I recently became what locals here call a “leaf peeper”- a fall tourist who travels to the East Coast to scout out its stunning autumn foliage. During my wanderings, I visited historic Salem, MA. There I had an unexpected reaction during what was originally nothing but a light-hearted exploration of the East Coast.
Salem is a charming historic coastal city with a rich maritime past that generated many of America’s first millionaires. Notable people from Salem include American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (of “The Scarlet Letter” fame), or navigator Nathaniel Bowditch (whose brilliant 1802 maritime protocols are still in use). But Salem’s primary identity comes from the historical echoes of its famous witch trials. Nicknamed “Witch City,” Salem has developed a cheerful witch-related persona. Wiccan merchandise and attractions dominate the usual tourist souvenirs. The town even has a statue of TV witch Samantha from “Bewitched” overseeing its tourist throngs.
But in the Puritan society of 1692 Salem, witchcraft was an extremely serious matter, punishable by death. Back then, Salem’s witchcraft hysteria arose when several Salem-area young girls fell ill. They accused local women of casting spells on them. The accusations escalated into a wave of arrests and trials. 150 men and women were charged with practicing witchcraft. 19 people were hanged, and one man was crushed to death while being tortured to confess.
By 1693, the hysteria lost momentum, when the wife of Governor William Phips was also accused of witchcraft. This caused the governor to order an end to the trials. He established a new court that did not allow so-called spectral evidence. (Spectral evidence was the testimony of dreams or visions by alleged victims against the accused. It was admitted in court as legal evidence and proof that the accused were indeed witches).
“Not all of Salem’s witchiness is silly…the play ‘Cry Innocent: the People Vs. Bridget Bishop’ in which the audience may question the accused, is educational and beautifully performed.” (The NY Times)
Salem’s History Alive, Inc. offered me and others a reenactment where we interactively took part in the witchcraft trial of Bridget Bishop. The play took us back in time, with trial participants all dressed in period clothing. We heard testimonies, asked questions, and were the jury that voted on Bridget Bishop’s innocence or guilt. The Puritan’s use of dreams and visions as legal evidence was not seen as credible with us modern “jurists.” Of course we thought our Bridget was innocent.
Unfortunately the historical truth is that 60 year old Bridget Bishop was the first person in the witch trials to be executed. And she was the last of the innocent witchcraft victims to be exonerated, not until Massachusetts passed legislation in 2001. (Talk about the wheels of justice grinding slowly…!)
“I am Innocent” (One victim’s protest inscribed at the Memorial)
When I walked the dreary path of The Witch Trials Memorial on Liberty Street, it raised many questions. Here were innocent victims of a flawed legal system with “confessions” derived under torture. How could such horror stem from a society based on democratic order and faith?
Because the Puritan society did have great crowning achievements. Puritans established the first American colonies. They instituted representative democracies in all of them. They greatly valued education. For example, education was mandatory for children, and Puritan John Harvard founded the Ivy League university of (you guessed it)- Harvard. New England’s prosperous shipbuilding economy was built on Puritan business skills and hard work. Yet an educated orderly Puritan society still wrongly condemned these people as witches. And the deadly hysteria of 1692 is not a one-time anomaly. It has continued to manifest in many ways throughout history.
“The Red hunt, led by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and by McCarthy, was becoming the dominating fixation of the American psyche…”
(Arther Miller) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/10/21/why-i-wrote-the-crucible
Arthur Miller wrote his 1953 allegorical play “The Crucible” about the Salem witch trials, triggered by his observations of a threatening Senator Joseph McCarthy and his congressional hearings of 1950-1954. In the “Red hunt” for communist infiltrators in the government, Miller saw a repeat of the same human sacrifice to the furies of fanaticism and paranoia as in the witch trials. Miller later noted that the Salem interrogations could be seen modeled in Stalin’s Russia, Pinochet’s Chile, Mao’s China, and more.
So my upbeat leaf-peeping jaunt took a dark cautionary turn in Salem. The city’s history showcases how intolerance, fear, political turmoil, and belief in a vast [witchcraft] conspiracy led to horrific injustices. Sadly, those same issues present in Salem then still persist in America and other places today.
My Salem visit left me with a dark revelation. If we do not learn from Salem’s history, we are doomed to repeat it in some sad fashion.