible" was an act of desperation. Much of my desperation branched out, I suppose, from a typical Depression-era trauma-the blow struck on the mind by the rise of European Fascism and the brutal anti-Semitism it had brought to power. But by 1950, when I began to think of writing about the hunt for Reds in America, I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals who, despite their discomfort with the inquisitors' violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists if they should protest too strongly.

In any play, however trivial, there has to be a still point of moral reference against which to gauge the action. In our lives, in the late nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties, no such point existed anymore. The left could not look straight at the Soviet Union's abrogations of human rights. The anti-Communist liberals could not acknowledge the violations of those rights by congressional committees. The far right, meanwhile, was licking up all the cream. The days of " J'accuse " were gone, for anyone needs to feel right to declare someone else wrong. Gradually, all the old political and moral reality had melted like a Dali watch. Nobody but a fanatic, it seemed, could really say all that he believed.

President Truman was among the first to have to deal with the dilemma, and his way of resolving it-of having to trim his sails before the howling gale on the right-turned out to be momentous. At first, he was outraged at the allegation of widespread Communist infiltration of the government and called the charge of "coddling Communists" a red herring dragged in by the Republicans to bring down the Democrats. But such was the gathering power of raw belief in the great Soviet plot that Truman soon felt it necessary to institute loyalty boards of his own.

The Red hunt, led by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and by McCarthy, was becoming the dominating fixation of the American psyche. It reached Hollywood when the studios, after first resisting, agreed to submit artists' names to the House Committee for "clearing" before employing them. This unleashed a veritable holy terror among actors, directors, and others, from Party members to those who had had the merest brush with a front organization.

The Soviet plot was the hub of a great wheel of causation; the plot justified the crushing of all nuance, all the shadings that a realistic judgment of reality requires. Even worse was the feeling that our sensitivity to this onslaught on our liberties was passing from us-indeed, from me. In "Timebends," my autobiography, I recalled the time I'd written a screenplay ("The Hook") about union corruption on the Brooklyn waterfront. Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, did something that would once have been considered unthinkable: he showed my script to the F.B.I. Cohn then asked me to take the gangsters in my script, who were threatening and murdering their opponents, and simply change them to Communists. When I declined to commit this idiocy (Joe Ryan, the head of the longshoremen's union, was soon to go to Sing Sing for racketeering), I got a wire from Cohn saying, "The minute we try to make the script pro-American you pull out." By then-it was 1951-I had come to accept this terribly serious insanity as routine, but there was an element of the marvellous in it which I longed to put on the stage.

In those years, our thought processes were becoming so magical, so paranoid, that to imagine writing a play about this environment was like trying to pick one's teeth with a ball of wool: I lacked the tools to illuminate miasma. Yet I kept being drawn back to it.

I had read about the witchcraft trials in college, but it was not until I read a book published in 1867-a two-volume, thousand-page study by Charles W. Upham, who was then the mayor of Salem-that I knew I had to write about the period. Upham had not only written a broad and thorough investigation of what was even then an almost lost chapter of Salem's past but opened up to me the details of personal relationships among many participants in the tragedy.

I visited Salem for the first time on a dismal spring day in 1952; it was a sidetracked town then, with abandoned factories and vacant stores. In the gloomy courthouse there I read the transcripts of the witchcraft trials of 1692, as taken down in a primitive shorthand by ministers who were spelling each other. But there was one entry in Upham in which the thousands of pieces I had come across were jogged into place. It was from a report written by the Reverend Samuel Parris, who was one of the chief instigators of the witch-hunt. "During the examination of Elizabeth Procter, Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam"-the two were "afflicted" teen-age accusers, and Abigail was Parris's niece-"both made offer to strike at said Procter; but when Abigail's hand came near, it opened, whereas it was made up into a fist before, and came down exceeding lightly as it drew near to said Procter, and at length, with open and extended fingers, touched Procter's hood very lightly. Immediately Abigail cried out her fingers, her fingers, her fingers burned. . . ."

In this remarkably observed gesture of a troubled young girl, I believed, a play became possible. Elizabeth Proctor had been the orphaned Abigail's mistress, and they had lived together in the same small house until Elizabeth fired the girl. By this time, I was sure, John Proctor had bedded Abigail, who had to be dismissed most likely to appease Elizabeth. There was bad blood between the two women now. That Abigail started, in effect, to condemn Elizabeth to death with her touch, then stopped her hand, then went through with it, was quite suddenly the human center of all this turmoil.

