When his daughter becomes ill after partaking in what is understood to be a satanic ritual with his niece, he starts grasping at straws for who to scapegoat to save his image. He picks on his slave, Tituba. After beating her with other town officials, she confesses. Parris’s vanity becomes increasingly ugly because of his unwillingness to admit that those who have been named by Tituba, are not witches. The town trusts him as a minister, and so his own desire to preserve his reputation creates mass frenzy. Later, when doubt clouds the town, Parris insists that they continue the trials; he worries that if the trials discontinued his word will no longer mean anything. His desire to hold power over the town continues the trials, and ends many more lives. The town is thrown into chaos, simply because Parris can’t stand to have his reputation dirtied. The Crucible remains a powerful allegory for the McCarthy trials of the 60s, when one man’s desire for power became the whole country’s hysteria. No doubt, the struggles that comes from each character’s own desires, whether righteous or not, is what overthrows Salem. Miller provides a painful example of how we destroy ourselves, and