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Gus Hall | |
|---|---|
 Hall in 1980 | |
| General Secretary of the National Committee of theCommunist Party USA | |
| In office December 14, 1959 – May 2000 | |
| Vice President | Jarvis Tyner Angela Davis |
| Preceded by | Eugene Dennis |
| Succeeded by | Sam Webb |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Arvo Kustaa Halberg (1910-10-08)October 8, 1910 |
| Died | October 13, 2000(2000-10-13) (aged 90) New York City, U.S. |
| Political party | Communist Party USA |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 |
| Education | International Lenin School |
| Occupation | Lumberjack,miner,steel worker, trade unionist, political writer |
| Signature |  |
| Military service | |
| Branch/service | United States Navy |
| Years of service | 1942–1946 |
| Rank | Machinist's Mate |
| Battles/wars | |
Gus Hall (bornArvo Kustaa Halberg; October 8, 1910 – October 13, 2000) was an American activist who served as thegeneral secretary of theCommunist Party USA (CPUSA) from 1959 to 2000. 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 theSecond Red Scare, he was indicted under theSmith Act and was sentenced to eight years in prison. After his release, Hall led the CPUSA for over 40 years, generally taking an orthodoxMarxist–Leninist stance and becoming aperennial candidate forpresident of the United States.
Hall was born Arvo Kustaa Halberg in 1910 inCherry Township, St. Louis County, Minnesota, a rural community on northernMinnesota'sMesabi Iron Range. He wasFinnish-American, the son of Matt (Matti) and Susan (Susanna) Halberg.[1][2] Hall's parents wereFinnish immigrants from theLapua,Finlandregion, and were politically radical: they were involved in theIndustrial Workers of the World (IWW) and were early members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) in 1919.[3] The Mesabi Range was one of the most important immigration settlements for Finns, who were often active in labor militancy and political activism.[4][5] Hall'shome language wasFinnish, and he conversed with his nine siblings in that language for the rest of his life.[1] He did not know political terminology inFinnish and used mostly English when meeting with visitingFinnish Communists.[1]
Hall grew up in a Communist home and was involved early on in politics.[4] 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 alog cabin built by Halberg.[6]
At 15, to support the impoverished ten-child family, Hall left school and went to work in theNorth Woods lumber camps, mines and railroads.[1] Two years later in 1927, he was recruited to the CPUSA by his father.[7] Hall became an organizer for theYoung Communist League (YCL) in theupper Midwest.[4] In 1931, an apprenticeship in the YCL qualified Hall to travel to theSoviet Union to study for two years at theInternational Lenin School in Moscow.[3]
After his studies, Hall moved toMinneapolis to further the YCL activities there.[4] He was involved inhunger marches, demonstrations on behalf of farmers, and various strikes during theGreat Depression.[4] In 1934, Hall was jailed for six months for taking part in theMinneapolis Teamster's Strike, led byTrotskyistFarrell Dobbs.[4] After serving his sentence, Hall wasblacklisted and was unable to find work under his original name. He changed his name to Gus Hall, derived from Kustaa (Gustav) Halberg.[8] The change was confirmed in court in 1935.[8]
In late 1934, Hall went toOhio'sMahoning Valley. Following the call for organizing in the steel industry, Hall was among a handful hired at asteel mill inYoungstown, Ohio.[4] During 1935–1936, he was involved in theCongress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)[1] and was a founding organizer of theSteel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), which was set up by the CIO.[4] Hall stated that he and others persuadedJohn L. Lewis, who was one of the founders of the CIO, that steel could be organized.[9]
In Youngstown, Hall met Elizabeth Mary Turner (1909–2003), a woman ofHungarian background.[1][10] They were married in 1935. Elizabeth was a leader in her own right, among the first women steelworkers and a secretary of SWOC.[10] They had two children, Barbara (Conway) (born 1938) and Arvo (born 1947).[6][10]
Hall was a leader of the 1937"Little Steel" strike, so called because it was directed againstRepublic Steel,Bethlehem Steel and theYoungstown Sheet and Tube Company, as opposed to the industry giantU.S. Steel. It had previously entered into a contract withSWOC without a strike.[11] The strike was ultimately unsuccessful, and marred by thedeaths of workers at Republic plants in Chicago and Youngstown.[11] Hall was arrested for allegedly transporting bomb-making materials intended for Republic's plant inWarren, Ohio. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was fined $500.[12] SWOC became theUnited Steelworkers of America (USWA) in 1942.[11]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 theCommunist Party USA (CPUSA) in Youngstown in 1937.[1] His responsibilities in the party grew rapidly, and in 1939 he became the CPUSA leader for the city ofCleveland.[1] Hall ran on the CPUSA ticket for Youngstown councilman and also forgovernor of Ohio, but received few votes.[12] In 1940 Hall was convicted of fraud and forgery in an election scandal and spent 90 days in jail.[13]