All this I understood. I had not approached the witchcraft out of nowhere, or from purely social and political considerations. My own marriage of twelve years was teetering and I knew more than I wished to know about where the blame lay. That John Proctor the sinner might overturn his paralyzing personal guilt and become the most forthright voice against the madness around him was a reassurance to me, and, I suppose, an inspiration: it demonstrated that a clear moral outcry could still spring even from an ambiguously unblemished soul. Moving crabwise across the profusion of evidence, I sensed that I had at last found something of myself in it, and a play began to accumulate around this man.

But as the dramatic form became visible, one problem remained unyielding: so many practices of the Salem trials were similar to those employed by the congressional committees that I could easily be accused of skewing history for a mere partisan purpose. Inevitably, it was no sooner known that my new play was about Salem than I had to confront the charge that such an analogy was specious-that there never were any witches but there certainly are Communists. In the seventeenth century, however, the existence of witches was never questioned by the loftiest minds in Europe and America; and even lawyers of the highest eminence, like Sir Edward Coke, a veritable hero of liberty for defending the common law against the king's arbitrary power, believed that witches had to be prosecuted mercilessly. Of course, there were no Communists in 1692, but it was literally worth your life to deny witches or their powers, given the exhortation in the Bible, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." There had to be witches in the world or the Bible lied. Indeed, the very structure of evil depended on Lucifer's plotting against God. (And the irony is that klatches of Luciferians exist all over the country today; there may even be more of them now than there are Communists.)

As with most humans, panic sleeps in one unlighted corner of my soul. When I walked at night along the empty, wet streets of Salem in the week that I spent there, I could easily work myself into imagining my terror before a gaggle of young girls flying down the road screaming that somebody's "familiar spirit" was chasing them. This anxiety-laden leap backward over nearly three centuries may have been helped along by a particular Upham footnote. At a certain point, the high court of the province made the fatal decision to admit, for the first time, the use of "spectral evidence" as proof of guilt. Spectral evidence, so aptly named, meant that if I swore that you had sent out your "familiar spirit" to choke, tickle, or poison me or my cattle, or to control my thoughts and actions, I could get you hanged unless you confessed to having had contact with the Devil. After all, only the Devil could lend such powers of invisible transport to confederates, in his everlasting plot to bring down Christianity.

Naturally, the best proof of the sincerity of your confession was your naming others whom you had seen in the Devil's company-an invitation to private vengeance, but made official by the seal of the theocratic state. It was as though the court had grown tired of thinking and had invited in the instincts: spectral evidence-that poisoned cloud of paranoid fantasy-made a kind of lunatic sense to them, as it did in plot-ridden 1952, when so often the question was not the acts of an accused but the thoughts and intentions in his alienated mind.

The breathtaking circularity of the process had a kind of poetic tightness. Not everybody was accused, after all, so there must be some reason why you were. By denying that there is any reason whatsoever for you to be accused, you are implying, by virtue of a surprisingly small logical leap, that mere chance picked you out, which in turn implies that the Devil might not really be at work in the village or, God forbid, even exist. Therefore, the investigation itself is either mistaken or a fraud. You would have to be a crypto-Luciferian to say that-not a great idea if you wanted to go back to your farm.

The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common experiences in the fifties: the old friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into born-again patriots; and so on. Apparently, certain processes are universal. When Gentiles in Hitler's Germany, for example, saw their Jewish neighbors being trucked off, or farmers in Soviet Ukraine saw the Kulaks vanishing before their eyes, the common reaction, even among those unsympathetic to Nazism or Communism, was quite naturally to turn away in fear of being identified with the condemned. As I learned from non-Jewish refugees, however, there was often a despairing pity mixed with "Well, they must have done something." Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable And so the evidence has to be internally denied.

I was also drawn into writing "The Crucible" by the chance it gave me to use a new language-that of seventeenth-century New England. That plain, craggy English was liberating in a strangely sensuous way, with its swings from an almost legalistic precision to a wonderful metaphoric richness. "The Lord doth terrible things amongst us, by lengthening the chain of the roaring lion in an extraordinary manner, so that the Devil is come down in great wrath," Deodat Lawson, one of the great witch-hunting preachers, said in a sermon. Lawson rallied his congregation for what was to be nothing less than a religious war against the Evil One-"Arm, arm, arm!"-and his concealed anti-Christian accomplices.

