Gus Hall (born Arvo Kustaa Halberg) (October 8, 1910 ? October 13, 2000) was a leader of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and its four-time U.S. presidential candidate. As a labor leader, Hall was closely associated with the so-called "Little Steel" Strike of 1937, an effort to unionize the nation's smaller, regional steel manufacturers. During the Second Red Scare, Hall was indicted under the Smith Act and was sentenced to eight years in prison. After his release, Hall led the CPUSA for over 40 years, often taking an orthodox Marxist-Leninist stance.

Background and early political activism

Open battle between striking teamsters armed with pipes and the police in the streets of Minneapolis, June 1934.

Hall grew up in a Communist home and was involved early on in politics.^[3] According to Hall, after his father was banned from working in the mines for joining an IWW strike, the family grew up in near starvation in a log cabin built by Halberg.^[5] At 15, to support the impoverished ten-child family, Hall left school and went to work in the North Woods lumber camps, mines and railroads.^[1] In 1927 he was recruited to the CPUSA by his father.^[6] Hall became an organizer for the Young Communist League (YCL) in the upper Midwest.^[3] In 1931, an apprenticeship in the YCL qualified Hall to travel to the Soviet Union to study for two years at the International Lenin School in Moscow, where he learned sabotage and guerrilla tactics.^[2][5]

After, his studies Hall moved to Minneapolis to further the YCL activities there.^[3] He was involved in hunger marches, demonstrations on behalf of farmers, and various strikes.^[3] In 1934, Hall was jailed for six months for taking part in the Minneapolis Teamster's Strike (led by Trotskyist Farrell Dobbs).^[3] After serving his sentence, Hall was blacklisted and was unable to find work under his original name. This prompted him to change his name to Gus Hall, derived from Kustaa (Gustav) Halberg.^[7] The change was confirmed in court in 1935.^[7]

Ohio activism and WWII

In late 1934, Hall went to Ohio's Mahoning Valley. Following the call for organizing in the steel industry, Hall was among a handful hired at a steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio.^[3] During 1935-1936, he was involved in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)^[1] and was a founding organizer of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), which was set up by the CIO ^[3]. Hall stated that he and others persuaded John L. Lewis, who was one of the founders of CIO, that steel could be organized.^[8]

It was also in Youngstown that Hall met Elizabeth Mary Turner (1909?2003), a woman of Hungarian background.^[1][9] They were married in 1935. Hall's wife for 65 years, Elizabeth was a leader in her own right, among the first women steelworkers and a secretary of SWOC.^[9] They went on to have two children, Arvo (1947?) and Barbara (Conway) (1938?).^[5][9]

Hall was a leader of the 1937 ?Little Steel? strike, so called because it was directed against Republic Steel, Bethlehem Steel and the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company, as opposed to the industry giant U.S. Steel, which had previously entered into a contract with SWOC without a strike.^[10] The strike was ultimately unsuccessful, and marred by the deaths of workers at Republic plants in Chicago and Youngstown.^[10] Hall was arrested for allegedly transporting bomb-making materials intended for Republic's plant in Warren, Ohio. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was fined $500.^[11] SWOC became the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) in 1942.^[10] Philip Murray, USWA founding president, once commented that Hall's leadership of the strike in Warren and Youngstown was a model of effective grassroots organizing.

After the 1937 strike, Hall focused on party activities instead of union work, and became the leader of the CPUSA in Youngstown in 1937.^[1] His responsibilities in the party grew rapidly, and in 1939 he became the CPUSA leader for the city of Cleveland.^[1] Hall ran on the CPUSA ticket for Youngstown councilman and also for governor of Ohio, but received little votes.^[11] In 1940 Hall was convicted of fraud and forgery in an election scandal and spent 90 days in jail.^[12]

Hall volunteered for the U.S. Navy when World War II broke out, serving as a machinist in Guam.^[1] During the first years of the war in Europe, the CPUSA held an isolationist stance, as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were technically allied through the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. When Hitler broke the treaty by invading the USSR in June 1941, the CPUSA began to officially support the war effort. During his naval service, Hall was elected in absence to the National Committee of the CPUSA.^[3] He was honorably discharged from the navy in March 6, 1946.^[2] Seen as a Moscow loyalist, Hall's reputation in the party rose after the war, and in 1946 he was elected to the national executive board of the party under the new general secretary, Eugene Dennis, a pro-Soviet Marxist-Leninist, who had replaced Earl Browder after the latter's expulsion from the party.^[3][11]

Indictment during the 'Red Scare' and rise to the head of the CPUSA

Hall's mugshot, taken during his prison sentence in Leavenworth, Kansas for "Conspiring and Teaching Overthrow of the U.S. Government by Force or Violence." Date 1954.

