Gus Hall

Gus Hall (born Arvo Kustaa Halberg; October 8, 1910 – October 13, 2000) was an American communist activist who served as the general secretary of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) from 1959 to 2000. As a labor leader, he was closely associated with the "Little Steel" strike of 1937, an effort to unionize the nation's smaller, regional steel manufacturers. Hall was indicted under the Smith Act during the Second Red Scare and was sentenced to 8 years in prison. After his release, Hall led the CPUSA for over 40 years, generally taking an orthodox Marxist-Leninist stance and becoming a perennial candidate for president of the United States.

Born to Finnish immigrants in Cherry Township, Minnesota, Hall's parents were active communists and had been involved with the CPUSA and the Industrial Workers of the World. Hall's family had ten children, and to support them, Hall left school and started working blue-collar jobs at age 15. He joined the CPUSA two years later, and by 1931, his apprenticeship in the Young Communist League allowed him to study abroad at the International Lenin School in the Soviet Union.

Hall moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota after returning from Moscow and became involved with various labor strikes there. He had been blacklisted after his participation in the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934, for which he spent six months in jail. It was then that he began calling himself Gus Hall, as he could no longer find work under his original name. He was a founding member of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee in the mid 1930s.

He was a leader of 1937's unsuccessful "Little Steel" strike, which led to his arrest for allegedly transporting bomb-making materials, to which he pled guilty and paid a $500 fine. Afterwards, he began climbing the ranks of the Communist Party, leading the party in Youngstown and then Cleveland, and he was the candidate for multiple Communist Party tickets in the state of Ohio, although he didn't garner many votes. In 1940, he spent 90 days in jail after an election scandal for which he was convicted of fraud and forgery. He served in the Navy from 1942 until 1946.

Indicted under the Smith Act in 1948, Hall was sentenced to 5 years in prison, and served over 5 more after getting caught trying to skip bail. He was elected general secretary of the CPUSA in 1959. The rise of the New Left in the 1960s hurt the Communist Party, and Hall tried but ultimately failed to form an alliance with New Left activists. He was consistently one of the staunchest supporters of the actions of the Soviet Union and became one of the best-known American politicians in the country. He made appearances on Soviet television in the 1960s and '70s, in which he always supported the Soviet government. He also frequently spoke on American talk shows to advocate for socialism in the United States.

Hall and his party endorsed Lyndon B. Johnson for president in 1964 in opposition to conservative Barry Goldwater. Beginning in 1972, rather than endorsing another party, Hall ran as the CPUSA's presidential candidate. He would do this four consecutive times until the party ceased presidential campaigns after 1984.

Hall resigned party leadership in 2000, leaving the post to Sam Webb. Hall lived with his wife in Yonkers, New York during his last years and died in Manhattan from complications relating to diabetes.

Early life and political activism Hall was born Arvo Kustaa Halberg in 1910 in Cherry Township, St. Louis County, Minnesota, a rural community on northern Minnesota's Mesabi Iron Range. He was Finnish-American, the son of Matt (Matti) and Susan (Susanna) Halberg. Hall's parents were Finnish immigrants from Lapua in South Ostrobothnia, and were politically radical: they were involved in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and were early members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) in 1919. The Mesabi Range was one of the most important immigration settlements for Finns, who were often active in labor militancy and political activism. Hall's home language was Finnish, and he conversed with his nine siblings in that language for the rest of his life.

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. Hall became an organizer for the Young Communist League (YCL) in the upper Midwest. The change was confirmed in court in 1935. The strike was ultimately unsuccessful, and marred by the deaths of workers at Republic plants in Chicago and Youngstown. SWOC became the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) in 1942.

Hall volunteered for the United States Navy when World War II broke out, serving as a machinist's mate in Guam. 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. 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, organizations active in the civil 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. From 1959 onward, Hall spent some time in Moscow each year and was one of the most widely known American politicians in the USSR, where he was received by high-level Soviet politicians such as Leonid Brezhnev.

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 the United 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 magazine Political Affairs. In the 1964 United States presidential election, Hall endorsed Lyndon B. Johnson, stating that a Barry Goldwater presidency might result in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. He tried to attract the anti-war movement to the CPUSA through postulating abolition of nuclear weapons and peace between the USSR and USA; Hall also hoped to appeal to the civil rights movement, blaming capitalism for slavery and oppression of African-Americans.

