The Devil Carries Himself Through History.
Hatred has been prevalent through out the history of our country. Each new wave of Immigrants has been looked down upon as they enter America's melting pot of ethnic backgrounds, religions, and views. Here two testaments to mankind's hatred and unjust behavior towards each other can be seen in these two slivers of American History, the internment of Japanese people in America during WWII and the era of the Salem Witch trials as described in the Play, The Crucible. These two incidents were approximately 250 years apart from each other. However, the situations while not totally parallel to each other, still hold some strong similarities. .
In both of these incidents, the accused were average citizens. The accused witches were regular people whose only fault was not being liked by a fellow citizen. The accused Japanese were average American citizens; their only fault was their ancestry, being Japanese. There were a few reasons that their accusers felt it legitimate to lash out on these innocent people.
Both contain one important aspect to the pandemonium, and that would be fear. As described in Webster's Dictionary, fear is a feeling of anxiety and agitation caused by the presence or nearness of danger, evil, pain, etc. The people of Salem, the setting for The Crucible, were deeply afraid of witches and the devil. Their fear of curses and the powers that witches supposedly possessed propelled them to chaos and hysteria. Fear was also present during the Japanese American Internment as well. Americans were afraid of espionage. In May 1942, the assistant chief of the Army's Western Defense Command's Civil Affairs Division wrote: "In the case of the Japanese, their Oriental habits of life, their and our inability to assimilate biologically, and what is more important, our inability to distinguish the subverts and saboteurs from the rest of the mass made necessary their class evacuation on a horizontal basis.