Guilt over Salem was an itch that some could not resist scratching. In 1946 the Georgia industrialist H. Vance Greenslit, who would later become President of Southeastern Greyhound Bus Lines, petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to pardon one of his Salem descendants Ann Pudeator, and six others who were executed for witchcraft. It was rejected, as were further requests in 1946 and 1953, although a resolution was finally passed in 1957.65 Greenslit then ceased pursuing any further public interest in the matter, leaving a Salem resident, John Beresford Hatch, to carry on a one-man crusade to have the British parliament exonerate all those executed at Salem. Hatch, who was not related to any of the Salem accused, sent numerous letters to Buckingham Palace and to the Prime Minister’s office. In i960 he petitioned Congress, the State Department, and the Massachusetts legislature to pressure the British government. A letter to the British Consul General in Boston received the curt reply that Her Majesty’s government no longer had jurisdiction over the witch trials. Another missive to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, suggested he and Hatch meet At Salem’s Gallows Hill ‘to settle one and for all time’ the exoneration of the Salem accused. He did not receive a reply.66 Then, in 1992, the tercentenary of the Salem trials was marked by the installation of a new monument commissioned after a competitive process. It was unveiled by playwright Arthur Miller, and the human-rights campaigner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel gave a memorial speech. The event provided a sober moment of reflection about Salem’s status, underlining its role in reminding the nation of the dangers of persecution, prejudice, and scapegoating.67
Meanwhile the popular image of the witch was changing, and not just because of the rise of Wicca. There was a flipside to the satanic image being peddled by evangelists. Writing in November 1964, Joy Miller, Women’s Editor at the Associated Press, complained, ‘This may go down as the year of the kook—the year the weirdo achieved status, the year Halloween lasted around the calendar’. She was referring to the success of The Adams Family and Bewitched which had both begun airing on ABC that year. The old films of vampires and werewolves used to send shivers down the spine, but now television was sanitizing such figures of supernatural fear, ‘the ghoul next door is pure Pollyanna, and the witch is a homebody who conjures up dinner. By a twitch of her pretty nose’.68 By the 1960s witches had become sexy, overshadowing the venerable stereotypical old crone so strikingly represented in the Wizard of Oz and the Disney animation Snow White. Young beautiful witches had been depicted in nineteenth-century literature, but it was the advertising industry, commerce, film, and television that provided the real makeover in popular culture.69
In the romantic comedy I Married a Witch (1942), based on the novel The Passionate Witch by James Thome Smith, Veronica Lake plays Jennifer, an attractive young seventeenth-century Salem witch burned at the stake along with her father Daniel—perpetuating the mistaken belief that witches were burned in America. Their spirits are imprisoned in a tree until one day in 1942, it is split asunder by lightning and they are freed to exact revenge on the descendant of their Puritan persecutor, played by Frederic March. True love overcomes hate, of course, and the film ends happily with the spiteful, sozzled Daniel trapped in a bottle, and Jennifer marrying March. Bell, Book and Candle (1958), based on a successful 1950 Broadway play, presented a modem-day witch Gillian Holroyd, played by Kim Novak, who lives alone in Greenwich Village with her cat familiar Pyewacket—which was the name of an imp mentioned in an English witch investigation conducted by Mathew Hopkins the Witchfinder General in 1644. Gillian finds herself attracted to her neighbour played by James Stuart, and faces the dilemma that she will lose her witch powers if she truly falls in love. A strong message in both was that a good witch had to be not only nubile but domesticated, as came across loud and clear in the most influential sexy witch of the era, Samantha Stephens, in the television comedy Bewitched. ABC made 254 episodes between 1964 and 1972. Elizabeth Montgomery, she of the pretty nose, was Samantha, married to her mortal husband Darren, played by Dick York for most of the series.70 In June 1970, the cast of Bewitched made a rare venture out of the studio to record scenes at Salem for two Halloween-based episodes, ‘Samantha’s Bad Day in Salem’ and ‘Samantha’s Old Salem Trip’. For the occasion, the show’s producer explained to the press, ‘the directional traffic signals which carry the face of an old hag on a broom will be changed to carry the much prettier profile of Samantha’.71 The town was about to undergo a witch revolution.
