Bernard Rosenthal: Lessons to learn from the Salem witch hunt

Professor emeritus of English at State University of New York at Binghamton, Bernard Rosenthal is the author of the classic Salem Story: Reading the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and general editor of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, which includes all the extant legal documents newly transcribed, in chronological order, with notes.

WitchesMass Bay: In Salem Story, you essentially peel back the onion, and tell people to read the primary sources. With all the books and movies that have covered the subject, what one thing do people keep repeating about the Salem witch hunt that is inaccurate, untrue, or has no 17th-century corroborating evidence? (Your favorite pet peeve!)

Bernard Rosenthal: Over and over again, scholars and others go back to the idea that the Salem witch hunt was all started by village quarrels. If I were to rewrite Salem Story I would start by showing how that idea has been taken apart. The evidence just doesn’t support it. Fortunately, some recent scholarship has dismantled parts of the village quarrels idea. I proposed to Cambridge University Press a revised edition of Salem Story with a new first chapter that addressed this, but for a lot of reasons it didn’t work out.

WitchesMassBay: What made you decide to tackle the huge editing project that became Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt?

Bernard Rosenthal: Tackling Records, like a lot of other things, just sort of happened. I found some errors in the standard work, poked around, and the next thing you know 20 years went by. I had made a mistake in Salem Story based on an incorrect transcription in the source I was using and gradually, after looking at other manuscripts, I came to the conclusion that a new edition was needed. It proved a lot more complicated than I had anticipated and took a lot more time—20 years I think. I chose a wonderful group to work with me on this—and without them the book would not have been possible for me alone—but working with a group also involved heavy work of administration, group dynamics, as well as pure scholarship.

WitchesMassBay: One of your causes is social injustice and fair trials. Do you find something about the Salem witch hunt that we as a society or our court systems still need to learn?

Bernard Rosenthal: Yes, but I think this answer is going to surprise you. I think what we need to learn from Salem is how a community can do something awful, but be courageous enough to realize and acknowledge it. Our modern criminal justice system is based on an adversarial system, and institutions that have little interest in justice. Our prisons have too many inmates who do not belong there but remain locked up because the state’s legal team was better than the defendant’s legal team. The state has enormous power against which its victims can do little.

I am working now on something called the Headstart case, and am doing what I can to get out the word of the injustice done to two people. One is now out of prison, but with a criminal record. The other remains in prison. Neither committed the crime for which they went to jail, and in fact the “crime” never happened. Just like the witchcraft claims. You can see my Facebook page, Free Joseph Allen, and you can get an excellent account of it all on the web at the National Center for Reason and Justice.

There are other cases on that website of innocent people incarcerated, and not by a long stretch inclusive of them all. The Puritans, for all their faults, really wanted to get it right, and when they saw they had failed they did what they could for the survivors and for families of the victims. I don’t present them as an ideal, and I don’t want a government without due process. But due process needs serious fixing, and a good place to begin is to look at how the Puritans had the courage to stay with the witchcraft matter and to do what they could to remedy the mistakes. You will not find that in our contemporary criminal justice system, at least nothing analogous to what the Puritans did. But it makes us feel superior to say that they were crazy and we are wise.

Note: Joseph Allen was released from prison 23 December 2021.