Parallels+to+the+Salem+Witch+trial

McCarthy vs. Salem Witch Trial By Kyle

There are eerie similarities between the Salem witch trials and the McCarthy hearings. To compare and contrast the two we must understand why they happened, what happened, where they happened. If we know this information we can prevent this disgusting behavior of man from happening again.

=Salem Witch Trial.=

To start, the Salem witch trials took place in 1692 in the newly formed town of Salem Massachusetts. Two teenagers accused a West Indian and two white women of witch craft. A few months later, the same two girls accused numerous others of being witches. The situation escalated and it became more common for people to be accused. Salem was not the only town with alleged witchcraft, but it had the biggest accusation of sorcery.

The people charged with being witches would be put on trial. The person who accused them would say why they thought he or she was a witch and in the end the judge had the final ruling. The defendant had these three options. The first was to deny it; if they chose this option the result would end in a hanging. The second choice was to accuse someone else of being a witch, but first you must admit you were a witch. This was a common choice, if you chose this one you would be let go and banished from the community. But if you were a female you had an alternative option to say that you were pregnant. This would result in a delayed trial after you had your baby. The people in charge of deciding admitted that there were flaws in the ruling and realized they based their decisions on fear. Many innocent people were convicted of witchcraft on false accusations and lost their lives.

=**McCarthy hearings**=

McCarthy was a Republican senator from Wisconsin. He was born in 1908 and died in 1957. He was in office from 1947 to 1957. He was extremely anti- communist, so anti-communist that he held his own trials to convict people of being communists. These trials judged whether these U.S. senators were communist. This was called McCarthyism. The trials were telecast and the U.S. public found the hearings to be fascinating.

McCarthy based his judgments on who the person was associated with and tried to use this as evidence against them. He also used any remote signs of a communist and turned that into an offense that you could be convicted for. The Democrats saw through his evidence and would not support him. On the other hand, the Republicans supported him blindly. In the end, of the 205 people he accused of being Communists, zero were convicted. In 1954 he was reprimanded by the Senate.

=**Compare and Contrast**=

Now that we have assessed both topics, we can identify the similarities and differences between the two. The two were both a result of fear for the McCarthy hearings it was the fear of the spread of communism. For the Salem witch trials it was the fear of witchcraft. The two were both based off of little evidence. The end result had no accomplishment and there were no resolutions to the problem because of the actions of the people, and also the public was no safer then they were before. In the end the public saw through the cases and realized the mistakes they had made. The big difference between the two that sets them apart the most was that in Salem, innocent people were executed. The McCarthy hearings did not end in death. There weren’t too many other differences besides people, place, time, and location. “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” [|//George Santayana//]. These two periods in history could be wrapped up by this simple quote. If we were to remember what happened in Salem, Massachusetts we would have been able to prevent the McCarthy hearings from happening sooner.

From [|__Wisdom Quotes__]: Quotations to inspire and challenge - by Jone Johnson Lewis

[|__http://www.wisdomquotes.com/cat_history.html__]

"Joseph McCarthy." Wikipedia. 12 Feb. 2007. 12 Feb. 2007 <[|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy>.] Parallels to the Salem Witch Trial
 * 1. __Citation__**

G. Cunningham, Jesse, ed. The McCarthy Hearings. Farmington Hills, Michigan: Bonnie Szumski, 2003