Hall volunteered for theUnited States Navy whenWorld War II broke out, serving as amachinist's mate[9] inGuam.[1] During the first years of the war in Europe, the CPUSA held anisolationist stance, as the Soviet Union andNazi Germany were cooperating based on theMolotov–Ribbentrop Pact. When Hitler broke the treaty byinvading 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.[4] He was honorably discharged from the Navy on March 6, 1946.[3]
Seen as a Moscow loyalist, Hall's reputation in the party rose after the war. 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 replacedEarl Browder after the latter's expulsion from the party.[4][12]
Now a major American communist leader in the post-war era, Hall caught the attention of United States officials. On July 22, 1948, Hall and11 other Communist Party leaders were indicted under theAlien Registration Act, popularly called theSmith Act, on charges of "conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government by force and violence", although his conviction was based entirely on Hall's advocacy of Marxist thought. Hall's initial prison sentence lasted for five years.[4]
Released on bail, Hall rose to the secretariat of the CPUSA.[1] When the Supreme Court upheld the Smith Act (June 4, 1951), Hall and three other menskipped bail and went underground.[4] Hall's attempt to flee to Moscow failed when he was picked up inMexico City on October 8, 1951.[1][4] He was sentenced to three more years and eventually served over five and a half years inLeavenworth Federal Penitentiary.[3] In prison he distributed party leaflets and lifted weights. He was located in a cell adjacent to that ofGeorge "Machine Gun" Kelly, a notorious gangster of theprohibition era.[12] TheSupreme Court of the United States later reversed some convictions under the Smith Act as unconstitutional.
In the early 1960s, Hall was in danger of facing yet another indictment, this time under the Internal Security Act of 1950, known as theMcCarran Act, but the Supreme Court found the Act partly unconstitutional, and the government abandoned its charges.[1] The act required "Communist action" organizations to register with the government, it excluded party members from applying for United States passports or holding government jobs.[12] Because of the Act, Hall's driver's license was revoked by the State of New York.[12]
After his release, Hall continued his activities.[3] He began to travel around the United States, ostensibly on vacation but gathering support to replace Dennis as the general secretary.[14] He accused 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.[12][14] Hall's rise to the position of general secretary was generally unexpected by the American Communist circles (the post was expected to go to eitherHenry Winston orGil Green, both important figures in the YCL[14]), although Hall had held the office of acting general secretary briefly in the early 1950s after Dennis's arrest.[14] In 1959, Hall was elected CPUSA general secretary and afterward received theOrder of Lenin.[3]
The McCarthy era had taken a heavy toll on the Communist Party USA, as many American members were called to testify tocongressional committees. In addition, due to theSoviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, many members became disenchanted and left the party. They were also moved by the Soviet leaderNikita Khrushchev'sdismissal ofStalinism.[12] In the United States, the rise of theNew Left and theWarsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 created hostility between leftists and the CPUSA, marginalizing it.[4]
Hall, along with other party leaders who remained, sought to rebuild the party.[3] He led the struggle to reclaim the legality of the Communist Party and addressed tens of thousands inOregon,[15]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, theanti-Vietnam War movement, organizations active in thecivil rights movement, and the new rank-and-file trade union movements in an effort to build the CPUSA among the young "baby boomer" generation of activists.[12] Ultimately, Hall failed to forge a lasting alliance with the New Left.[12]
Hall had a reputation of being one of the most convinced supporters of the actions and interests of the Soviet Union outside theUSSR's political sphere of influence.[4][16] From 1959 onward, Hall spent some time in Moscow each year and was one of the most widely known American politicians in the USSR,[17] where he was received by high-level Soviet politicians such asLeonid Brezhnev.[18]
Hall spoke regularly on campuses and talk shows as an advocate for socialism in the United States. He argued for socialism in the United States to be built on the traditions of U.S.-style democracy rooted in theUnited States Bill of Rights. He would often say Americans didn't accept the Constitution without a Bill of Rights and wouldn'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 current events, producing a great number of articles and pamphlets, of which many were published in the magazinePolitical Affairs.[1]
