The Devil in Massachusetts. Marion L. Starkey

The Devil in Massachusetts.
Marion L. Starkey.
New York: Time Incorporated. 1949/1964.

Young girls set off the hysteria of being hurt by witches, leading to a time of chaos in which people charged anyone they disliked or anyone who was different as witches. People were hanged. A study of madness and irrationality in society. The few voices that tried to point out what was happening were overwhelmed by the hysteria and accused of being witches themselves. The author studies the origins of the hysteria, its spread and its aftermath, in which the young perpetrators had only to apologize in church. At least, in the end, the voice of sanity prevailed.

"...witch hunting, those waves of irrational behavior that sweep through otherwise rational-seeming societies."

"Hard to escape the conclusion that most of the girls consciously and sometimes viciously exercised a power they had discovered, a power of playing upon the credulity of their elders so as to inflict punishment on anyone they chose to single out."

"...she [the author] has made it possible for us to understand those dark, those truly diabolic forces which lurk in the recesses of the human mind, ready, whenever history gives them their opportunity, to break out into the open."

"Salem's swing to sanity through the stubborn refusal of the few to give way to the hysteria and mad logic of the many..l."

The author: "It's bad business meddling with the devil; it makes you superstitious. I find myself impelled to report that the very hour I began my formal research (in Kittredge's Witchcraft in Old and New England) a small hurricane came through my open window, wrecked the room, brought every tree in the yard crashing against the house, and toppled the steeple of the East Saugus Community Church, visible in the lightning beyond my window; than again, the evening of the day I finally shipped off the manuscript, there came a plague of lightning, continuous and directly overhead, striking neighbors' houses but missing mine."

"Similar examples of mass hysteria and on a far more enormous scale had occurred repeatedly in the Middle Ages, and always like this one in the wake of stress and social disorganization after wars or after an epidemic of the Black Death...the children's Crusade, the Flagellantes, the St. Vitus' Dance and, again and again, outbreaks of witchcraft."

"Dedicated to industry, accustomed to measuring godliness by the prosperity meted out as a reward, Puritans at large had scant patience with the poor. If you had a toothache, you knew you had been sinning with your teeth. To doubt the existence of the devil was a blasphemy on a par with doubting God Himself."

"Hallucinations, dreams and mere fancies would be accepted in court as factual proof not of the psychological condition of the accuser but of the behavior of the accused."

"An infection of demonism was running across the whole assembly; people shrank back from the touch and look of neighbors, no longer sure who was a witch and who was bewitched."

"...the good Rev. Noyes...made one last appeal to her to save her immortal soul by confessing; he reminded her that she well knew she was a witch; 'You're a liar!' said Sarah Good; 'I am no more a witch than you are a wizard; if you take my life away, God will give you blood to drink'; they took away her life and Noyes did have blood to drink, years later, when he lay dying of a hemorrhage, though not so many years later that Sarah's words were not thought of."

"Finally, the girls met their match; they cried out on a gentleman in Boston and the latter took novel action; he sent a 'writ to arrest these accusers in one thousand pound action of defamation' and entrusted local friends to put the accusers under observation; so coldly legal an act had a chastening effect; adolescents tough enough to watch a hanging without a qualm blanched at the idea of someone's having to pay a thousand pounds; their voices became discreet and then fell silent altogether."

"The most important difference was in procedure; everyone had agreed to eliminate spectral evidence as a basis of conviction; deprived of such evidence, however, there seemed to be little point in trying a witch at all; rule out the visions of the girls and their friends, the tales of airy travels, of meetings behind Parris's orchard, the testimony of being pinched and choked and there was nothing left, nothing tangible, nothing provable."

"Now that people outside the [Puritan] faith could vote and shape the course of government, the power of theocracy had been forever broken."

"...husband and 'broken charity' with wife and wife with husband, mother with child and child with mother; even worse had been the tattling of neighbor against neighbor; not in a generation would it be forgotten how neighbor had responded with spite to a neighbor's need."

"He identified the true devils as the small spites that had so long embroiled the village in petty squabbles."

"No one was wholly innocent in the tragedy; it was chargeable to a kind of collective guilt on the part of all Massachusetts."

"...admiration for men whose sanity in the end proved stronger than madness, hope that 'enlightenment' too is a phenomenon that may recur."

One message in this book is an understanding of the roots of the irrationality, the "spectral" evidence that allowed in court tales of pinching, punching, fainting, etc. by the accusers. Another message is the courage of the few people who persisted in saying clearly what was happening and that what was happening was wrong. And still another was the reaction of families in which wives, husbands and children turned against each other; neighbors turned petty spites into hangings. A cold legal judgment against the accusers finally put the madness to rest. We shouldn't feel too superior about this. The Duke lacrosse case and the Don Imus flap in the early twenty-first century are examples of the same kind of irrationality on the part of society. Can we learn anything from this book on how to deal with such madness in the future?