The commercial exploitation of 1692 had begun back in the early 1890s when a local jeweller began making ‘Salem Witch Souvenir Spoons’ on which were depicted witches, hanging ropes, cats, brooms, and the moon. A few years later a number of the town’s businesses were using a ‘made in Witch City’ brand. In 1940 the makers of a line of female toiletries called ‘Early American Old Spice’, launched a marketing campaign depicting a beautiful woman hanging by a noose from a gnarled tree, a rose clasped in one hand, with a verse underneath that began:
Hung! As a witch —
Much too much for the Puritans of Salem —
Her charming witchery quite overcame them
Readers were enticed with the prospect that they too could possess ‘the radiant charm that baffled our Founding Fathers’.72 Salem witchcraft could be fun as well as seductive! In 1889 Parker Brothers produced a Salem game called Ye Witchcraft Game, but sensitivities were such that the company decided to pull it from production a few years later. No such problem eighty years on. At the 67th annual America Toy Fair in 1970, a Salem company presented Witch Pitch in which players tossed discs into a revolving cupola on top of a witch’s house. The packaging announced, ‘Made in Witch City, U.S.A.’73
Small-scale tourism in Salem had been going on for much of the century but there had long been a struggle between those in the town who wished to promote its rich heritage sans witches, and those that wanted to exploit further a brand with huge potential.74 The scales tipped decidedly during the 1970s. The Halloween episodes of Bewitched played their part. Then the town’s chamber of Commerce finally fully embraced the Witch City brand, and the Wiccans came to town. Leading the way was Californian Wiccan Laurie Cabot who opened a store called ‘A Witch Shop’ in 1971 selling Wiccan paraphernalia and witch-related curios. She was an entrepreneurial witch in the Sybil Leek mould, courting the media, writing popular books, and even managing to brand herself successfully as the ‘Official Witch of Salem’ with a little unwitting help from Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Some on the city council were not best pleased, with the mayor explaining in 1977 that they thought ‘the historical recognition of the city would be internationally demeaned by allowing a commercial capitalization by one individual’.75 There was undoubtedly also a Christian cringe at the promotion of witchcraft however defined.
Similar uneasiness emerged during attempts to turn the 1928 ‘hex murder’ house of Nelson Rehmeyer in North Hopewell Township, Pennsylvania, into an educational heritage experience. Rehmeyer’s house still stands, repeatedly broken into by thrill seekers, and so in 2007 one of his great-grandsons spear-headed a venture to have it listed on the National Register of Historic Places, restore it, and turn it into a museum exploring the beliefs behind the murder and the tradition of pow-wowing. It was soon clear, however, that the local planners and the North Hopewell Township authorities were resistant to the idea. ‘Thank goodness Elvis’ Graceland isn’t located in North Hopewell Township’, one local journalist wryly observed.76
The embrace of the witch was also due in part to the commercialization of Halloween. A Dallas journalist recalled in 1964 that in the 1930s, the Halloween tradition of mischief night, which was primarily an Irish introduction, was a pretty violent affair. The youths of Dallas would grease the railway tracks, puncture tyres, smash windows, and turn over outdoor toilets. But during the early 1960s the more innocent version of costumed trick-and-treating we know today was in the ascendancy and ripe for commercialization. The journalist reported that ‘for weeks supermarkets, drug stores and variety stores have been structured for the coming festival, featuring hundreds of special Halloween items for parties’.77 It took a while, but Salem businesses finally saw it as an opportunity not to be missed. In 1982 a group of business people led by the owner of the Salem Witch Museum devised a ‘Haunted Happenings’ event for the autumn holiday, advertising the town as the ‘Halloween Capital of the World’. The initiative grew and grew until it attracted the hundreds of thousands who flock there today. Danvers, nee Salem Village, where the accusations began, has been left relatively untouched by the tourist boom, its remembrance of the trials rendered more discreet.
A new generation of young attractive witches hit American screens in the 1990s. Following on from the modest impact of the fantasy comedy Teen Witch (1989), series such as Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996-2003), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1:997-2003), and Charmed (1998-2006) were hugely successful, and culturally significant—at least for a time. Matching the generational changes taking place in society, these witches were more independent and less domesticated than their mid-century screen counterparts. The creators of the shows injected elements of the Wiccan tradition, introducing a pre-teen and young teen audience to the movement, albeit largely shorn of its paganism. This exposure coupled with the advent of the publishing sensation that was Harry Potter, the first volume of which appeared in 1997, helped generate the ‘teen witch’ phenomenon of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Hundreds of thousands of teenagers, girls in particular, were inspired to dabble in making their own spells to enhance their social and emotional situation, and some moved on to exploring the notion of witchcraft as the Old Religion. Authors, some Pagan like Silver Raven Wolf, pumped out heaps of‘how to’ empowerment books for an eager youthful audience. The response was predictable, with evangelical groups up in arms over this new outbreak of diabolic heathenism perverting America’s youth. That old persecutorial tendency was roused once again with high-profile book burnings of Harry Potter novels.
So here we are in twenty-first century America with witchcraft as much a matter of the present as the past, the idea of the witch refracted by twentieth-century culture.
Yet ever since 1692 the narrative regarding witchcraft has been distorted by the constant manipulation of history and slanted by racial prejudice. Much of the story of witchcraft in modernizing America has been conveniently forgotten or obscured by myth-making and seductive assumptions about progress. The preoccupation with Salem has served as a smokescreen for some uncomfortable truths regarding the people who built the United States. Thousands of Americans, Native, European, and African, were persecuted, abused, and murdered as witches after 1692. Where are the monuments to them? They are as much a part of America’s heritage as the witches of colonial New England. It is time this history was taught as a lesson in how the past is not a foreign country.