Of the attempts by historians to make sense out of the Salem witch trials of1692–that is, the question of why that particular part of Puritan Massacusetts saw so many persons hanged for trafficking with the Devil in that particular year–two that stand out are Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s 1974 work Salem Possessed and Mary Beth Norton’s 2002 monograph In the Devil’s Snare. At first glance they appear very different and hard to reconcile with each other, but to me what’s most interesting is what they have in common–and what, together, they may be able to tell us about the unfortunate Trump phenomenon that we’re all living through today.
Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded in 1630–that’s 62 years before the witchcraft crisis–by a community of English Calvinist Christians who believed that God had called them, not only to confess their sins and worship him, but to get aboard the Arbella and sail to North America to found a godly commonwealth where Calvinist theology would reign supreme. Since this whole venture was not their idea but God’s, it naturally stood to reason that if they obeyed his will and put his plan into operation he would bless them, while if they disobeyed and gave into temptation he would curse them. If their experiment failed, in fact, they believed they could expect worse punishment than all their compatriots back in England who blissfully took their communion at the Anglican Church and gave the invisible world scarcely a thought beyond that.
That point is worth amplifying even further. The Puritans of New England, both the early settlers and their descendants all the way through the seventeenth century, believed that if, collectively, as a people, they adhered to their founding myths, they could expect certain things: not necessarily great wealth, but the ability to maintain their godly community indefinitely and enjoy ongoing signs of God’s blessing. Now, the fact that they felt they had to do this collectively gives a clue to how some things might go wrong: if you were one of them, even if you did everything you were supposed to do, some others around you might mess it up for everybody by being not so faithful, not so devoted to the cause, not so sure of the founding myths.
And now to those two books. Salem Possessed and In the Devil’s Snare, for as much as they differ, both deal with the scenario of villagers in Salem looking at events happening around them that they could not make rational sense out of, events that in their minds couldn’t possibly be happening if they had all adhered to their founding faith, and that clearly took drastic action to remedy.
In the more recent one, Mary Beth Norton’s emphasis is on the war that the English colonists were fighting against the French and their Wabanaki Indian allies, a war that had involved some horrific village massacres very close to home. (If everyone were being faithful to God, God surely would not have given these villagers into the hands of their heathen enemies.) She also shows that every one of the nine judges on the court that sentenced accused witches to hang had, in some way, been at fault when it came to the defense of the colony.
The older work, Salem Possessed, looks more at the tension between the east and the west sides of Salem Village and at the related factionalism in the village church that had reached a boiling point. Boyer and Nissenbaum present a map of Salem Village, showing that most of the accusers lived in the western half, the section that was more squeezed for land and had more of a struggling, subsistence-farming economy, while most of the accused and their defenders lived on the more prosperous, commercialized side. But if this sounds as if Boyer and Nissenbaum were saying that it was about the poor taking revenge on the rich, no, that wasn’t what it was about. True, they emphasized the hardships of the west villagers, but an even bigger part of their point was that west villagers viewed east villagers as less godly, less devoted to the founding principles of the colony, less united for the furtherance of the mission of the holy commonwealth, on account of being too individualistic and self-interested.
It cannot be stressed enough that we are talking about people who wanted to live in a peaceable community in which they could all love one another, bear one another’s burdens, strengthen one another in faith and devotion to their God, and all that good stuff. Really, that was all they wanted. But somehow, they felt, it had been slipping away from them. It didn’t start in 1692; preachers and their faithful congregants had been lamenting in the meeting houses for decades that something was missing, something was on the decline, as people got too caught up in the cares of this world, too prone to sue each other over every kind of petty scrap–they felt something lost that needed to be regained. And between the factionalism and the Indian massacres, that feeling overtook the villagers of Salem with a vengeance in 1692.
Yes, we are talking about people who wanted to live in peace and harmony with their neighbors. We’re also talking about people who, when they felt that so much of that was lost, resorted to incredibly destructive, not to mention ungodly, actions to reclaim it. And they had quite an elaborate fantasy world with which to justify it to themselves. Let us now consider how their fantasy world worked. God had called their forefathers to create this special commonwealth for him, and they were now heirs to it. But because they were special to God, they were also special to the Devil. The Devil had invaded their sanctuary through some of their own neighbors who, as evidenced by this or that sign of nonconformity or dissension, were casting spells and bewitching the children of the village.
That brings us to a specific component of the fantasy world that the political and religious leaders indulged in with the full approval of much of Salem Village. Let’s say that accused witch Rebecca Nurse, or Martha Corey, is seated before the judges and the accusers pleading her innocence. The children, meanwhile, are looking at the ceiling and earnestly insisting that they see the very same woman’s face on the specter that’s dancing around up there, laughing at them, and reaching down to pinch and prick them. Assuming that the children are really seeing that specter with that face, does that mean that the woman whose face they see is the one who is making that vision happen? Absolutely not. In fact, the clergy “knew” full well that the Devil they believed in could put anybody’s face up there that he wanted to. But these leaders, being the well-versed theologians that they were, had an answer to that. True, the Devil could deceive them, but because they were so earnestly trying to serve God by rooting out evil among them, there was no way that God would allow them to be so deceived. And thus they executed 20 people, including many who were at least as pious in their Christianity and dedicated to the peaceable kingdom as anyone else in that community.
What could it have been like to be so caught up in a fantasy world that the most basic reason couldn’t penetrate? To be so sure of their own identity as the true defenders of a noble commonwealth that anybody who opposes them must be working for the dark side? And to embrace a solution that could not possibly do anything but bring destruction and shame on their peaceable little kingdom, and make them look at best pathetic to the generations after them who would have the task of writing their history? Could anything like that happen today?
The people who made Donald Trump their president believed that they once had something that had been taken away from them. It was partly economic–we all know that many Trump voters had suffered economic displacement. It was partly cultural. (“When I’m president, people will say Merry Christmas again, not Happy Holidays.”) There was also the fear of terrorist attack, coupled with the wild paranoia that the outgoing president was in cahoots with their enemies. (By the way, I forgot to mention that Salem Villagers thought their former minister George Burroughs had conspired with their Indian enemies, and Reverend Burroughs was one of the ones who got hanged as a wizard.) The Trump voters imagined that they were under siege by all manner of sinister forces, foreign and domestic. And here’s the clincher: they somehow imagined that the economic privations, the cultural assaults, and the fear of terrorist attacks couldn’t possibly be happening to America if America were holding to its old-fashioned principles, however they might conceive them to be. So when a loud-mouthed man came along with no manners, no tact, no knowledge of how government works, no knowledge of how political economy works, and no track record of public service or even of decent and honorable behavior, when this obvious charlatan bellowed that he was going to “Make America Great Again,” it made perfect sense to them that this was the man who could set everything right.
Hang some people for witchcraft in 1692, make Donald Trump president in 2016. Everything old is new again. And a key ingredient is the ability of a large population group to make a fantasy world for themselves, reinforce each other in it, cast everybody who doesn’t share the fantasy as a villain to their peaceable kingdom, and let ‘er rip.