But it was not yet my language, and among other strategies to make it mine I enlisted the help of a former University of Michigan classmate, the Greek-American scholar and poet Kimon Friar. (He later translated Kazantzakis.) The problem was not to imitate the archaic speech but to try to create a new echo of it which would flow freely off American actors' tongues. As in the film, nearly fifty years later, the actors in the first production grabbed the language and ran with it as happily as if it were their customary speech.

"The Crucible" took me about a year to write. With its five sets and a cast of twenty-one, it never occurred to me that it would take a brave man to produce it on Broadway, especially given the prevailing climate, but Kermit Bloomgarden never faltered. Well before the play opened, a strange tension had begun to build. Only two years earlier, the "Death of a Salesman" touring company had played to a thin crowd in Peoria, Illinois, having been boycotted nearly to death by the American Legion and the Jaycees. Before that, the Catholic War Veterans had prevailed upon the Army not to allow its theatrical groups to perform, first, "All My Sons," and then any play of mine, in occupied Europe. The Dramatists Guild refused to protest attacks on a new play by Sean O'Casey, a self-declared Communist, which forced its producer to cancel his option. I knew of two suicides by actors depressed by upcoming investigation, and every day seemed to bring news of people exiling themselves to Europe: Charlie Chaplin, the director Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, the harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler, Donald Ogden Stewart, one of the most sought-after screenwriters in Hollywood, and Sam Wanamaker, who would lead the successful campaign to rebuild the Old Globe Theatre on the Thames.

On opening night, January 22, 1953, I knew that the atmosphere would be pretty hostile. The coldness of the crowd was not a surprise; Broadway audiences were not famous for loving history lessons, which is what they made of the play. It seems to me entirely appropriate that on the day the play opened, a newspaper headline read "ALL THIRTEEN REDS GUILTY"-a story about American Communists who faced prison for "conspiring to teach and advocate the duty and necessity of forcible overthrow of government." Meanwhile, the remoteness of the production was guaranteed by the director, Jed Harris, who insisted that this was a classic requiring the actors to face front, never each other. The critics were not swept away. "Arthur Miller is a problem playwright in both senses of the word," wrote Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune, who called the play "a step backward into mechanical parable." The Times was not much kinder, saying, "There is too much excitement and not enough emotion in 'The Crucible.' " But the play's future would turn out quite differently.

About a year later, a new production, one with younger, less accomplished actors, working in the Martinique Hotel ballroom, played with the fervor that the script and the times required, and "The Crucible" became a hit. The play stumbled into history, and today, I am told, it is one of the most heavily demanded trade-fiction paperbacks in this country; the Bantam and Penguin editions have sold more than six million copies. I don't think there has been a week in the past forty-odd years when it hasn't been on a stage somewhere in the world. Nor is the new screen version the first. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his Marxist phase, wrote a French film adaptation that blamed the tragedy on the rich landowners conspiring to persecute the poor. (In truth, most of those who were hanged in Salem were people of substance, and two or three were very large landowners.)

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, especially in Latin America, "The Crucible" starts getting produced wherever a political coup appears imminent, or a dictatorial regime has just been overthrown. From Argentina to Chile to Greece, Czechoslovakia, China, and a dozen other places, the play seems to present the same primeval structure of human sacrifice to the furies of fanaticism and paranoia that goes on repeating itself forever as though imbedded in the brain of social man.

I am not sure what "The Crucible" is telling people now, but I know that its paranoid center is still pumping out the same darkly attractive warning that it did in the fifties. For some, the play seems to be about the dilemma of relying on the testimony of small children accusing adults of sexual abuse, something I'd not have dreamed of forty years ago. For others, it may simply be a fascination with the outbreak of paranoia that suffuses the play-the blind panic that, in our age, often seems to sit at the dim edges of consciousness. Certainly its political implications are the central issue for many people; the Salem interrogations turn out to be eerily exact models of those yet to come in Stalin's Russia, Pinochet's Chile, Mao's China, and other regimes. (Nien Cheng, the author of "Life and Death in Shanghai," has told me that she could hardly believe that a non-Chinese-someone who had not experienced the Cultural Revolution-had written the play.) But below its concerns with justice the play evokes a lethal brew of illicit sexuality, fear of the supernatural, and political manipulation, a combination not unfamiliar these days. The film, by reaching the broad American audience as no play ever can, may well unearth still other connections to those buried public terrors that Salem first announced on this continent.

