Gus Hall

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Gus Hall

Gus Hall (October 8, 1910 – October 13, 2000) was a labor organizer, a founder of the United Steelworkers of America trade union, a leader of the Soviet-allied Communist Party USA and five-time U.S. presidential candidate.

Hall was born Arvo Gustav Halberg to a Jewish father in Cherry, a rural community on Northern Minnesota's Iron Range. Hall's parents had been in the Industrial Workers of the World and were founding members of the Communist Party.

At 15, Hall left school and went to work in the north woods lumber camps, where he spent much time studying Marxism. At 17, he joined the Communist Party and became an organizer for the Young Communist League. In 1931 Hall travelled to the Soviet Union spending two years at the Lenin Institute in Moscow.

In 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.

Hall was a founding organizer of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) and a leader of the 1937 “Little Steel” strike. Victory in that strike, huge in everything but name, gave birth to the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) in 1943. 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.

It was in Youngstown that Hall met Elizabeth Turner. They were married in 1935. Elizabeth Hall was a leader in her own right, among the first women steelworkers and a secretary of SWOC.

Hall and other rank-and-file steelworkers signed up workers who wanted to join a union.

“This had to be a secret operation,” Hall wrote in a 1972 letter to the USWA. “Any man who signed was immediately fired if it became known. As a matter of fact, I was fired. It was not until we had collected thousands of such signed cards that Lewis agreed to set up the [SWOC]. I was on the committee that presented the cards to John L. Lewis in the dugout of a baseball stadium where he was the speaker at a Miners' Day rally” in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

Thus, Lewis was convinced and one of his first decisions was to hire Hall as a full-time SWOC organizer in the Mahoning Valley where he served as an international representative throughout the organizing drive and later as chairman of the strike committee during the strike. Under Hall's leadership, 10,000 workers were recruited to the steel union in the Mahoning Valley.

Later, he resigned his union post to become an organizer for the Communist Party in Youngstown.Hall volunteered for the U.S. Navy when World War II broke out, serving as a machinist in Guam. He was honorably discharged March 6, 1946. After his return, he was elected to the National Executive board of the American Communist Party.

On July 22, 1948, Hall and 11 other Communist Party leaders, were indicted under the Smith Act on charges of “conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government by force and violence.” Many Communists and progressives were jailed, blacklisted, and hounded by the FBI during the McCarthyist Red Scare that followed World War II. Hall spent eight years in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary for the crime of thinking about teaching. The U.S. Supreme Court finally struck down the Smith Act as unconstitutional.

After his release, Hall continued his activism. He led the struggle to reclaim the legality of the Communist Party and addressed tens of thousands in Oregon, Washington and California.

He became a very popular speaker on campuses and talk shows as a leading 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 had a deep confidence in the democratic traditions of the American people.

In 1959, Hall was elected CPUSA general secretary. But the McCarthy, Cold War era had taken a heavy toll on the Communist Party. Hall, along with other Party leaders who stuck through the persecution, had to rebuild it.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Hall worked to build the Communist Party among the young “baby boomer” generation of activists involved in the peace, civil rights and the new rank-and-file trade union movements.

He ran for president four times, in 1972, 1976, 1980, and 1984, the last two times with Angela Davis. Due 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, it was decided that the CPUSA would suspend running national campaigns, while continuing to run candidates at the local level.

According to formerly secret documents quoted by the Washington Post in early 1992, Hall received over $2 million from the Soviet government for the party's expenses in publishing the Daily Worker and for rental fees for the party headquarters. Payments to client parties then supposedly ceased in 1990 after the collapse of Soviet-supported governments in Eastern Europe.

In late 1980s, when liberalisation and democratisation were under way in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Hall stood by his anti-revisionist 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 become a member of CP because of Stalin and shall not leave because of him.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the party faced a crisis. Hall led a faction of the party that stood against Gorbachev and for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Hall worked to preserve the party as many members left. He served as leader until his death. By that time, the party had benefited from a steady comeback, although it remains tiny.

List of books

• Working Class USA
• Fighting Racism
• Basics--For Peace, Democracy and Social Progress
• Imperialism Today
• Ecology: Can We Survive Under Capitalism?
• The Energy Rip-off: Cause and Cure
• Karl Marx: Beacon for Our Times