Hall (left), Helen Winter (center) and James E. Jackson return from the 25th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, March 7, 1976

During the 1960s and 1970s, Hall also made frequent appearances on Soviet television, always supporting the position of the Soviet regime. After the Sino-Soviet split, Maoism likewise was condemned, and all Maoist sympathizers were expelled from the CPUSA in the early 1960s. Hall also supported the socialist governments of Cuba and Vietnam, but severely criticized China and North Korea, including accusing them of lack of political freedom.

Hall defended the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, and supported the Stalinist principle of "Socialism in One Country". The writer and J. Edgar Hoover biographer Curt Gentry has noted that a similar story about Hall was planted in the media through the FBI's secret COINTELPRO campaign of disruption and disinformation against radical opposition groups.

Presidential candidate and later years 1976 campaign poster featuring Hall and running mate Jarvis Tyner. In the 1964 United States presidential election, Hall's party supported Lyndon B. Johnson, saying it was necessary to prevent the victory of the conservative Barry Goldwater. During the 1972 presidential election, the CPUSA withdrew its support from the Democratic Party and nominated Hall as its candidate. Hall ran for president four times—in 1972, 1976, 1980, and 1984—the last two times with Angela Davis. 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.

Hall's results in his presidential candidacies Election year Running mate Received votes (absolute) Received votes (%) 1972 Jarvis Tyner 25,597 0.03% 1976 Jarvis Tyner 58,709 0.07% 1984 Angela Davis 36,386 0.04% 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 longtime Federal Bureau of Investigation informant. 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. Hall supported Vietnam and Cuba but criticized the People's Republic of China for failing to oppose the West. In late 1991, members wanting reform founded the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a group critical of the direction in which Hall was taking the party. When they were unable to influence the leadership, they left the party and Hall purged them from the membership, including such leaders as Angela Davis and Charlene Mitchell.

During the last years of his life, Hall lived in Yonkers, New York, with his wife, Elizabeth. Along with following political events, Hall engaged in hobbies that included art collecting, organic gardening, and painting. In 1994, Michael Myerson, who had left the CPUSA along with Herbert Aptheker, Angela Davis, Gil Green, and Charlene Mitchell, accused Hall of living a "good bourgeois life" including "an estate in fashionable Hampton Bays".

Criticism When the Trotskyist Socialist 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. The Trotskyist movement held strong negative opinions against Hall; upon his death, the Trotskyist World Socialist Web Site denounced him for what they perceived as his incompetence, loyalty to the Soviet Union, and abandonment of the working class.

At times, some Soviet officials criticized Hall by accusing him of poor leadership of the CPUSA. 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. In a 1977 speech, future U.S. president Ronald Reagan planned to quote this alleged 1961 statement as proof of the evils of communism: "I dream of the hour when the 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 chairman William Z. Foster. Hall would later make positive comments about Christianity; in 1963, he called the papal encyclical Pacem in terris "the work of a great Pope". According to Francis Nigel Lee, Hall held Pope John XXIII in high regard and hoped for dialogue between Catholics and Communists, writing in Political Affairs that "Marxists have shown their remarkable willingness to go along with Pope John's giant step forward."

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 as Harry Hay were expelled from the party in the 1950s. The Communist Party was critical of newly emerging social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, keeping its distance from the New Left. Nevertheless, some CPUSA members attempted to appeal to the youth, with Gil 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.” Despite the fact that the Communist party of Mexico and some Afro-American communists such as Jarvis Tyner and Kendra Alexander opposed homophobia, CPUSA was opposed to gay 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". According to Erwin Marquit, Hall sought to moderate the party's hostile stance towards gay groups, and when questioned by the student council of the University of Minnesota, he stated his opposition to expelling homosexual members from the party. 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". He was buried in the Forest Home Cemetery near Chicago.

Works 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. Main Street to Wall Street: End the Cold War!, New York: New Century Publishers, 1962. 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 The energy rip-off: cause & cure, International Publishers, New York 1974. 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. Basics: For Peace, Democracy, and Social Progress, International Publishers, New York. 1980. For peace, jobs, equality: prevent "The Day after", defeat Reaganism: report to the 23rd Convention of the Communist Party, U.S.A., New York: New Outlook Publishers and Distributors, 1983. Karl Marx: beacon for our times, International Publishers, New York 1983. Fighting racism: selected writings, International Publishers, New York 1985. Working class USA: the power and the movement, International Publishers, New York 1987.

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