“Witchcraft and Stagecraft,” New York Post, February 1, 1953.

Unhappily, the despotic threat that confronts modern society is real; the people who loved freedom in Czechoslovakia, China and other places now ruled by tyranny can testify to that…There are spies and saboteurs; there are accused agents who are guilty; the simple-minded in our time have too often been those who choose to believe that the gauleiters and the commissars are imaginary characters.

Robert Warshow, “The Liberal Conscience in The Crucible,”

Commentary XV (March 1953).

Surely there were some in the audience to notice uneasily that these witch trials, with their quality of ritual and their insistent need for ‘confessions,’ were much more like the trial that had just ended in Prague than like any trial that has lately taken place in the United States.

Gerald Weales, ed., The Crucible: Text and Criticism (New York: Penguin, 1996), 198, 217.