Mass hysteria is a social phenomenon wherein people valve something worthwhile, to such an extreme level, that it leaves to them doing horrible things to maintain it. The Crucible and Swing Kids share many commonalities that make them examples of mass hysteria. The Crucible is a dramatization of the Salem witch trials and they show a number of teenage and preteen girls feeling (or at least claiming they feel) as though they are being cursed by witches, so they seek to root them out. In Swing Kids, we follow a group of boys who like to dance to swing music, something outlawed by the Nazis; two of the boys join Hitler’s Youth and start to believe Nazi propaganda, at least to a degree; by the end of the movie, one of these boys ends up so firmly against the Nazis that he gets sent to a prison camp, while the other …show more content…
In The Crucible, it is the young girls acting strangely that leads to the witch hunt. While in Swing Kids, one could argue that some of the extremes the Nazis are going to is to protect the children, although they are more protecting the country of Germany from the perceived threat of the outside, namely the blacks and the Jews, rather than protecting children. However, it could be likewise said that The Crucible is more about protecting their faith from the perceived threat of witchcraft than protecting the children, that is just a side effect. The vice in both of these stories is a literal and metaphorical witch hunt. In The Crucible, the girls accuse the people they don’t like of witchcraft and when Mary Warren tries to tell the court that they have been faking it, the other girls turn on her and accuse her of witchcraft until she turns around and claims that John Procter was bewitching and threatening her. While in Swing Kids, the Hitler’s Youth, or HJ’s, would help the Nazis arrest and get in trouble, those who disagreed with Hitler, like the swing kids and Thomas’s