Japanese Crucible Clarence Drewa Hour: Last Over 127,00 U.S. citizens were imprisoned during World War 2 just because of having japanese ancestry. Putting the Japanese Americans into internment camps shows how there was hatred and unjust behavior towards one another in America. This is also shown in Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible”. The Crucible and the Japanese internment camps also have something in common, they both were caused by hysteria and greed. In both of these incidents, the people that were being accused were average citizens. The witches that were being accused were normal people whose only fault was not being liked by a fellow citizen. The accused Japanese were average American citizens like you and me; their only fault was …show more content…
In both situations the people used it to their advantage to get ahead of others. In the The Crucible we see greed take place in many different forms. An example would when Abigail Williams accuses a woman of witchcraft because she loves that woman's husband. "I know how you clutch my back behind your house and sweated like a stallion whenever I come near you! Or did I dream of that? It's she put me out, you cannot pretend it were you. I saw your face when she put me out, and you loved me then and you do now!" (Miller 22) This refers to how Abigail was kicked from John Proctor's by his wife Goody Proctor. Another scenario in the book was when people were accusing other people of witchcraft just so they can get their land.Then when the Japanese were forced from their homes, lots of the white people stole their household items and other pieces of property. The also destroyed their homes and sold their businesses. "The excluded Japanese suffered enormous damages and losses, both material and intangible. The loss of farms, businesses, and homes, disruption of careers and professional lives and long-term loss of income, earnings and opportunity is in-calculable. In 1983 dollars, the loss was determined to fall between $810 million and $2 billion dollars. (Hal Sterns 1) This Quote came from a article I read and it basicly showed all the things thaat the white people did to the Japanese people’s stuff when the were in the …show more content…
They lied and manipulated the court into believing their stories. They did this for lots of reasons. One was because females were not allowed many rights let alone any power in their city. Through the witch trials and lies they gained power in Salem. Also, they were trying to win over lovers by accusing their wives and getting them hung. The accusers used the trials to settle situations such as the death of a loved one by blaming it on witchcraft. It was not quite like that in the Japanese Internment experience. The accuser now was the government not little girls. And there was a document that the government used to do this. This document gave the Secretary of the U.S. the power to exclude any people, citizen or alien, from certain areas in order to provide security for the U.S. Pretty much it gave the government the power to round up all the Japanese Americans and place them in Internment camps. It was not about money or land like The Crucible. It was done to protect the U.S. from Japanese
The main people in both The Crucible and The Red Scare also known as McCarthyism is used the witch hunts to gain power and look good in their community. For example, people stood up for themselves in both of these witch hunts. Arthur Miller who wrote the Crucible to stand up to Mccarthy about how ridiculous the communist witch hunt and was willing to stand up to the truth even though he knew he was going to get in trouble for telling the truth. Arthur Miller went to the House Committee on American Activities, “refuses to name suspected communists.” These people that stood up for themselves had punishments, “had their passports taken away, while others were jailed
Throughout history, there were many conflicts between people all around the Americans such as people being accused of things which they have not committed. For example there are many similarities to what happened in Arthur Miller’s, The Crucible, and the Japanese Americans of the 1940's. In The Crucible it’s mainly focused on the accusations and witch hunts. For the Japanese Americans it focused on how they get incarcerated into different camps around America.
Mexican Americans, Japanese Americans, all Undocumented Immigrants, the gay community and many more stereotypical groups of people are discriminated against whether it’s based on race or a lifestyle that they live in in this world filled with fear and hatred. Multiple groups of people were targeted in different decades of time, for example, chinese laborers in the 1910’s, mexican americans in the the 1930’s, communists in the 1950’s, the gay community in 1980’s and most recently, undocumented immigrants in the 2010’s. All of these moments of judgement and hatred to these groups, are used as allusions to plays that are made and to movies that are directed. One of the most famous plays, written in 1953, is The Crucible by Arthur MIller. This
“The internment of Japanese Americans in the United States was the forced relocation and incarceration during World War II of between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who lived on the Pacific coast in camps in the interior of the country.” (Crawford 1). After the attack, the government felt threatened by the Japanese. Therefore, they could not trust any, even the ones living in the United States. Franklin D. Roosevelt issued the relocation of Japanese Americans to internment camps or military camps where they were not allowed to leave.