One thing more-something wonderful in the old sense of that word. I recall the weeks I spent reading testimony by the tome, commentaries, broadsides, confessions, and accusations. And always the crucial damning event was the signing of one's name in "the Devil's book." This Faustian agreement to hand over one's soul to the dreaded Lord of Darkness was the ultimate insult to God. But what were these new inductees supposed to have done once they'd signed on? Nobody seems even to have thought to ask. But, of course, actions are as irrelevant during cultural and religious wars as they are in nightmares. The thing at issue is buried intentions-the secret allegiances of the alienated heart, always the main threat to the theocratic mind, as well as its immemorial quarry. ♦

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From 1996: Arthur Miller shares the story behind his play about the Salem witch trials.

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Witch hunts: A global problem in the 21st century

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Witch hunts: A global problem in the 21st century

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Akua Denteh was beaten to death in Ghana's East Gonja District last month - after being accused of being a witch. The murder of the 90-year-old has once more highlighted the deep-seated prejudices against women accused of practicing witchcraft in Ghana, many of whom are elderly.

An arrest was made in early August, but the issue continues to draw attention after authorities were accused of dragging their heels in the case. Human rights and gender activists now demand to see change in culture in a country where supernatural beliefs play a big role.

But the case of Akua Denteh is far from an isolated instance in Ghana, or indeed the world at large. In many countries of the world, women are still accused of practicing witchcraft each year. They are persecuted and even killed in organized witch hunts - especially in Africa but also in Southeast Asia and Latin America.
Read more: Ghana: witchcraft accusations put lives at risk

Witch hunts: a contemporary issue
Many women in Ghana are pushed to live in so-called witch camps because they are rejected by society

Those accused of witchcraft have now found a perhaps unlikely charity ally in their fight for justice: the Catholic missionary society missio, which is part of the global Pontifical Mission Societies under the jurisdiction of the Pope, has declared August 10 as World Day against Witch Hunts, saying that in at least 36 nations around the world, people continue to be persecuted as witches.

While the Catholic Church encouraged witch hunts in Europe from the 15th to the 18th century, it is now trying to shed light into this dark practice. Part of this might be a sense of historical obligation - but the real driving force is the number of victims that witch hunts still cost today.

Historian Wolfgang Behringer, who works as a professor specializing in the early modern age at Saarland University, firmly believes in putting the numbers in perspective. He told DW that during these three centuries, between 50,000 and 60,000 people are assumed to have been killed for so-called crimes of witchcraft - a tally that is close to being twice the population of some major German cities at the time.

But he says that in the 20th century alone, more people accused of witchcraft were brutally murdered than during the three centuries when witch hunts were practiced in Europe: "Between 1960 and 2000, about 40,000 people alleged of practicing witchcraft were murdered in Tanzania alone. While there are no laws against witchcraft as such in Tanzanian law, village tribunals often decide that certain individuals should be killed," Behringer told DW.

The historian insists that due to the collective decision-making behind these tribunals, such murders are far from being arbitrary and isolated cases: "I've therefore concluded that witch hunts are not a historic problem but a burning issue that still exists in the present."

A pan-African problem?
A picture of so-called witch doctors in Sierra Leone taken roughly around the year 1900

In Tanzania, the victims of these witch hunts are often people with albinism; some people believe that the body parts of these individuals can be used to extract potions against all sorts of ailments. Similar practices are known to take place in Zambia and elsewhere on the continent.

Meanwhile in Ghana, where nonagenarian Akua Denteh was bludgeoned to death last month, certain communities blamed the birth of children with disabilities on practices of witchcraft.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it is usually the younger generations who are associated witchcraft. So-called "children of witchcraft" are usually rejected by their families and left to fend for themselves. However, their so-called crimes often have little to do with sorcery at all:
'Children of witchcraft' in the DRC
"We have learned of numerous cases of children suffering rape and then no longer being accepted by their families. Or they are born as illegitimate children out of wedlock, and are forced to live with a parent who no longer accepts them," says Thérèse Mema Mapenzi, who works as a mission project partner in the eastern DRC city of Bukayu.

Mapenzi's facility was initially intended to be a women's shelter to harbor women who suffered rape at the hands of the militia in the eastern parts of the country, where rape is used as a weapon of war as part of the civil conflict there. But over the years, more and more children started seeking her help after they were rejected as "children of witchcraft."

