How does truth win out in a world afire with falsehood, or put differently, where does delusion go to die?
Let’s take a random example from early American history. Let’s say you happen to find yourself in the midst of a witch hunt. I mean a real witch hunt, where people testify to crimes invisible to others and bordering on the preposterous, before a court that prefers imaginary deeds to actual evidence and that aggressively executes innocents. The kind that might leave the inhabitants of two dozen towns cowering in fear, worrying that the next knock will land on their doors, in which there is as much recycling of ancient envy, antipathy and insecurity as there are reports of flying cups and translucent cats.
The kind in which — as was the case with the Salem witch trials, which consumed eastern Massachusetts in 1692 — the only effective way to avoid an accusation is to point a finger oneself.
It is unclear who first spoke out against the actual “single greatest witch hunt in American history,” but among the first was a 34-year-old merchant named Thomas Brattle.
Brattle had a number of advantages. He was the son of one of the richest men in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Having spent several years in London, he had seen more of the world than most New Englanders. He was well versed in the sciences. He knew all the men at the upmost reaches of power but had no family ties to their administration. He had no constituency. He did have a conscience.
Brattle was no wide-eyed innocent blurting out a truth the adults preferred to ignore, like the boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” He had no personal stake in the Salem proceedings; he was neither related to nor intimate with any of the accused witches. He came forward of his own volition, for the sake of two victims who could not speak for themselves: the public good and the historical record.
Brattle had observed the trials. He seems to have attended at least one hanging. He fully knew the danger of speaking out. He also anticipated the price New England would pay for the irregular proceedings. “I am afraid,” he explained, “that ages will not wear off that reproach and those stains which these things will leave behind them upon our land.”
By the time he sat down to register his concerns, 20 people had been executed for witchcraft. Seven more awaited hanging. Fifty additional prisoners had confessed, many of them to flying through the air and signing pacts with the devil, in blood. For the authorities one prisoner volunteered a report of a cloven foot. Another offered up a phalanx of diabolical swordsmen.
Brattle wrote anonymously, affixing only his initials to his pages. He did so for good reason: Over the previous months those who raised questions about the trials had been rewarded with witchcraft accusations. At least one person had paid for his skepticism with his life. A prominent minister close to several judges on the witchcraft court had, for expressing his concerns, himself met with “unkindness, abuse and reproach.” Never printed in his lifetime, Brattle’s pages circulated privately, from hand to hand. The original manuscript has never surfaced.
Brattle began deferentially. He had, he wrote, only respect for the men on the bench. He preferred to chew the fingers from his hand than to question authority. He had no interest in undermining a government. At the same time, he did not believe even judges to be infallible. And when men erred, silence was unconscionable.
Brattle knew well it was difficult to reverse course. Doing so implied that a man had erred. “However,” he continued, “nothing is more honorable than, upon due conviction, to retract and undo (so far as may be), what has been amiss and irregular.”
He turned the trials on their heads: Should the madness continue, he argued, the justices rather than the bewitched girls would be remembered as the ones in league with the devil. The Massachusetts authorities would prove to have been possessed of “ignorance and folly.” They, rather than the purported witches, would turn out to have participated in the “hellish design to ruin and destroy this poor land.”
Point by point, Brattle dismantled the untruths that we acknowledge so effortlessly today but that eluded the Massachusetts colonists in 1692. It required no education in optics to grasp that it was impossible to see with one’s eyes closed, as did the Salem accusers. That was not vision but imagination. If fantastical accusations were to be admitted in court, would liberty not evaporate overnight?
Brattle found risible the idea of an unprecedented, infernal assault on the New England orthodoxy, an idea to which the justices subscribed. At the end of the day, they believed they were eradicating dark invaders who plotted against them. Meanwhile, false testimony had been extracted from the most pious of New Englanders. The upstanding had been slandered. Outlandish ideas circulated wildly.