During the 1960s and 1970s, Hall also made frequent appearances onSoviet television, always supporting the position of the Soviet regime.[1] Hall guided the CPUSA in accordance with the party line of theCommunist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), rejecting any liberalization efforts such asEurocommunism.[4] He also dismissed the radical new revolutionary movements that criticized the official Soviet party line of "Peaceful coexistence" and called for aworld revolution.[19] After theSino-Soviet split,Maoism likewise was condemned, and all Maoist sympathizers were expelled from the CPUSA in the early 1960s.[20]
Hall defended theSoviet invasions of Czechoslovakia andAfghanistan,[21] and supported the Stalinist principle of "Socialism in One Country".[7] In the early 1980s, Hall and the CPUSA criticized theSolidarity movement in Poland.[20] In 1992, the Moscow dailyIzvestia claimed that the CPUSA had received over $40 million in payments from the Soviet Union, contradicting Hall's long-standing claims of financial independence.[12] The formerKGB GeneralOleg 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.[22] The writer andJ. Edgar Hoover biographerCurt Gentry has noted that a similar story about Hall was planted in the media through the FBI's secretCOINTELPRO campaign of disruption and disinformation against radical opposition groups.[23]
In the1964 United States presidential election, Hall's party supportedLyndon B. Johnson, saying it was necessary to prevent the victory of the conservativeBarry Goldwater.[24] During the1972 presidential election, the CPUSA withdrew its support from theDemocratic Party and nominated Hall as its candidate.[25] Hall ran for president four times — in 1972, 1976, 1980, and 1984 — the last two times withAngela Davis.[3] Of the four elections, Hall received the largest number of votes in 1976, largely because of theWatergate scandal bringingprotest votes for minor parties. Hall ranked only in eighth place among the presidential candidates.[26] Owing to the great expense of running, the difficulty in meeting the strenuous and different election law provisions in each state, and the difficulty in getting media coverage, the CPUSA decided to suspend running national campaigns while continuing to run candidates at the local level. While ceasing presidential campaigns, the CPUSA did not renew support for the Democratic party.[27]
| Election year | Running mate | Received votes (absolute) | Received votes (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1972 | Jarvis Tyner | 25,597 | 0.03%[28] |
| 1976 | Jarvis Tyner | 58,709 | 0.07%[26] |
| 1980 | Angela Davis | 44,933 | 0.05%[29] |
| 1984 | Angela Davis | 36,386 | 0.04%[30] |
The 1980s 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 in 1980 to be a longtimeFederal Bureau of Investigationinformant.[31] Although Childs was taken into theUnited States Federal Witness Protection Program and received thePresidential Medal of Freedom in 1987, Hall continued to deny that Childs had been a spy.[8] Also, Henry Winston, Hall's African-American deputy, died in 1986. The black party base questioned the fact that the leadership was exclusively white.
After thedissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the party faced another crisis. In a press conference that year, Hall warned of witch hunts andMcCarthyism in Russia, comparing that country unfavorably withNorth Korea.[12] Hall led a faction of the party that stood againstGlasnost andPerestroika and, for the hardliners of the CPSU, accusedMikhail Gorbachev andBoris Yeltsin of "demolishing" socialism.[32] Hall supportedVietnam andCuba but criticized thePeople's Republic of China for failing to oppose the West.[33] In late 1991, members wanting reform founded theCommittees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a group critical of the direction in which Hall was taking the party.[34] When they were unable to influence the leadership, they left the party and Hall purged them from the membership, including such leaders asAngela Davis andCharlene Mitchell.
During the last years of his life, Hall lived inYonkers, New York, with his wife, Elizabeth.[10] Along with following political events, Hall engaged in hobbies that included art collecting,organic gardening, and painting.[13] In 2000, shortly before his death, Hall resigned the post of party chairman in favor ofSam Webb and was appointed honorary chairman.[35] In 1994,Michael Myerson, who had left the CPUSA along withHerbert Aptheker,Angela Davis, Gil Green, andCharlene Mitchell,[36] accused Hall of living a "good bourgeois life" including "an estate in fashionable Hampton Bays."[37]
Gus Hall died on October 13, 2000, atLenox Hill Hospital inManhattan fromdiabetes mellitus complications.[12][38] He was buried in theForest Home Cemetery near Chicago.