With assistance from the Catholic missionary society missio, Mapenzi is now also supporting these underage individuals in coping with their many traumas while trying to find orphanages and schools for them.

"When these children come here, they have often been beaten to a pulp, have been branded as witches or have suffered other injuries. It is painful to just even look at them. We are always shocked to see these children devoid of any protection. How can this be?" Mapenzi wonders.

Seeking dialogue to end witch hunts
Thérèse Mema Mapenzi is trying to help women and girls accused of being "children of witchcraft"

But there is a whole social infrastructure fueling this hatred against these young people in the DRC: Many charismatic churches blame diseases such as HIV/AIDS or female infertility on witchcraft, with illegitimate children serving as scapegoats for problems that cannot be easily solved in one of the poorest countries on earth. Other reasons cited include sudden deaths, crop failures, greed, jealousy and more.

Thérèse Mema Mapenzi says that trying to help those on the receiving end of this ire is a difficult task, especially in the absence of legal protection: "In Congolese law, witchcraft is not recognized as a violation of the law because there is no evidence you can produce. Unfortunately, the people have therefore developed their own legal practices to seek retribution and punish those whom call them witches."

In addition to helping those escaping persecution, Mapenzi also seeks dialogue with communities to stop prejudice against those accused of witchcraft and sorcery. She wants to bring estranged families torn apart by witch hunts back together. Acting as a mediator, she talks to people, and from time to time succeeds in reuniting relatives with women and children who had been ostracized and shamed. Mapenzi says that such efforts - when they succeed - take an average of two to three years from beginning to finish.

But even with a residual risk of the victims being suspected of witchcraft again, she says her endeavors are worth the risk. She says that the fact that August 10 has been recognized as the World Day against Witch Hunts sends a signal that her work is important - and needed.

Hunting the hunters - a dangerous undertaking

For Thérèse Mema Mapenzi, the World Day against Witch Hunts marks another milestone in her uphill battle in the DRC. Jörg Nowak, spokesman for missio, agrees and hopes that there will now be growing awareness about this issue around the globe.

As part of his work, Nowak has visited several missio project partners fighting to help bring an end to witch hunts in recent years. But he wasn't aware about the magnitude of the problem himself until 2017.

The first case he dealt with was the killing of women accused of being witches in Papua New Guinea in the 2010s - which eventually resulted in his publishing a paper on the crisis situation in the country and becoming missio's dedicated expert on witch hunts.

But much of Nowak's extensive research in Papua New Guinea remains largely under wraps for the time being, at least in the country itself: the evidence he accrued against some of the perpetrators there could risk the lives of missio partners working for him.
Maxwell Suuk and Isaac Kaledzi contributed to this article.
Not much has changed for centuries, apart from the localities involved when it comes to the occult belief in witchcraft, says Nowak while stressing: "There is no such thing as witchcraft. But there are accusations and stigmatization designed to demonize people; indeed designed to discredit them in order for others to gain selfish advantages."

Africa's exiled 'witches'

Hopeful

The women in the "witch villages" know that they cannot return to their families. Yet, many of them still hope for a small miracle. Ann-Christine Woehrl's photos gave them a new sense of confidence and pride. For some of the women, it was the first time they had seen an image of themselves. A book showing a selection of Woehrl's photos will soon be published.

Author: Silke Bartlick / kbm

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Witch hunts: A global problem in the 21st century | DW | 10.08.2020

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Witch hunts are far from being a thing of the past - even in the 21st century. In many countries, this is still a sad reality for many women today. That is why August 10 has been declared a World Day against Witch Hunts.

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1. Swimming Test

As part of the infamous "swimming test," accused witches were dragged to the nearest body of water, stripped to their undergarments, bound and then tossed in to to see if they would sink or float. Since witches were believed to have spurned the sacrament of baptism, it was thought that the water would reject their body and prevent them from submerging. According to this logic, an innocent person would sink like a stone, but a witch would simply bob on the surface. The victim typically had a rope tied around their waist so they could be pulled from the water if they sank, but it wasn't unusual for accidental drowning deaths to occur.

