Malavika Vivek

10/26/15
US History 10-2
Epoch Essay Team G
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe
it. -Joseph Goebbels. The infamous Salem witch trials of 1692, after a group of young girls in
Salem Village, MA, called the afflicted exhibited strange behaviors similar to be possessed.
When it came to the attention of the adults of the community they intensely questioned the
afflicted as they suspected witchcraft. The adults who were already besieged with the
changing times and the pressure newer generations thoughts and customs were putting on their
long held Puritan beliefs were convinced that the neighbors who were the perpetrators of the
New age thoughts were behind the witchcraft of the afflicted too. As a wave of hysteria was
spread throughout colonial Massachusetts, a special court convened in Salem to hear the cases;
this resulted in 19 people going to the gallows, while some 150 more men, women and children
were accused over the next several months. By the end of 1692, the hysteria had begun to abate
and public opinion turned against the trials. Though the guilty verdicts against accused witches
were later annulled and their families were granted indemnities, bitterness lingered in the
community, and the painful legacy of the Salem witch trials would endure for centuries.
The root cause for the Salem witch trials was due to a minor case of a clash of
civilizations. The adult citizens of Salem village were believers in an outdated radical form of
Puritanism. To add to it these followers felt that they were being left out of the economic upturn
that was sweeping the area due to the increased Atlantic trade. They felt their rustic puritan
culture was being eroded by this influx of new ideas, beliefs all fueled by a vulgar mix of riches.
The puritans felt that everything that they stood for was being destroyed and it was a now or
never scenario to save their beliefs. In the modern context it is the same effect the idea of same
sex marriage propagated by the Californians has on the Bible belt natives. Once you feel left out
of the gravy train and also see the people who have different beliefs getting on it, it did not take
too much for that sweetest of sins the green headed one to lash out in moral outrage. There is no
better approval than the divine one to get everybody behind an already popular belief.
The adult Puritans were afraid of the rapid socio economic changes sweeping through
their area. These changes seemed to overturn their long held beliefs and customs. They seemed
to become strangers in their own land. To make matters worse the majority of the people of
Salem village were rustic and poor. This dangerous intersection of social change and economic

backwardness fueled the primal fears of survival and brought together a sense of being besieged
as a tribe. The result, it is said, was a stagnant, class-ridden, divided society, ill-equipped
materially and morally to meet the challenges of its times, specifically the ideological challenge
of New age thought and the economic waves sweeping through.
In this atmosphere of presumptive guilt with a need to reach a pre-determined conclusion
to buttress dearly held divine views. Thus the alleged witches stripped to their bare essentials,
were applied an age old technique that was a guilt-presumptive, confrontational, psychologically
manipulative procedure whose purpose is to extract a pre-determined confession. In these
circumstances to achieve the confession the alleged witches were coerced to admit that they were
witches or alternately threatened with the gallows if they did not. The witches that confessed
were not hanged and allowed to live with just minor punitive action.
The question is not the reality of witches but the power of authority to define the nature
of the real, and the desire, on the part of individuals and the state, to identify those whose
purging will relieve a sense of anxiety and guilt. What lay behind the procedures of both witch
trial and political hearing was a familiar American need to assert a recoverable innocence even if
the only guarantee of such innocence lay in the displacement of guilt onto others. To sustain the
integrity of their own names, the accused were invited to offer the names of others, even though
to do so would be to make them complicit in procedures they despised and hence to damage their
sense of themselves. The test of life is the point of trading ones integrity for ones life. This is where
free will wreaks havoc on weak minds. Every witness was asked to pay the price, which is to offer the
names of others to buy ones life. Most took it but some didnt. The brave few when asked to betray
others chose to protect their sense of self by not using the name of another person and bring trouble on
them.

In conclusion the Salem witch trials have been deeply embedded into the American
conservative psyche as method to deal with change. When dealing with rationalism and logic
stoop to emotional blackmail, hark to the nostalgia of a golden past, the wonder years though the
reality of said wonder years smells of rancor and is anything wondrous. The impact of the trials
is still apparent in the playbook of the American conservative.
"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people
are human." - Aldous Huxley