“[T]he offender against HUAC could not be accused of any such violation [of law] but only of a spiritual crime, subservience to a political enemy’s desires and ideology… In essence, it came down to a governmental decree of moral guilt that could easily be made to disappear by ritual speech: intoning names of fellow sinners and recanting former beliefs. This last was probably the saddest and truest part of the charade, for by the early 1950s there were few, and even fewer in the arts, who had not left behind their illusions about the Soviets” (Reader, 449).