Witch swimming derived from the "trial by water," an ancient practice where suspected criminals and sorcerers were thrown into rushing rivers to allow a higher power to decide their fate. This custom was banned in many European counties in the Middle Ages, only to reemerge in the 17th century as a witch experiment, and it persisted in some locales well into the 18th century. For example, in 1710, the swimming test was used as evidence against a Hungarian woman named Dorko Boda, who was later beaten and burned at the stake as a witch.

2. Prayer Test

Medieval wisdom held that witches were incapable of speaking scripture aloud, so accused sorcerers were made to recite selections from the Bible-usually the Lord's Prayer-without making mistakes or omissions. While it may have simply been a sign that the suspected witch was illiterate or nervous, any errors were viewed as proof that the speaker was in league with the devil. This twisted test of public speaking ability was commonly used as hard evidence in witch trials. In 1712, it was applied in the case Jane Wenham, an accused witch who supposedly struggled to speak the words "forgive us our trespasses" and "lead us not into temptation" during her interrogation. Still, even a successful prayer test didn't guarantee an acquittal. During the Salem Witch Trials, the accused sorcerer George Burroughs flawlessly recited the prayer from the gallows just before his execution. The performance was dismissed as a devil's trick, and the hanging proceeded as planned.

3. Touch Test

The touch test worked on the idea that victims of sorcery would have a special reaction to physical contact with their evildoer. In cases where a possessed person fell into spells or fits, the suspected witch would be brought into the room and asked to a lay a hand on them. A non-reaction signaled innocence, but if the victim came out of their fit, it was seen as proof that the suspect had placed them under a spell.

Touch tests played a famous part in the 1662 trial of Rose Cullender and Amy Denny, two elderly English women charged with bewitching a pair of young girls. The children had been suffering from fits that left their fists clenched so tightly that even a strong man could not pry their fingers apart, but early tests showed they easily opened whenever Cullender or Denny touched them. To ensure the reaction was genuine, judges had the children blindfolded and touched by other members of the court. The girls unclenched their fists anyway, which suggested they were faking, but even this was not enough to prove the women's innocence. Cullender and Denny were both later hanged as witches.

4. Witch Cakes

A bizarre form of counter-magic, the witch cake was a supernatural dessert used to identify suspected evildoers. In cases of mysterious illness or possession, witch-hunters would take a sample of the victim's urine, mix it with rye-meal and ashes and bake it into a cake. This stomach-turning concoction was then fed to a dog-the "familiars," or animal helpers, of witches-in the hope that the beast would fall under its spell and reveal the name of the guilty sorcerer. During the hysteria that preceded the Salem Witch Trials, the slave Tituba famously helped prepare a witch cake to identify the person responsible for bewitching young Betty Parris and others. The brew failed to work, and Tituba's supposed knowledge of spells and folk remedies was later used as evidence against her when she was accused of being a witch.

5. Witch's Marks

Witch-hunters often had their suspects stripped and publically examined for signs of an unsightly blemish that witches were said to receive upon making their pact with Satan. This "Devil's Mark" could supposedly change shape and color, and was believed to be numb and insensitive to pain. Prosecutors might also search for the "witches' teat," an extra nipple allegedly used to suckle the witch's helper animals. In both cases, it was easy for even the most minor physical imperfections to be labeled as the work of the devil himself. Moles, scars, birthmarks, sores, supernumerary nipples and tattoos could all qualify, so examiners rarely came up empty-handed. In the midst of witch hunts, desperate villagers would sometimes even burn or cut off any offending marks on their bodies, only to have their wounds labeled as proof of a covenant with

6. Pricking and Scratching Tests

If witch-hunters struggled to find obvious evidence of "witch's marks" on a suspect's body, they might resort to the ghastly practice of "pricking" as a means of sussing it out. Witch-hunting books and instructional pamphlets noted that the marks were insensitive to pain and couldn't bleed, so examiners used specially designed needles to repeatedly stab and prick at the accused person's flesh until they discovered a spot that produced the desired results. In England and Scotland, the torture was eventually performed by well-paid professional "prickers," many of whom were actually con men who used dulled needlepoints to identify fake witch's marks.

Along with pricking, the unfortunate suspect might also be subjected to "scratching" by their supposed victims. This test was based on the notion that possessed people found relief by scratching the person responsible with their fingernails until they drew blood. If their symptoms improved after clawing at the accused's skin, it was seen as partial evidence of guilt.