Three weeks after Brattle committed his thoughts to paper, the Salem court was disbanded. The belief in witchcraft would persist for some time. There would be additional accusations, but there would be no further convictions.
“How would anyone look back upon these things,” Brattle asked, “without the greatest of sorrow and grief imaginable?” He feared Salem’s reign of terror would leave a lasting blot on the record.
He was right. “The foul stain upon this country,” as John Adams would later call the Salem trials, became the standard by which future disgraces were measured. The worthy, well-educated authorities indeed proved, as Brattle had predicted, to be “the blind, nonsensical parties.”
Sometimes delusions crumble slowly. Sometimes they abate only provisionally. The earth was round for several centuries before it went flat again for many more. But we have had no witchcraft epidemics since Thomas Brattle’s time.
By definition you do not qualify as the victim of a witch hunt if you are the most powerful man on the planet. You do, however, incite a witch hunt when you spew malignant allegations and reckless insinuations, when you broadcast a fictitious narrative, attack those who resist it and charge your critics with a shadowy, sinister plot to destroy you. (Witness intimidation can sound strangely like a witchcraft accusation. Did someone really tweet that everything a middle-aged woman touched during her diplomatic career tended to sour?)
Having swerved from reason, having shot rule of law in the back, having taken truth hostage and tossed it in the trunk, the White House has returned us to Thomas Brattle’s “irregular and dangerous methods.” This time incalculably more is at stake. There are 53 Republican senators. Might one of them care to rise above the paranoid imaginings, the mad rants, the noxious conspiracy theories, the cruel, crazy character assassinations? Anyone?
What could have possessed that benighted 1692 administration, we ask today? They did as well, shuddering afterward at what they had wrought. The guilt proved crushing. You can walk gutlessly into history behind a deluded man, holding tight to a ridiculous narrative. Or you can follow the lead of Thomas Brattle, in which case someone will be extolling your heroism 327 years from now.
Stacy Schiff (@stacyschiff) is the author, most recently, of “The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | What a Witch Hunt Really Looks Like
Opinion | What a Witch Hunt Really Looks Like
How does truth win out in a world afire with falsehood, or put differently, where does delusion go to die?
Let’s take a random example from early American history. Let’s say you happen to find yourself in the midst of a witch hunt. I mean a real witch hunt, where people testify to crimes invisible to others and bordering on the preposterous, before a court that prefers imaginary deeds to actual evidence and that aggressively executes innocents. The kind that might leave the inhabitants of two dozen towns cowering in fear, worrying that the next knock will land on their doors, in which there is as much recycling of ancient envy, antipathy and insecurity as there are reports of flying cups and translucent cats.
The kind in which — as was the case with the Salem witch trials, which consumed eastern Massachusetts in 1692 — the only effective way to avoid an accusation is to point a finger oneself.
It is unclear who first spoke out against the actual “single greatest witch hunt in American history,” but among the first was a 34-year-old merchant named Thomas Brattle.
Brattle had a number of advantages. He was the son of one of the richest men in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Having spent several years in London, he had seen more of the world than most New Englanders. He was well versed in the sciences. He knew all the men at the upmost reaches of power but had no family ties to their administration. He had no constituency. He did have a conscience.
Brattle was no wide-eyed innocent blurting out a truth the adults preferred to ignore, like the boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” He had no personal stake in the Salem proceedings; he was neither related to nor intimate with any of the accused witches. He came forward of his own volition, for the sake of two victims who could not speak for themselves: the public good and the historical record.
Brattle had observed the trials. He seems to have attended at least one hanging. He fully knew the danger of speaking out. He also anticipated the price New England would pay for the irregular proceedings. “I am afraid,” he explained, “that ages will not wear off that reproach and those stains which these things will leave behind them upon our land.”
By the time he sat down to register his concerns, 20 people had been executed for witchcraft. Seven more awaited hanging. Fifty additional prisoners had confessed, many of them to flying through the air and signing pacts with the devil, in blood. For the authorities one prisoner volunteered a report of a cloven foot. Another offered up a phalanx of diabolical swordsmen.
