The Red Scare

Fear is a powerful motivator. Personal fears can lead individuals to do some unsavory things. Look at Bernie Madoff, the headgefund manager who misled people out of billions of dollars by running a Ponzi scheme. Sure, greed was the overlying motivation for this tragic criminal series of acts, which left thousands of individuals, not to mention institutions like Brandeis University, teetering on the brink of financial ruin. Madoff violated the trust of his clients in the worst possible way, doing so in a heartless, cowardly manner with no remorse or regard for the devastation that his scheme would cause. He willfully ruined lives, stuffing away billions of dollars in the process. Investigators still have very little idea where that money has been hidden. What Madoff did was arguably more destructive than murder; he should be sentenced to death.

But what would cause a person to lie and cheat innocent people out of their life savings to line his own pockets? I believe it was fear: a misguided and perverse fear by a sick man believing that he could never amass enough wealth to eliminate the fear that he might not have enough. He feared being poor in the way that an individual with severe anorexia fears being obese, even when they are teetering on the brink of starvation. He squirreled away money like an opiate addict who stores a cache of pills in the medicine cabinet that could last a non-addict an entire lifetime. He let his fear rule his judgment like a paranoid dictator who executes his entire staff based on the belief that his closest advisors are conspiring to poison his food in order to gain power. To say cite greed as the primary motivation for Madoff's actions is to grossly underestimate the power of fear as a prime motivator for human behavior. There have been many dispicable acts committed by human beings throughout history: human sacrifices by the Mayas and the Aztecs, the mass genocide of Native Americans by European settlers, the extermination of 11 million people during the Holocaust, the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge, the massacres in Rwanda, the genocide in Darfur, the institution of slavery...and the list goes on. Examine each of these and I have no doubt that you would find that fear is the prime motivation behind all of these dispicable acts.

The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and the Red Scare of the 1950's are both examples of the evil that can emerge from fear gone rampant. The Witch Trials, which led to the execution of twenty innocent individuals, was a mockery of institutional justice; the sanctity of the judicial process cloaked the ugliest of human motivations like a cheap Halloween costume. The judges who presided over the Trials brought their own fears and personal feelings into the courtroom. Personal vendettas caused neighbors to baselessly accuse other neighbors of witchcraft. And when all was said and done, the judges had painted themselves into a corner: even after it became clear that the entire process was a mockery of justice, they were unwilling to stop the executions for fear that their historical legacies would be tainted if they admitted mistakenly condemning innocent people to death.

The Red Scare took place at the early height of the Cold War when the United States and the Soviet Union each feared nuclear annihilation by the other. There were rumors of covert communist spy rings convening in secret with members who masqueraded by day as regular Americans. A United States Senator, Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin, led a public campaign to root out the secret communist spies that were assumed to be living in America. People were interviewed to testify about suspicious, "un-American" behaviors and attitudes exhibited by their friends, neighbors, family members and colleagues. The House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) search for anti-American sentiment amongst the arts and entertainment community, leading to a "Black List" of writers, actors and producers whose names were connected with Communism. A friend of Miller's was forced to testify before the HUAC and subsequently accuse several other people from the theater community of being communists. This modern-day witch hunt was the inspiration for Miller's writing The Crucible. Arthur Miller was later considered to be a person of interest by the HUAC, which ultimately revoked Miller's passport and prevented him from travelling to London to see the opening of The Crucible.