7. Incantations

Also known as "charging," this test involved forcing the accused witch to verbally order the devil to let the possessed victim come out of their fit or trance. Other people would also utter the words to act as a "control," and judges would then gauge whether the statements had any effect on the victim's condition. Charges were famously used in the 16th century witch trial of Alice Samuel and her husband and daughter, who were accused of bewitching five girls from the wealthy Throckmorton family. During the proceedings, judges forced the Samuels to demand that the devil release the girls from their spell by stating, "As I am a witch...so I charge the devil to let Mistress Throckmorton come out of her fit at this present." When the possessed girls immediately recovered, the Samuels were found guilty and hanged as witches.

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As part of the infamous "swimming test," accused witches were dragged to the nearest body of water, stripped to their undergarments, bound and then tossed in to to see if they would sink or float. Since witches were believed to have spurned the sacrament of baptism, it was thought that the water would reject their body and prevent them from submerging.

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Witchcraft: Crash Course European History #10

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Check your email for a NYT invite! You now have free access until September!

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What Happened to the Girls in Le Roy (Published 2012)

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When 18 students started twitching, parents suspected the environment. The answer turned out to be much more complex.

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Europe/American colonies: 1400-1800

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Ugly History: Witch Hunts - Brian A. Pavlac

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What is McCarthyism? And how did it happen? - Ellen Schrecker

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Playwright Arthur Miller on communism, 1971: CBC Archives | CBC

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History and Tour of Salem, MA with Steve Thomas 1995

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Arthur Miller Biography | American Masters | PBS

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All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and The Last Yankee are among the playwright’s probing dramas that reveal the unrest of the American psyche.

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August 8, 1958

Miller is Cleared of House Contempt
By ANTHONY LEWIS
thur Miller's conviction of contempt of Congress was reversed today by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
The full nine-man court held unanimously that the House Committee on Un-American activities had not sufficiently warned the playwright of the risk of contempt if he refused to answer its questions. The court ordered him acquitted.

The opinion cited a 1955 Supreme Court ruling that a contempt conviction could not stand if the witness had not been clearly warned of the possible penalty for not answering a Congressional committee's questions.

The court did not mention that, a few days after the 1956 hearing, the House committee voted to give Mr. Miller ten more days to answer questions, with the implication that he would be cited for contempt if he did not. Mr. Miller, who is 42 years old, is regarded as one of the two or three most important living American playwrights. Among his plays are "All My Sons," The Crucible," "A View From the Bridge" and "Death of a Salesman," for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. His wife is Marilyn Monroe, the film actress.

The House Committee questioned Mr. Miller in the course of hearings about the use of passports by alleged communists.

The playwright testified freely about himself. He said he had never been a member of the Communist party but had had associations with many persons of Communist bent and had signed many communist-backed petitions.

His difficulties with the committee arose when he was asked to name other persons present at a meeting of "Communist writers" in 1947.

Mr. Miller refused to testify about other persons. He said he could not in good conscience do so, and he also argued that the questions were not pertinent to the committee's passport inquiry.

The House voted, 373 to 9, to cite him for contempt. He was convicted, fined $500 and given a thirty-day suspended jail sentence.

Because of the importance of the case and its expected controversial nature, all nine judges of the Court of Appeals sat in instead of the usual three. It was something of a surprise, therefore, when the decision came down today in a brief and cryptic unsigned opinion.

The opinion noted that Mr. Miller had asked the House committee chairman, Representative Francis E. Walter, Democrat of Pennsylvania, "not to press the direction to answer the question and requested him to defer it until a later time. The chairman agreed."

The hearing ended shortly afterward, the court said, "without any unequivocally renewed direction or command to answer the 'suspended' question. On the whole record it seems clear that appellant had a right to leave the hearing thinking that the direction to answer was still suspended, if not abandoned."

Mr. Miller issued a statement through his lawyer here, Joseph L. Rauh Jr., that the decision made "the long struggle of the past few years fully worth while."

"I can only hope," the statement said, that the decision "will make some small contribution toward eliminating the excesses of Congressional committees and particularly toward stopping the inhuman process of making witnesses inform on long past friends and acquaintances."

William Hitz argued the case for the Government.

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August 8, 1958 Miller is Cleared of House ContemptBy ANTHONY LEWIS thur Miller's conviction of contempt of Congress was reversed today by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.The full nine-man court held unanimously that the House Committee on Un-American activities had not sufficiently warned the playwright of the risk of contempt if he refused to answer its questions.