When theTrotskyistSocialist Workers Party (SWP) and its leaders in the Midwest Teamsters were prosecuted under the Smith Act in Minnesota in 1941, some Communist Party members supported the government actions. Later, Hall admitted it was a mistake for the party to not openly fight against imprisonment of SWP members under the Smith Act.[39] The Trotskyist movement held strong negative opinions against Hall; upon his death, the TrotskyistWorld Socialist Web Site denounced him for what they perceived as his incompetence, loyalty to the Soviet Union, and abandonment of the working class.[40]
At times, some Soviet officials criticized Hall by accusing him of poor leadership of the CPUSA.[41] Young American communists were advised to distance themselves from CPUSA, as the party was under intense FBI surveillance, and these officials believed that under such conditions the party could not be successful.[41]
Many conservatives saw Hall as a threat to the United States, withJ. Edgar Hoover describing him as "a powerful, deceitful, dangerous foe ofAmericanism."[12] An inflammatoryanti-Christian statement was falsely ascribed to Hall, earning him the hostility of some Christian groups, includingJerry Falwell'sMoral Majority.[42] In a 1977 speech, future U.S. presidentRonald Reagan planned to quote this alleged 1961 statement as proof of the evils of communism: "I dream of the hour whenthe last congressman is strangled to death on the guts of the last preacher — and since the Christians seem to love to sing about the blood, why not give them a little of it? Slit the throats of their children [and] draw them over the mourner's bench and the pulpit and allow them to drown in their own blood, and then see whether they enjoy singing those hymns." The statement, which Reagan ultimately excised from his speech because he claimed he did not have the "nerve" to say it, was falsely claimed to have been said by Hall at the funeral oration of former CPUSA party chairmanWilliam Z. Foster.[43] Hall would later make positive comments about Christianity; in 1963, he called the papalencyclicalPacem in terris "the work of a great Pope".[44] According toFrancis Nigel Lee, Hall heldPope John XXIII in high regard and hoped for dialogue between Catholics and Communists, writing inPolitical Affairs that "Marxists have shown their remarkable willingness to go along with Pope John's giant step forward."[44] Gus Hall is also reported to have said: “Our quarrel is with capitalism, not God.”[45]
Hall was also accused of homophobia, as the CPUSA followed a Stalinist doctrine of declaring homosexuality a "fascist tendency". As a result, openly gay party members such asHarry Hay were expelled from the party in the 1950s.[46] The Communist Party was critical of newly emerging social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, keeping its distance from theNew Left. Nevertheless, some CPUSA members attempted to appeal to the youth, withGil Green arguing that “the correct line should have been to try to turn this upheaval amongst young people into a permanent kind of movement while letting its dynamics work itself out with our participation.”[47] Despite the fact that theCommunist party of Mexico and some Afro-American communists such asJarvis Tyner and Kendra Alexander opposed homophobia, CPUSA was opposed togay rights, with the official party programme from early 1970s condemning any behaviour “which encourages or promotes homosexual relationships as an alternative to sound, healthy, male–female relationships or distracts from the family as the basic unity of society and the fundamental component of the future we see to bring into being” and repudiating “as false any attempt to depict the so-called gay lifestyle as part of advanced and even revolutionary movements, or to promote it in the guise of a progressive ideology".[47] However, Hall himself was not homophobic.[48] According toErwin Marquit, Hall sought to moderate the party's hostile stance towards gay groups, and when questioned by thestudent council of theUniversity of Minnesota, he stated his opposition to expelling homosexual members from the party.[48] Hall had also intervened on behalf of Bernard Koten, a party member who was arrested inKiev in August 1963 and charged with homosexuality.[49] Hall reacted strongly to the news of Koten's arrest and called for the charges to be dropped "unless a more serious crime is involved".[49] After protests from Hall and a number of progressive activists, Koten was released without trial.[49]
| Party political offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | General Secretary of the CPUSA 1959–2000 | Succeeded by |