Hall was in danger of facing yet another indictment, this time under the Internal Security Act of 1950, known as the McCarran Act in the early 1960s, but the Supreme Court found the Act partly unconstitutional and the charges were abandoned.^[1] However, the act required "Communist action" organizations to register with the government, and limited party members from applying for United States passports and from holding government jobs.^[11] Because of the Act, Hall's driver's license was revoked by the State of New York.^[11]

After his release, Hall continued his activities.^[2] He began to travel around the United States, ostensibly on vacation, but actually gathering support to replace Dennis as the general secretary.^[13] He accused the general secretary Dennis of cowardice for not going underground as ordered in 1951 and also claimed Dennis had used funds reserved for the underground for his own purposes.^[11][13]. Hall's rise to the position of general secretary was generally unexpected by the American Communist circles (the post was expected to go to either Henry Winston or Gil Green, both important figures in the YCL^[13]) although Hall had held the office of acting general secretary briefly in the early 1950s during Dennis' arrest.^[13] In 1959, Hall was elected CPUSA general secretary, and afterward, received the Order of Lenin.^[2]

General Secretary of the CPUSA

The McCarthy, Cold War era had however taken a heavy toll on the Communist Party USA: The Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 caused many to leave the party along with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's dismissal of Stalinism^[11] , and the rise of the New Left and the hostility on the part of American leftists caused by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 further marginalized the CPUSA.^[3] Hall, along with other Party leaders who remained, sought to rebuild it.^[2] He led the struggle to reclaim the legality of the Communist Party and addressed tens of thousands in Oregon^[14], Washington and California. Envisioning a democratization of the American Communist movement, Hall spoke of a "broad people's political movement" and tried to ally his party with radical campus groups, the anti-Vietnam War movement, civil rights organizations and the new rank-and-file trade union movements, in an effort to build the CPUSA among the young ?baby boomer? generation of activists.^[11] Ultimately Hall failed to forge a lasting alliance with the New Left.^[11]

Hall became a speaker on campuses and talk shows as an advocate for socialism in the United States. Hall argued that socialism in the United States would be built on the traditions of U.S.-style democracy rooted in the United States Bill of Rights. He would often say Americans didn't accept the Constitution without a Bill of Rights and they won't accept socialism without a Bill of Rights. He professed deep confidence in the democratic traditions of the American people. He remained a prolific writer on currents events, producing a great number of articles and pamphlets, of which many were released in the magazine Political Affairs.^[1]

During the 1960s and 70s, Hall also made frequent appearances on Soviet television always supporting the position of the Soviet Communist Party and the Brezhnev regime.^[1] Unlike many of his fellow Marxist party leaders in Western Europe, Hall guided the CPUSA in accordance with the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), rejecting any liberalization efforts such as Eurocommunism.^[3] He also dismissed the radical new revolutionary movements, which criticized the official Soviet party-line of "Peaceful coexistence" and called for a world revolution.^[15] After the Sino-Soviet split, Maoism likewise was condemned, and all Maoist sympathizers were expelled from the CPUSA in the early 1960s.^[16] Hall had a reputation of being one of the most convinced supporters of the actions and interests of the Soviet Union outside the USSR's political sphere of influence.^[3][17] From 1959 onward, Hall spent some time in Moscow each year, and was one of the most widely-known American politicians in the USSR^[18], where he was received by high-level Soviet politicians such as Leonid Brezhnev.^[19]. Hall thus defended the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.^[20], and supported the Stalinist principle of "Socialism in One Country".^[6] Hall gave his support to the pro-Soviet regime of Pol Pot - until Soviet-backed Vietnam invaded Kampuchea in 1978.^[16] In the early 1980s, Hall and the CPUSA were critical of the Solidarity movement in Poland.^[16] In 1992, the Moscow daily Izvestia claimed that the CPUSA had received over $40 million in payments from the Soviet Union, in contrast with Hall's longstanding claims of financial independence.^[11] Former KGB General Oleg Kalugin declared in his memoir that the KGB had Hall and the American Communist Party "under total control" and that he was known to be siphoning off "Moscow money" to set up his own horse-breeding farm." ^[21]

Presidental candidate and later years

Communist Party Campaign Poster:
Gus Hall for President;
Jarvis Tyner for Vice-President (1976)