The 1950s harbored one of the largest witch hunts in world history, the second Red Scare. This brutal political movement targeted Communists, Socialists, and members of subversive groups, physically and socially maiming those citizens. Led by Joseph McCarthy, innocent members of society were figuratively “burned at the stake” in public trials and accused them of Communism and espionage. McCarthy’s ruthless tactics sparked the development of “McCarthyism,” which today refers to any unfounded accusation of a person with immaterial evidence. The second Red Scare is comparable to Salem Village, Massachusetts where the original witch hunt began, based off of mass hysteria, just like the Red Scare.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Americans were fearful of further Japanese attacks on the West Coast and also of Japanese Americans. In response to this fear, President Roosevelt passed an executive order relocating all people of Japanese descent from the West Coast inland. Similar to the fear of the American people, the witch hunts in the novel The Crucible by Arthur Miller led people to believe that girls in the town were being bewitched. Mass hysteria caused multiple arrests for accusations and even death for the so called “witches”. The theme of fear in both the Crucible and the Japanese Internment Camps of WWII caused people to be easily persuaded with the use of pathos and logos.
As a French Proverb states, “greedy eaters dig their graves with their teeth”. People are consumed with wanting more and more rather than knowing what they need in life. The human race constantly carries on this pattern of greed. A theme of greed is shown in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
Power in our society nowadays is very misgiven and abused. When people have power they tend to use it for their own benefit and to manipulate people into believing them. In the play, The Crucible, Arthur Miller dramatizes the Salem witch trials of 1692 in order to show his audience how easy it was to be accused and hung for witchcraft. In the Crucible a group of young girls were caught dancing in the woods and in order to not receive a punishment they lied saying they got witched. The girls blamed many people of the town of being witches and caused conflict all over the village.
Society as a whole seeks to satisfy themselves. This may be at the expense of their peers or individuals they are associated with. Arthur Miller brilliantly displays this dark side of humanity’s side in his play The Crucible. This play is based on the Salem witch trials in the early 1690s. During the Salem witch trials over two hundred people were accused of witchcraft and twenty were executed.
Throughout the history of our country hatred has been common, as Immigrants enter our homeland they are looked down upon and thought of people who are “destroying” this nation. All these new people coming in are only seeking new opportunities but are discouraged by other because of their ancestry. Humanity’s unjust behaviors can be seen in two different aspects of America 's history, we first see it in the internment of the Japanese Americans during WWII and the period of the Salem Witch trials. Arthur Miller’s dramatized play, The Crucible can be correlated to the event of Pearl Harbor because of the similarities between the Japanese Americans and the characters in the play; they both demonstrate the lives of civilians being ruined, a mass hysteria caused by fear of their neighbors, and lack of a just court system. To being with, it was the year of 1692 when the “witch hunts” had officially began, fellow citizens were being accused of being involved in witchcraft.
Life of a Japanese American was harsh and scary because you never knew what the mad people would do. Japanese Americans shouldn’t have been punished because most of them were born and raised on the West Coast. They had to sell their homes, stores, and most of their assets because they could not be certain their homes and livelihoods would still be there on their return. It made no difference that many had never been to Japan because Japananese American veterans of WW1 were forced to leave. The fear was that if Japanese invaded the west coast of America, they would be loyal to Japan instead of the U.S.
Period4 The Crucible Essay Communism and Witchcraft have the same effect on humans, that effect is fear, when you hear fear you think of your worst nightmare or someone hiding in your closet, during the McCarthyism era and the salem witchcraft people had fear about whether their life is on the line or not. It all depended on one person in their community whether or not they choose to save their life. The Crucible by Arthur Miller is an allegory for the Red Scare in the McCarthy era because the girls feared Abigail just like everyone feared J.McCarthy, Elizabeth being accused is similar to McCarthy accusing the US Army, they are innocent just like Elizabeth.
Japanese internment camps made us question who was really an American and it relates to today’s issues. Internment camps were similar to concentration camps or prison and Japanese-Americans were put into them. Even though they were considered Americans, they were still treated unfairly by other Americans. So who is American?
Abstract Imagine not being able to walk outside at night or having to sell your possessions and abandon your home to spend years behind barbed wire—even though you’d done nothing wrong. For Japanese Americans during World War II, this scenario was reality. The freedom they once had is now gone, as they are put into concentration camps no longer in their home. Now having to line up for meals and to do laundry, thing you did before on a normal basis, while being hovered over. The internment of Japanese Americans in the U.S. was the act of forcing those of Japanese decent to relocation and incarcerating them during World War II.
As a result, all Japanese were discriminated in the U.S.A. as biased perceptions were already set in their minds. They were judging the Japanese as the whole, just because the attack of a small part of the