An interview with Professor Emerson W. Baker, part 4
A student interview with Professor Emerson W. Baker on the triumph and tragedy of the 1692 Salem witch trials as part of the 2019 National History Day contest. (Missed Part 1, Part 2, or Part 3?)
Kayleigh: As you said in your book, A Storm of Witchcraft, Governor William Phips created one of the first large-scale government coverups in American history by curbing free speech [about the Salem witch trials]. This happened again, during World War I, etc. Why do you think the government seems to repeat the same problems over and over again? Is it because they don’t learn from history or they forget about the past?
Dr. Baker: I don’t really think history repeats itself but I do think sometimes it burps itself back up. Part of it is that most politicians are not good historians. I also think too that unfortunately, it’s sort of a self-preservation reaction to try to cover something up. It’s an instinctive thing to muzzle the press, to quiet dissent. It’s weird because on the one hand, you know, it’s such an American thing to have dissent and to have freedom of speech and open opinion. It’s also part of a self-preservation mode to try to quash that, to control that.
Frankly, you can see that today in this whole bit about fake news. The president can’t control free speech, he can’t issue a public speech ban the way William Phips did, but what he can do as much as possible is to control the media by saying they are speaking falsehoods. To me, it’s the same kind of process. What’s interesting to me—and this is where Salem is so fascinating—is that every generation has that version, that incident of Salem: the Red Scare, McCarthyism, or earlier on, the treatment of Loyalists, or the issue of slavery. Every generation has its political fight where one group or multiple groups try to restrict the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, of other groups, for political ends. Ultimately, unfortunately, it almost seems to be part of human nature and it’s something we have to be constantly on guard for and to fight against.
At the end of my previous book, The Devil of Great Island, which is another case of witchcraft in New Hampshire in the 1680s, I say, unfortunately, as long as we have hatred and prejudices and racism and bigotry and persecution and scapegoating, we’re going to have some form of witchcraft. And we’re also going to have some kind of effort to restrict people’s freedoms. It’s not the most optimistic, uplifting note. But to me, it’s why studying this stuff is so important because it rings true today and it alerts us to the dangers of any efforts to restrict a free society.
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Emerson (“Tad”) W. Baker is a historian and professor at Salem State University and the author of A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Witch Trials and the American Experience (2014), The Devil of Great Island: Witchcraft & Conflict in Early New England (2007), and The New England Knight: Sir William Phips, 1651-1695 (1998).