In late 1980s, when liberalization and democratization were under way in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Hall stood by his Marxist-Leninist stance. Concerning Stalin, he admitted that even leaders of a socialist country might err sometimes, but suggested that the Soviet historians were exaggerating Stalin?s crimes. Hall declared that he had not become a member of CP because of Stalin and would not leave because of him. The 80s were a politically difficult decade for Hall and the CPUSA, as one of Hall's trusted confidants and the deputy head of the CPUSA, Morris Childs was revealed to be a long-time FBI informant in 1980.^[13] Although Childs was taken into the United States Federal Witness Protection Program and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1987, Hall continued to deny that Childs had been a spy.^[7] Also, Henry Winston, Hall's African-American deputy, died in 1986, causing the still left black party base to question the now exclusively white leadership.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the party faced another crisis. In a press conference that year, Hall warned of witch hunts and McCarthyism in Russia, comparing that country unfavorably with North Korea.^[11] Hall led a faction of the party that stood against the Glastnost and Perestroika, and for the hardliners of the CPSU, accusing Gorbachev and Yeltsin of "demolishing" socialism.^[30]

The last years of his life Hall lived in Yonkers, NY together with his wife, Elizabeth.^[9] Along with following political events, Hall's hobbies included art collecting, organic gardening and painting.^[12] In 2000, shortly before his death, Hall resigned the post of party chairman in favor of Sam Webb, and was appointed honorary chairman.^[31]

Gus Hall died on October 13, 2000 at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan from diabetes complications .^[11][32] He was buried in the Forest Home Cemetery near Chicago.

Criticism

During his long political career as the general secretary of the CPUSA, Hall received criticism from practically every side of the American political landscape. His pro-Soviet stance led him into conflict with various Trotskyist groups and individuals. When the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) was prosecuted under the Smith Act in Minnesota in 1949, Hall supported the government actions, although later admitted this had been a mistake.^[33] Hall was accused of holding a vision of class struggle rooted in the early 20th century, and of not understanding the socio-economic changes taking place in the post-war society.^[11] In the early 90s, disgruntled party members demanded more openness and democratization of the party ^[12]

Former party members claimed Hall had used two million dollars^[25], received from the USSR for the CPUSA to help detained comrades, for his own chauffeured car use and for a private golf club.^[34] Even the Soviet officials criticized Hall for poor leadership of the CPUSA.^[35] Young American Communists were advised to distance themselves from Hall and the CPUSA, as the party was seen lacking any capacity for revolutionary action.^[35] The CPUSA was under FBI surveillance and infiltration, and thus had no potential.^[35]

Many conservatives saw Hall as a threat to America, with J. Edgar Hoover describing him as "a powerful, deceitful, dangerous foe of Americanism".^[11] Hall received the hostilities of certain fundamentalist Christian groups due to an inflammatory Anti-Christian bogus quote he never uttered. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority used the spoof quote in a 1980 presentation titled "America, You're Too Young To Die."^[36] Far-right and Anti-Semitic groups accused Hall of being a Jew (apparently because of his birth name Halberg), and thus a domestic manifestation of the supposed "Judeo-Bolshevism".

Writings

• Peace can be won!, report to the 15th Convention, Communist Party, U.S.A., New York: New Century Publishers, 1951.
• Our sights to the future: keynote report and concluding remarks at the 17th National Convention of the Communist Party, U.S.A., New York: New Century Publishers, 1960.
• Which way U.S.A. 1964? The communist view., New York: New Century Publishers, 1964.
• On course: the revolutionary process; report to the 19th National Convention of the Communist Party, U.S.A. by its general secretary., New York: New Outlook Publishers and Distributors, 1969.
• Ecology: can we survive under capitalism?, International Publishers, New York 1972.
• Imperialism today; an evaluation of major issues and events of our time., New York, International Publishers, 1972 ISBN 0-7178-0303-1
• The energy rip-off: cause & cure., International Publishers, New York 1974, ISBN 0-7178-0421-6.
• The crisis of U.S. capitalism and the fight-back : report to the 21st convention of the Communist Party, U.S.A., New York: International Publishers, 1975.
• Labor up-front in the people's fight against the crisis : report to the 22nd convention of the Communist Party, USA., New York: International Publishers, 1979.
• For peace, jobs, equality : prevent "The Day after," defeat Reaganism : report to the 23rd Convention of the Communist Party, U.S.A., New York, NY : New Outlook Publishers and Distributors, 1983. ISBN 0-87898-156-X
• Karl Marx: beacon for our times, International Publishers, New York 1983, ISBN 0-7178-0607-3.
• Fighting racism: selected writings, International Publishers, New York 1985, ISBN 0-7178-0634-0.
• Working class USA: the power and the movement, International Publishers, New York 1987, ISBN 0-7178-0660-X.

References

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