Brattle wrote anonymously, affixing only his initials to his pages. He did so for good reason: Over the previous months those who raised questions about the trials had been rewarded with witchcraft accusations. At least one person had paid for his skepticism with his life. A prominent minister close to several judges on the witchcraft court had, for expressing his concerns, himself met with “unkindness, abuse and reproach.” Never printed in his lifetime, Brattle’s pages circulated privately, from hand to hand. The original manuscript has never surfaced.
Brattle began deferentially. He had, he wrote, only respect for the men on the bench. He preferred to chew the fingers from his hand than to question authority. He had no interest in undermining a government. At the same time, he did not believe even judges to be infallible. And when men erred, silence was unconscionable.
Brattle knew well it was difficult to reverse course. Doing so implied that a man had erred. “However,” he continued, “nothing is more honorable than, upon due conviction, to retract and undo (so far as may be), what has been amiss and irregular.”
He turned the trials on their heads: Should the madness continue, he argued, the justices rather than the bewitched girls would be remembered as the ones in league with the devil. The Massachusetts authorities would prove to have been possessed of “ignorance and folly.” They, rather than the purported witches, would turn out to have participated in the “hellish design to ruin and destroy this poor land.”
Point by point, Brattle dismantled the untruths that we acknowledge so effortlessly today but that eluded the Massachusetts colonists in 1692. It required no education in optics to grasp that it was impossible to see with one’s eyes closed, as did the Salem accusers. That was not vision but imagination. If fantastical accusations were to be admitted in court, would liberty not evaporate overnight?
Brattle found risible the idea of an unprecedented, infernal assault on the New England orthodoxy, an idea to which the justices subscribed. At the end of the day, they believed they were eradicating dark invaders who plotted against them. Meanwhile, false testimony had been extracted from the most pious of New Englanders. The upstanding had been slandered. Outlandish ideas circulated wildly.
Three weeks after Brattle committed his thoughts to paper, the Salem court was disbanded. The belief in witchcraft would persist for some time. There would be additional accusations, but there would be no further convictions.
“How would anyone look back upon these things,” Brattle asked, “without the greatest of sorrow and grief imaginable?” He feared Salem’s reign of terror would leave a lasting blot on the record.
He was right. “The foul stain upon this country,” as John Adams would later call the Salem trials, became the standard by which future disgraces were measured. The worthy, well-educated authorities indeed proved, as Brattle had predicted, to be “the blind, nonsensical parties.”
Sometimes delusions crumble slowly. Sometimes they abate only provisionally. The earth was round for several centuries before it went flat again for many more. But we have had no witchcraft epidemics since Thomas Brattle’s time.
By definition you do not qualify as the victim of a witch hunt if you are the most powerful man on the planet. You do, however, incite a witch hunt when you spew malignant allegations and reckless insinuations, when you broadcast a fictitious narrative, attack those who resist it and charge your critics with a shadowy, sinister plot to destroy you. (Witness intimidation can sound strangely like a witchcraft accusation. Did someone really tweet that everything a middle-aged woman touched during her diplomatic career tended to sour?)
Having swerved from reason, having shot rule of law in the back, having taken truth hostage and tossed it in the trunk, the White House has returned us to Thomas Brattle’s “irregular and dangerous methods.” This time incalculably more is at stake. There are 53 Republican senators. Might one of them care to rise above the paranoid imaginings, the mad rants, the noxious conspiracy theories, the cruel, crazy character assassinations? Anyone?
What could have possessed that benighted 1692 administration, we ask today? They did as well, shuddering afterward at what they had wrought. The guilt proved crushing. You can walk gutlessly into history behind a deluded man, holding tight to a ridiculous narrative. Or you can follow the lead of Thomas Brattle, in which case someone will be extolling your heroism 327 years from now.
Stacy Schiff (@stacyschiff) is the author, most recently, of “The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Source: Read Full Article