Salem Witch Trials Research Paper

“Men are not afraid of things, but of how they view them” - Epictetus. From the proscriptions of Ancient Rome to the September 1st terrorist attacks, fear was changed the course of history. People used fear as an excuse to outcast people, until others stood up and fought the fear during the Salem Witch Trials, the Red Scare and the Stonewall riots.
The Salem Witch Trials are characterized by people taking advantage of fear to get their own personal agendas across. The Salem Witch Trials began with the scapegoating of Tituba, a slave from Barbados (making her easy to blame). “By this time, suspicion had already begun to focus on Tituba, who had been known to tell the girls tales of omens, voodoo, and witchcraft from her native folklore” ( Linder). …show more content…
Despite a lack of any proof of subversion, more than 2,000 government employees lost their jobs as a result of McCarthy’s investigations ("Joseph " ). “Ostensibly seeking to protect democracy by eliminating communism from American life, anticommunist crusaders ironically undermined democracy by suppressing the expression of dissent” (Storrs). “The program’s oft-noted flaws included the ambiguous definition of “derogatory” information and the anonymity of informants who provided it, the reliance on an arbitrary and changing list of subversive organizations, and a double-jeopardy problem for employees for whom a move from one government job to another triggered reinvestigation on the same grounds” (Storrs). High level officials who were investigated, the majority of whom were not communists, but left-leaning New Dealers trying to reduce social inequalities, struggled to fulfill their goals, since the idea of disloyalty was included to hamper their ability to do their job (Storrs). “It was not unusual for a career civil servant to be investigated under the Hatch Act during World War II and then again after each executive order” (Storrs). People stopped joining voluntary organizations out of fear that the organization join the ranks of the Attorney General's list (Storrs). Labor unions ousted Communists, but right-wing people still associated labor unions with Communism

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Research Paper On The Salem Witch Trials