Hall, Gus

HALL, GUS (b. 1910). Born Arvo Halberg, Gus Hall has been the official leader of the Communist Party, USA, since 1959. He personally symbolizes both the victory of Leninist orthodoxy over a more flexible and open style of Communist politics advocated during the later 1950s, and the relative insularity of American Communists from the New Left, feminism, gay liberation, and Left ecology movements of the 1960s–1980s.

Raised in a Finnish American home in the iron-mining region of Minnesota, Hall grew up in a Communist family, surrounded by one of the most intensive Left subcultures in the United States. By age seventeen he had joined the Young Communist League and soon toured the often-radical mining towns of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota for the Young Communists. As a leader in the Young Communist League, he became deeply involved in the Minneapolis of the early 1930s, participating in hunger marches, farm protests, and the famous 1934 Teamster strike led by Trotskyists. On strike-related charges, he served a six-month prison sentence.

Reassigned to the Ohio-Pennsylvania district, Hall took a leading role in the organization of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube plant where he had gone to work. He reached his apex of labor influence as a leader of the Warren-Youngstown area 1937 “Little Steel” strike and as a staff member of the United Steel Workers of America. Soon after, he resigned to become Communist leader of Youngstown, from which he rose to section organizer and finally leader of the Cleveland branch.

Elected to the Party’s National Committee in 1944 while serving in the Pacific, Hall reentered civilian and Party life two years later at a most critical point. The ouster of Party general secretary Earl Browder and the resulting political confusion and disintegration over the next few years discredited or demoralized a number of familiar leaders and threw into question the validity of seemingly time-tested approaches. Under these conditions, Hall rapidly gained the reputation of a supreme Party loyalist and a deputy to Browder’s successor, Eugene Dennis. Elected to the National Executive Board in 1946, he faced indictment under the Smith Act in 1948. Convicted in 1949 and sentenced to a five-year term, he became acting national secretary in 1950 (replacing the jailed Dennis) while appealing his sentence.
In this period of Hall’s leadership, the Party—faced with multiple legal threats—adopted the view widely known as “five minutes to midnight”; that is, the time had arrived to prepare an underground movement. Many leaders became “unavailable.” Hall himself, choosing the underground rather than prison, was arrested in Mexico City during a failed effort to reach Moscow, and sentenced to an additional three years in prison.

On his release in 1959, Hall found a Party still further diminished by the upheavals after the Hungarian Revolution and Khrushchev’s denunciation of misdeeds by Stalin. Hall himself was indicted once more, in the early 1960s, under the McCarran Act, but escaped prison with the Supreme Court’s ruling against most of that act. Winning the office of general secretary, then held by Eugene Dennis, Hall rapidly placed his stamp upon the movement. Like those within the main branch of socialism, he and his fellow Communist leaders chose to remain committed fundamentally to reorienting the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Hall’s own repeated candidacies since 1972 constituted a largely symbolic side-gesture.

Hall was hostile first to Eurocommunism as it developed in the 1980s and then to the reforms initiated in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev. He vigorously resisted efforts within the American Communist Party for greater democracy and his possible replacement with a younger leader. This conflict came to a head in 1989. Hall outmaneuvered his opponents, leading to more than a thousand members leaving the Party. This number included many longtime officers and prominent personalities who promptly established the Committees of Correspondence. Still supportive of the old Communist Party leadership in the new Russia, Hall headed an increasingly graying Party. Hall himself was in declining physical health, but his speeches and writings remained, in the People’s Weekly World, Political Affairs, and in pamphlet and book form, the authoritative Communist political statement of the moment.

Starobin, Joseph. American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972.